Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“History is anomalous, and there is no way to get used to it.”
“The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place but how brief it all has been.”
“Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.”
“A singularity is a place where the rules are broken. A miracle is a singularity.”
“That’s part of the nature of a fractal cosmos, nothing is utterly unannounced.”
“History is a series of approximations of the final singularity.”
“I believe in extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials are so peculiar that the job is to recognize them.”
“So when you look at the eschaton what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.”
“The things I encounter that I call elves or gnomes, it’s just a gloss. I mean, they’re small, and they have the archetype. They’re more like leprechauns, and this maybe raises a racial issue.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And for those who have asked me what
00:00:26 ►
my plans are for New Year’s Eve, well, this is it. I’m here with you in the salon. But
00:00:32 ►
please don’t think that this is any kind of a sacrifice on my part because, well, I really
00:00:38 ►
dislike New Year’s Eve parties. And for a long time this made me feel like an outcast,
00:00:43 ►
but at least until a few days ago it did, when John Oliver posted a YouTube video in which, among other things, he said,
00:00:51 ►
New Year’s Eve is like the death of a pet. You know it’s going to happen, but somehow you’re never really prepared for how truly awful it is.
00:01:00 ►
So thank you, John Oliver, for letting me know that I’m not the only one who stays home on New Year’s Eve.
00:01:06 ►
Actually, it’s quite nice being here at home and in the salon with you right now.
00:01:11 ►
So, hey, Happy New Year, by the way.
00:01:14 ►
And just a word to our new listeners,
00:01:16 ►
particularly if you’re becoming as enamored with the flowing words of the Bard McKenna
00:01:21 ►
as I and many of my friends were at first,
00:01:25 ►
my advice is to be sure that you listen to him with a critical ear. For me, Terrence’s raps are
00:01:31 ►
starting points to get me thinking, but I no longer treat everything that he says as gospel.
00:01:36 ►
So whenever he uses the word clearly, I’d really be careful that you don’t automatically assume that
00:01:42 ►
what he sees so clearly is how it still is.
00:01:46 ►
And in fairness to Terrence, it’s also wise to keep in mind that the talk that we’re about to
00:01:51 ►
listen to was given in May of 1993, so it took place over 21 years ago, and it’s likely that
00:01:58 ►
by now he may have changed his mind about some of the things that were so clear to him at the time.
00:02:03 ►
Now, at the very end of this talk,
00:02:06 ►
we get to hear what I think is the best description of a DMT trip
00:02:10 ►
that we’ve yet heard from Terrence.
00:02:12 ►
And I may have missed this in the past,
00:02:14 ►
but it’s the first time that I remember hearing him say that,
00:02:17 ►
in a way, the elves are like dogs who run up and lick your face.
00:02:23 ►
I probably should have issued a spoiler alert first,
00:02:26 ►
but I want to be sure that you don’t tune out during this rap,
00:02:30 ►
thinking that you’ve heard it before.
00:02:32 ►
You probably have, at least in bits and pieces,
00:02:35 ►
except for the face-licking part.
00:02:37 ►
That was a new one for me.
00:02:40 ►
So now let’s begin with another question for the bard Terrence McKenna.
00:02:44 ►
So now let’s begin with another question for the bard Terrence McKenna.
00:02:51 ►
You might want to talk about the copyright of genetic, copywriting of genetic coding.
00:02:55 ►
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Monsanto and DuPont.
00:02:57 ►
They’re getting into agribusiness.
00:03:06 ►
They go off to the mountains of the Andes and solicit the indigenous cultures to provide them with their potato stock.
00:03:09 ►
Then they go back and dissect the genetic code and copyright it.
00:03:11 ►
They happen to catch a farmer in Idaho
00:03:13 ►
growing the same potato.
00:03:15 ►
They consume it
00:03:15 ►
because they hold the copyright on that code.
00:03:18 ►
Well, yeah, I mean, this is a very complicated issue.
00:03:21 ►
It isn’t necessarily of interest to this group.
00:03:26 ►
It’s of interest to me because I deal with the question of endangered species and stuff like that.
00:03:32 ►
This question of what shall we give the rainforest people for the drugs and medicines that we take out
00:03:40 ►
is a real tricky question because say I go to the amazon and and i bring back a plant
00:03:48 ►
and and i am able to vegetatively propagate this plant into a crop of some sort well now all i took
00:03:57 ►
from the amazon was one plant which god knows there’s plenty of there, but also the knowledge of the people
00:04:05 ►
because inevitably you learn this stuff from informants.
00:04:10 ►
There’s very little original botanizing of any consequence in the Amazon.
00:04:15 ►
And there’s been a lot of debate among pharmaceutical companies
00:04:21 ►
and conservation organizations as to what should we give back to these cultures.
00:04:27 ►
And of course, pharmaceutical companies think in terms,
00:04:30 ►
even the ones that are well-motivated and generous,
00:04:34 ►
think in terms of money and medicine.
00:04:39 ►
Well, money they don’t need.
00:04:41 ►
Money will destroy the culture,
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and medicine seems a disingenuous thing to give them
00:04:48 ►
since the premise was in the first place
00:04:51 ►
that their medicine was better than your medicine.
00:04:54 ►
I don’t know what should be done about this.
00:04:57 ►
I do know in practical terms
00:04:59 ►
I have seen whole scenes go to hell
00:05:03 ►
over something as simple as an outboard motor. I mean, an outboard
00:05:09 ►
motor brings whores and alcohol days closer to an upriver village. And so what favor are you doing
00:05:19 ►
these people by dropping 110 horsepower Evinrude onto the hefe of the village.
00:05:27 ►
Really, I don’t know if there’s any…
00:05:29 ►
The biggest favor we could do them
00:05:31 ►
is to never show up in the first place.
00:05:34 ►
But that would defeat our goal,
00:05:38 ►
our goal, meaning the pharmaceutical goal,
00:05:40 ►
of extracting drugs from the rainforest,
00:05:42 ►
which is not an unknowable goal. I mean, after
00:05:46 ►
all, if you’re trying to cure AIDS or TB or shrink tumors, that’s not exactly a mission
00:05:55 ►
of rape and destruction. But it can turn into rape and destruction, depending on how it’s
00:06:00 ►
prosecuted. Does that…
00:06:02 ►
The drugs aren’t prepared the way they’re natively prepared.
00:06:06 ►
You know, I mean, if you’re going to start preparing drugs
00:06:08 ►
by extracting supposed active ingredients,
00:06:12 ►
then you’re losing the synergism,
00:06:14 ►
you’re losing the life of the history that’s there, too.
00:06:19 ►
Yeah, and you’re losing a connection to the morphogenetic field,
00:06:22 ►
if you believe morphogenetic fields exist.
00:06:28 ►
You’re losing the induction ritual that may be connected with the drugs.
00:06:33 ►
That’s right, that’s right.
00:06:35 ►
But even on your own terms, you see,
00:06:39 ►
on your own terms you’re taking away what you need,
00:06:42 ►
because if you have a materialist view of medicine,
00:06:44 ►
your own terms you’re taking away what you need because if you have a materialist view of medicine then really all you need is the uh the um the substance well this is this sheldrakean idea
00:06:54 ►
that things long in existence have a kind of momentum to perpetuate themselves that things that are very recently created lack it’s not a scientifically
00:07:08 ►
creditable notion but rupert’s been working for many years to show that an idea like this
00:07:18 ►
is necessary to to solve some of the problems of modern biology do you all understand the concept
00:07:25 ►
it’s slippery but fairly simple
00:07:27 ►
it’s that it can be simply stated
00:07:30 ►
by saying
00:07:31 ►
once something happens
00:07:33 ►
it’s easier for it to
00:07:36 ►
happen again
00:07:37 ►
anywhere in the
00:07:39 ►
universe
00:07:40 ►
and it leads to somewhat
00:07:43 ►
magical expectations in the realm of experimentation
00:07:47 ►
in other words if you if you design a maze of some sort that has never existed before
00:07:54 ►
and you teach rats in canada to run this maze and they get very good at it then when you go to Australia to teach rats to run the same maze, they should
00:08:07 ►
learn faster. And believe it or not, there is some evidence for this effect. A very interesting
00:08:15 ►
experiment was done a couple of years ago where a computer was programmed with Hebrew,
00:08:22 ►
was programmed with Hebrew programmed to generate
00:08:25 ►
three letter sequences
00:08:28 ►
of Hebrew words
00:08:30 ►
now some of these
00:08:32 ►
I’m sorry
00:08:33 ►
three letter sequences
00:08:34 ►
of Hebrew letters
00:08:35 ►
and some of these sequences
00:08:37 ►
were Hebrew words
00:08:40 ►
including words which occur
00:08:42 ►
in the Torah
00:08:42 ►
and consequently
00:08:44 ►
are read by have been read by devout Jews since Abraham.
00:08:51 ►
And some were simply random combination of Hebrew letters that meant nothing.
