Program Notes
Guest speaker: Tom Barbalet
Today’s podcast features a conversation between fellow podcaster Tom Barbalet and his guest. Their discussion centers on what we have all come to think of as that voice in our head. As you will hear, it may not be anything like what you think it is. As Tom’s guest says, “The idea for me is really very simple, break the identification with the voice in your head. It’s not who you are. It’s just your language machine. And you’ll be in a much better position to evaluate your experience and formulate new actions if you language machine isn’t filling your head with a bunch of stupid, really bad ideas.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:26 ►
space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I want to begin today’s podcast by dedicating it to a woman who made a significant impact on my life.
00:00:32 ►
Her name was Rosalia Stotemeister and back in 1957 she was my high school English teacher.
00:00:40 ►
Most of my classmates were terrified of Mrs. Stotemeister, for she was really stern and didn’t allow any slackers in her class, but somehow she and I became close.
00:00:50 ►
When I went on to study engineering and law after I left high school, it was her English class that stuck with me more than any other high school or actually since then university class that I’ve had.
00:01:06 ►
class that I’ve had. It was Mrs. Stotemeister who inspired me to become a writer, and it was largely through the teaching and guidance that she gave me that my life has been so greatly enriched.
00:01:12 ►
I never saw her again after I left high school, so I never got a chance to tell her how important
00:01:17 ►
she was in my life, but there has seldom been a period in my life when she hasn’t come to mind.
00:01:22 ►
Her spirit will always be with me. It was Rosalia
00:01:26 ►
Stotmeister who was the first person to encourage me to write about my own experiences, to tell my
00:01:32 ►
own story. So I owe her quite a lot. And how interesting it is to me that I should be making
00:01:39 ►
this announcement at the beginning of this particular podcast, which in essence is about
00:01:43 ►
creating your own life story.
00:01:46 ►
What we’re about to listen to is a conversation
00:01:48 ►
that my friend Tom Barberle recorded
00:01:51 ►
specifically for us here in the salon.
00:01:53 ►
It’s, I guess, been several years
00:01:55 ►
since Tom was last here with us in the salon,
00:01:57 ►
but he and I have been in touch for a long time,
00:02:00 ►
thanks primarily to the good graces
00:02:02 ►
of our mutual friend Bruce Dahmer.
00:02:04 ►
And I have an announcement about Bruce that I’ll pass along after we first listen to Tom and his guest, Heron Stone.
00:02:11 ►
Tom, by the way, is the creator of the Noble Ape simulation that has been ongoing mainly on college campuses since 1996.
00:02:20 ►
And Tom is also a virtual reality pioneer, and we first crossed paths back when we were both involved in Bruce’s company, Digital Space.
00:02:29 ►
Now, Tom and Heron, I should mention, are also the hosts of the popular Stone Ape podcast.
00:02:34 ►
Although, I still like to think of it as the Stoned Apes podcast.
00:02:40 ►
Sorry about that, Tom and Heron, but, you know, you guys left yourselves wide open for that one.
00:02:46 ►
I’ll post links to some of the activities that Tom and Heron are involved in,
00:02:51 ►
but just to give you a brief introduction to Tom’s guest, Heron Stone,
00:02:55 ►
here’s how Tom describes him, and I quote,
00:02:58 ►
Through no effort or intention of his own,
00:03:01 ►
Heron Stone woke up from the trance of language at 21. He never recovered from the
00:03:07 ►
shock and has been trying to figure out what’s going on here ever since. End quote. So let’s
00:03:14 ►
join him now and see if you can figure out what I’m thinking about right now. Well, I probably
00:03:20 ►
should introduce myself. My name is Tom Barbalay. I’ve appeared once previously on The Psychedelic Salon.
00:03:26 ►
I was in episode 283 with my friend Bruce Dahmer talking about elves and the machine.
00:03:32 ►
And I heard on a recent podcast Lorenzo opining that his regulars weren’t providing him with audio.
00:03:38 ►
So I thought I would take the bull by the horns and start a conversation associated with my friend and fellow podcaster
00:03:47 ►
Heron Stone’s perspective with language, an internal narrative or a language machine or
00:03:53 ►
all of the above and just introduce Heron to the broader listening audience of the Psychedelic
00:03:59 ►
Salon. I’ve been podcasting with Heron for about four years now. By the time this audio goes out, he will be 69 years old.
00:04:08 ►
And he and I have been talking about a wide variety of topics
00:04:11 ►
with a heavy returning view associated with the power of language
00:04:19 ►
and also what I call the internal narrative
00:04:22 ►
and what Heron calls the language machine.
00:04:25 ►
Heron, for folks listening in, how would you introduce what the language machine is?
00:04:30 ►
The voice in your head.
00:04:33 ►
That little monologue that accompanies most people’s lives all day, all night.
00:04:42 ►
Basically, its job is to take our sense data and make a story out of it. And of course,
00:04:48 ►
most people are totally entranced by the voice in their head. They think that they are doing it,
00:04:54 ►
as opposed to something that is happening to them.
00:04:58 ►
So in terms of your broader project, it’s about understanding the voice in the head,
00:05:04 ►
but is it about taming it
00:05:06 ►
or quietening it in the long term well to begin with it’s about breaking identification with it
00:05:11 ►
it’s just i mean that’s almost the whole game because at least from from what from what i see
00:05:19 ►
my perspective is that it looks like most people most most of the time, and I mean like 98% of people, 98% of the time, are literally living in a linguistically induced hypnotic trance.
00:05:33 ►
They believe everything they hear their language machine say.
00:05:37 ►
In fact, they think they said it.
00:05:39 ►
Therefore, they must believe it.
00:05:42 ►
So it’s really about getting that that voice in our head is something that is happening to us.
00:05:47 ►
It’s a programmed function that began before we were born, actually, while in the womb.
00:05:55 ►
And like I say, most people think that that’s them.
00:05:59 ►
That’s who they are.
00:06:00 ►
That voice is who they are.
00:06:02 ►
But it’s just your language machine.
00:06:04 ►
who they are. That voice is who they are. But it’s just your language machine.
00:06:11 ►
And once you’ve identified it, should one consider quietening it or should one just acknowledge it? What relationship should one have to it?
00:06:14 ►
I don’t know. You know, it’s funny. I’ve been doing this for a long time, as you mentioned.
00:06:20 ►
I started this when I was 21 years old. So I’ve been at it for a few years, and it’s changed over the years.
00:06:29 ►
It actually has started to quiet down recently in the last couple of years, surprisingly.
00:06:35 ►
Really, it’s so simple.
00:06:37 ►
It’s just seeing that the voice isn’t me.
00:06:42 ►
almost everything after that is practically irrelevant because
00:06:44 ►
once you’re no longer identified
00:06:47 ►
with it, it can be doing all sorts of
00:06:49 ►
silly shit and you’re not caught
00:06:51 ►
up in it. That’s the thing is that people are caught
00:06:53 ►
up in that
00:06:55 ►
thing
00:06:56 ►
and
00:06:57 ►
well
00:07:01 ►
yeah, so it’s just about breaking
00:07:03 ►
that trance. Quieting it, that’s a good try.
00:07:10 ►
Most people, in fact, that’s what meditators find out almost immediately and why most of them quit pretty soon is they can’t quiet it.
00:07:20 ►
You know, it just has its own life.
00:07:23 ►
It will quiet, but you can’t make it quiet.
00:07:26 ►
You can sort of allow it.
00:07:28 ►
Actually, if you watch it, it tends to shut up.
00:07:32 ►
That’s sort of interesting.
00:07:33 ►
So I would say, yeah, one of the things you can do is just observe it.
00:07:36 ►
Just watch it rather than get caught up in it.
