Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1503356108[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Now all that stands between us and some kind of angelic completion of some sort is the dark side of ourselves and the unpaid bills of the historical process.”
“I am a resolute optimist of a very complicated sort.”
“If you have the psychedelic experience in your inventory of experiences, you are able to make a different model of reality than if you lack it.”
“I don’t think that what the shaman is doing is something metaphorical, or analogical, or allegorical. What the shaman is doing is something real that is couched in a language that we find difficult to understand.”
“Consciousness seeks the shape of its vessel. It’s like water.”
“At the center of the archaic impulse is the shaman. At the center of the shaman’s understanding of the world is the boundary-dissolving experience of psychedelics.”
“I don’t believe me. I hated theology. And I think the way to keep it light is to not believe. I will attempt to convert you in the course of these meetings to all kinds of things that I don’t believe.”
“Ideology is poisonous. We’re not trying to figure out the best thing to believe. What we’re trying to do is not believe anything and somehow have a return to the direct empowering of common sense and common senses.”
The Genesis Generation: A psychedelic novel by Lorenzo
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And hopefully you’ve listened to my podcast just previous,
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which announces this year’s fun drive and the updated paperback edition of my novel,
00:00:32 ►
The Genesis Generation.
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And since today is the first day of that pledge drive,
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I have no other news to report other than what is in that podcast, number 438.
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Now, as has been pointed out to me in various and sundry forums, it’s been
00:00:48 ►
a couple of months now since we have heard from Terrence McKenna. So I dug around a little bit,
00:00:54 ►
and I think that I’ve come up with something that we haven’t yet listened to here in the salon.
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However, parts of this multi-day workshop may have been sent to me by more than one person.
00:01:03 ►
So if you think that you
00:01:05 ►
heard part of this before, well, maybe you have. But the part that I’m going to play right now
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isn’t something that I can remember hearing before, even though some of the stories and
00:01:13 ►
topics are familiar. Now, just to set the scene a little, this talk took place over 20 years ago,
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in June of 1994, and some of the major events that had taken place just the
00:01:26 ►
month before included the opening of the Channel Tunnel between the UK and the continent, and
00:01:33 ►
the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa.
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So let’s join Terence and a few friends now and find out what was on his mind back then.
00:01:43 ►
few friends now and find out what was on his mind back then.
00:01:51 ►
Which is just simply an excuse to get together to talk about the state of the world, what’s hot, what’s not, what’s interesting, what’s coming, what’s going.
00:01:58 ►
These seem to be the things on everybody’s mind.
00:02:02 ►
There’s a palpable acceleration
00:02:05 ►
of historical
00:02:08 ►
novelty you don’t have to be
00:02:10 ►
a weatherman to see which way
00:02:12 ►
the wind is blowing
00:02:13 ►
I think
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the question is
00:02:17 ►
there’s growing
00:02:20 ►
consensus that we have
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managed ourselves into a
00:02:24 ►
situation where any path out is going to be
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fairly dramatic and transforming and then the question is how dramatic how transforming
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can it be managed is it a human initiated, and can it therefore be managed by human management strategies?
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Or are we no more than the ant before the hurricane,
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and just in the warp and woof of the evolution of the planet,
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we have come now to a period of dissolution and chaotic
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recasting. I’m interested personally in, well, I guess in a way all my interests lead back
00:03:18 ►
to history, to the human experience on the planet, which I take to be an extraordinarily peculiar variant on nature,
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that something very unusual has lodged itself
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in this particular species of higher primate.
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And through technology, through an ability to create
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omni-adaptable responses to the changing environment, we have ratcheted ourselves
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into a place of planetary domination to the point where now all that stands between us and some
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kind of angelic completion of some sort is the dark side of ourselves and the unpaid
00:04:15 ►
bills of the historical process. I’ve been here for ten days and there’s been a lot of talk already under the bridge.
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In terms of anything we might say to each other or take away from these meetings,
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I am a resolute optimist of a very complicated sort.
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And it troubles me that I have to say of a very complicated sort
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because I just always thought of myself as an optimist.
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But I realize, listening to people play back what they imagine they’ve heard me say,
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that it comes off as scary to some people.
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Because I’m not a conservative of any sort.
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I don’t think very much of what we have created
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is going to survive the keyhole through which we must pass
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to get to a sane world beyond the contradictions
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of a dwindling environment and a rapacious economic system
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and enormous power concentrated in the hands of a dwindling environment and a rapacious economic system and enormous power concentrated in the hands of a few,
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enormous misery experienced by vast numbers of people.
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Because my faith, based on, well, basically just a lifetime of edge running,
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living in marginal societies, taking psychedelic drugs, spending
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time with aboriginal people, staying out of America during some of its more dramatic convulsions.
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All that has led to the conclusion for me that the thing we are caught up in
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is not our fault
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nor can it be managed by good will
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and since there doesn’t seem to be much
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that’s sort of a moot question anyway
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the thing that we are caught up in
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is what we have been caught up in
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for a very long time
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the oldest skeletons of is what we have been caught up in for a very long time.
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The oldest skeletons of Homo sapiens sapien,
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the double-thinking hominid,
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are 100,000 years old.
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They didn’t spring from nowhere. Probably Homo sapiens sapien is 150,000 to 200,000 years old on this planet.
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And in us, nature has decided to take a very dramatic set of chances.
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And though the results are not in
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essentially it appears that it’s going to come out
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in the next couple of decades
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I think that nature
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is the great source of optimism
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in all of this
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that history far from being
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the harbinger of extinction and catastrophe,
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as it’s interpreted by linear empirical thinkers,
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is instead a slow dawning of a transcendental possibility
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transcendental possibility that, you know, cast its light over essentially at least a million years of human becoming. And that from the very beginning of the stirrings of self-reflection,
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the observation of the rising of setting of stars on the horizon, the observation that sex is linked to procreation, the dimmest
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awareness in our species has been pointed toward the revelation of a something, a something
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that is in the biology of the planet. And history, as we have experienced it since the fall of Rome
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an endless ebb and flow of dynastic rulership expanded technological capability expanded
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coding systems so forth and so on and history as we have experienced it since, say, 1900, an ever-expanding electromagnetic sphere of information transfer,
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an ever more dramatic collapse of distances and boundaries.