00:08:57 ►
And then what they did is they, I think, used a Korean population,
00:09:04 ►
people who had absolutely no empathy
00:09:06 ►
or familiarity with Hebrew
00:09:08 ►
and they would flash these three letter
00:09:11 ►
sequences on a television screen
00:09:14 ►
and you would be asked A
00:09:17 ►
to guess whether it was a word or nonsense
00:09:20 ►
and then B you were asked to guess
00:09:24 ►
if you thought
00:09:26 ►
it was a word what the word
00:09:28 ►
meant and then
00:09:30 ►
C you were asked to
00:09:32 ►
rate the confidence of your guess
00:09:34 ►
between 1 and 10
00:09:36 ►
and what they discovered
00:09:38 ►
was none of these Korean people
00:09:40 ►
could guess the meaning of the
00:09:42 ►
Hebrew words
00:09:43 ►
but when confronted with a real
00:09:45 ►
word in Hebrew they had high confidence that that was what it was and so you see
00:09:54 ►
this seems to imply that the Hebrew words that had been said by millions and
00:10:00 ►
millions of Jews over time had a field, a morphogenetic field around them
00:10:06 ►
that the purely arbitrary stuff didn’t.
00:10:10 ►
And then other experiments have been done,
00:10:13 ►
you know, with nursery rhymes versus rhymes
00:10:17 ►
that were just made up by a poet a week ago.
00:10:21 ►
I actually thought of an experiment
00:10:24 ►
which I thought would settle it once and for all because
00:10:27 ►
I noticed my publicist I mean I resist technology believe it or not but my publicist finally forced
00:10:34 ►
me to get call waiting well so then I noticed that the telephone will be silent for hours
00:10:42 ►
then it rings you pick it up you start talking to somebody and
00:10:46 ►
immediately the call waiting thing starts beeping and it’s clear that a telephone call in progress
00:10:56 ►
attracts other telephone calls and my my well my notion was you could create a computer system to monitor an office building where hundreds of people were getting calls and making calls and see if, in fact, ordinary statistical expectations are violated because I think it’s uncanny. to Esalen on a weekend like this and I will go home and there will be 30 messages on the phone machine
00:11:25 ►
and then when I listen to them
00:11:27 ►
some of them will be no longer than
00:11:30 ►
15 or 20 seconds
00:11:31 ►
and I can hear the call waiting
00:11:34 ►
on the message
00:11:36 ►
machine as the person is
00:11:38 ►
leaving the message
00:11:39 ►
so I can’t be receiving
00:11:41 ►
3500 calls a day
00:11:44 ►
so it must be that the act of a telephone call in progress
00:11:48 ►
is a magnet for another telephone call.
00:11:52 ►
That’s morphogenetic resonance.
00:11:54 ►
So don’t pick up all again.
00:11:56 ►
Yeah, right.
00:11:58 ►
Did you intend to discuss your current thinking
00:12:03 ►
about the current today,
00:12:05 ►
about the Eschaton philosophy?
00:12:09 ►
And if you were, what I’m really interested in is whether we’re talking about
00:12:13 ►
everything from Amazon people to this morning ourselves
00:12:17 ►
and how people relate to the experience.
00:12:20 ►
What’s the point of it all?
00:12:21 ►
If you’re still convinced that this is a 20-year cycle
00:12:25 ►
before the entire universe that we know heads into the hole?
00:12:31 ►
Well, I think that if your hypothesis is that a universe of 20 billion years plus age
00:12:38 ►
is about to go bazingo in 20 years,
00:12:41 ►
you should probably prepare a fallback position
00:12:45 ►
just in case it goes awry.
00:12:52 ►
I’ve sort of talked around this
00:12:55 ►
because I didn’t know at what point we wanted to really engage it
00:12:59 ►
because I talked about the condensation of the imagination as a physical object
00:13:08 ►
and the philosopher’s stone as an attractor for the historical process.
00:13:14 ►
I really, and I talked about this alien force,
00:13:18 ►
the tractor beam that reaches into our species
00:13:21 ►
and begins sculpting us in its image and that’s where we are now
00:13:27 ►
all of this leads toward the conclusion i think that biology is being drawn out of matter
00:13:33 ►
and that the this is not some kind of process that goes on hundreds of thousands or millions of years in the future that history is actually ending within our lifetime.
00:13:49 ►
And I’ve, you know, I mean it sounds silly in a way to say it,
00:13:54 ►
but based on what will come this evening, maybe not so silly,
00:13:57 ►
you can actually calculate the rate of closure.
00:14:01 ►
You can actually figure out the kind of acceleration in which we’re involved in.
00:14:09 ►
And it leads to the conclusion that history has only a very little bit more to run. That’s,
00:14:17 ►
in a sense, realists know this, but deny the implication. I I mean we’re running out of everything
00:14:25 ►
that’s always a sure sign that the party is over
00:14:29 ►
you know when the liquor is gone
00:14:32 ►
when the hors d’oeuvres are munched
00:14:34 ►
when the buffet table is wreckage
00:14:37 ►
the party is over it’s time to go home folks
00:14:40 ►
go get your hats and coats call your cabs
00:14:44 ►
and do your host a favor and that’s where we
00:14:48 ►
are it’s impossible it’s impossible to imagine history continuing for centuries and given the
00:14:57 ►
rate of acceleration it doesn’t appear that that’s going to happen. The only question is, is it extinction?
00:15:07 ►
Is that what it is?
00:15:09 ►
Or is it transformation?
00:15:12 ►
And I choose to believe it’s transformation
00:15:13 ►
because the evidence
00:15:15 ►
of the psychedelics
00:15:17 ►
seems to support that.
00:15:23 ►
I can’t, I mean,
00:15:26 ►
I guess I can’t stress enough my sense that
00:15:28 ►
history is anomalous
00:15:31 ►
that there’s no
00:15:32 ►
way to get used to it
00:15:34 ►
and that it represents a
00:15:36 ►
phase transition
00:15:38 ►
it’s an extraordinary emergency
00:15:40 ►
circumstance
00:15:42 ►
it only lasts tops
00:15:44 ►
25,000 years.
00:15:47 ►
And really the intense part
00:15:49 ►
is the last 5,000 or 6,000 years.
00:15:52 ►
I mean, if you go back 6,000 years,
00:15:55 ►
we’re talking 4,000 BC.
00:15:59 ►
The pyramids weren’t built yet.
00:16:02 ►
Nothing familiar was in place in 4000 BC.
00:16:07 ►
You know, there’s a tendency in occult thinking
00:16:10 ►
to fiddle with the dating
00:16:13 ►
because occultists have inherited
00:16:16 ►
without sophisticated examination
00:16:20 ►
the Renaissance’s belief
00:16:23 ►
that the older it is, the better it is. And, you know,
00:16:28 ►
enthusiasts of Atlantis want to place it 50,000 years in the past, and Lemuria 100,000. This is
00:16:38 ►
all nonsense. The miracle of our predicament is not how long everything has been in place,
00:16:46 ►
but how brief it all has been.
00:16:50 ►
The whole thing has come into being since yesterday.
00:16:53 ►
I mean, the people who built the pyramids are what?
00:16:58 ►
1,500 generations in the past.
00:17:01 ►
Less. Less.
00:17:04 ►
Probably more like 600 generations in the past. Less. Less. Probably more like 600 generations
00:17:06 ►
in the past.
00:17:08 ►
So the emergence
00:17:09 ►
of technology codes,
00:17:11 ►
high culture,
00:17:12 ►
is all very, very sudden.
00:17:15 ►
And this seems to be,
00:17:19 ►
I think it’s a phenomenon
00:17:21 ►
which could be elevated
00:17:23 ►
to the level of a general rule about reality, that each stage of cosmic development happens much quicker than the stage which preceded it. So after the initial Big Bang, you know, there was a long, long period of basically just churning physical chemistry,
00:17:50 ►
not even physical chemistry, but an atomic plasma.
00:17:53 ►
There were no elements.
00:17:55 ►
There were only electrons.
00:17:57 ►
Later, hydrogen and helium formed and could aggregate into stars.
00:18:04 ►
Then a new property emerged.
00:18:09 ►
In the center of these large masses of helium,
00:18:14 ►
fusion began to take place
00:18:16 ►
because the pressure and temperature went so high.
00:18:20 ►
Well, fusion cooked out heavier elements
00:18:23 ►
like iron and carbon
00:18:25 ►
and they become the basis then for a whole new
00:18:29 ►
kind of reality, molecular
00:18:32 ►
existence and then organomolecular
00:18:36 ►
existence based on long chain
00:18:38 ►
polymers based on carbon
00:18:41 ►
once life emerged the tempo
00:18:44 ►
really begins to pick up.
00:18:47 ►
Change is now coming on a scale
00:18:49 ►
of once every few million years.
00:18:51 ►
Once you get higher animals,
00:18:53 ►
change is even more accelerated.
00:18:56 ►
Once you have languages and culture,
00:18:59 ►
change takes an exponential leap forward.
00:19:04 ►
And the main characteristic of our culture
00:19:07 ►
is phenomenally accelerated change.