00:07:39 ►
Like, son of a bitch, look what that guy did.
00:07:41 ►
Well, the next time I see him, I’m going to be there.
00:07:43 ►
And it goes on and on and on.
00:07:46 ►
It’s to just observe the thing. But once you turn
00:07:48 ►
your attention to it, at least my experience
00:07:50 ►
has been that it
00:07:51 ►
quiets down real fast.
00:07:54 ►
So,
00:07:55 ►
once one has acknowledged it, and acknowledged
00:07:58 ►
it as a separate entity,
00:08:00 ►
where can one
00:08:01 ►
derive the I from
00:08:03 ►
in terms of one’s own identity?
00:08:06 ►
Well, I haven’t got a clue.
00:08:08 ►
Of course, that becomes – that is the question.
00:08:11 ►
If that voice in my head isn’t me, then who the hell is me?
00:08:16 ►
Or where is this I?
00:08:19 ►
And I don’t know.
00:08:20 ►
I’m still working on that one.
00:08:22 ►
That’s the big mystery as far as I’m concerned is the nature of I.
00:08:27 ►
I mean I have my story about that and I would say that it’s Bob who’s doing everybody, who’s looking through your eyes and mine and all the listeners and all of that.
00:08:42 ►
But that’s just a story. And that’s the other thing is this whole idea of getting that anything we can say in language is a story.
00:08:50 ►
We have experience, direct perceptual experience, moment by moment, an ongoing process.
00:09:00 ►
And then we’ve got our stories about that experience.
00:09:04 ►
And that’s all we have.
00:09:06 ►
Some stories are a little better than others or considerably better than others.
00:09:11 ►
But they’re still just stories.
00:09:14 ►
So by defining those two terms in terms of immediate direct sense perception and then the stories about that sense perception,
00:09:30 ►
you create quite a level playing field. But you’ve also mentioned Bob, and this is something I found rather curious about discussions. With this perspective in mind, with sense perception
00:09:36 ►
and stories about sense perception, does this eliminate any notion of spirituality? Or I mean,
00:09:42 ►
oftentimes, the internal narrative is given kind of divine
00:09:46 ►
prominence in you know
00:09:47 ►
a number of different religions a number of different
00:09:49 ►
spiritual teachings well either that or
00:09:51 ►
you know or it’s
00:09:53 ►
demonized
00:09:55 ►
one or the other it’s either glorified
00:09:57 ►
or demonized
00:09:59 ►
yeah
00:10:00 ►
I would think this all is just
00:10:03 ►
the absolute essence of spirituality.
00:10:07 ►
But that word, you know, different people have different responses to that sequence of phonemes, spirituality.
00:10:17 ►
And, you know, I mean, there is no such thing as spirituality.
00:10:21 ►
That’s just one of those abstract words.
00:10:30 ►
It’s not like spoon or monitor or wine glass.
00:10:34 ►
In terms of the psychedelic salon, three prominent thinkers who have spoken periodically, some quite regularly, through the salon
00:10:39 ►
that have affected your thinking. Let’s start off with Alan Watts.
00:10:43 ►
He woke me up. He was the guy that started it all in the summer of
00:10:47 ►
- I was 21 years old.
00:10:51 ►
I won’t go into the long story, but nevertheless, that book
00:10:55 ►
as I was reading it, and it was the only book I ever read.
00:10:59 ►
It’s a weird story how that book came into my…
00:11:03 ►
We have time, Heron. Do we?
00:11:04 ►
Yeah.
00:11:05 ►
Oh, really?
00:11:06 ►
Tell the story.
00:11:06 ►
Okay.
00:11:07 ►
I’ll go through.
00:11:08 ►
It was the summer of 67.
00:11:10 ►
I was in the Air Force.
00:11:11 ►
I was living in Manhattan Beach, California, and I had just discovered marijuana recently.
00:11:21 ►
Anyway, I went to – and I smoked cigarettes at the time.
00:11:23 ►
Anyway, I went to, and I smoked cigarettes at the time So I was walking to the liquor store
00:11:25 ►
Which is on Manhattan Avenue
00:11:27 ►
Where the pier was in Manhattan Beach
00:11:29 ►
And it was the middle of summer
00:11:30 ►
And there were all these beautiful women
00:11:33 ►
It was a great town to live in
00:11:34 ►
In the summertime, it was just full of girls
00:11:37 ►
Beautiful women in little tiny bikinis
00:11:40 ►
Anyway, I walked into the liquor store
00:11:43 ►
And as I was going in the store, this girl
00:11:45 ►
came around the corner from the opposite direction. We both went through the door. And she
00:11:50 ►
had to be one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in my life. And she had probably
00:11:56 ►
maybe one of the smallest bikinis I’d ever seen in my life. And I was entranced, I guess. I found myself sort of following her around.
00:12:07 ►
Then she gave me this dirty look, and I realized I was, oops.
00:12:12 ►
So I was standing next to a used book rack,
00:12:15 ►
and I reached over without really looking and grabbed a book off the book rack
00:12:19 ►
and held it up in front of my face so that I could look at her tits.
00:12:24 ►
And basically I went like that for a while.
00:12:29 ►
And the next thing I knew, I was up at the cash register,
00:12:32 ►
and the guy was saying, do you want anything else?
00:12:34 ►
And I had the book in my hand, and I said, yeah, give me a couple packs of Luckies.
00:12:40 ►
And he gave me two packs of cigarettes, and i bought the book and went home and when i got
00:12:46 ►
home i threw the book in the trash can but i missed the trash can it was only 10 cents it
00:12:51 ►
was a used book and it was 1967 so maybe it was 50 cents anyway um i had no intention of reading it
00:13:00 ►
but i mean why would i read i had. So in any case, sometime later,
00:13:07 ►
I don’t know whether it was a week or a month or when it might have been, I found myself reading
00:13:14 ►
the book. And I don’t know why. I dug it out of the trash. Apparently, I missed the trash can.
00:13:19 ►
I think it was laying next to the trash can. And with my hygienic habits, it was still there a
00:13:24 ►
month later. I started reading the book. and within, I don’t remember how quickly,
00:13:28 ►
but within a couple of hours, I mean the very first night,
00:13:31 ►
I came to this blinding realization that I didn’t know anything,
00:13:38 ►
that everything I thought I knew about the world was just,
00:13:42 ►
I didn’t have this language then, but it was just the story I’d been sold.
00:13:46 ►
That reality was more malleable, you know, like the, what do they call it, the rabbit
00:13:51 ►
duck?
00:13:52 ►
Are you familiar with that?
00:13:53 ►
Yeah.
00:13:54 ►
You know, that what’s there can be interpreted multiple ways.
00:14:00 ►
And the fact that I had my interpretation of reality, that book gave me just – like I said, well, it just pulled the rug out from underneath my entire life.
00:14:10 ►
I mean I really got it.
00:14:11 ►
It wasn’t like I understood the idea.
00:14:14 ►
I couldn’t even leave the house for two days.
00:14:24 ►
sort of in awe of the fact that I had just been sold this story and that it’s no more likely to be the way it is than anything else
00:14:29 ►
and that I had to start all over.
00:14:30 ►
And that’s really what I had to do.
00:14:32 ►
My whole life began right then and there.
00:14:36 ►
So thank you, Alan Watts.
00:14:39 ►
So Timothy Leary, what impact has he had on your life?
00:14:45 ►
Well, you know, almost everybody.
00:14:46 ►
Well, Leary, a lot.
00:14:48 ►
I’ve read most of his stuff.
00:14:49 ►
I like him a lot.
00:14:52 ►
But his impact is really more, you know, Alan Watts and Alfred Korzybski were the two big ones.