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History is not simply the record of the random walk of a higher animal. It is in fact the thing which we have been, I think, most
00:09:11 ►
taught to suspect, which is it is the inner penetration of the humdrum of biology with something extra-dimensional transcendental
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if you wish
00:09:28 ►
even god-like
00:09:30 ►
if you wish
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although I don’t go that far
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it’s not
00:09:34 ►
to my mind
00:09:35 ►
we’re not talking about
00:09:36 ►
the god who hung the stars
00:09:38 ►
like lamps in heaven
00:09:40 ►
as Milton said
00:09:41 ►
we’re talking about
00:09:43 ►
the secret agenda
00:09:45 ►
of bios on the planet
00:09:48 ►
that it is complete hubris
00:09:50 ►
to believe that you can escape
00:09:53 ►
from the yoke of nature
00:09:58 ►
the domain of natural constraints
00:10:03 ►
it can’t happen.
00:10:05 ►
What is happening to us
00:10:07 ►
is devastating, to be sure,
00:10:10 ►
dramatic, possibly unique
00:10:14 ►
in the history of the planet,
00:10:15 ►
but not unnatural or unexpected.
00:10:20 ►
It is simply the consequence
00:10:21 ►
of intelligence reaching
00:10:24 ►
a certain level of mastery over its environment and the stuff of itself.
00:10:33 ►
And, you know, we will talk about all this in high detail or as much as we can over the course of the meetings.
00:10:43 ►
over the course of the meetings.
00:10:49 ►
What I just want to say this evening to sort of set the stage,
00:10:53 ►
and those of you who’ve read my books will recognize the theme,
00:11:00 ►
the reason I believe that we have reached an end to the historical journey is because now the only metaphors which make any sense
00:11:05 ►
are the metaphors that lie outside of history.
00:11:11 ►
The whole of the 20th century can be understood
00:11:16 ►
as an enormous turning in the mind of Western civilization toward the archaic,
00:11:28 ►
toward the prehistorical.
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And we who have grown up, you know,
00:11:34 ►
visiting the Hall of Dinosaurs
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at the American Museum of Natural History and so forth,
00:11:39 ►
this is not such a big deal for us.
00:11:41 ►
But this dimension to our lives
00:11:44 ►
is very new and very modern. Bishop
00:11:49 ►
Asser believed that the world was created in 4004 BC. That was a reasonable opinion
00:11:58 ►
to be held by a member of the British intelligentsia 150 years ago. When the cave paintings at Lascaux
00:12:07 ►
were discovered by shepherds in the south of France,
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they brought the great men from the academies at Paris
00:12:16 ►
to view these things,
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and they assured their discoverers
00:12:21 ►
that they had doubtless been done
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by members of the
00:12:25 ►
Grand Army of Napoleon who had overwintered there in the winter of 1812.
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The idea that these paintings could have been done 25,000 years ago by human
00:12:41 ►
beings was utterly inconceivable. The idea that the earth could have a history
00:12:47 ►
that would reach back 4,000 million years
00:12:52 ►
is an entirely modern understanding
00:12:56 ►
of what is possible.
00:12:59 ►
And in this discovery of the archaic
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from paleontology from
00:13:05 ►
archaeology
00:13:09 ►
also
00:13:10 ►
comes an awareness
00:13:12 ►
that much of the world
00:13:14 ►
until very recently has remained
00:13:17 ►
archaic
00:13:18 ►
that tribal structures
00:13:20 ►
set in place
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at the melting of the last
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glaciers are in place today in the melting of the last glaciers
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are in place today in many parts of the world
00:13:29 ►
with very complex social structures, religious beliefs,
00:13:34 ►
theories of polity, medicine, so forth and so on.
00:13:39 ►
But medicine, the key concept here.
00:13:43 ►
Because these aboriginal societies that have kept the archaic
00:13:48 ►
toolkit, when we sort through that toolkit, there’s more there than fish poisons and abortificants
00:13:57 ►
and even contraceptives. What there are are psychedelic plants. And again, those of us who have grown up
00:14:06 ►
with the assumption of psychedelic plants
00:14:09 ►
or even synthetic psychedelic chemistry
00:14:11 ►
tend to forget that this has all arrived
00:14:15 ►
on the plate of Western civilization
00:14:18 ►
in the last hundred years.
00:14:22 ►
You know, mescaline was characterized in
00:14:25 ►
1888
00:14:26 ►
harming in
00:14:29 ►
1928
00:14:30 ►
LSD discovered
00:14:32 ►
in 37
00:14:33 ►
not really
00:14:33 ►
known
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until
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after the war
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psilocybin
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53
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DMT 56
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everything made
00:14:44 ►
illegal in
00:14:44 ►
66 these things are very new psilocybin 53, DMT 56, everything made illegal in 66.
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These things are very new in the catalog of the artifactria
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that we have looted from cultures around the world.
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And because they are illegal, very little is known about them.
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The issues raised in the 1960s around these
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substances have never been settled. The use of them was savagely repressed. The government
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proved it could repress, but it never was then able to deliver on the only excuse there
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is for government repression,
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which is the prosecution of a reasonable social agenda.
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That never happened.
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But more is at stake here than American civilization and its attitude towards psychedelics.
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The whole of the 20th century is characterized by this nostalgia for the archaic.
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It begins when Picasso brings African masks to Paris in 1910.
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It even begins earlier than that when Impressionism deconstructs
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the photographic realism of late Romanticism
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and instead turns everything into shimmering light and surfaces.
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Certainly, pataphysics and Dada, the precursors of surrealism, were, you know, attacks on
00:16:15 ►
the sensibilities of the petty bourgeois for sure, but also a breaking up of the expectations of linear time that had been created in the West since the Industrial Revolution generally. permissiveness, rock and roll, body piercing, house dancing, all of these things are characterized
00:16:51 ►
by a nostalgia for the archaic. And I think that this means we have come full circle.