00:19:11 ►
So much change that when you take this curve of acceleration
00:19:16 ►
and plot its future vector,
00:19:20 ►
you discover that within 50 years
00:19:23 ►
we will release more energy than there is in the solar system
00:19:28 ►
travel faster than light
00:19:30 ►
so forth and so on
00:19:31 ►
well if you assume these things are impossible
00:19:34 ►
then it means we’re hitting the limit
00:19:36 ►
we’re approaching the limit
00:19:39 ►
yeah
00:19:39 ►
singularities
00:19:43 ►
in relation to your
00:19:45 ►
yeah
00:19:45 ►
the attractor
00:19:48 ►
at the end of time
00:19:50 ►
is a perfect example of a singularity
00:19:53 ►
and in fact
00:19:55 ►
good question
00:19:56 ►
it seems that
00:19:58 ►
first of all what is a singularity
00:20:00 ►
a singularity is a place
00:20:03 ►
where the rules are broken a miracle is a singularity a singularity is a is a place where the rules are broken uh a miracle is a singularity
00:20:09 ►
uh and it strangely enough it turns out to be very hard to model the universe without resorting
00:20:17 ►
to a singularity or or several a few years ago uh step Hawking, who has incredible press, I must say,
00:20:28 ►
Stephen Hawking hypothesized
00:20:32 ►
the existence of what he called mini black holes.
00:20:36 ►
He thought that black holes left over
00:20:38 ►
from the early birth of the universe
00:20:40 ►
had evaporated so much matter off their surfaces
00:20:44 ►
that they might
00:20:46 ►
be now down to the size of a few
00:20:48 ►
centimeters in diameter
00:20:50 ►
well when they asked
00:20:52 ►
him to calculate how many of these
00:20:54 ►
mini black holes there are
00:20:56 ►
in the universe they came up
00:20:58 ►
with a number like
00:20:59 ►
14
00:21:01 ►
high 11
00:21:03 ►
well if every one of those black holes
00:21:07 ►
has a singularity in the center of it
00:21:09 ►
that’s a hell of a lot of singularities
00:21:11 ►
what kind of a theory
00:21:12 ►
is it that allows for
00:21:14 ►
14 high 11 exceptions
00:21:17 ►
to its rule
00:21:18 ►
that there are
00:21:20 ►
exceptions to the rule
00:21:22 ►
well that’s a fishy way
00:21:24 ►
that’s a way of wiggling out of it.
00:21:27 ►
Straight science tries to do it with just one singularity.
00:21:34 ►
Essentially, the position of ordinary science is give us one free miracle,
00:21:40 ►
and then we can explain everything.
00:21:44 ►
and then we can explain everything and that one free miracle
00:21:46 ►
is the idea
00:21:49 ►
that the universe sprang
00:21:51 ►
from an area considerably smaller
00:21:54 ►
than a gnat’s eyebrow
00:21:56 ►
for no reason
00:21:58 ►
in a single moment
00:22:00 ►
and if you believe that
00:22:03 ►
then all the rest flows quite naturally notice however that whatever
00:22:09 ►
you think about this idea it’s the limit case for credulity do you understand what i mean i mean you
00:22:19 ►
cannot think of a more unlikely proposition it’s almost almost like the unlikeliest of all propositions.
00:22:28 ►
I defy anyone to dream up a position
00:22:31 ►
less intuitively compelling than that one.
00:22:35 ►
And yet that’s where they start from, you see.
00:22:40 ►
So what I say is, okay,
00:22:41 ►
if science gets one free singularity,
00:22:45 ►
then in the game of hypothesis building,
00:22:48 ►
it must be that each player is dealt one singularity chip at the beginning,
00:22:54 ►
and I choose to play mine at the end and say,
00:22:59 ►
it’s highly unlikely to my mind that a singularity would spring from an absolute nothingness.
00:23:07 ►
I mean, that seems to me the least fruitful environment to seek a singularity of this type.
00:23:15 ►
Far more likely, if singularities exist at all,
00:23:20 ►
that they would exist in a domain of complex energies,
00:23:25 ►
molecular bonds, chemical bonds,
00:23:28 ►
electromagnetic radiation, hard radiation,
00:23:32 ►
languages, biological systems,
00:23:34 ►
membranes, gels, liquid crystals, and so forth.
00:23:37 ►
In other words, the kind of stew of phenomena
00:23:41 ►
that our present cosmos represents,
00:23:45 ►
who can say what could arise out of this?
00:23:49 ►
I mean, if you can get people, you could get anything, it seems to me.
00:23:55 ►
So rather than view the universe as the shockwave of an initial explosion
00:24:02 ►
spreading out through the dimensions, why not place the singularity as a chaotic attractor at the end of the life of the universe and see all processes as drawn toward it rather than pushed away from it, drawn toward it, complexified, interleaved, folded, mixed, and connected in
00:24:28 ►
many, many exotic ways. And that’s what this eschaton object is. I mean, it’s something which
00:24:36 ►
we anticipate through technology. It’s something we are building out of ourselves you know the the grand work of history is the
00:24:46 ►
condensation and concrescence of the visible soul but in the same way that alchemists are like
00:24:55 ►
catalysts to natural processes that was the idea see that gold and precious metals grew in the earth and that alchemists were not doing anything unnatural
00:25:08 ►
they were simply really speeding up time well in that same way what we are doing is uh catalyzing
00:25:17 ►
the emergence of a process that nature would otherwise ultimately deliver at some yet more distant time.
00:25:26 ►
We’re like an enzyme in the universal mix of being.
00:25:32 ►
And what the eschaton is,
00:25:34 ►
is pointless to speculate upon
00:25:37 ►
because it is literally below the event horizon
00:25:41 ►
of rational apprehendability.
00:25:44 ►
That means we’re too stupid to know what it is.
00:25:49 ►
But when we look east,
00:25:51 ►
the sky is touched with the rosy blush of dawn.
00:25:57 ►
But the surface of the solar disk of the singularity
00:26:01 ►
has not yet come above the horizon.
00:26:05 ►
However, in the next 20 years, I think this will happen.
00:26:09 ►
I mean, I will abandon this theory long before we reach 2012
00:26:13 ►
if it doesn’t begin to gain power as a meme in society.
00:26:20 ►
Because one of the things the mushroom told me
00:26:23 ►
that I found to be true, it’s interesting,
00:26:26 ►
it said to me, nothing is unannounced. You know, there is no such thing as a surprise.
00:26:35 ►
Everything is preceded by the ghost of its appearance. And if you’re sensitive to that,
00:26:41 ►
you know, you can’t be taken by surprise. That’s part of the nature of a fractal cosmos is that nothing is utterly unannounced. How could it be since everything
00:26:52 ►
is distributed through the matrix?
00:26:56 ►
You’re saying this is a different notion of history? You’re describing history from
00:27:01 ►
the very beginning? Yeah, that history is a series of approximations
00:27:07 ►
of the final singularity.
00:27:11 ►
And that’s what all these religions are.
00:27:14 ►
They’re people’s best guess
00:27:16 ►
given their cultural circumstance
00:27:19 ►
and historical angle of regarding
00:27:23 ►
their best guess as to what the singularity is.
00:27:28 ►
Yeah.
00:27:29 ►
My calendrics, how did they arrive at the ending in their calendar at the same time?
00:27:39 ►
Well, the only thing I share in common with the Maya is that we both did mushrooms.
00:27:45 ►
So it’s sort of like, is it that there’s a barcode in there?
00:27:49 ►
That no matter where and when in all of space and time you take the mushroom,
00:27:55 ►
you come to the conclusion that something very important is going to happen on December 22, 2012.
00:28:03 ►
The Mayan calendar is a real puzzle,
00:28:06 ►
not the well-known details of it,
00:28:09 ►
although to speak of any detail of the Mayan calendar
00:28:12 ►
as well-known is maybe specious.
00:28:16 ►
But see, the strange thing about the Mayan calendar,
00:28:20 ►
it’s about a 4,385 year cycle with many sub-cycles in it.
00:28:32 ►
It begins on a slow Tuesday in August and it ends on a winter solstice, a very important
00:28:44 ►
winter solstice, a very important winter solstice, a winter solstice when the heliacal rising of the sun is eclipsing the galactic center. That seems to imply that the Mayans, that the Maya did not establish the beginning of their calendar and count forward, they established the end date and counted backward
00:29:07 ►
to establish the beginning.
00:29:10 ►
And there’s argument among astronomers
00:29:13 ►
as to whether this is even possible
00:29:15 ►
for people at that level of culture to do.
00:29:19 ►
You know, there are a number of these astronomical mysteries around,
00:29:22 ►
like the Dogon tribe in Africa,
00:29:27 ►
who, before the era of telescopes,
00:29:30 ►
cheerfully informed astronomers
00:29:32 ►
that the star Sirius,
00:29:35 ►
which is 10 light years away,
00:29:37 ►
had a companion too faint
00:29:40 ►
to be seen by the naked eye,
00:29:42 ►
and that it had a 50-year orbit
00:29:44 ►
around Sirius Prime
00:29:46 ►
this is true
00:29:48 ►
how did they
00:29:50 ►
know that
00:29:50 ►
and they go further
00:29:54 ►
they also claim a third companion
00:29:56 ►
Sirius C
00:29:57 ►
which has to this day not yet
00:30:00 ►
been detected
00:30:01 ►
if it is detected by long base
00:30:04 ►
interferometry or some other, that
00:30:06 ►
speckling technique. Well, if they, if
00:30:12 ►
Sirius C comes into focus, a lot of
00:30:14 ►
people will have to come to terms with
00:30:17 ►
the question of how did the Dogon get
00:30:19 ►
this. However, there are, there are odd
00:30:22 ►
examples of unbelievably,
00:30:26 ►
what appear to be unbelievably
00:30:27 ►
unlikely coincidences
00:30:30 ►
or good guesses.
