440 - The Tao of the Ancestors

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

http://feedbackart.com/[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The present is this hairline division between the past and the future, and the past exists in memory largely for the coordination of some agenda in the future. And that’s history!”

“We have thought of history as something that we do. History is something that is done to us, and therefore we are not responsible. This is the first thing to understand. History is a process. It’s like waves in the ocean, and you are a cork.”

“That’s what the psychedelic experience is. It opens the inner eye, and what the inner eye sees is time.”

“A human being is a kind of a plant/animal combination when they are at perfection. That’s why shamanism is such a high ideal, because what shamanism really is is a symbiosis with the plant world.”

“Western civilization is the bundled group of civilizations that have been most distant from plant hallucinogens for the longest time.”

“Without doubt, in my mind, the most unique feature of psilocybin is that it speaks. It speaks in your native tongue.”

“All other spiritual disciplines drive with the accelerator to the floor. That’s how you do it. When you come to psychedelics suddenly there arises a great interest in locating the brakes.”

“Technology is biology pursued by other means.”

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Previous Episode §

439 - A Resolute Optimist of a Complicated Sort

Next Episode §

441 - The Technology of Spirituality

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And yes, I really did think that I’d get this podcast out a couple of days sooner,

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but to tell the truth, I just didn’t feel like spending so much time at the computer this past couple of days.

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So I did something that I haven’t done in a while, and simply read.

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But some of our fellow salonners didn’t take the week off,

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and so my first report about our annual fun drive is a good one.

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In the first seven days of our drive, 42 people have made contributions,

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and they add up to enough to take us to this coming June 10th,

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which will be the 10th anniversary of podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.

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So I can now rest easy knowing that for sure I’ll be able to complete

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10 years of podcasting in just a couple of months. Now it’s up to our fellow salonners to determine

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how many months beyond June we’ll keep going, and I’m hopeful that the next three weeks of the fun

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drive will be successful enough to keep us going until next March, when we’ll have to go through

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this exercise once again. Also, I’d like to thank

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Kevin J. and Raymond R., both of whom wrote a recent review for the revised paperback edition

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of my novel, The Genesis Generation. And I want to thank the four people who purchased a copy of it

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on Amazon. They don’t send me any information about who purchased a copy, but whomever bought the copy on March 3rd is the owner of copy number one, and the purchase on March 4th was copy number two.

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Now, if you want to know more about this year’s Fund Drive and the gift that comes with every donation, then you can listen to podcast 438, which is very short and gives all the details.

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Now let’s get on with the show.

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Very short and gives all the details.

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Now let’s get on with the show.

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If you recall, in the podcast just before this one,

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we left Terrence just as he had put forth the conventional view about how we humans wound up with such big brains.

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And so this session picks up with Terrence telling his ape and the mushroom story.

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And I have to admit, my first impulse was to cut that part out,

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as it’s something that most of us have heard before. But I couldn’t find a good place to pick up without his lead-in. So,

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for the newcomers here in the salon, this will be a really good introduction to what Terrence

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McKenna thought of as one of his two original ideas. Actually, it’s one of his better tellings

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of this theory. And in truth, it’s one that I still

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think of as having a lot of merit. And my qualifications for saying that are completely

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non-existent, by the way. It just seems to have the ring of truth to me for some reason.

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And for you old-timers here, see if you can figure out how much of the following I should

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have edited out in the beginning.

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So if you recall that when Terence left off in my previous podcast,

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he had just stated the more or less then mainstream proposition about human evolution,

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that the rapid increase in brain size came about by the need to throw objects at large animals,

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well, we’ll pick up right where he left off.

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Nobody knows what happened,

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and I think that our blind spot on this matter is a cultural one, and that the key to understanding the breakout of human consciousness

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is dietary and pharmacological,

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and that what happened to us is, like most animal species, is dietary and pharmacological.

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And that what happened to us is, like most animal species, we were very happy to achieve an ecological climax

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to fill our niche in the canopied rainforests of Africa.

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About five million years ago, that’s where we were at.

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Fruit eating,

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canopy dwelling, so forth and so on, or earlier. And that environment came under pressure from

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the evolution of the climate of the planet. It simply began to dry up. Africa is still

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drying up and it’s still creating political problems for human beings because of it.