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Merci Léon said this, actually. He said, 20th century culture has the character of a terminal delirium.
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As we sink toward cultural death,
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the last 20,000 years of cultural endeavor
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are swirling around the deathbed
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in a kind of hallucinogenic storm.
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We publish every religious text of every cult, of every persuasion anywhere in the world.
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All ruins must be excavated. All artifacts must be reconstructed and studied in one last,
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final, frantic effort to make sense of it all as we sense ourselves sinking toward,
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and that’s the question, toward what?
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Toward the yawning grave?
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Toward the fate we probably richly deserve for the way we’ve conducted our culture over the past 5,000 years?
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Or, you know, is there the equivalent of a deus ex machina in this story?
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Is the U.S. cavalry disguised as friendly extraterrestrials
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or God’s avenging angelic horde
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about to sweep into this sad story and help us out?
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Well, I sort of come down halfway in between there.
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I think that built in to our story is the structure of nature, which, believe it or not, supports us in the incredibly peculiar endeavor of history.
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Because I think nature is an engine for the production and conservation of novelty. I mean, at the risk of repeating myself,
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this is the idea,
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which if you don’t understand the mathematics,
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if you don’t take the drugs,
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if you can’t,
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nevertheless, here’s what’s being pushed here.
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The idea that nature conserves novelty
00:19:02 ►
and that this is what evolution of higher plants and animals
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and culture and 20th century life is about.
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We are the heirs, multiplied in our wealth many times,
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of a continuous bequeathment of novelty
00:19:21 ►
from one generation to another
00:19:23 ►
over vast amounts of space and time.
00:19:28 ►
And what is important about this
00:19:31 ►
is that it changes fundamentally
00:19:34 ►
how you think about being a human being.
00:19:37 ►
Because if you are embedded in secular scientism,
00:19:42 ►
the official faith of the realm,
00:19:50 ►
secular scientism, the official faith of the realm, then you know that we are just a kind of animal,
00:19:59 ►
that our planet is not particularly unusual, that our star is typical, our galaxy is ho-hum,
00:20:09 ►
and everything is just terribly dreary, uniform, and uninteresting. You should just be damn glad that there’s anything at all to talk about. In other words, the conclusion of modernity is that any meaning life may have
00:20:17 ►
has to be, in the phrase of the existentialists, conferred.
00:20:22 ►
That means you put it on it.
00:20:29 ►
You say you’re important, and that makes you important. You say you have hope, and that means you have hope. But the idea that there is any
00:20:35 ►
external source making any comment on your being at all is thought to be a childish 19th century notion
00:20:46 ►
now transcended
00:20:48 ►
by our more sophisticated
00:20:50 ►
reading of things
00:20:52 ►
etc. etc.
00:20:53 ►
I don’t believe this
00:20:54 ►
I believe
00:20:56 ►
that
00:20:57 ►
the idea that nature
00:21:01 ►
conserves novelty
00:21:02 ►
moves the human enterprise
00:21:04 ►
back to where it was a thousand years
00:21:07 ►
ago in terms of making what we do important, making our acts of brutality and kindness
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to each other somehow more important than simply the importance that existentialism would confer upon these things.
00:21:25 ►
That somehow we are actors in a drama that requires a certain kind of denouement,
00:21:36 ►
or it fails in some sense. And the basis for such an idea is the datum that is provided by the psychedelic experience.
00:21:53 ►
And so then this is a big domain for controversy,
00:21:57 ►
because if you have the psychedelic experience in your inventory of experiences,
00:22:05 ►
you are able to make
00:22:07 ►
a different model of reality
00:22:09 ►
than if you lack it.
00:22:11 ►
It’s just like somebody
00:22:12 ►
who’s never been to Paris.
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If they don’t have that experience,
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there’s a whole set of triangulations
00:22:19 ►
on being human
00:22:21 ►
that are going to be
00:22:22 ►
sort of hard to carry out for them.
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And this is not for me a metaphor.
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It’s much stronger
00:22:32 ►
because I don’t think that what the shaman is doing
00:22:39 ►
is something metaphorical or analogical or allegorical.
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What the shaman is doing is something real
00:22:50 ►
that is couched in a language that we find difficult to understand.
00:22:59 ►
We, well, and here is the notion that consciousness seeks the shape of its vessel
00:23:11 ►
that it is like water
00:23:14 ►
you know, you put water in a wine glass
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and it takes that shape
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you put it in a champagne flute
00:23:21 ►
and it takes that shape
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consciousness takes the shape of its vessel.
00:23:26 ►
And consciousness, in the long, long period
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when we were much more at prey to the forces of nature,
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consciousness evolved into a threat detection device
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of superb sensitivity,
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so that approaching saber-toothed tigers
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so forth and so on
00:23:47 ►
were anticipated and dealt with
00:23:50 ►
in a secure, reassuring, dark environment
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under the influence of psychotropic plants
00:24:01 ►
the structures of consciousness
00:24:03 ►
put in place by cultural programming are dissolved,
00:24:08 ►
melted, eliminated, and in silent darkness, the mind recasts itself in its own natural geometry,
00:24:19 ►
unconfined by three-dimensional space and time. And this is, I stress, not a metaphor.
00:24:29 ►
This actually happens.
00:24:31 ►
This is how it is that shamans can perform apparent miracles.
00:24:37 ►
Shamans, recall, predict weather,
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predict game movement, cure illnesses,
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and have an uncanny insight into the secret business of the social group,
00:24:56 ►
like who’s sleeping with who, who stole the chicken,
00:25:00 ►
who beat who up in the garden, that kind of thing.
00:25:04 ►
that who beat who up in the garden, that kind of thing.
00:25:11 ►
Well, I maintain that this is real, this super ordinary knowledge,
00:25:16 ►
and it is gained by virtue of unfolding the shamanic imagination in a super space, a cultural super space that is higher dimensional.