00:15:03 ►
There are a lot of people who have had impacts on me.
00:15:07 ►
Leary was certainly one, but not even close to Watson and Korzybski.
00:15:13 ►
Leary was just a fellow spirit, a guy who’s doing really good work and a fun guy.
00:15:23 ►
I enjoyed reading him
00:15:25 ►
and i enjoyed listening to him and watching him never met him in probably the first two or three
00:15:31 ►
of our conversations just by chance i mentioned the name terence mckenna and immediately you lit
00:15:39 ►
up yeah yeah yeah yeah you met terence mckenna or you met him on a couple of occasions? Yeah, a couple of times, yeah.
00:15:46 ►
Yeah, we exchanged a couple of emails.
00:15:47 ►
I still have his emails.
00:15:50 ►
So what impact did Terence McKenna have on your general thinking?
00:15:53 ►
Well, again, you know, it wasn’t that he certainly didn’t make much of a change.
00:15:58 ►
Well, he opened my mind, I guess, to something else.
00:16:00 ►
You know, basically, I just loved listening to him talk.
00:16:04 ►
something else. You know, basically, I just loved listening to him talk. The way his language machine functions is so
00:16:08 ►
unique, so fascinating.
00:16:11 ►
I just loved listening to him talk. And of course, his ideas,
00:16:15 ►
especially back in the 70s or 80s, I actually don’t even
00:16:20 ►
remember how far back that goes.
00:16:22 ►
80s through early 90s.
00:16:25 ►
80s, alright. Well, whenever it was,
00:16:28 ►
it just,
00:16:30 ►
you know, for most, for the
00:16:31 ►
mainstream media, I mean, he was just
00:16:33 ►
a voice coming from
00:16:35 ►
somewhere.
00:16:37 ►
He was just great fun.
00:16:39 ►
I love Terence McKenna.
00:16:42 ►
And now I think,
00:16:43 ►
of course, I’m wondering how much,
00:16:45 ►
maybe that brain tumor had been in there for 30 years,
00:16:50 ►
and that was why his language machine was so weird.
00:16:53 ►
And then finally it killed him.
00:16:55 ►
But in the meantime, it gave us just tons of great audio tape to listen to.
00:17:01 ►
Yes, I’m certainly very appreciative of Lorenzo’s efforts archiving
00:17:05 ►
Terrence’s work, and Lorenzo also does
00:17:08 ►
his own little bit of censorship in
00:17:10 ►
terms of removing a good
00:17:11 ►
portion of the 2012 narrative,
00:17:13 ►
and a good portion of the alien narrative,
00:17:15 ►
and a wide variety of other things that
00:17:17 ►
Terrence would rap about
00:17:19 ►
periodically. Yeah, I never
00:17:21 ►
could get into his time wave
00:17:24 ►
zero thing. I just thought that into his time wave zero thing.
00:17:26 ►
I just thought that was,
00:17:27 ►
you know,
00:17:27 ►
well,
00:17:29 ►
it was interesting sort of,
00:17:29 ►
but yeah,
00:17:30 ►
there’s a,
00:17:31 ►
but again, I didn’t really care whatever he was talking about.
00:17:33 ►
It was always fun to listen to him talk.
00:17:35 ►
I don’t care how weird it was.
00:17:37 ►
The alien stuff didn’t bother me.
00:17:40 ►
yeah,
00:17:40 ►
I think the,
00:17:40 ►
the 2012 stuff and the,
00:17:43 ►
the time wave zero things were, I thought, what the hell is wrong with him?
00:17:49 ►
How can he be so right on for everything else and just so far off on these things?
00:17:55 ►
But who cares?
00:17:56 ►
I loved him.
00:17:58 ►
Something we’ve talked about periodically is the movements that you were involved with in the late 70s and early 80s in LA.
00:18:07 ►
And they weren’t directly related to Terence McKenna, but there were a number of other
00:18:11 ►
folks who kind of overlapped in that general scene, for want of a better term. Can you describe
00:18:18 ►
a little bit associated with your progression from Manhattan Beach through, you know, various movements, various kind of communities that you discovered and wrapped with periodically?
00:18:31 ►
Well, you know, it started with a group called COTO, C-O-T-O, which was an outgrowth of the EST training for people who are aware of that.
00:18:41 ►
who are aware of that.
00:18:45 ►
And Est had a center in Santa Monica called the Santa Monica Center, strangely enough.
00:18:51 ►
And a bunch of graduates of the training
00:18:56 ►
who were aware of the fact that there were lots of people around L.A.
00:18:59 ►
who had done the training,
00:19:01 ►
started a once-a-week networking thing.
00:19:05 ►
No, once every other week.
00:19:06 ►
We met every other Wednesday night at the S Center,
00:19:09 ►
although the thing wasn’t about S at all.
00:19:12 ►
It was about taking what was just loosely called transformation at the time
00:19:17 ►
into the workplace.
00:19:20 ►
And it started with some pretty high-level people.
00:19:23 ►
There were two captains from the L.A. Police Department were involved in this, the secretary to one of the hot shots at ARCO in downtown L.A.
00:19:38 ►
You know, these were the people who started this thing.
00:19:41 ►
And they just started inviting people they knew to come.
00:19:47 ►
And they had a wonderful format.
00:19:51 ►
It was a big room, maybe 70 feet.
00:19:55 ►
Anyway, almost like a small auditorium.
00:20:00 ►
And they just arranged the chairs or tables in a great big circle. And near the end there, there were like
00:20:03 ►
100 people showing up at these
00:20:05 ►
meetings. So the table was big enough for 100 people to sit around. And the format was, it just
00:20:12 ►
started at one place, and everybody had like one minute to stand up and say whatever the hell they
00:20:18 ►
wanted. And this went on for more than, I don’t know, about two years maybe.
00:20:27 ►
And some amazing projects came out of this space.
00:20:31 ►
Oh, and the idea was at the end – just people went around the circle and had their say, introduced themselves, what they’re doing, what they’re looking for, blah, blah, blah.
00:20:41 ►
looking for, blah, blah, blah.
00:20:46 ►
And then we would put the chairs away and put the tables back and go to this restaurant down the street and take it over, basically.
00:20:50 ►
You know, 80 people would show up.
00:20:53 ►
And while people were doing their introductions, other people were taking notes.
00:20:59 ►
So when you went down to the restaurant, then everybody was hooking up with everybody who
00:21:03 ►
they thought had said something interesting and were making connections.
00:21:07 ►
And like I say, some amazing projects, some projects with gangs in the L.A. area, hooking them up with shit.
00:21:16 ►
All sorts of stuff came out.
00:21:17 ►
And I met a bunch of really interesting people there and found other groups.
00:21:24 ►
There were other networking groups that were meeting around. really interesting people there and found other groups.
00:21:28 ►
There were other networking groups that were meeting around.
00:21:32 ►
And so, and a lot of people, a lot of interesting people came through all these places.
00:21:34 ►
It was great fun. The format for Kodo still intrigues me.
00:21:36 ►
I’m still trying to figure out how to kind of do that online because it would work.
00:21:41 ►
I mean, that format, the only problem is no restaurant to go to
00:21:45 ►
afterwards because that was crucial you know i mean uh but but the first part was a wonderful
00:21:53 ►
format so in terms of your philosophy i mean you’ve touched on it a little bit associated
00:21:59 ►
with the distinction between squish and the matrix this This is another seminal Heron Stone idea that I think will probably be explained.
00:22:08 ►
Oh, we are presently in squish, even though my body,
00:22:13 ►
I mean, we are presently in the matrix.
00:22:15 ►
This conversation is occurring in the matrix.