00:30:32 ►
For example,
00:30:34 ►
Jonathan Swift
00:30:35 ►
wrote Gulliver’s Travels
00:30:38 ►
and he
00:30:39 ►
describes in there
00:30:41 ►
the
00:30:43 ►
presence of two moons around Mars
00:30:46 ►
and their relative size and orbital periods
00:30:50 ►
70 years before William Herschel observed these objects through the telescope.
00:30:56 ►
And nobody knows, you know, was it just an incredibly lucky guess
00:31:01 ►
or what was going on there.
00:31:03 ►
Yeah. lucky guess or what was going on there yeah no I think
00:31:14 ►
I tend to be
00:31:16 ►
nervous about the extraterrestrial
00:31:18 ►
hypothesis because I think
00:31:20 ►
I believe in extraterrestrials
00:31:22 ►
but I believe that real
00:31:24 ►
extraterrestrials, but I believe that real extraterrestrials
00:31:25 ►
are so peculiar
00:31:27 ►
that the job is to recognize them.
00:31:33 ►
No, I think that not the Chinese,
00:31:38 ►
because the evidence seems to point to the fact
00:31:40 ►
that the I Ching was actually composed
00:31:43 ►
in central southern China somewhere by
00:31:47 ►
a pre-Zhou people. But I think that these people had a technique, perhaps analogous to a yogic
00:31:56 ►
technique, perhaps analogous to the stilling of the heart techniques, which are yogas that suppress physiological functioning
00:32:05 ►
and that they were able to look into organism
00:32:09 ►
and they’re looking into their own bodies
00:32:13 ►
with a completely different epistemic toolkit than we have.
00:32:18 ►
They saw flux and they watched, perhaps for a thousand years, you know, and tried to model this flux.
00:32:28 ►
And they finally realized that there were myriads of elements in this flux, but not an infinite number of elements.
00:32:46 ►
and that all of the structure of the flux could in fact be reduced to 64 elements,
00:32:53 ►
which they then created a symbolical notation system for, which we call hexagrams.
00:32:59 ►
In other words, in the same way that we, with our obsession with matter, have discovered and satisfied ourselves that it only requires, what is it now, 108 elements to create all material phenomena and all molecular configurations.
00:33:12 ►
They discovered that there are 64 elements necessary to produce all varieties of temporal situation.
00:33:21 ►
of temporal situation.
00:33:23 ►
There is a,
00:33:25 ►
it is no coincidence that the numbers
00:33:27 ►
which run the I Ching,
00:33:30 ►
64, 6, 4, cube of 8,
00:33:34 ►
so forth and so on,
00:33:35 ►
that all of those numbers
00:33:36 ►
are the same numbers
00:33:38 ►
that are necessary
00:33:39 ►
to describe the functioning of DNA.
00:33:43 ►
I mean,
00:33:44 ►
you can perfectly model the DNA using DNA I mean you can perfectly model
00:33:46 ►
the DNA using the
00:33:48 ►
I Ching, not only the
00:33:50 ►
64 codons that code for
00:33:52 ►
protein, but templating
00:33:54 ►
replication
00:33:55 ►
so forth and so on
00:33:57 ►
all the functions of DNA
00:33:59 ►
can be modeled very cleanly
00:34:01 ►
using the I Ching
00:34:02 ►
so really what it is, is it’s a calculus of biological necessity.
00:34:09 ►
And we, as creatures made of DNA,
00:34:14 ►
then find that this calculus of biological necessity functions for us like magic
00:34:19 ►
because it describes the matrix in which we are in fact embedded
00:34:26 ►
and with which we must come to terms.
00:34:32 ►
That’s why throwing the I Ching,
00:34:35 ►
even though I think that’s a completely corrupted use of it,
00:34:40 ►
still it is like dropping a dipstick into the flow of a river
00:34:45 ►
and then pulling it out and taking
00:34:47 ►
a depth measurement.
00:34:49 ►
It’s something like that.
00:34:52 ►
Yeah.
00:34:53 ►
I was wondering if
00:34:57 ►
some of the things we’re seeing manifest
00:34:59 ►
now are perhaps
00:35:02 ►
reverberations
00:35:02 ►
of this event which is approaching
00:35:05 ►
and I was wondering if crop circles
00:35:07 ►
might fit into that sometime
00:35:08 ►
well I think that
00:35:11 ►
well
00:35:12 ►
when pressed I guess
00:35:16 ►
I think that all phenomena
00:35:17 ►
are reverberations
00:35:19 ►
and in a sense
00:35:22 ►
pre-echoes
00:35:23 ►
is that a preco? I’m not sure
00:35:26 ►
of the eschaton
00:35:28 ►
many of you have heard me make this metaphor
00:35:33 ►
it’s like one of those mirrored
00:35:36 ►
bar balls in a disco
00:35:38 ►
it reflects
00:35:41 ►
its surround
00:35:43 ►
the essence of the eschaton is impossible to discern
00:35:48 ►
because its surface is mirrored.
00:35:51 ►
So when you look at the eschaton,
00:35:53 ►
what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
00:35:57 ►
And religions and hysterias of various sorts
00:36:05 ►
are particularly strong incidences
00:36:08 ►
of reflection of the eschaton.
00:36:11 ►
This thing which happened in Waco, Texas
00:36:14 ►
was just fascinating
00:36:15 ►
because it was a real cognitive dissonance.
00:36:20 ►
It made no sense to most people
00:36:24 ►
and yet obviously to most people.
00:36:31 ►
And yet, obviously, to the people inside the metaphor, it made perfect sense.
00:36:35 ►
I think we will see more and more of this kind of thing.
00:36:39 ►
And that, in fact, we need to guard against it.
00:36:45 ►
Prophets of all sorts will arise in the last days.
00:36:51 ►
Christianity taught this in an attempt to cover its own ass, not realizing that it is one of these cults which arise in the last days.
00:36:58 ►
The whole thing about the Christos, stripped of all the mumbo-jumbo,
00:37:04 ►
what this is about is the mystery of the resurrection,
00:37:09 ►
the idea that Christ was somehow involved
00:37:13 ►
in some kind of crypto-biological transformation
00:37:16 ►
that was necessary in order to unlock the doors of paradise
00:37:21 ►
which had been slammed shut with the fall of Adam. And I find
00:37:28 ►
Christianity fascinating. I don’t believe a word of it because I don’t think Christian theologians
00:37:34 ►
understand what they’re looking at. But what they’re looking at is the closest thing to the eschaton that we ever had,
00:37:45 ►
but the conclusions are all wrong.
00:37:48 ►
There’s an amazing passage in, I think it’s Luke.
00:37:53 ►
It’s the morning after the entombment of Christ
00:38:00 ►
and the three Marys, Mary the mother of James,
00:38:04 ►
Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of Christ, go to the tomb. And Christ is there, standing beside the rolled away stone.
00:38:28 ►
And one of these women starts toward him and he says, go read it, it’s right there.
00:38:35 ►
He says, touch me not woman, for I am not yet fully of the nature of the father.
00:38:40 ►
Well, you just wonder what in the world is going on here. He is alive, he resurrected he is he has overcome death but he says touch me not i am not
00:38:49 ►
yet fully of the nature of the father and what it implies is a process of some sort something is
00:38:57 ►
happening he is hypercarbolating is what is happening and the hypercarbolation is not yet complete
00:39:05 ►
it was a near miss
00:39:09 ►
and if you read the whole thing from that light
00:39:12 ►
it’s clear that the people involved
00:39:15 ►
could not understand what was happening
00:39:18 ►
so what you get here
00:39:21 ►
is a picture of somebody not fully in command of their own mojo, you know,
00:39:30 ►
and not themselves completely understanding what is going on.
00:39:35 ►
And I think that every religious teacher is a sense of victim of eschatonic,
00:39:43 ►
is a sense of victim of eschatonic,
00:39:46 ►
precursive reflectivity.
00:39:49 ►
And a David Koresh,
00:39:52 ►
it’s a mess.
00:39:57 ►
It’s a very distorted and twisted kind of reflection.
00:40:01 ►
A Christ, a Buddha, a Mohammed, a slightly cleaner shot at what it is,
00:40:07 ►
but nevertheless horribly distorted and misunderstood
00:40:10 ►
by historical contextuality.
00:40:14 ►
I was wondering if a study of some of the phenomena
00:40:17 ►
happening in the crop fields in England
00:40:21 ►
might shed some light on the form and shape of the eschaton?
00:40:26 ►
Well, I think that there will be more and more of these anomalies.
00:40:30 ►
The flying saucer is an interesting anomaly.
00:40:34 ►
The flying saucer is clearly the ghost of the eschaton.
00:40:38 ►
It’s, I mean, our unconscious mind, the skies of this planet
00:40:43 ►
are haunted by the image of a spinning silvery disc
00:40:47 ►
that has eternity and the aliens
00:40:50 ►
and the mysteries of existence locked inside of it.
00:40:55 ►
The appearance of the flying saucers in 47,
00:40:59 ►
I mean, the modern era of flying saucers,
00:41:03 ►
to my mind indicates closure with this eschatonic moment.
00:41:10 ►
But as we get closer to this coincidencia positorum,
00:41:17 ►
things will get wackier and rational analysis will fail.
00:41:23 ►
I think that the crop circles are a good example of this.
00:41:27 ►
If it is not a hoax, and this is a huge if,
00:41:32 ►
because there are things about the crop circles that just stink to high heaven.