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The collapse of the African tropical forests has been feeding into the human adventure since it began.

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Well, an animal under pressure, environmental pressure like that, has only two choices. It can go extinct,

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and if its genetic component is sufficiently rigid, like a lower animal, a butterfly, a

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beetle or something, it will go extinct. If the food supply is threatened, it will go down with it. Higher animals are more adaptable and they, under nutritional pressure, will begin to experiment with other foods, unfamiliar foods. is because food specialization is a strategy for avoiding mutagens in the environment,

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things which cause, interrupt RNA transcription or cause birth defects or something like that,

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because many, many plants sequester, meaning store in their tissues, toxic compounds specifically evolved to discourage browsing and predation.

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So animals specialize.

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If an animal is forced out of its creode of food preference

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and begins experimenting with many different foods

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the rate of mutation

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will rise

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and natural selection

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working on this higher incidence

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of sporting or mutation

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will produce

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a jump in

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evolutionary activity

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there will be a rise

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in lethal mutations, but consequently and

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coincident with this, there will be a small rise in successful mutations. And to give

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you an example of this that makes it not so abstract, birth control pills are made from the roots of diascoria vines

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and are grown on huge plantations in Mexico.

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It’s cheaper to produce them biologically than in a vat.

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Well, diascoria is the genus of sweet potatoes,

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and sweet potatoes in the tropics have always been a very important human food.

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So here you have in the tropics many genetic and racial variants of these sweet potatoes.

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Now imagine a hungry troop of primates discovering a patch of sweet potatoes with a high incidence of these steroid compounds in them,

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and chowing down.

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And so what you’re going to get is interrupted lactation, miscarriage,

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screwed up child spacing.

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It’s just a mess.

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It’s just like stirring the genetic pot.

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Well, over and over, over a million and a half years,

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these scenarios were enacted many, many times.

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The sweet potato example is a fairly benign example.

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Usually these little experiments in gourmet dining ended tragically.

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But in this mix of many things on, in, recall what is a grassland

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environment, because by now the hominids are down in the grassland, they’re rooting for corms,

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which are the roots of grasses, which are a source of protein, and baboons still prefer these and this is why

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monkeys use digging sticks

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it’s corms they’re after

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so we’re foraging in a grassland

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environment in Africa

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in a situation

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where large ungulate animals

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are evolving at the same time

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this is the perfect environment

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for psilocybin mushrooms

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to flourish and in

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all tropical environments where these elements are present psilocybin

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mushrooms do flourish well there’s no question that our hungry binocular

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seeing curious ancestors would have checked these mushrooms out.

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I’ve seen in Kenya baboons in grassland investigating cow pies

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because they know from long experience that if you flip over an old cow pie,

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you’ll probably find beetle grubs.

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And so it’s a vector for protein. I mention the

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cow pies because, as you probably know, they are the preferred environment for the mushroom.

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Well, so here then is a mushroom sequestering psilocybin in its tissue. And what is psilocybin? Well, for the moment, let’s just say it’s an incredibly powerful neurocatalyst in primates. And so here come the primates. and the first effect that they experience at low dosages,

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so low that you can’t feel them, you know, as a self-reflecting person,

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is visual acuity, increase in visual acuity,

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especially, and this has all been secured by measurement in laboratories with grad students,

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especially edge detection, movement of edges.

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Well, this is the skill, the ability,

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that is the difference between life and death

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in an environment of tall grass,

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both for getting food and for spotting approaching predators

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who are creeping through the grass on their fuzzy tummies.

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So immediately then, this chemical factor

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being unconsciously imbibed in the food chain

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begins to divide the hominids into two groups.

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Those that accept this item into the diet

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and those that for reasons of taste, allergy,

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or who knows what, don’t.

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And they begin to be outbred.

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Why outbred?

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Because visual acuity means success in hunting.

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Success in hunting means a more dependable food supply

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for yourself and your offspring,

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and that’s the key to evolutionary advance.

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To bring your own children to reproductive age

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is the name of the game.

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I mean, nature is pretty relentless about this.

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Okay, so that’s the tiny, tiny crack in the door

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which allows psilocybin,

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in concert with the hominid brain,

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to begin to work toward higher levels of self-reflection.