00:25:26 ►
Not in a metaphorical sense, but as a mathematician would use the term.
00:25:32 ►
If you had a profound insight into the future,
00:25:38 ►
then next week’s weather would not pose a problem for you to discuss.
00:25:44 ►
Where the game is going to be would be a fairly transparent matter.
00:25:50 ►
And who’s sleeping with who, this sort of thing,
00:25:54 ►
this would simply be present, apparent, on the surface of things,
00:26:03 ►
yet hidden to ordinary members of the culture
00:26:06 ►
because of cultural programming.
00:26:10 ►
Well, the fascination then with psychedelics
00:26:14 ►
in our culture is I think a desire for this same end
00:26:19 ►
to glimpse the end of the historical process
00:26:23 ►
and to transcend the creode of cultural programming
00:26:27 ►
that has been so deeply worn in us since the Renaissance.
00:26:35 ►
So, and this then is the culmination,
00:26:39 ►
I’m bringing it around here full circle, believe it or not,
00:26:42 ►
this then is the culmination of this archaic impulse
00:26:46 ►
at the center of the
00:26:48 ►
archaic impulse is the shaman
00:26:50 ►
at the center of the
00:26:52 ►
shaman’s understanding of the world
00:26:53 ►
is the boundary dissolving
00:26:55 ►
experience of psychedelics
00:26:58 ►
and what is
00:27:00 ►
interesting to me is I see
00:27:02 ►
a strange fractal
00:27:03 ►
parallelism in all of
00:27:06 ►
this. History
00:27:07 ►
is like a psychedelic
00:27:10 ►
experience.
00:27:13 ►
It is,
00:27:14 ►
you know, it begins on the
00:27:16 ►
plains of Africa.
00:27:17 ►
History, natural,
00:27:20 ►
ordered,
00:27:22 ►
dynamic,
00:27:24 ►
given.
00:27:29 ►
And then, it’s as though we drift into a dream, a dream of energy
00:27:32 ►
a dream of conquest
00:27:35 ►
over each other, a dream of
00:27:38 ►
interaction with strange higher powers
00:27:41 ►
that trade in gnosis and lead us
00:27:44 ►
toward sacrifice and revelation and the
00:27:48 ►
codification of human rules for our societies and magical insights into how to get to the
00:27:56 ►
side of the angels, so forth and so on.
00:27:59 ►
And this builds and builds.
00:28:02 ►
It becomes not merely slightly strange,
00:28:05 ►
mud cities, priests, slavery.
00:28:09 ►
It becomes very strange.
00:28:12 ►
You get Greek mathematics.
00:28:14 ►
You get Roman science.
00:28:16 ►
You get the rise of world-ruling imperiums
00:28:21 ►
and an ever-elaborating technology
00:28:24 ►
that feeds in upon itself faster and faster and faster
00:28:28 ►
imaging the human faustian desire to go beyond itself somehow and now in the 20th century
00:28:37 ►
you know we’re over the top or into the fourth hour or something because we can call down the energies that burn in the
00:28:48 ►
stars themselves we primates we monkeys do this we light the fires that burn at the very center
00:28:58 ►
of the stars that shine at night this is an an extraordinary feat of biology.
00:29:06 ►
I mean, it’s not the feat of an
00:29:08 ►
ideology. It’s the feat
00:29:10 ►
of biology that
00:29:12 ►
the stuff of protoplasm
00:29:14 ►
that runs on energies
00:29:16 ►
less than those of a triple
00:29:18 ►
flashlight battery
00:29:19 ►
can hurl instruments
00:29:21 ►
outside the solar system, decode
00:29:24 ►
the DNA, so forth and so on.
00:29:26 ►
Well, what it is leading toward is an imaging of this object in the imagination
00:29:35 ►
that has always been there, always driven our aesthetic concerns, our art, our poetry,
00:29:47 ►
aesthetic concerns, our art, our poetry, you know, dimly glimpsed in orgasm, glimpsed in
00:29:59 ►
psychedelic ecstasy, fits of aesthetic creation, so forth and so on. And now,
00:30:13 ►
at the end of this process, and with incredible speed, all the secrets are being told, all the veils are being lifted, all the doors are being opened.
00:30:19 ►
It’s that deathbed delirium that Mersiliad was talking about.
00:30:25 ►
So that’s all I wanted to say about that.
00:30:32 ►
The part you needed to hear is that nature conserves novelty,
00:30:37 ►
that in that enterprise, history has been created,
00:30:40 ►
and in the furtherance of that enterprise,
00:30:44 ►
history will be transcended, and soon. And the way to get with the program is to anticipate it
00:30:48 ►
by following the shamans into hyperspace.
00:30:52 ►
That’s what I was trying to say.
00:30:54 ►
Can I ask you a question?
00:30:56 ►
Sure.
00:30:56 ►
What did you mean by we’re at a historical end?
00:31:01 ►
Well, that you cannot imagine sitting where we are tonight, that a phrase like 500 years from now or 100 years from now, it the accelerated rate of change is now so intense that we are confronted with
00:31:28 ►
a number of trends that when you extend the curve out 30 years, it reaches infinity.
00:31:40 ►
So a continuation of the historical process as we’ve known it for several thousand years is impossible to imagine.
00:31:50 ►
Is that all you want to say? Is that a good question?
00:31:54 ►
Okay, yeah, I always, when I was a little kid, I used to hear about the end of the novel, not a novel, the novel, and also the end of the symphony.
00:32:06 ►
And I just thought this was such a hard concept to grasp.
00:32:10 ►
And then, you know, I’ve made my living out of the end of history,
00:32:14 ►
which when most people hear that phrase for the first time,
00:32:18 ►
it’s a mind-boggling concept.
00:32:20 ►
I mean, how can history end?
00:32:22 ►
Isn’t it the stuff of which reality is made?
00:32:26 ►
Turns out, no, it’s just a funny kind of notion.
00:32:30 ►
It was invented by Germans
00:32:32 ►
and it’ll be put away by them probably.