00:41:38 ►
I mean, it is so marginally convincing.
00:41:44 ►
I mean mean for instance
00:41:45 ►
isn’t it a little odd that these things
00:41:48 ►
begin to appear
00:41:49 ►
within an hour and a half
00:41:52 ►
drive of most of the
00:41:54 ►
people on the planet who will embrace
00:41:56 ►
the phenomenon
00:41:57 ►
I’m thinking of John Michelle and his
00:42:00 ►
cronies I mean what if it were happening in the
00:42:02 ►
wheat fields of Siberia
00:42:03 ►
how inconvenient you know
00:42:06 ►
another thing about the crop circles that’s puzzling is everyone says it’s a communication
00:42:12 ►
it’s a curious form of communication because it communicates absolutely nothing what it
00:42:19 ►
communicates is complete confusion nobody has clue. If you really wanted to communicate
00:42:26 ►
and for some reason your chosen method of communication
00:42:30 ►
was mashed wheat fields in England,
00:42:33 ►
you could still write in the Queen’s English.
00:42:37 ►
Another thing very puzzling about the crop circles,
00:42:41 ►
not about the crop circles per se,
00:42:43 ►
but where is the British establishment
00:42:46 ►
in all this?
00:42:48 ►
I mean, my God,
00:42:49 ►
southern England is dotted
00:42:51 ►
with air bases, RAF bases,
00:42:54 ►
nuclear weapons depots,
00:42:57 ►
cruise missile bases.
00:42:58 ►
Are we being asked to believe
00:43:00 ►
that the Ministry of Defense
00:43:02 ►
is completely sanguine
00:43:04 ►
about nightly violations
00:43:06 ►
of British airspace
00:43:08 ►
year after year
00:43:09 ►
and they’re just perfectly
00:43:11 ►
comfortable with the idea
00:43:13 ►
that half a mile away
00:43:15 ►
from their nuclear weapons depot
00:43:17 ►
corn is being snapped over on its side.
00:43:21 ►
I mean, if you can snap a corn stalk,
00:43:23 ►
you can reset a switch on an
00:43:25 ►
arming device or a missile.
00:43:27 ►
.
00:43:28 ►
Pardon me?
00:43:29 ►
Bent and molded.
00:43:30 ►
Bent and molded. So it’s puzzling that the British government is so nonplussed by all
00:43:38 ►
this. I think that means they must either know what it is or, more likely, they’re doing
00:43:44 ►
it.
00:43:45 ►
They actually might have a military operation to observe a field.
00:43:52 ►
The military itself did actually observe a field for, I think, 10 days.
00:43:57 ►
Well, you know, I mean, you want to be very, very subtle in looking at a phenomenon like this.
00:44:04 ►
very subtle in looking at a phenomenon like this. It is conceivable that inside MI5,
00:44:08 ►
people have observed the rise of the neo-paganism in England
00:44:13 ►
that is characterized by the Glastonbury crowd
00:44:17 ►
and the rave culture and all that,
00:44:20 ►
and has created a hoax to lure those people out on a limb.
00:44:26 ►
In a sense, it’s already happened,
00:44:28 ►
because for years the crop circle enthusiasts ran around saying,
00:44:33 ►
no human being could make one of these things.
00:44:37 ►
Well, then Sheldrake and company and the people at the seriologist, you know,
00:44:42 ►
sponsored that contest last year
00:44:45 ►
where under very rigidly controlled conditions
00:44:48 ►
people were given 10-acre plots of corn
00:44:53 ►
and told, you know, you have from midnight to 4 a.m.,
00:45:00 ►
you can’t use any light, we will be monitoring for sound,
00:45:04 ►
and here is a high resolution photograph
00:45:07 ►
of a recent crop circle
00:45:09 ►
your mission is to make this crop circle
00:45:13 ►
in a convincing manner
00:45:14 ►
the people who won the prize produced a splendid crop circle
00:45:19 ►
so that put the no human beings can do it people
00:45:23 ►
highly on the defensive.
00:45:28 ►
I don’t know.
00:45:30 ►
It amused me.
00:45:31 ►
I mean, here’s an example of how occult thinking works.
00:45:33 ►
Remember, what were their names?
00:45:35 ►
Was it Ned and Dave, the two drunken painters?
00:45:39 ►
Doug and Dave.
00:45:41 ►
Okay, so here come Doug and Dave,
00:45:44 ►
these two mildly alcoholic itinerant house painters
00:45:48 ►
who claim to have done all the crop circles.
00:45:51 ►
People who the week before
00:45:54 ►
were talking about telluric messaging
00:45:57 ►
from the guy in World Soul
00:46:00 ►
just dumped all over Doug and Dave
00:46:03 ►
and said, well, you believe
00:46:05 ►
that two out-of-work painters could do this?
00:46:08 ►
Say, well, what’s your position?
00:46:10 ►
That a telluric force did it?
00:46:13 ►
Now, I ask you, you know,
00:46:15 ►
just in the interests of fairness,
00:46:17 ►
which is more likely?
00:46:19 ►
Doug and Dave may be a stretch of the imagination.
00:46:23 ►
Telluric force’s intent on saving the world
00:46:26 ►
is highly improbable
00:46:27 ►
so Rupert and I
00:46:29 ►
we went to work on this
00:46:32 ►
because I felt
00:46:33 ►
see there’s something
00:46:35 ►
it plays with people
00:46:36 ►
in the way that flying saucers never did
00:46:39 ►
for instance
00:46:39 ►
I don’t know if you know this
00:46:40 ►
but last summer
00:46:43 ►
I believe it was last summer’s most spectacular crop circle,
00:46:47 ►
was the logo of the crop circle society, the seriologist.
00:46:54 ►
And then the other big startling crop circle of last summer
00:47:00 ►
was a mantle broad set.
00:47:03 ►
Well, this is just a little too cute.
00:47:06 ►
It was right outside of Cambridge.
00:47:08 ►
Yes, isn’t that startling?
00:47:10 ►
It was right outside of Cambridge.
00:47:13 ►
So, for instance, when I criticize the crop circles
00:47:16 ►
and say, isn’t it strange that they all are in southern England
00:47:19 ►
where John Michelle and company would be most likely to stumble into them?
00:47:25 ►
Ah, that’s what people say.
00:47:26 ►
They say, you’re wrong.
00:47:28 ►
They’re not all in southern England.
00:47:30 ►
What about the one in Arkansas?
00:47:32 ►
What about the ones in Ontario and so forth?
00:47:35 ►
Japan, I say, baloney.
00:47:39 ►
I say, there aren’t.
00:47:41 ►
There aren’t.
00:47:42 ►
And did you see the one in Arkansas or Ontario?
00:47:46 ►
Well, of course we all saw pictures of it.
00:47:49 ►
But it’s sort of like determining whether or not Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world.
00:47:54 ►
I mean, how the hell would you actually verify that, and how much faith would you have in the results?
00:48:00 ►
I mean, here we have a mountain in Tibet and a mountain in Bolivia and you’re telling me you know beyond a shadow of a doubt
00:48:07 ►
which has its surface
00:48:09 ►
its utmost surface furthest from the center of the earth
00:48:13 ►
the crop circles
00:48:16 ►
if they are outside of England
00:48:18 ►
they aren’t spreading, they’re intermittent
00:48:20 ►
enough that we could easily dismiss all cases
00:48:24 ►
outside of England as the hoax of enthusiasts.
00:48:28 ►
And again, it communicates nothing.
00:48:32 ►
It is anti-communication.
00:48:34 ►
It is noise in the circuits.
00:48:37 ►
How many of you are in the British?
00:48:40 ►
I mean, maybe it’s just a little push.
00:48:43 ►
It’s something that is happening a little ahead of us.
00:48:46 ►
Well, yeah, I had this notion.
00:48:50 ►
At first, see, I thought,
00:48:52 ►
when I was more inclined to treating it as real,
00:48:55 ►
I thought maybe somebody is trying to contact us,
00:49:00 ►
and after 40 years of flying saucers,
00:49:04 ►
they finally figured out we just don’t get it of flying saucers they finally figured out
00:49:05 ►
we just don’t get it with flying saucers
00:49:09 ►
and they said
00:49:10 ►
well so we’ll leave a physical trace
00:49:14 ►
but the really
00:49:16 ►
to me the giveaway
00:49:19 ►
the key to the crop circle phenomenon
00:49:21 ►
is that nobody has ever seen one form and by god if you want to
00:49:28 ►
rivet the attention of the population of this planet just make a crop circle in front of us
00:49:37 ►
in front of television cameras in other words if we could see the corn lay down, then all skeptics would be just undercut completely.
00:49:49 ►
And it made one behind the television camera.
00:49:52 ►
About four or five years ago,
00:49:54 ►
20 magazines said,
00:49:55 ►
okay, we’re going to do something about it.
00:49:57 ►
And they went and they put the show on
00:50:00 ►
and they said,
00:50:00 ►
we went and they show all the crop circles
00:50:02 ►
and all the different theories.