00:22:17 ►
Although sometimes it’s not clear just where I is,
00:22:21 ►
but my body is clearly in squish.
00:22:27 ►
Squish is the word I use for what most people call real reality,
00:22:32 ►
which is clearly nonsense.
00:22:34 ►
It’s just another story.
00:22:36 ►
But the so-called physical world of my sense perceptions and everything and all that,
00:22:42 ►
that’s what I call squish, you know, stuff that’s squishy.
00:22:45 ►
And then there’s the matrix, which is the virtual realities that are beginning to show up now.
00:22:54 ►
And what we’re doing is in the matrix.
00:22:59 ►
It’s pretty primitive.
00:23:00 ►
It’s just audio.
00:23:02 ►
But it’s a start.
00:23:07 ►
primitive it’s just audio but it’s a start when we first started talking you described your project which is gendo as it’s described in a kind of general sense as debugging wild english and it
00:23:16 ►
was only through talking with you you started talking about the language machine can you talk
00:23:21 ►
a little bit about the principle of debugging why? Yeah, yeah. Again, though, it’s changed over the years
00:23:28 ►
too. Now I see everything almost, and it’s much simpler.
00:23:32 ►
It used to be more complex, but it’s getting simpler. Now it’s really
00:23:35 ►
about breaking identification with the voice in your head, with the language
00:23:39 ►
machine. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reprogram it. There are certain
00:23:43 ►
specific words or
00:23:45 ►
groups of words that are just almost always wrong and get us, you know, lead us to make false
00:23:54 ►
evaluations and all sorts of stuff. So once you’ve broken the identity with or the identification
00:24:01 ►
with the language machine and you know it’s just a language machine, you can begin to reprogram it.
00:24:07 ►
You can begin to eliminate the five stupidities of English
00:24:10 ►
from your own thinking.
00:24:12 ►
It’s not easy. It takes some time.
00:24:14 ►
I’m still working on it.
00:24:15 ►
I’ve been doing it for years and I’m getting better.
00:24:19 ►
I’m not nearly as stupid and unconscious as I used to be.
00:24:23 ►
But there’s a way to go still.
00:24:26 ►
Some of my favorites include
00:24:28 ►
two-valued logic,
00:24:31 ►
which I think is a beautiful example
00:24:34 ►
that as soon as, I mean, everything,
00:24:35 ►
well, the political system
00:24:37 ►
is absolutely rife with two-valued logic.
00:24:39 ►
Oh, everything is.
00:24:40 ►
It runs the world, practically.
00:24:42 ►
But for folks listening
00:24:43 ►
who may not be familiar
00:24:44 ►
with the idea of two-valued logic.
00:24:46 ►
Well, it also goes under the word of dualism.
00:24:49 ►
Yes.
00:24:49 ►
Okay.
00:24:50 ►
It’s basically the either-or approach.
00:24:53 ►
It’s either this or that.
00:24:55 ►
And that analysis is just a way of analyzing a particular situation.
00:25:04 ►
That analysis is just a way of analyzing a particular situation. It’s not an aspect of the real world, to use a really stupid word.
00:25:16 ►
It’s an aspect of our system of analysis.
00:25:19 ►
We divide the world into good people and bad people.
00:25:23 ►
Real people are neither good nor bad.
00:25:26 ►
They’re just real people who do all sorts of very complex things that you may like or dislike
00:25:31 ►
and then go ahead and label them as good or bad.
00:25:35 ►
Is he a good king or a bad king, daddy?
00:25:40 ►
And thinking in two-valued logic is just one of the hallmarks of stupidity of humans.
00:25:48 ►
It applies actually in the human invention, artificial side of life.
00:25:56 ►
Like you’re either married or you’re not married.
00:25:59 ►
There isn’t any in between.
00:26:01 ►
That’s not an analog state. As soon as something is signed, well I suppose
00:26:06 ►
during the signing
00:26:07 ►
maybe
00:26:10 ►
you’re married, maybe you’re not. But certainly
00:26:11 ►
once you’ve finished signing
00:26:13 ►
you are no longer married.
00:26:16 ►
Or you are married.
00:26:18 ►
Well, either way.
00:26:22 ►
Either way.
00:26:23 ►
But again,
00:26:23 ►
within the human I mean we can set up situations like in computers where you’ve got either-or choices.
00:26:30 ►
I mean, it’s a wonderful way to, it’s a very useful tool.
00:26:34 ►
But it’s an aspect of our system of analysis.
00:26:38 ►
It’s not an aspect of the world out there.
00:26:40 ►
The world is not divided into two mutually exclusive opposite categories. That is
00:26:47 ►
totally an invention in the domain of language, two-valued logic. And once you begin to be aware
00:26:54 ►
of it, and let me suggest that the way to begin reprogramming yourself is not by starting looking
00:27:00 ►
at yourself, but it’s easy to find people you don’t like on YouTube, you know,
00:27:05 ►
like Rush Limbaugh or, you know, I don’t know who’s there, but I mean, if there’s, if you
00:27:10 ►
listen to people you don’t like, you’re already predisposed to be critical of what they’re
00:27:15 ►
saying.
00:27:16 ►
Use that to listen for these kinds of things, two-valued logic.
00:27:21 ►
It’s used in advertising extensively, in politics, of course.
00:27:26 ►
And once you begin to notice it in other people,
00:27:31 ►
then that’s the beginning.
00:27:33 ►
And that’s okay.
00:27:34 ►
But what’s really good is when you start noticing it
00:27:36 ►
coming out of your own mouth.
00:27:38 ►
But it’s a good start to notice it
00:27:41 ►
coming out of other people’s mouths.
00:27:42 ►
It’s easier.
00:27:43 ►
Another one I like,
00:27:45 ►
primarily because of the way it sounds,
00:27:46 ►
is reification.
00:27:47 ►
There’s a flaw in the noun structure of English.
00:27:51 ►
Nouns, well, I won’t say what it is,
00:27:54 ►
but everyone in America, anyway,
00:27:56 ►
learned that a noun is a mm-mm,
00:27:59 ►
a mm, or a mm.
00:28:02 ►
Mm.
00:28:04 ►
A noun is a person, place, or thing.
00:28:08 ►
But, of course, that’s not true.
00:28:10 ►
Well, it depends on what you mean by a thing.
00:28:13 ►
See, I would say in order for something to qualify as a thing, it has to be available to the senses for inspection, like a spoon or a wine glass or a monitor.
00:28:25 ►
Those are what I would call things.
00:28:28 ►
But freedom, dignity, happiness, love, honor, intelligence, consciousness,
00:28:34 ►
power, force, energy, time, space, none of those are things.
00:28:40 ►
There is no such thing as love. There is no such thing as dignity or time or matter or space or life or death or any of those things.
00:28:52 ►
Those are just words.
00:28:54 ►
They’re what we call reifications.
00:28:56 ►
What they do is refer to relationships between things.
00:29:00 ►
But they themselves are not things.
00:29:02 ►
They have no properties.
00:29:35 ►
But they themselves are not things. They have no properties. They can’t argue over what democracy really is because there is no such thing as democracy. There are many people doing many things and you can put labels on some of those and call them whatever you want. That’s all something that takes place in the domain of language, in our stories. And the failure to understand that leads to just endless conversations and meaningless arguments over things that don’t exist.
00:29:45 ►
Another favorite, and this isn’t something that you’re unique in identifying because there are a number of groups on Facebook that have their sole purpose to eliminate this particular thing. The verb to be. That’s a tough one to talk about. I would say go
00:29:52 ►
to the Wikipedia article on E prime and read it. It turns out this comes from Alfred Korzybski’s
00:30:00 ►
work, Science and Sanity. The verb to be turns out basically to be meaningless.