00:32:38 ►
Yes, it’s interesting how resistant people are
00:32:42 ►
to the concept of the possibility of the end of the world
00:32:46 ►
as though that violates some innate order of things when it’s perfectly obvious that it’s a
00:32:53 ►
fairly academic discussion compared to the absolute certainty of the end of your world
00:33:00 ►
you know you being you me and everybody
00:33:06 ►
I mean the end of the world is built in
00:33:08 ►
it’s just this technicality about whether it happens to everybody
00:33:12 ►
when it happens to you or it just happens to you
00:33:15 ►
we’re in hyperspace
00:33:18 ►
yeah we’re in hyperspace
00:33:21 ►
I’ve been heralding it for years
00:33:24 ►
and I’m just about to the place where I’m willing to say
00:33:28 ►
it is happening.
00:33:31 ►
It’s not coming.
00:33:33 ►
It’s like the little girl says in Poltergeist,
00:33:35 ►
they’re here.
00:33:38 ►
They’re here.
00:33:41 ►
But it’s an appalling thing to grapple with.
00:33:45 ►
Does it believe you or challenge you?
00:33:48 ►
Well, believing me, if you know me well,
00:33:51 ►
I don’t believe me.
00:33:54 ►
I hate ideology,
00:33:57 ►
and I think the way to keep it light is to not believe.
00:34:01 ►
I will attempt to convert you in the course of these meetings to all kinds of things that I don’t believe. I will attempt to convert you in the course of these meetings to all kinds of things
00:34:07 ►
that I don’t believe. I figure, you know, I could throw it off. You can throw it off.
00:34:16 ►
I think ideology is poisonous. We’re not trying to figure out the best thing to believe. What we’re trying to do is not believe anything
00:34:27 ►
and somehow have a return to the direct empowering of common sense and common senses. That’s
00:34:37 ►
why the psychedelic experience is so central to me, because it’s an experience. You can say that it’s like Kundalini
00:34:49 ►
yoga, or you can say that it’s like a visitation from the Virgin Mary, but what it is is an
00:34:57 ►
experience. And then I can tell you, well, based on my psychedelic experiences I think the world is thus and so but you can take the psychedelic experience
00:35:08 ►
and leave what I think about it
00:35:10 ►
or what anybody thinks about it behind
00:35:13 ►
it’s an experience
00:35:15 ►
and in terms of figuring out what the world is
00:35:19 ►
it’s indispensable
00:35:22 ►
I think
00:35:23 ►
that we are all infantilized by a cultural machinery.
00:35:30 ►
I like to say culture is not your friend.
00:35:36 ►
It’s not your friend, all this stuff.
00:35:39 ►
It infantilizes you because it provides answers.
00:35:44 ►
You know, the culture has answers.
00:35:46 ►
Work hard.
00:35:48 ►
Make money.
00:35:50 ►
Be a good Christian, Jew, Muslim, whatever.
00:35:55 ►
And culture is not your friend.
00:35:59 ►
The psychedelic experience is a primary recasting of experience.
00:36:04 ►
It’s as profound as sex.
00:36:07 ►
It’s like sex.
00:36:08 ►
In fact, they would make sex illegal if they could
00:36:12 ►
for the very reasons that psychedelics are illegal.
00:36:16 ►
It’s just they can’t, you know, it’s in the bone.
00:36:19 ►
They can’t get it out of us.
00:36:21 ►
But it is that same kernel of chaos that drives them crazy that makes it very
00:36:30 ►
hard to control a social agenda well anyway not to rave about that but yeah
00:36:38 ►
you speak of that movement of evolution I think it’s something that’s happening to a
00:36:44 ►
lot of people and it’s a movement forward for all of us, I think it’s something that’s happening to a lot of people,
00:36:45 ►
and it’s a movement forward for all of us.
00:36:47 ►
So I’m just interested in hearing more about that
00:36:50 ►
and speaking some things and whatever.
00:36:54 ►
Good.
00:36:55 ►
You mean you have your foot in both worlds,
00:36:57 ►
that you’re interested in shamanism
00:36:59 ►
and you are somehow involved in technology?
00:37:02 ►
The opposite.
00:37:04 ►
Actually, I’m very involved
00:37:06 ►
in shamanism and I’m finishing
00:37:08 ►
up my doctorate in
00:37:10 ►
working with computers and doing
00:37:12 ►
all that.
00:37:14 ►
And it’s much easier to be involved in shamanism
00:37:16 ►
and multidimensional reality
00:37:17 ►
and to move in those worlds than it is to do
00:37:20 ►
the academic thing.
00:37:21 ►
Well, the net is sort of like the
00:37:23 ►
shamanic other place
00:37:26 ►
and getting more so, I think.
00:37:30 ►
Because it’s a domain
00:37:31 ►
defined by language
00:37:33 ►
and the faith of magic
00:37:36 ►
is that the world
00:37:37 ►
is made of language.
00:37:38 ►
That’s really the difference,
00:37:40 ►
the fundamental difference
00:37:41 ►
between science and magic
00:37:42 ►
is that science believes
00:37:44 ►
there is something
00:37:46 ►
what Whitehead called stubborn facts
00:37:49 ►
which need to be illuminated
00:37:51 ►
and the magician knows
00:37:53 ►
that the world is being created
00:37:57 ►
by linguistic intent
00:37:59 ►
yeah I think the more I think about it, that the challenge is not to Because the people who have bad ideas
00:38:26 ►
are going to be defeated by the circumstances.
00:38:30 ►
You don’t have to do anything.
00:38:32 ►
There will come a moment when if you have good ideas,
00:38:35 ►
they will plead with you to help bail them out.
00:38:42 ►
First, of course, they’re going to try all the bad ideas. I mean, my
00:38:47 ►
notion of progress is it’s when good things occur for all the wrong reasons. If we can
00:38:55 ►
find the wrong reasons, the right things will occur. You know, something like the Soviet Union falling apart.
00:39:06 ►
It fell apart for all the wrong reasons.