00:50:03 ►
And they said,
00:50:04 ►
so we set up an infrared camera
00:50:05 ►
in a field one night and we waited for a crop circle
00:50:07 ►
to happen and then they show the
00:50:09 ►
infrared images of people in the
00:50:11 ►
shadows and stuff and they said sure enough
00:50:13 ►
by morning there was no crop circle and we
00:50:15 ►
were all getting ready to go and somebody said uh oh
00:50:17 ►
look and in the field behind them
00:50:19 ►
the ones that they weren’t filming
00:50:21 ►
the crop circle is here and that was the end of
00:50:23 ►
the I say arrest and torture the entire crew
00:50:27 ►
and you’ll get your answer
00:50:30 ►
because you see it’s perfectly clear
00:50:34 ►
that somehow if you were to see the crop circle made
00:50:39 ►
the mystery would flee
00:50:41 ►
and so we only get before and after how come no during when that’s
00:50:48 ►
what in fact would convince us of its reality it’s playing with us or somebody is playing with us
00:50:54 ►
well that’s what i was trying to do when i said uh that it’s a language virus of some sort.
00:51:06 ►
I mean, here’s the thing. Think about this.
00:51:08 ►
Suppose, my
00:51:09 ►
other example,
00:51:12 ►
suppose you’re a scientist
00:51:13 ►
and you’re measuring the
00:51:15 ►
amount of electricity running in
00:51:17 ►
a line. And just for purposes
00:51:20 ►
of argument, let’s say you put
00:51:21 ►
a million voltmeters
00:51:24 ►
on this line. So you’re say you put a million volt meters on this line so you’re going
00:51:27 ►
to get a million measurements of the amount of voltage running through the
00:51:31 ►
line nine hundred thousand nine hundred and ninety ninety nine thousand nine
00:51:37 ►
hundred and ninety nine of these meters tell you that the voltage flowing through the line is between three and five volts.
00:51:46 ►
One volt meter on this line tells you that 8,000 volts are flowing through the line.
00:51:55 ►
Now, what do you do if you’re a scientist? You throw out that value. You say, well, that can’t
00:52:01 ►
possibly be true. All the other meters metered within a certain
00:52:07 ►
narrow range, this one meter is broken. Get rid of it. Now, think of each of us as meters,
00:52:16 ►
metering reality. Millions of us, all reporting, no big deal, no big deal. Then comes one person.
00:52:25 ►
They say that there’s a thousand-ton beryllium ship
00:52:28 ►
populated by little gray men
00:52:31 ►
who want to give you a proctological examination
00:52:33 ►
in the middle of the night.
00:52:35 ►
Now, what do we do?
00:52:38 ►
We don’t throw them out.
00:52:39 ►
We put them on national TV and make a movie about it
00:52:43 ►
and hold conferences and try and figure out how could this be.
00:52:51 ►
But the same thing can be said about the very foundation of everything we talk about.
00:52:57 ►
No, because psychedelic experiences are repeatable on demand.
00:53:02 ►
That’s the great difference.
00:53:05 ►
These phenomena which just come and go
00:53:08 ►
and leave you jaw hanging in the wind,
00:53:11 ►
since you can’t control the confrontation,
00:53:15 ►
you don’t know what you’ve got.
00:53:18 ►
With psychedelics, you know,
00:53:20 ►
you can see elves twice a day on schedule.
00:53:24 ►
You can see elves twice a day on schedule.
00:53:31 ►
And the people who find this assertion disconcerting don’t want to hear about it.
00:53:33 ►
But it’s in fact true.
00:53:35 ►
The drugs at last give us a handle on the other
00:53:39 ►
where we can deal with it
00:53:42 ►
rather than wait for it to occur.
00:53:45 ►
With large unbiased populations.
00:53:48 ►
You mean that they get elves?
00:53:50 ►
You mean people who’ve been
00:53:51 ►
contaminated by Terence McKenna rats?
00:53:54 ►
I’ve read your books and I’ve seen
00:53:55 ►
elves. Well, do you think
00:53:58 ►
you saw elves because you read my books?
00:54:00 ►
I don’t know.
00:54:02 ►
Well, what do you think?
00:54:03 ►
I think I don’t know. Well, I didn’t know. What do you think? I think I don’t know.
00:54:06 ►
Well, I didn’t read my books when I saw elves.
00:54:11 ►
It was on the natch.
00:54:15 ►
I think that I spread the elf meme.
00:54:22 ►
I make it legitimate to report elves
00:54:25 ►
but that I think people were seeing
00:54:28 ►
elves before
00:54:29 ►
it’s a difficult
00:54:32 ►
thing because it’s a mental phenomenon
00:54:34 ►
you know I mean we can’t lug
00:54:36 ►
a camera in there although
00:54:38 ►
with virtual reality and sufficient
00:54:40 ►
money we could set
00:54:42 ►
out to create
00:54:44 ►
a virtual version of one person’s trip.
00:54:47 ►
And once they said, yes, that’s it, 100%, you got it,
00:54:53 ►
then we would bring somebody else in and put the helmet on them
00:54:56 ►
and say, is this what your trip was like?
00:54:59 ►
And please critique and modify the contents of this virtual reality.
00:55:07 ►
critique and modify the contents of this virtual reality. I think this is that virtual reality is going to be a very powerful tool for exploring pharmacological states because at last we are
00:55:13 ►
going to be able to compare the contents of our own minds through something a little more fine
00:55:20 ►
tuned than verbal language. Basically, my method has been
00:55:26 ►
a what-can-you-show-me method.
00:55:28 ►
And I know that there are these,
00:55:31 ►
you know, this particular style
00:55:32 ►
of refined English womanhood
00:55:35 ►
that seems at home
00:55:37 ►
with the fairies of the garden,
00:55:40 ►
the Dutch.
00:55:42 ►
The things I encounter
00:55:43 ►
that I call elves or gnomes it’s just a gloss i mean they’re small
00:55:50 ►
and they have the archetype they they’re more like leprechauns and this maybe raises a racial issue
00:55:57 ►
and they they make things and they live in domed spaces and you know the mythology of
00:56:08 ►
elves is that they live under hills and their master craftsmen makers of jewelry and machines
00:56:17 ►
and stuff like that that is exactly the deal and their and their dead souls is what they are
00:56:25 ►
interestingly the whole
00:56:27 ►
notion of fairyland
00:56:29 ►
is
00:56:30 ►
when Saint Patrick
00:56:33 ►
arrived in Ireland to
00:56:35 ►
convert the pagan Irish to
00:56:38 ►
Christianity they were
00:56:39 ►
practicing what is called the fairy
00:56:42 ►
faith they believed
00:56:44 ►
in little people.
00:56:46 ►
They believed they were the souls of the departed.
00:56:49 ►
They believed they were everywhere around us,
00:56:52 ►
and they believed that certain people who had the eye
00:56:55 ►
could see these fairies.
00:56:57 ►
And they believed this with such conviction
00:57:00 ►
that Patrick quickly realized that he was not going to get anywhere converting
00:57:06 ►
the Irish unless he
00:57:08 ►
made a place for this
00:57:10 ►
phenomenon. So he
00:57:12 ►
invented purgatory.
00:57:14 ►
Purgatory was invented
00:57:16 ►
by St. Patrick. It was not church
00:57:18 ►
doctrine before that
00:57:20 ►
time and he
00:57:22 ►
then very successfully
00:57:24 ►
and if you are not Catholic or don’t truck in this domain
00:57:28 ►
you may not know what purgatory is is a place exactly like hell except you eventually get out
00:57:37 ►
and and it’s where you do penance for your sins. Well, he was so successful converting the pagan Irish with this concept
00:57:48 ►
that when word reached the Holy See, the Vatican,
00:57:52 ►
it was made church dogma,
00:57:55 ►
and then it was very successfully used to convert the pagan Slavs,
00:58:00 ►
who also had a belief in a kind of fairyland.
00:58:04 ►
who also had a belief in a kind of fairyland.
00:58:11 ►
So I don’t know what this thing about dead souls is puzzling to me.
00:58:18 ►
It even with my predilection for the peculiar and the psychedelic, I find it hard to completely embrace the notion that these are ancestors alive in some other dimension. But in some ways,
00:58:30 ►
that is the most conservative explanation. After all, if you believe they’re extraterrestrials who
00:58:39 ►
came from the stars, then you’re supposing and hypothesizing all kinds of things. Since they
00:58:47 ►
are interested in human beings, since they can converse with human beings, since they seem to
00:58:54 ►
know our boundaries and limitations, they must be some kind of human being. And then the choices
00:59:01 ►
are they are a prenatal form of existence
00:59:05 ►
in other words souls that never
00:59:08 ►
incarnated into a body
00:59:10 ►
and are like up there waiting
00:59:12 ►
for the stork or something
00:59:14 ►
or
00:59:16 ►
they are some
00:59:18 ►
future state of humanity
00:59:20 ►
where apparently we no longer
00:59:22 ►
have bodies and we’ve changed ourselves
00:59:24 ►
into self-dribbling jeweled basketballs
00:59:27 ►
for God knows what reason
00:59:28 ►
or they are post-life forms
00:59:35 ►
they are people who once walked the earth as you and I do
00:59:40 ►
but have gone beyond into this other circumstance
00:59:44 ►
one of the things that is, to me,
00:59:47 ►
almost as puzzling as the elfin nature of the DMT encounter is that after you’ve been in there four
00:59:55 ►
or five times, and it takes a while because at first it’s just absolute shock and disbelief.