00:30:08 ►
There’s nothing you can say with the verb to be that you can’t say better, more accurately,
00:30:13 ►
with fewer unconscious assumptions without it. Rather than saying, my next-door neighbor is an
00:30:19 ►
asshole, I could say, my next-door neighbor plays polka music at 2.30 in the morning really loud, has two pickup trucks parked in his front lawn, and painted his house pink, beats his kids and his dog.
00:30:36 ►
All without the verb to be.
00:30:38 ►
All without the verb to be.
00:30:41 ►
And now you actually know something.
00:30:48 ►
me. And now you actually know something. Whereas about him, as opposed to me saying he’s an asshole, which really tells you nothing about him, it just tells you about my evaluation of him. I
00:30:53 ►
don’t like him. But it says absolutely nothing about him. So the verb, that’s the quick one.
00:31:02 ►
That’s a tough one. I don’t usually – I usually don’t bring that one up.
00:31:07 ►
A fan favorite, the word the.
00:31:10 ►
Yeah, that’s the one that – the one that I think is – it’s sort of like when they talk about marijuana as a gateway drug.
00:31:22 ►
The is a gateway gendo issue.
00:31:26 ►
Very good. It’s the most
00:31:28 ►
common word in English. It accounts
00:31:30 ►
for approximately 6%
00:31:32 ►
of all printed text
00:31:34 ►
in English. One word
00:31:35 ►
in a language with 200,000
00:31:38 ►
words, 50,000
00:31:39 ►
in common
00:31:41 ►
parlance,
00:31:43 ►
one word accounts for 6% of all printed text.
00:31:49 ►
And by my reckoning, and I’ve done extensive research on this stuff,
00:31:54 ►
is that it’s wrong more than 90% of the time.
00:31:57 ►
It carries an unconscious assumption of exclusivity.
00:32:02 ►
If I tell you to go get me the green chair in the next room, if you walk into
00:32:07 ►
the room and find more than one green chair, you’re going to be surprised. You’re going to
00:32:11 ►
come back and say, which green chair did you want? Because you said, I didn’t say go get a green
00:32:17 ►
chair. Big difference. So when people talk about here’s the problem or here’s the – if your boss wants to know the answer to some problem and you go and you think about it for a little while and you come up with an answer, if you mistake it for the answer, you’re probably not even going to give it another thought.
00:32:39 ►
I found the answer.
00:32:40 ►
Here’s the reason something happened.
00:32:49 ►
the answer. Here’s the reason something happened. If you ask somebody, what’s a truth about this,
00:32:56 ►
or what’s a reason you did something, it just sounds weird. Nobody talks like that in English. The is the default value for abstract nouns. It’s just the way English works. We say, well,
00:33:03 ►
what’s the reason you did that? What’s the answer to this problem? And all of those situations serve to just limit our ability
00:33:10 ►
to think. What’s a reason you did that? Makes a lot more sense. The way it is. That’s just the
00:33:18 ►
way it is. What about that’s one way of thinking about it yes the word the i’m a fan of reading histories
00:33:28 ►
in fact as erin is talking i’m scanning my bookshelves looking at all the histories i have
00:33:33 ►
yeah yeah that’s a perfect example and of course modern scholars have picked that up and now they
00:33:40 ►
call it a history of the california system. They don’t call it that.
00:33:48 ►
Actually, that’s a good nowadays.
00:33:52 ►
You can almost use that to decide whether or not to read the book.
00:34:00 ►
Because a lot of people have caught on to that in writing, the psychology of something or other.
00:34:02 ►
I’m reading a book right now called The Psychology of Writing. It’s actually a very good book, but he needs to get into language rehab because it really is only a psychology of reading.
00:34:11 ►
Yes.
00:34:11 ►
Before we get to absolutism, it’s something that I’ve done in my own reading, particularly when I read history texts, earlier, older history texts from, you know, the turn of last century, these kind of things.
00:34:23 ►
To translate them with Gendo provides a very…
00:34:27 ►
I mean, the start of the First World War I find fascinating.
00:34:31 ►
Oh, yes, we know the cause of the war.
00:34:34 ►
That’s right.
00:34:35 ►
Which, when you start exploring a wide variety of social phenomena
00:34:39 ►
that were occurring at the time,
00:34:42 ►
it becomes a very curious thing, the history.
00:34:45 ►
It’s a powerful word.
00:34:46 ►
Yes.
00:34:48 ►
And even in science, I read science news every week.
00:34:52 ►
And in there, you can see it.
00:34:54 ►
Scientists have finally found the reason for something or other going on.
00:34:59 ►
Or they have, you know, or the cause of something or other.
00:35:04 ►
It’s just, it’s all, again, it’s totally, that’s the thing is that because people are identified with their own language machine,
00:35:11 ►
and because it is a machine, it works on default values.
00:35:16 ►
Certain situations call for the word the.
00:35:18 ►
It gets kicked up.
00:35:20 ►
It comes out of our mouth.
00:35:21 ►
We believe it.
00:35:22 ►
It’s just scary as hell.
00:35:24 ►
A close relative to the word the is absolutism.
00:35:28 ►
In fact, it’s difficult to find absolutism without the word the.
00:35:32 ►
Yeah, they go together very well.
00:35:33 ►
You talk a little bit about absolutism as the final of the five stupidities.
00:35:36 ►
Well, there’s a bunch of words.
00:35:37 ►
I don’t remember all of them, but, you know, never, always, same.
00:35:43 ►
God, help me out here.
00:35:48 ►
Anyway, I haven’t got the list in front of me, but
00:35:52 ►
you never do that. Never and always are good
00:35:56 ►
ones. All. All. No. Nobody.
00:36:01 ►
Those kinds of, you know, and again,
00:36:03 ►
in the domain of human inventions, that’s correct because you can say all quadrupeds have four legs.
00:36:11 ►
Because by definition, if they don’t have four, they’re not quadrupeds.
00:36:17 ►
So there are places where it can be useful.
00:36:22 ►
But when you’re talking about the world out there, it’s far more subtle than that.
00:36:27 ►
And anytime anybody is saying something about everything, absolutely, you know,
00:36:33 ►
that’s something to be very wary of. So I explored this a little bit with the
00:36:39 ►
question associated with spirituality. But when you have taken the teaching
00:36:45 ►
associated with the language machine,
00:36:47 ►
I hate to use the word,
00:36:48 ►
when you take your teaching…
00:36:51 ►
Story.
00:36:52 ►
My story.
00:36:53 ►
Your pervasive story
00:36:54 ►
associated with the language machine,
00:36:57 ►
and then you take five stupidities
00:36:59 ►
that you have outlined here,
00:37:01 ►
what gives you,
00:37:03 ►
I hate to say this, the will to live,
00:37:04 ►
what gives you something to
00:37:06 ►
explore after these well trying to make sense of it yes trying to come up with a better story
00:37:12 ►
because clearly the stories we’ve got suck certainly you know or at least the one oh
00:37:17 ►
actually the one i’ve got is pretty good but the one that apparently you’re running in most
00:37:21 ►
language machines pretty much is fucked up.
00:37:25 ►
They’re destroying the world
00:37:26 ►
and people don’t seem to be all that happy.
00:37:29 ►
So if I can come up with a better story for me,
00:37:32 ►
then that would seem like something worth doing.
00:37:35 ►
You know, and if I can share it,
00:37:37 ►
you know, if it could make a difference in the world,
00:37:39 ►
that would be cool.
00:37:40 ►
Your work in my own thinking
00:37:42 ►
has related to my simulation Noble Noble Ape, and in particular the power that – the power, look at this – language as a directing force.