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Now, the next level in this argument,

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and these levels of psilocybin use were obviously going on simultaneously,

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I’m just presenting them incrementally,

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some animals would not be content with simply browsing psilocybin mushrooms as part of their hunting and gathering regimen.

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Some would take more.

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Some would take more.

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some would take more, some would take more.

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And a middle-range dose of psilocybin,

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which can be obtained from just two or three specimens,

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I mean, it would quickly be attainable,

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involves CNS arousal, central nervous system arousal,

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which is the feeling you have after a double cappuccino.

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You know, you can’t sit down, you’re restless,

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you’re maybe dancing is a possibility, and you’re just agitated.

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And in highly sexed animals like primates,

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this CNS arousal means erection in the male.

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And, you know, without the advent of Christian and Calvinistic rectitude,

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our primate ancestors probably fell to humping at every opportunity.

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We certainly see this in the bonobo, the pygmy chimpanzee,

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which is our genetically nearest relative.

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Well, from an anthropologist’s better-fed, more successful hunters,

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feeling more frisky, are having more sex,

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and more children are being born into the

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the psilocybin-using members of the tribal set

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than the non-psilocybin-using.

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And then, and simultaneous in time, yet higher doses would be taken.

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I mean, three mushrooms puts you in the mood for hanky-panky.

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Six to eight mushrooms nails you to the ground by the campfire

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and there is no thought of hunting or sex or even movement because your boundaries are

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dissolved. You have fallen into trance. And we, you know, with all our intellectual sophistication,

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moon flight, Heidegger, advanced mathematics,

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we still can’t get a handle

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on what this stuff does to us.

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We still come down quaking with awe.

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And so you can imagine

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its impact on a hominid

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of the high Paleolithic.

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I mean, it was literally,

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if people were naive enough to think that thunder and lightning of the high paleolithic. I mean, it was literally, you know,

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if people were naive enough to think that thunder and lightning could have inspired religion,

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they should take five grams of psilocybin

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on a dark, stormy night in a desert grassland

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and see if that doesn’t carry you over the brink.

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So an extraordinary thing

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is happening here

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what’s being proposed is a kind of

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symbiosis

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that this hominid

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has discovered by accident

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I’m sure

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a factor in the environment, a chemical factor, which

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is just beginning to open a doorway onto successful food, which means happiness, a different sexual

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style. And this is something I want to talk about that’s very important, because you might

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say, well, that’s all very well, and maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong, but so what?

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It’s a long time ago.

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But I draw a political implication from all of this

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because we have a lot of…

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Behaviorally, we’re messed up.

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And how could we have gotten so far and yet be so messed up

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what’s the deal

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and I think it all goes back to this same

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set of factors

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when you look at the primates

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even the pre-hominids

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back into the squirrel monkeys

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and the lemurs

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even the old world primates

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they all have what are called

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dominance hierarchies and that means that the hard-bodied

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long fanged young males control everybody they control of women of course children certainly

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the elderly the homosexual and the ill. Everybody’s taking orders

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from the tough guys in the hood.

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This is how primates do it.

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And it’s how we do it today, sitting here.

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And of course we’re self-reflecting beings,

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we build spaceships,

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we etch circuits on pinheads and so forth,

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but male dominance hierarchies are how our society is run.

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There may be some whining and criticism at the edges,

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but the fact of the matter is that’s how it is.

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And it’s not a happy situation.

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It’s not making things better.

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happy situation. It’s not making things better. So the psilocybin, I think, acted because of this eroticizing factor, psychedelic slash erotic factor. I think that it overwhelmed that

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tendency toward male dominance,

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that it was like a pharmacological intervention

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on a maladaptive social habit,

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and that this group sexuality,

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this orgiastic sexuality

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that established itself in the high Paleolithic

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and only faded out 7 or 8 to 10,000 years ago

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was artificial in the sense that

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primate genetics and behavioral programming

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would not maintain it

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except in the presence of psilocybin.

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And so the

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tendency to form monogamous

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pairs which is strong

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in the primates

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and strong in us

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was interrupted for a long

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long period of time

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the very period of time

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when consciousness was

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emerging

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and it was interrupted because of this eroticization factor,

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which is very strong in us.

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It’s strong in all the primates, but more in us than any other.

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You know, other primates have estrous cycles.