01:00:02 ►
I mean, you bring very little out of it you’re just appalled
01:00:05 ►
and that’s about all you can say about it
01:00:07 ►
but after a while
01:00:10 ►
I realized
01:00:12 ►
that the motif of the DMT encounter
01:00:17 ►
and I guess I should describe it briefly
01:00:19 ►
when you burst into the DMT space
01:00:22 ►
you have the impression that you’re in a domed space,
01:00:26 ►
approximately the size of the length of this room,
01:00:30 ►
but round, with a somewhat lower ceiling,
01:00:33 ►
indirectly lit, warm, comfortable.
01:00:37 ►
And the moment you get your bearings, they’re there.
01:00:41 ►
In fact, as you break into that space they cheer
01:00:45 ►
and some of you may know that
01:00:48 ►
song by the Pink Floyd
01:00:50 ►
from years ago
01:00:51 ►
the gnomes have learned a new way
01:00:53 ►
to say hooray
01:00:57 ►
so you break into this space
01:00:59 ►
they scream their greeting
01:01:02 ►
and while you’re just trying to get oriented,
01:01:07 ►
they come bounding forward, somewhat like dogs, actually.
01:01:11 ►
And they begin to lick your face and crawl all over you
01:01:15 ►
and jump in and out of your body.
01:01:18 ►
And they say, we love you, we love you.
01:01:21 ►
You send so many, you come so rarely.
01:01:24 ►
Welcome, welcome
01:01:25 ►
and so you’re like
01:01:28 ►
you know
01:01:30 ►
trying to take your pulse
01:01:32 ►
trying to make sure you’re breathing
01:01:34 ►
because you really, you have the impression
01:01:36 ►
this is so serious
01:01:38 ►
that I may be dead
01:01:40 ►
I may have just simply
01:01:42 ►
killed myself
01:01:43 ►
ten seconds ago
01:01:45 ►
and this is what’s happening
01:01:47 ►
they use their voices to make objects
01:01:51 ►
they speak a language which you do not hear
01:01:55 ►
but which you see
01:01:56 ►
you not only see it, you feel it
01:01:59 ►
and so they use language
01:02:02 ►
to cause syntactical, architectonic
01:02:07 ►
techno
01:02:08 ►
structures to
01:02:10 ►
condense out of the air
01:02:11 ►
and they show you
01:02:14 ►
these things, they’re proud of them
01:02:16 ►
they come bounding forward
01:02:18 ►
and jump up and down in front of you
01:02:20 ►
and say look at this, look at this
01:02:22 ►
and they’re all competing like children
01:02:24 ►
to show you this stuff. And as you direct your attention into one of these objects,
01:02:31 ►
you see beyond any power of contradiction that this thing that they’re showing you is impossible.
01:02:39 ►
They’re constantly transforming themselves in the most amazing way and they’re showing you this stuff and they’re
01:02:46 ►
saying do what we’re doing you can do this use your voice to make something and you’re like
01:02:56 ►
you know this is now 30 seconds into this experience reality has been obliterated and you’re just in this place well uh and and one can do this
01:03:09 ►
and there is a glossolalia and then these objects condense out of the air and the objects themselves
01:03:16 ►
are somehow alive you put one down and they they emit sound and make subsets of their own type.
01:03:26 ►
And all of this is just, you know, you’re just like, my God, what has happened?
01:03:31 ►
The strange thing about DMT is it doesn’t affect your mind in the ordinary sense
01:03:37 ►
so that you’re not ecstatic or freed of anxiety
01:03:42 ►
or you’re exactly who you were before this started happening
01:03:46 ►
with all your neuroses, fears, doubts, and you’re saying, you know,
01:03:51 ►
is this all right? Am I going to be okay?
01:03:55 ►
How long is it going to last? So forth and so on.
01:03:59 ►
But the point I wanted to make that I got started on a few minutes ago
01:04:02 ►
is after many of these exposures to this
01:04:06 ►
I have realized
01:04:08 ►
and I think I’m
01:04:09 ►
right that this
01:04:11 ►
environment into which you
01:04:13 ►
are catapulted
01:04:15 ►
bizarre as it is
01:04:18 ►
it is someone
01:04:19 ►
very strange
01:04:21 ►
it’s their idea
01:04:23 ►
of a reassuring environment
01:04:26 ►
for a human being
01:04:27 ►
they are so marvelous
01:04:30 ►
to you because you’ve never seen
01:04:32 ►
anything like it but on the other hand
01:04:34 ►
you’ve just been born into
01:04:36 ►
this world and
01:04:37 ►
trying and this is why
01:04:40 ►
I think perhaps it is a
01:04:42 ►
bardo perhaps it is
01:04:44 ►
an after death
01:04:45 ►
I don’t know if
01:04:47 ►
maternity ward is quite
01:04:49 ►
the phrase but it’s
01:04:51 ►
it’s where you
01:04:54 ►
start your existence
01:04:55 ►
in this other dimension
01:04:57 ►
but in the same way that a baby lying
01:05:00 ►
in a bassinet in a maternity
01:05:01 ►
ward could hardly conceive
01:05:03 ►
of growing up to drive Ferraris
01:05:06 ►
collect art and crush
01:05:08 ►
the competition
01:05:09 ►
you lying there in this
01:05:12 ►
nursery in this
01:05:13 ►
playpen how can you extrapolate
01:05:17 ►
what lies
01:05:18 ►
beyond that space because clearly
01:05:20 ►
the entire space has been prepared
01:05:22 ►
for baby and you’re
01:05:24 ►
the baby so you’re the baby
01:05:25 ►
so you can’t figure out
01:05:28 ►
is this the entirety of this universe
01:05:30 ►
or how far does it extend
01:05:33 ►
and I suspect that when you die
01:05:36 ►
this is what you get
01:05:39 ►
and that familiarity with the after death vehicle
01:05:42 ►
that DMT actually is a thanatoptic compound,
01:05:48 ►
and that this trip is your peeking over the edge into eternity.
01:05:54 ►
And, you know, questions you never thought you would have answers to
01:05:59 ►
are answered just, you know, is there life after death?
01:06:03 ►
You bet. Next question.
01:06:04 ►
answered just, you know, is there life after death? You bet. Next question.
01:06:11 ►
On that note, let’s go to dinner. Thank you.
01:06:20 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. Well, I hope that you enjoyed that somewhat new version of a DMT experience,
01:06:27 ►
but please don’t forget that not everyone is going to have an experience similar to Terrence’s.
01:06:33 ►
And while I have certainly had my own share of DMT experiences, never, not once, did a pack of
01:06:40 ►
elves or leprechauns for that matter, jump on me and lick my face. So I don’t want you to think that while in very general terms psychedelic experiences
01:06:49 ►
are repeatable, they are mainly repeatable in that they launch you into the psychedelic
01:06:54 ►
realm every time.
01:06:55 ►
But it seems to me that the actual experience, once you are there, is never the same.
01:07:01 ►
Similar in some ways, but never the same.
01:07:03 ►
is never the same. Similar in some ways, but never the same.
01:07:08 ►
Also, and this is a personal aside to my grandchildren,
01:07:12 ►
who hopefully will get to this podcast in about 30 more years or so,
01:07:17 ►
but when Terrence mentioned that the Mayan creation date for their long-count calendar began on 4 Ahau 8 Kamkua, that translates in our system to August 11, 3114 BC.
01:07:27 ►
Now, what is significant about that date for me is what happened exactly 5,056 years later,
01:07:34 ►
because that’s my own personal creation date,
01:07:37 ►
as it is for all of our other fellow salonners who were also born on August 11.
01:07:43 ►
And that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, so let’s move on.
01:07:49 ►
Now, I know that this is a trite observation, but I couldn’t help thinking that when Terence said,
01:07:54 ►
So when you look at the eschaton, what you see, strangely enough, is your own face.
01:08:01 ►
Well, when he said that, without realizing it, I suspect,
01:08:10 ►
Well, when he said that, without realizing it, I suspect, he was actually speaking about his personal eschaton, which took place less than seven years later.
01:08:19 ►
In fact, now that we’ve listened to so many of his talks and workshops, it’s become quite clear to me that, back in the day, as the expression goes,
01:08:24 ►
one of the big attractions that he must have had for us was his constant talk about the eschaton. Of course,
01:08:26 ►
we had the Millennium’s Y2K issue as well as 2012 well into the future at the time.
01:08:32 ►
But I’m now wondering if his message would have been so compelling back then if he’d
01:08:36 ►
placed the eschaton, say, 500 years into the future. But considering how popular his message
01:08:42 ►
still is, even after 2012 has come and gone, well, my guess is that we still would have wanted to hear what he had to say.
01:08:50 ►
After all, back then there was no World Wide Web, no Arrowid.org, and outside of Terrence, detailed information about drugs was simply not available.
01:09:00 ►
In my case, I didn’t even know about 2012 or the time wave until well after I’d already come into contact with him.
01:09:07 ►
Now, later on in this talk, when he was speaking about crop circles and gave what he called an example of cult thinking,
01:09:14 ►
I had to gulp a little because during the mid to late 90s, Terence himself was well on the way to becoming a cult phenomena.
01:09:24 ►
the way to becoming a cult phenomena. In fact, there’s been a lot of speculation that the pressure of avoiding cult status was one of the stresses that eventually brought about his demise.