00:37:56 ►
Let’s go back for a second because the power – because this is a perfect example of just what I’m saying about how it’s a default value. I mean, for you to say a power, it sounds weird.
00:38:10 ►
Everyone would hear that as being strange.
00:38:13 ►
It feels funny.
00:38:15 ►
I mean, if our listeners would stop and just say, what was the sentence you used?
00:38:20 ►
The power of your analysis.
00:38:24 ►
Okay, the power of your analysis. Okay, the power of your analysis.
00:38:27 ►
If everybody would just say the power of your analysis and then say a power of your analysis, I think you’ll find that it sort of sticks in your throat.
00:38:38 ►
It doesn’t feel right.
00:38:41 ►
Well, it makes you think about the word power as well here.
00:38:44 ►
Well, that’s a reification
00:38:46 ►
so you start decompressing everything yeah you’re in you’re in big trouble but the is is so pervasive
00:38:53 ►
it’s a wonderful tool because because it is so pervasive you can’t you can’t be in any linguistic
00:39:00 ►
environment without hearing it being misused constantly. Your analysis has impacted me in my thinking associated with simulation in a number of ways.
00:39:13 ►
And aside from describing, you know, narrative, internal narrative simulation,
00:39:18 ►
which I’ve added in NoBlake from our discussions over the past four years,
00:39:23 ►
from our discussions over the past four years.
00:39:25 ►
Something that is interesting me currently is language as an analytical tool to solve crimes.
00:39:32 ►
Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:39:33 ►
And through this, you can tease away things like the legal system,
00:39:39 ►
for example, as being a linguistic simulation.
00:39:43 ►
It’s something that’s codified in language.
00:39:46 ►
It’s something that is heavily reified in language.
00:39:50 ►
Well, it exists nowhere but in the domain of language.
00:39:52 ►
Exactly.
00:39:53 ►
And through that, you have these sensory events
00:39:57 ►
which exist in the simulated environment.
00:40:00 ►
And then you have a language that has to map onto those things.
00:40:06 ►
And, yeah, a lot of our interaction has not necessarily – I mean I came to talking with you already with a pretty good understanding of the stupidities and already with a pretty quenched internal narrative.
00:40:19 ►
You know, to go back to that thing about the five stupidities, almost everybody already knows all of those things.
00:40:25 ►
Certainly.
00:40:26 ►
But there’s a big difference between knowing something and knowing that you know it.
00:40:30 ►
Certainly.
00:40:31 ►
And there’s no power.
00:40:32 ►
I mean, well, it’s okay to know it, but once you know you know it, you’re in an entirely different position with respect to that.
00:40:39 ►
Yes.
00:40:40 ►
So, yeah, this has been a description of how our interaction has impacted my own thinking and what
00:40:48 ►
you’re saying here is very important that people should probably take away from this conversation
00:40:52 ►
a number of the pieces that we’ve talked about with the view that it may assist their own thinking
00:40:58 ►
and hopefully improve certain aspects of their lives, the idea for me is really very simple.
00:41:06 ►
Break the identification with the voice in your head.
00:41:09 ►
It’s not who you are.
00:41:11 ►
It’s just your language machine.
00:41:13 ►
And you’ll be in a much better position to evaluate your experience and formulate new actions
00:41:20 ►
if your language machine isn’t filling your head with a bunch of stupid,
00:41:25 ►
really bad ideas.
00:41:29 ►
So as we are talking on the psychedelic salon, a periodic discussion that we have approached
00:41:36 ►
through recording StoneApe has been DMT.
00:41:41 ►
Yeah.
00:41:42 ►
Thankfully, by putting it out in the ether, we have listeners that have been able to at least in
00:41:47 ►
your case supply you with some dmt yeah but you haven’t had the mckenna like experiences with it
00:41:55 ►
no well not yet i haven’t given up but uh but see there’s more to this there’s also my history with LSD, which I’ve taken five times and have never had any effect
00:42:07 ►
at all. And after the second time, I began to get very careful about making sure that, you know,
00:42:14 ►
I was doing it with other people who were, you know, doing the same stuff and, you know, all
00:42:18 ►
sorts of things. And after five attempts at LSD and nothing happening, and I’ve now done DMT, I don’t know, two or three times and got nothing more than some slight geometric hallucinations that were kind of interesting, but they were really slight.
00:42:40 ►
I mean, I had to have my eyes closed just to get them.
00:42:44 ►
But I’m not convinced that I’ve done it right yet, so I still have some more.
00:42:51 ►
But, you know, I don’t feel any real rush or need to do it.
00:42:56 ►
I’m certainly interested.
00:42:57 ►
I mean, after listening to McKenna, I mean, how the hell would you not be interested, you know? So the idea of meeting the machine elves and some alien intelligence or something, that strikes me as really damned interesting, you know?
00:43:13 ►
But, again, I don’t feel like I’m in any hurry.
00:43:17 ►
It’s been probably a couple months since I did it last.
00:43:20 ►
did it last.
00:43:28 ►
Well, certainly by putting the audio out to the Psychedelic Salon audience, maybe some folks in that community might be able to provide some pointers.
00:43:31 ►
I’d love it if anybody would like to communicate with me.
00:43:35 ►
I’m on Facebook, Heron Stone, or Skype, Heron underscore Stone.
00:43:43 ►
If you would like to communicate with me and tell me anything about that that I might find helpful, I’d be open to that.
00:43:52 ►
And you and I record a podcast typically once a week, sometimes every other week.
00:43:58 ►
And we’ve been doing this for about four years now.
00:44:01 ►
Four years?
00:44:02 ►
Yes.
00:44:02 ►
Is that counting the time off?
00:44:04 ►
No, it’s not counting the time off no it’s not counting the
00:44:05 ►
time off there was a period off when i started a new job and various other things so there was a
00:44:10 ►
period off through that period of time but okay but from the beginning it’s been four years now
00:44:14 ►
yes okay more than that actually four and a half years really so about what three years
00:44:20 ►
talk shoe when you were doing that, and I barged in.
00:44:26 ►
Heron and I discovered each other.
00:44:28 ►
I was recording a Biota podcast at the time,
00:44:30 ►
and Heron had to tell me that my audio quality could be better,
00:44:34 ►
and there were things that I could be doing associated with podcasting
00:44:36 ►
that would be considerably better if I listened from him.
00:44:39 ►
And the interesting thing associated with that interaction
00:44:42 ►
was your audio was unbelievably bad.
00:44:44 ►
I think she was yelling at me in a Starbucks cafe.
00:44:46 ►
You never told me that.
00:44:47 ►
Oh, I was at Starbucks at the time.
00:44:49 ►
Oh, okay.
00:44:50 ►
Yeah.
00:44:50 ►
So the whole thing, people can go back and listen to the audio.
00:44:54 ►
They can experience this again.
00:44:55 ►
But yes, Hera and I record a podcast on a nearly weekly basis called Stone Ape.
00:45:00 ►
So if folks haven’t gotten all the answers,
00:45:04 ►
if they haven’t gotten a group answers, haven’t gotten a group
00:45:06 ►
of answers through our audio
00:45:08 ►
interaction, StoneApe
00:45:09 ►
would be the place to go.
00:45:11 ►
You’ll have all of the answers there.
00:45:14 ►
Yes. Or at least
00:45:15 ►
three years and two months worth of
00:45:18 ►
All the
00:45:19 ►
answers are there.
00:45:22 ►
That covers everything.
00:45:24 ►
The verb to be, I mean,
00:45:26 ►
that covers all the answers
00:45:28 ►
are there. What is it
00:45:29 ►
missing?
00:45:32 ►
Two valued logics. Well, except
00:45:34 ►
that there are no answers.