00:39:11 ►
Similarly, much of the future, I think,
00:39:15 ►
is going to be ruled by this principle.
00:39:17 ►
They don’t do things out of altruism.
00:39:20 ►
They do things in order to serve a system already in place.
00:39:25 ►
That’s why when you try to think of solutions,
00:39:28 ►
think of things that will simultaneously enrich people.
00:39:32 ►
If we could find a way to make self-interest and community interest the same thing,
00:39:38 ►
we’d have it like that,
00:39:41 ►
because everybody would pitch in on that program.
00:39:44 ►
Yeah. because everybody would pitch in on that program.
00:39:45 ►
Yeah.
00:39:49 ►
Yeah, well, you mentioned science fiction.
00:39:53 ►
Yeah, I would certainly confess that science fiction was the entry-level drug for me.
00:39:58 ►
So many people have an aversion to it,
00:40:01 ►
and all science fiction is is a permissioning of imagination.
00:40:07 ►
It’s the how would it be if clause worked out to its ultimate.
00:40:13 ►
And it also teaches you the way in which the future exceeds the wildest imagining.
00:40:26 ►
I mean, I remember Robert Heinlein, when he published his book Universe,
00:40:32 ►
the people on their way to the moon have slide rules,
00:40:37 ►
which they’re always whipping out and fiddling with,
00:40:41 ►
because he got part of it right, but he didn’t get that part right and all of those
00:40:47 ►
futures in science fiction are simply in a sense models modeling for what works and what doesn’t
00:40:55 ►
uh i i think you know melville said reality outruns apprehension. I’m not sure he meant what I think he means,
00:41:07 ►
but certainly in the 20th century,
00:41:09 ►
reality has outrun apprehension.
00:41:12 ►
Things are far weirder than anybody anticipated.
00:41:17 ►
Even the weirdest among us have been overreached.
00:41:21 ►
I remember when I was 16,
00:41:23 ►
I read William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
00:41:25 ►
mostly for
00:41:27 ►
pornographic reasons
00:41:29 ►
but it seemed to me it was like
00:41:32 ►
the ravings of a diseased
00:41:33 ►
intellect. It was so
00:41:35 ►
unhinged. Now
00:41:37 ►
it reads like the sober
00:41:40 ►
musings of a concerned
00:41:42 ►
social critic.
00:41:43 ►
So that’s what we were able to achieve
00:41:46 ►
in 30 years
00:41:48 ►
well before I let you go this evening
00:41:53 ►
I should self promote briefly
00:41:57 ►
the invisible landscape
00:41:59 ►
is back in print it was published
00:42:02 ►
originally in 1975 and had a very small print run then.
00:42:09 ►
At the time, it was said that it was 50 years ahead of its time.
00:42:13 ►
So now I guess we’re down to 30 years ahead of its time.
00:42:19 ►
In some ways, this is our best book.
00:42:24 ►
This is not our easiest book or our most friendly book.
00:42:28 ►
This is the most uncompromising
00:42:31 ►
because it’s our stab at immortality, basically.
00:42:38 ►
I mean, this is our Principia, our Prolegomena,
00:42:43 ►
our da-da-da-da.
00:42:46 ►
And it’s also our most, and the use of our,
00:42:51 ►
meaning my brother and myself,
00:42:54 ►
the most speculative of all the books.
00:42:57 ►
I think that the bookstore tried to stalk everything.
00:43:04 ►
And what everything means is this book and food of the
00:43:09 ►
gods which is a book defending and reviewing the history of psychedelic use and suggesting that it
00:43:18 ►
was an evolutionary force shaping consciousness suggesting and defending the fairly radical idea that if
00:43:27 ►
it weren’t for psychedelic plants, there would be no conscious monkeys on this planet.
00:43:33 ►
That in fact, this is the missing chemical trigger in the environment that can account
00:43:40 ►
for the explosive evolutionary speed with which the human brain established itself on the scene.
00:43:49 ►
We can talk more about that tomorrow.
00:43:51 ►
Also a book of essays called The Archaic Revival,
00:43:57 ►
which I talked about The Archaic Revival tonight,
00:44:00 ►
although I’m not sure I used that phrase.
00:44:03 ►
And then, if you’re not into didacticism,
00:44:07 ►
a book that I wrote called True Hallucinations, which is a travel, adventure, science fiction
00:44:17 ►
narrative, except that every word is true, and I will stand behind it and defend it. Being that every
00:44:26 ►
word is true, no claim
00:44:28 ►
is made that the dead walk
00:44:30 ►
or that Lemuria will
00:44:31 ►
rise from beneath the sea, but
00:44:34 ►
small violations of
00:44:35 ►
natural law are very
00:44:38 ►
important in the real world,
00:44:40 ►
not if you’re Carlos
00:44:41 ►
Castaneda or something, but
00:44:43 ►
in my world, even small violations of physics
00:44:47 ►
get real celebration around the dinner table
00:44:51 ►
also they have some copies
00:44:53 ►
those of you who are more practically minded
00:44:56 ►
and perhaps more impecunious
00:44:58 ►
than some of the rest of us
00:45:00 ►
might want to look at
00:45:02 ►
Psilocybin Magic mushroom growers guide then you can
00:45:09 ►
you can produce a dependable supply of genetically certified pure psilocybin and delight your roommates, and perhaps pay some of your bills as well.
00:45:28 ►
And I think that covers the waterfront.
00:45:31 ►
I’m at a place in my life which is sort of gratifying and sort of not,
00:45:36 ►
which is that everything I’ve ever written is now in print.
00:45:40 ►
The problem with that is,
00:45:43 ►
surely within a matter of months,
00:45:44 ►
one or another will slip out of print
00:45:47 ►
and then I will have that unmistakable feeling
00:45:50 ►
that I’m over the top
00:45:52 ►
but it will be true
00:45:55 ►
so what’s the point of evading it
00:45:58 ►
I mean the 20th century has seen too much
00:46:01 ►
of occult arm-waving theosophical pontification and burning-eyed
00:46:08 ►
visionaries with this that or the other brand of hokum that they’re peddling the rules of evidence
00:46:15 ►
are clear and whether you are asserting that you were told by a flying saucer or you decoded the
00:46:22 ►
scripts of lemuria or what it is you’re claiming.