01:09:31 ►
And if you’ve been here with us in the salon for a while, you’ve already heard him bemoan the fact
01:09:35 ►
that he was trying to avoid a cult while at the same time he had to earn a living on the speaking
01:09:41 ►
circuit. It was a real dilemma for him, I’ve been told, and just so you know, the last thing that I want to do here in the salon
01:09:48 ►
is to further the cult idea.
01:09:51 ►
My purpose is simply to see that some of these ideas
01:09:53 ►
stay around for a little while longer.
01:09:56 ►
And obviously, in the beginning, I too came for the drug information.
01:10:00 ►
No secret there.
01:10:03 ►
Now, for our younger salonners, when Terrence mentioned
01:10:06 ►
what he called that Waco thing, well, he was talking about the incident a couple of months
01:10:11 ►
before this talk was given, where the Clinton crime family attacked the Branch Davidians,
01:10:16 ►
for reasons never made clear, and burned a number of children to death with tanks and
01:10:21 ►
flamethrowers. So you see, policing civilians with military hardware
01:10:25 ►
actually got its start under blowjob Bill Clinton.
01:10:29 ►
Keep that in mind should you ever be insane enough
01:10:31 ►
to vote for that Clinton woman who keeps threatening to run for president.
01:10:35 ►
To quote Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now,
01:10:38 ►
it’s a horror. It’s a horror.
01:10:42 ►
But that thought isn’t the one that I want to end this podcast with
01:10:46 ►
in fact it seems that what I have to say right now
01:10:50 ►
may become a tradition here in the salon
01:10:52 ►
because I just received my year-end announcement
01:10:55 ►
from the publisher of the dailypsychedelicvideo.com website
01:10:59 ►
and the man behind the site is my friend Ido
01:11:03 ►
who I got to meet several years ago
01:11:05 ►
when he was touring the states
01:11:06 ►
and each day he publishes a link
01:11:09 ►
to a new psychedelic video
01:11:10 ►
and then at the end of the year
01:11:12 ►
he publishes a best of link
01:11:14 ►
and I’ll be sure to link that
01:11:16 ►
in today’s program notes
01:11:17 ►
which you know you can get to
01:11:19 ►
via psychedelicsalon.us
01:11:20 ►
now before I go
01:11:22 ►
I suppose I would be remiss
01:11:24 ►
in not closing this the last podcast of 2014, with a parting thought of my own or two.
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And what comes most forcefully to my mind right now is how very much alike all of us humans are, in spite of our differences in language and customs.
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At this very moment, there are over 500 people
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who are either downloading or streaming a podcast from this salon.
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And are you ready for this?
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Not all of them are Americans.
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Each month, these podcasts are downloaded by people from more than 100 countries.
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Plus, there is a large.mil contingent as well.
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Obviously, with a group this widespread,
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there must be considerable differences
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in the way we live our daily lives, and yet there is something here that seems to draw us all
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together. Something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Actually, the best I can do is to put
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it down to what I call the commonality of psychedelic thinking. And if you’re new to the
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salon, you should be aware that by psychedelic thinking, I’m not talking about being under the influence of a drug or a plant medicine.
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I’m talking about the state of mind or worldview that people arrive at who are willing to step out of their normal cultural, family, and religious constraints and come to their own conclusions about life.
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conclusions about life. And should you want to know more about what I mean, you can re-listen to my podcast number one, which is a recording of the talk that I gave at the Mind States
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Conference held near the end of May in 2001, just a few months before our current age of
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craziness began. The talk is titled Psychedelic Thinking in the Dawn of Homo Cyber, and since
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I haven’t listened to that talk myself for quite a long time now,
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I probably have changed my mind about some of the things I said back then.
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The point of the talk, however, isn’t to convince you to accept my analysis of the situation,
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but to encourage you to get out of any mental box you may find yourself in
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and begin thinking for yourself and questioning any and all authorities.
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And, by the way, do you remember who it was that first made that phrase,
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think for yourself and question authority, famous?
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Well, that’s today’s pop quiz.
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As you know, each and every culture thinks that, but for a few small loose ends,
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they’ve figured out everything about how the world should work.
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And, of course, every century or so, historians revisit the past
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and laugh at how delusional those poor souls were back in the old days.
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The same will be true 500 years from now,
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when our descendants look back at how primitive we sometimes have behaved toward one another.
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One of my dearest friends is Vietnamese.
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He was an 8-year-old orphan at the time that I was involved in the war in his homeland, and today he is an extremely accomplished artist and computer programmer, who, with his wonderful wife, has raised three extremely high-achieving sons.
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My friend’s early life was a horror beyond my ability to describe, and yet he’s been able to come to grips with his
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past and move beyond the pain. What we came to learn during these many years of friendship
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is that when we strip away the wrappings of culture and religion, that deep down at our very
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core, we are essentially the same when it comes to basic human emotions. Being human beings,
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we are identical in so many more ways than our exterior lives indicate. In the 1990s, my wife
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and I traveled from Saigon to Hanoi, mostly in the company with my friend and his wife and oldest son,
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and we stayed with his extended family and friends in their homes along the way.
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For almost two weeks, we didn’t see any other Westerners.
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Much of our time was spent in the Central Highlands, not far from Laos, where we visited a leper village.
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Now, you wouldn’t think that an old white guy from the States could have much in common with those villagers,
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which is what I thought before that day in the village of Dock Ring,
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when my eyes looked into the eyes of a young woman who lived there.
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She had lost several fingers, part of one hand, and most of her nose.
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She spoke no English, and I spoke no Vietnamese.
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Yet, through our eyes, we communicated on a level that I’ve seldom known.
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As our eyes locked on one another, she gave me one of the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen.
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I’ll never forget her. Here I was, still kind of feeling sorry for myself because I grew up poor
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in America, and here was this wonderful being who life had treated very shabbily and yet was sending
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me love and cheer with her smile and her eyes. It is a moment in my life that remains as vivid as if it
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happened yesterday, and I can never thank her enough for reminding me how that under the skin
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we are all ultimately the very same. Beyond question, the United States is a deeply racist
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society, and in my opinion this racial divide is actually being programmed into our
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culture very directly and systematically. I’ll give you just one example, but looking around,
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you’ll be able to find many other such things as this. I’m talking about those horrible television
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shows where a mean-spirited judge listens to poor people argue with one another. If you pay
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attention, you’ll notice that about half of all the people on those programs,
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and on other reality TV shows like Cops, are black.
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Now, if a true representation of the population was taken into account,
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only about 1 in 10 would be black.
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Yet, the impression that is left with the viewer is that
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most of these petty quarrels are among black people.
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What is so insidious about this, from my point of view,
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is that so many U.S. households simply leave the television on all day,
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and so the children in the house,
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even though they aren’t paying attention to what’s going on on TV,
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are being bombarded subliminally
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with images of black people arguing with one another
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while a white judge adjudicates their disputes.
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of black people arguing with one another while a white judge adjudicates their disputes.
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How do you suppose a four-year-old child processes an imprint like that?
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And if you don’t yet know about the importance of early imprinting, you may want to listen to some of my early Timothy Leary podcasts where he goes into great detail about imprinting.
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And by the way, Timothy Leary is the answer to today’s pop quiz, in case you’re wondering.
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Now, let me tell you about a case of positive imprinting that happened to me.
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During the last half of the 1940s, in the small town where I grew up just outside of Chicago,
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the local garbage collection was done by several independent companies.
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One of them was owned and operated by a black man named
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Gene Wheeler, and my mother was his bookkeeper. She worked from her home, and every Friday at
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the end of the workday, Mr. Wheeler’s men would drive their now-empty trucks to our house where
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they picked up their paychecks for the week. Our house was on a corner lot, and Friday afternoons
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for me were the most exciting time of the week. There’d be a dozen or so big trucks parked in our driveway and on the two streets that our house was on,
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and the times I remember best was when I was four or five years old,
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and the truck drivers would help me climb up into the cabs of their trucks,
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and then let me pull the rope that sounded the horn.
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I don’t think there’s ever been a little boy who didn’t want to do that.
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And sometimes one of them would even let me sit on his lap
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and drive around the block with me thinking that I was doing all the steering
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over time I got to know most of the men
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and so when my mother would come out and sit on the back porch steps
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with a stack of paychecks in her lap
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I’d see who had just pulled up next and would run to their trucks
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and give them their week’s pay
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so my imprint as a child of young black men I’d see who had just pulled up next and would run to their trucks and give them their week’s pay.
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So my imprint as a child of young black men is one of happy, laughing, friendly people who liked me and they treated me as if I was all grown up and one of them.
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Now today, when I’m walking down a city street and see a black man walking my way,
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unlike many of my contemporaries, my first thought is of those wonderful smiling
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men who were my childhood friends. At least, that’s how I came to think of them. I was very
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fortunate to have been imprinted in that way, and hopefully in my own little boy way, by running out
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to their trucks with their paychecks, some of those men were imprinted by me in a positive way as well.
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Well, I’m just rambling now, but my point is that
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perhaps this new year is one in which you should seek out someone who has been raised in a different
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culture and is of a different race. Then get to know them like you would if you were stranded on
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a desert island with them. Talk about substantive things, not just small talk. And if you do,
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not just small talk.
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And if you do,
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my guess is that you’re going to realize what a deep common humanity we share.
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And it’s time that we begin acting
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like the brothers and sisters we really are.
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We’re all in this together, you know.
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And for now, this is Lorenzo
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signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
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Be careful out there my friends Thank you.