00:45:35 ►
Yeah, yeah. It’s got the other four, though.
00:45:37 ►
All the answers are here.
00:45:40 ►
We should really make that into a T-shirt.
00:45:42 ►
Yeah.
00:45:45 ►
Because if anyone reads the T-shirt, Aaron. Because if
00:45:46 ►
anyone reads the t-shirt and then comes to Stone
00:45:48 ►
Oak, clearly they’re in need of
00:45:49 ►
as much of
00:45:51 ►
the five stupidities as possible. Aaron,
00:45:54 ►
it’s been a pleasure as always. I’d like to thank
00:45:56 ►
Lorenzo for the opportunity to
00:45:57 ►
record this impromptu podcast and
00:45:59 ►
put it out to the Psychedelic Salon audience.
00:46:02 ►
Thank you again, Aaron. So they’re actually going
00:46:03 ►
to listen to this. This is actually, what, is he running out of stuff to do or what?
00:46:11 ►
Lorenzo can choose whether or not he includes that audio.
00:46:17 ►
Well, I imagine he’ll probably listen to this before he broadcasts it.
00:46:20 ►
I hope so.
00:46:23 ►
Anyway, it’s been fun, Heron.
00:46:24 ►
Thank you. Good night. Okay, good night.
00:46:27 ►
Well, as a matter of fact, yes, Tom and Heron, I did listen to your entire conversation before
00:46:33 ►
podcasting it just now. And Heron, your assumption was spot on. Of course, you and Tom have now
00:46:40 ►
gotten me quite paranoid about what words I’m using. So what do I mean by assumption? And I guess more than that, what do I mean by spot on? Well, the fact is that Tom correctly picked
00:46:50 ►
up on the fact that I was running out of material to play here in the salon. Granted, I’ve still got
00:46:56 ►
quite a few more unlistened to Terrence McKenna tapes here in my closet, but we’ve had quite a
00:47:01 ►
bit of Terrence lately, and so I wanted to get some more variety.
00:47:08 ►
Tom and Heron were kindly enough to pitch in, and for what it’s worth,
00:47:14 ►
I now have most of the 2014 Palenque Norte lectures in hand, and will begin playing them next week. So we’re off to the races in 2015.
00:47:20 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:47:26 ►
Before I get to my comments about the conversation that we just listened in on,
00:47:31 ►
I want to pass along some information to our fellow salonners who live in Australia.
00:47:36 ►
And it seemed appropriate to do that right after we heard Black Beauty, or Bebe as she is better known,
00:47:41 ►
for Bebe, as you can tell by her lovely accent, lives down under.
00:47:46 ►
Well, at the end of this month, Bruce Dahmer and one of my other friends
00:47:50 ►
will be making appearances at the Rainbow Serpent Festival in Victoria,
00:47:54 ►
and that’s going to take place from the 24th through the 26th of this month,
00:47:58 ►
which is January 2015, in case you’re a little behind in listening to these podcasts.
00:48:05 ►
After that, on the evening of January 29th in Melbourne,
00:48:09 ►
Bruce will also be participating in an open salon,
00:48:12 ►
should you want to engage him in conversation.
00:48:15 ►
And Bruce will also be making appearances in Sydney and in Byron Bay,
00:48:19 ►
where he’ll be heading the Samara Shamanic Medicine Forum on February 7th and 8th,
00:48:24 ►
followed by a salon in Brisbane on the 10th,
00:48:27 ►
and two talks at the Earth Frequency Festival in Queensland from February 13th through the 16th.
00:48:34 ►
Quite a schedule there, Bruce.
00:48:36 ►
And I’ll post those dates in today’s program notes,
00:48:39 ►
which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,
00:48:42 ►
you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us or you can go to www.levityzone.org
00:48:50 ►
for the complete details.
00:48:53 ►
Also, if you attend the Rainbow Serpent Festival,
00:48:56 ►
be sure to look up fellow salonner
00:48:58 ►
and longtime friend of mine,
00:49:00 ►
the visionary artist Michael Devine.
00:49:02 ►
Michael is going to be building the main stage, which he also designed.
00:49:07 ►
So, if you live down under, there are quite a few opportunities in the next few weeks
00:49:11 ►
to get out and find a few more of the others.
00:49:15 ►
I’m looking forward to hearing all about it once our intrepid travelers return.
00:49:21 ►
Now, getting back to the conversation that we just listened to,
00:49:24 ►
I’m going to pass along a few thoughts of my own that it spurred,
00:49:28 ►
but please keep in mind that these are only a few preliminary thoughts.
00:49:32 ►
They aren’t something that I’m yet ready to say I actually believe,
00:49:36 ►
but as you’ll be able to tell in just a moment,
00:49:39 ►
I’m feeling as if what Heron had to say about that voice in our heads
00:49:43 ►
has perhaps nudged me a little closer to
00:49:45 ►
getting a better handle on what I think of as the big picture of awareness. So what I’m about to do
00:49:52 ►
is to toss a few ideas up in the air, much like a juggler does with colored balls. If you’ve ever
00:49:58 ►
watched closely when somebody is juggling, say, a half a dozen or so balls, it appears as if while
00:50:04 ►
most of them are in the air,
00:50:05 ►
there’s always one being caught in one hand and another being tossed into the air with the other
00:50:10 ►
hand. Now, if you film a juggler and slow the motion way down, you’ll notice that every once
00:50:16 ►
in a while, for just the briefest of moments, there’s a point where the tossing hand has just
00:50:21 ►
released a ball, but the catching hand hasn’t quite caught the next one in the rotation.
00:50:27 ►
At that brief instant, all of the balls are in the air at the same time,
00:50:31 ►
and the juggler isn’t in contact with any of them.
00:50:34 ►
Now, that’s how I see the ideas that I’m about to pass along.
00:50:38 ►
These ideas, while interrelated, can also stand on their own.
00:50:42 ►
But my hope is that when they’re all floating together in my mind,
00:50:46 ►
all at the same time, without me directly touching or thinking about a particular one,
00:50:51 ►
at that instant, maybe I’ll reach an aha moment
00:50:54 ►
that the connections between these ideas will crystallize into some kind of a new awareness.
00:51:02 ►
Is that melodramatic enough for you?
00:51:05 ►
Let’s not get too serious here, okay?
00:51:08 ►
Anyway, here are my ideas.
00:51:09 ►
And keep in mind that ultimately they are all deeply intertwined and directly connected to the conversation that we just listened to,
00:51:17 ►
which concerns letting go of that little or sometimes not so little voice in our heads.
00:51:23 ►
My first thought has to do with my very own first pseudo-psychedelic experience.
00:51:28 ►
I say pseudo because it was with MDMA, or ecstasy, or molly, whatever you want to call it,
00:51:34 ►
which technically isn’t actually a psychedelic substance.
00:51:37 ►
But my very first thought when I was coming on for the first time was,
00:51:42 ►
I’ve felt like this before.
00:51:43 ►
I was much younger then, but I felt
00:51:46 ►
exactly like this before. And having taken a good number of others on their first experience with
00:51:51 ►
MDMA, I can attest to the fact that that thought is almost universally expressed by people using
00:51:58 ►
the substance for the first time. So we’ll toss that fact up into the air as our first idea ball, and then move on to my next thought.
00:52:07 ►
And that is Terence McKenna’s often repeated phrase that culture is a cult. Culture is not your friend.
00:52:14 ►
Now, after you toss that one up into the air, let’s pick up another Terence McKenna concept,
00:52:20 ►
which is that psychedelic substances dissolve boundaries.
00:52:23 ►
which is that psychedelic substances dissolve boundaries.