00:46:25 ►
The rules of evidence are clear and it must make sense.
00:46:30 ►
And, you know, the truth does not require your belief.
00:46:36 ►
The truth is perfectly capable of sustaining itself no matter what you think about it.
00:46:42 ►
no matter what you think about it. And the attitude somehow that we must be careful with the truth
00:46:47 ►
and not bang on it to see if it can take the heat is wrong.
00:46:54 ►
In that, I’m thoroughly scientific.
00:46:57 ►
And the best ideas can survive this.
00:47:00 ►
It’s only the somehow compromised or not thoroughly thought through, or yes, the half-baked.
00:47:11 ►
They can’t survive this test, but the truth can. There’s nothing at all wrong with applying a sophisticated eye
00:47:26 ►
to the ideological hardware and software that’s being touted.
00:47:32 ►
Yeah.
00:47:34 ►
Something like that, that we think it’s a metaphor.
00:47:37 ►
I just wondered if you could get more specific on what you meant,
00:47:38 ►
like the language that shamans use or something like that. Well, for example, you know, quantum physics has a whole bunch of terms which appear transparent and trivial.
00:47:55 ►
Spin, charm, and yet, because these are words in common speech, but charm has nothing to do with charm,
00:48:07 ►
and beauty has nothing to do with beauty.
00:48:11 ►
Beauty being another one of these quantum mechanical terms.
00:48:15 ►
So the anthropologist goes to the shaman and says,
00:48:18 ►
you know, tell me what’s the deal with how you’re relating to the cosmos.
00:48:23 ►
And the shaman says something like, well,
00:48:26 ►
we can cure people through the power of ancestor spirits. Cure people through the power of
00:48:37 ►
ancestor spirits. Each one of these words is an abyss of ambiguity that is culturally defined and very hard to communicate.
00:48:49 ►
The anthropologist tiles over the Witoto or Muinani or Warani intent with a European understanding of what these things mean, cure, ancestors, spirit,
00:49:06 ►
and then goes away with the idea that these people are naive
00:49:10 ►
and childish and full of quaint, primitive notions
00:49:13 ►
that positivism has allowed us to transcend.
00:49:18 ►
No real communication has taken place.
00:49:22 ►
That’s why the only way, I mean, I’m not even sure anthropology
00:49:26 ►
is a worthwhile enterprise
00:49:28 ►
in the I will go and describe other cultures style.
00:49:33 ►
But if it is,
00:49:34 ►
then you have to go somehow inside.
00:49:38 ►
And that means, you know,
00:49:39 ►
certainly a lifetime of relationships,
00:49:43 ►
certainly a complete assimilation of the language,
00:49:47 ►
and certainly if there are drugs to be taken,
00:49:53 ►
ordeals to be had,
00:49:56 ►
unusual sexual or social arrangements that are expected,
00:50:00 ►
you have to submit to that,
00:50:03 ►
or you’re not to, you can’t understand it.
00:50:09 ►
Language is a strange thing. It’s very localized.
00:50:13 ►
You almost could say that, I mean, think about it.
00:50:16 ►
It’s a weird thing.
00:50:18 ►
You are born out of the body of woman somewhere on the planet. And very much the grid coordinates of where you are born
00:50:29 ►
will determine your reality forever after
00:50:33 ►
because you imbibe a local language.
00:50:36 ►
You immediately begin to learn Swedish or English or Chinese.
00:50:42 ►
And then, though you may travel great distances and live among very different
00:50:47 ►
people, in a sense you always see through the linguistic lens, the very parochial linguistic
00:50:56 ►
lens of the place where you originated. I’ve made a number of trips to the Amazon. When I first started going,
00:51:12 ►
I was basically a professional butterfly collector on one level. And to me, the Amazon just seemed immensely variegated in its greenness.
00:51:20 ►
It was an unending thing of green.
00:51:45 ►
You know, it was an unending thing of green. Later, when I went back with people getting their PhDs under Schultes in the botany department at Harvard and lived cheek by jowl for weeks with these guys, I quickly learned plant families, genera, taxonomic terms, all kinds of genetic terms, and as I could pour this language into the greenery,
00:51:49 ►
it became endlessly discussable,
00:51:53 ►
and hence, you know, interesting and defined for me intellectually.
00:51:59 ►
Yeah, I mean, it’s very much part of my intellectual story
00:52:03 ►
that I basically make my living by speaking English,
00:52:09 ►
but my relationship to languages is a long and sad one.
00:52:17 ►
I’ve spent years and years in South America and Mexico,
00:52:22 ►
and my Spanish is atrocious.
00:52:26 ►
I spent a long time in Indonesia,
00:52:28 ►
learned practically none.
00:52:30 ►
My career as an Asian scholar,
00:52:33 ►
an Asian art historian,
00:52:35 ►
was ended when I went to Nepal
00:52:37 ►
and studied Tibetan and realized,
00:52:40 ►
you know, that I was never going to get it.
00:52:43 ►
And somewhere along the way,
00:52:46 ►
I failed Italian, German, Hebrew.
00:52:53 ►
I think that’s about it.
00:52:55 ►
But it’s some kind of weird thing
00:52:59 ►
where it just doesn’t take in me.
00:53:02 ►
And so my only option has been to explore English
00:53:06 ►
as though it were many languages, you know,
00:53:10 ►
scientific English, Chaucerian English,
00:53:14 ►
the English of art criticism,
00:53:16 ►
the English of scientific journalism,
00:53:18 ►
on and on and on.
00:53:20 ►
And so it’s a kind of a response
00:53:22 ►
to not being able to assimilate the other.
00:53:25 ►
I think people who speak many languages,
00:53:28 ►
I mean, I’m more in awe of that than almost anything else.
00:53:34 ►
Geological slash botanical information relating to psychedelics?
00:53:40 ►
No, my, I mean, I have only two original ideas as far as I can tell.
00:53:48 ►
And one of them we’ll get to later.
00:53:51 ►
And the other one you have stumbled into like an ant into an ant lion’s pit.
00:54:00 ►
You see, there’s great kudos.
00:54:11 ►
You see, there’s great kudos to be had to anyone who can convincingly explain within the confines of Darwinian theory as modified by molecular genetics
00:54:18 ►
how in the world the human thing got going and what could have possibly happened
00:54:26 ►
because the orthodox theory of evolution is just splendid
00:54:32 ►
for handling the evolution of grasses, the emergence of prairie dogs
00:54:38 ►
and elephants and bee colonies and so forth. It’s the human presence on the planet that is so jarring to biology
00:54:52 ►
because we emerged very, very quickly,
00:54:59 ►
uniquely among all species on the planet.
00:55:03 ►
Homo sapiens sapien, the double-thinking man,
00:55:07 ►
emerged within a million and a half years.
00:55:12 ►
And it involved a doubling in brain size
00:55:15 ►
from the previous model.
00:55:18 ►
And this has been called by Lumholtz,
00:55:21 ►
who’s one of the doyens of orthodox evolutionary biology, the most
00:55:27 ►
explosive expansion
00:55:28 ►
of a major organ of a higher
00:55:30 ►
animal in the entire fossil
00:55:33 ►
record.
00:55:35 ►
And it’s a great
00:55:36 ►
embarrassment to evolutionary theory
00:55:38 ►
for that reason, but the
00:55:40 ►
embarrassment is deepened when you
00:55:42 ►
realize that this particular organ that we’re talking about is not the
00:55:47 ►
Pancreas of a horseshoe crab or the chewing parts of a beetle. It’s the organ which produced the theory of evolution
00:55:55 ►
It’s the human brain
00:55:58 ►
So the organ which produced the theory cannot be accounted for by the theory. This is a great embarrassment. And the problem is time.
00:56:07 ►
Given
00:56:07 ►
50 million years,
00:56:10 ►
the brain could have
00:56:11 ►
doubled along the lines
00:56:14 ►
of natural selection,
00:56:15 ►
random mutation. But it happened
00:56:18 ►
in a million and a half.
00:56:21 ►
So,
00:56:21 ►
there was some extraordinary
00:56:24 ►
selective pressure
00:56:26 ►
on these hominids
00:56:28 ►
and if you could figure out what it is
00:56:31 ►
or what it was
00:56:32 ►
you would be carried on the backs of your comrades
00:56:35 ►
to a Nobel Prize in biology presumably
00:56:40 ►
and so then of course people have tried
00:56:44 ►
but it’s not easy.
00:56:48 ►
The latest theories have to do with the fact that we may have needed to develop immense hand-eye coordination to throw things at large animals.
00:57:01 ►
at large animals.
00:57:06 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:10 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:14 ►
Now, if you’re an old-timer here in the salon,
00:57:17 ►
you probably know where Terrence is going with this.
00:57:20 ►
But just as an irreverent aside here,
00:57:24 ►
looking at the current state of what is laughingly called human civilization, well,
00:57:25 ►
throwing things at large animals seems to be the main thing that we’re still doing.
00:57:30 ►
So maybe that theory of brain development is correct after all.
00:57:34 ►
Now, I don’t have to comment about this at any length, but I suspect that you were thinking
00:57:39 ►
the same thing that I was when Terence was talking about how half-baked ideas wouldn’t
00:57:44 ►
survive.
00:57:46 ►
Perhaps his unhappy example of how pushing the envelope of hope past the edges of the possible
00:57:51 ►
can lead you into a dead end should be something we take into consideration ourselves. In other
00:57:58 ►
words, if you’re going to make a wild prediction, it would be advisable maybe to set the date of
00:58:03 ►
the event a few centuries after the end of
00:58:05 ►
your life. That way nobody’s going to still be alive who even remembers that your prediction
00:58:10 ►
didn’t come about. Now that I think about it, well, maybe that’s the difference between a prophet and
00:58:16 ►
a crackpot. Prophets take a longer view. And no, I don’t think that Terence was a crackpot. He just
00:58:23 ►
got too entangled with his own dreams, I think. And even though I didn’t buy that Terrence was a crackpot. He just got too entangled with his own dreams,
00:58:25 ►
I think, and even though I didn’t buy into his time wave theory, I do think that buried
00:58:30 ►
in there somewhere, there still remains a seed of some great insight. I just have no
00:58:36 ►
idea what that could be. One of Terrence’s riffs in this talk has caused me to see the
00:58:42 ►
history of the prohibition of psychedelic
00:58:45 ►
substances in a new light. It wasn’t anything that I didn’t already know, but I’d never thought of
00:58:50 ►
it in the way it now appears to me after Terrence recited the year in which some psychedelic
00:58:56 ►
substances were first synthesized. Mescaline, 1919, LSD, 1938, DMT, 1956, psilocybin, 1959, and then it was all made illegal in 1966.
00:59:09 ►
I’d never really thought about it in such stark terms before, but in less than 50 years,
00:59:15 ►
chemists discovered how to synthesize some of the most powerful mind-altering and enhancing chemicals that we know of,
00:59:22 ►
and almost immediately, the existing power structures made them all illegal,
00:59:27 ►
thus eliminating essentially all professional research into these important substances.
00:59:32 ►
Obviously, the owners of the status quo are going to do whatever it takes
00:59:37 ►
to keep a lid on the consciousness that flows from the use of these plants and chemicals.
00:59:42 ►
But speaking of Terence’s riffs,
00:59:47 ►
I’m as curious as you are about what he’s going to say next in this June 1994 workshop,
00:59:50 ►
so I’m going to sign off,
00:59:51 ►
get a few other things done around here,
00:59:53 ►
and then I’m going to get the next part of this workshop
00:59:56 ►
out to you in a new podcast before this week’s end.
00:59:59 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:04 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.