00:52:30 ►
And finally, his concept that the world is created out of language, out of words.
00:52:33 ►
Next comes the ball that Tom and Heron just gave us,
00:52:38 ►
and it may just be the key to this entire juggling exhibition.
00:52:43 ►
If I understood them correctly, this unruly voice that we all have in our heads isn’t at all what I’ve been thinking it
00:52:45 ►
was. In the past, I thought of it as, well, for want of a better word, myself or possibly my
00:52:52 ►
conscience. But Tom and Heron are saying that this voice isn’t me. It isn’t you. It’s something else.
00:52:59 ►
It has another source outside of what I call me. And I’ll come back to this in just a moment.
00:53:04 ►
outside of what I call me, and I’ll come back to this in just a moment.
00:53:07 ►
But first, there’s one more ball to toss into the air,
00:53:13 ►
and that is what happens to our consciousness when we go deeply into what I call in-theo space.
00:53:17 ►
We’re all aware of Sasha Shulgin’s psychedelic rating scale,
00:53:21 ►
where a plus one is just a little tingle that tells us something’s going on,
00:53:23 ►
and at the top of the scale is plus five.
00:53:27 ►
If you’ve ever been there, you know that it’s simply beyond words.
00:53:28 ►
It’s ineffable.
00:53:33 ►
The other thing about a plus five is that, without any exceptions that I’ve encountered,
00:53:36 ►
when people come back from a plus five experience,
00:53:40 ►
they are absolutely, positively, without any question or doubt,
00:53:43 ►
convinced that ultimately everything is just fine.
00:53:46 ►
It’s all going to work out perfectly in the end, whatever that may mean. Remember, words don’t work in this area, so unless you’ve
00:53:53 ►
had your own plus fives, you probably won’t be able to quite grok what I’m saying here.
00:53:58 ►
Now let’s try to look at these six balls all at the same time and see if we can discover a unity between them. In essence,
00:54:06 ►
and I may be completely wrong here, but in essence what I now see as that voice in my head
00:54:11 ►
is the collective voice of the culture in which I’m living. When I was a young boy sitting up in
00:54:17 ►
that old maple tree in my backyard and dreaming about what I was going to do with my life,
00:54:22 ►
those dreams had nothing to do with being an engineer or a lawyer or most of the other things that I’ve done in my life.
00:54:29 ►
My dreams were actually much more romantic than that.
00:54:32 ►
But the culture of family, friends, school, religion, and nation superimposed a bunch
00:54:38 ►
of words over my dreams of youth, and as a result of that voice in my head that kept
00:54:44 ►
repeating words coming from
00:54:45 ►
outside of whatever it is I call me, well, I eventually let go of those dreams, one at a time.
00:54:52 ►
It wasn’t until many years later, when I began to read Emerson’s writings, that it dawned on me that
00:54:58 ►
I had strayed quite far from the path I once dreamed of following. One of Emerson’s quotes that struck me so forcefully is,
00:55:06 ►
and I quote,
00:55:07 ►
As others do, so will I.
00:55:09 ►
I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions.
00:55:12 ►
I must eat the good of the land
00:55:14 ►
and let learning and romantic expectations
00:55:16 ►
go until a more convenient season.
00:55:20 ►
If you say that, then dies the man in you.
00:55:23 ►
Then once more perish the buds of art and poetry and science,
00:55:28 ►
as they have died already in a thousand men.
00:55:31 ►
The hour of that choice is the crisis of your history,
00:55:34 ►
and see that you hold yourself fast by the intellect.
00:55:37 ►
End quote.
00:55:38 ►
Well, by the time that I first read that quote,
00:55:41 ►
I had all but forgotten my romantic expectations,
00:55:44 ►
and I hadn’t yet reached that more convenient season. Until a few years ago, I should add.
00:56:03 ►
still on my back burner, had, well, they’re now past.
00:56:07 ►
I’m not going to start another company, or write a great book, or run for public office,
00:56:12 ►
or any of the other things that I’m reading about in the obituaries of former friends of mine.
00:56:19 ►
But those things are just the surface gloss of what those people did, not who they were as a person.
00:56:23 ►
And I made the discovery that if you leave out the things that I’ve done,
00:56:27 ►
but only describe the impression of who I am that I leave with people,
00:56:35 ►
well, that person is about the same one who, as a young boy, sat up in a tree and daydreamed all summer long.
00:56:42 ►
It’s exactly the same person as the one I encountered on my first MDMA trip when I noticed that I’d felt like that before. The MDMA had dissolved the cultural boundaries of thought
00:56:47 ►
that had enveloped my mind and became that damn voice in my head
00:56:51 ►
that was always telling me to get up and do something.
00:56:54 ►
The words coming from that voice in my head
00:56:56 ►
became the language that created my world.
00:57:00 ►
Just as the voice in your head right now is creating your world
00:57:03 ►
by putting words on everything you see and every experience you have.
00:57:08 ►
Words.
00:57:09 ►
I think that I now better understand what Terence means when he says that the world is created with language.
00:57:16 ►
Thinking back to one of my plus five experiences, about all that I can remember is how totally blissful and at peace I was when in that state.
00:57:25 ►
A state in which words no longer appeared.
00:57:28 ►
I’m now beginning to think that the reason we can’t bring back a description of a plus five
00:57:33 ►
is that it’s a realm without words.
00:57:36 ►
A realm of pure thought.
00:57:37 ►
The realm where the core of your being exists.
00:57:41 ►
The world that exists outside of the one that we have created by attaching words to
00:57:46 ►
everything. By using a psychoactive medicine to dissolve the cultural barriers we build with our
00:57:53 ►
words, we reconnect with the essence of our being, which is those young children we all once were,
00:57:59 ►
before the world intruded on our thoughts. So I finally realized that I already am all that I’m going to
00:58:06 ►
be, at least when I’m on autopilot and not intentionally trying to modify a deeply held
00:58:11 ►
behavior that’s no longer serving my needs. As Popeye often said, I am what I am and that’s all
00:58:18 ►
that I am. Now this doesn’t mean that I’m finished accomplishing things. There’s still much that I have left to do.
00:58:25 ►
But whatever that is, it isn’t going to change who I am.
00:58:30 ►
I’ve been like this on the inside for a very long time.
00:58:34 ►
And if you ask most people over 40 how old they feel on the inside,
00:58:38 ►
most often you’re going to hear them say they still feel like teenagers.
00:58:41 ►
Of course, like all young children, we like to appear older than we actually are,
00:58:46 ►
so if the truth was being told, my guess is that, well, we’re all feeling about six years old on the inside.
00:58:54 ►
And if you don’t believe that, then pay attention to how quickly a six-year-old child
00:58:58 ►
who doesn’t want to follow your orders can bring you right down to their level in an instant.
00:59:03 ►
So, where’s all this leading, you ask?
00:59:05 ►
Well, you’re going to have to tell me.
00:59:07 ►
As I’ve said before, my role here is that of a carnival barker.
00:59:11 ►
My job is to tell you about what’s going on in the big tent of consciousness,
00:59:15 ►
and then to encourage you to go in and look around for yourself.
00:59:19 ►
If you do, you’re going to find out that the main attraction in the center ring is you.
00:59:24 ►
And to go any deeper into these thoughts is now up to you.
00:59:28 ►
For my part, I am now quite content to know that
00:59:31 ►
even though this old body of mine has been encrusted and coated over with all sorts of experiences,
00:59:38 ►
some good and some not so good,
00:59:40 ►
that deep down inside this cocoon of words and life experiences that has encased my boyhood dreams,
00:59:47 ►
deep down inside, little Larry still lives.
00:59:52 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:57 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. © BF-WATCH TV 2021