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They have heats where the females go into fertility and the sexual stuff is confined to one or two parts of the year. We are the only up and ready species.

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changes had to do with creating a very strong social glue among these tribal groups

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because you see the social consequence of orgy

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is that men cannot trace lines of male paternity.

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That’s really what it’s about.

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The women know whose children they have

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in terms of that they are the mother

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because they birth

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the children. But men’s loyalty then goes to the group and it creates an incredibly

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strong social glue. During the same period where psilocybin was suppressing monogamous pair bonding and establishing instead this orgiastic sexual style,

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it was responsible for glossolalia.

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It triggers glossolalia, even in modern human beings.

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Do you all know what glossolalia is?

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It’s speaking in tongues.

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It’s linguistic activity, meaning grammatically structured audio output without meaning.

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Meaning seems to come very late. to me is to suppose that it preceded meaning

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that it’s a kind of

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entertainment

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where you chop

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up time with sound

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you know I mean children do

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this they go

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ee ah oo

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ee no no no

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this is chopping up time with sound

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and it’s amusing

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and if you’re good at it

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as you’ve all heard aboriginal people

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do very interesting things with their voices

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then it becomes a kind of entertainment

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it was only some later rising positivist nerd

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who had the idea

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aha, we can decide that

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nertna means water.

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And then somehow we can play this game where when I say that, you know,

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and then the game, we were off and running.

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But I think language could have been 100,000 years old at that point,

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or maybe not that old,

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but that the grammar,

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which through Chomsky’s work and others

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has been established to be innate in the organism,

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was established before the convention of meaning.

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That’s why the rules of transformational grammar

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work for all languages,

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because they are deeper.

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They are the hardware.

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Local languages are the software.

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Well, so during this period

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when human beings and mushrooms and cattle

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were evolving a tighter and tighter relationship

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on the Saharan grasslands.

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This is the period when everything about us that we think of as human came into existence.

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Theater, poetry, ethics, religion, symbolic representation, language,

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the whole toolkit was evolved under conditions of dissolved male dominance

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maintained by a relationship to an indole-containing plant.

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And you can see in the last dim echoes of this era

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that have gotten into the archaeological

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strata that what was present was a religion of a goddess.

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Nature was imaged as feminine and this goddess was always horned.

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That means she is a cattle goddess.

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Cattle are right in there at the beginning.

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And it’s an image of boundary dissolution and orgy.

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There are no established edges, no cities cities no territories

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there is simply

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this vast grassland

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cut by rivers

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and islanded

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with rocky upland

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and in this

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people existed

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in two phases

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I think

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an early phase

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30 to 45,000 years ago existed in two phases, I think. An early phase,

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30 to, well, let’s say 30 to 45,000 years ago,

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when the cattle and the human beings and the mushrooms were all together,

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but there was no institution of husbandry as such.

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And then a later phase

00:24:43 ► §

that comes at the end of the Magdalenian

00:24:45 ► §

about 18 to 20,000 years ago

00:24:48 ► §

that only disappeared about 10,000

00:24:52 ► §

years ago and at that

00:24:55 ► §

point

00:24:55 ► §

it was like what we’re experiencing

00:25:00 ► §

it was like the end of the world

00:25:03 ► §

because as the mushrooms died away and they

00:25:08 ► §

faded for climatological reasons, first they retreated into seasonality, then into the

00:25:16 ► §

rain shadows of mountains, and then finally they were a rare trade item. The scarcity of mushrooms forced the evolution of a special class of people to take them.

00:25:30 ► §

Shamanism, priesthood, all of these things.

00:25:34 ► §

And finally, when there were no more mushrooms,

00:25:39 ► §

the primate programming that had been held in abeyance for perhaps 300,000

00:25:46 ► §

years to some degree

00:25:47 ► §

returned with a vengeance

00:25:49 ► §

and the orgiastic

00:25:51 ► §

sexuality was suppressed

00:25:54 ► §

nomadism

00:25:56 ► §

ended, agriculture

00:25:58 ► §

was invented, city states

00:26:00 ► §

slavery, class

00:26:02 ► §

hierarchy, standing armies

00:26:04 ► §

the whole toolkit of male dominance,

00:26:12 ► §

western civilization, alphabetic existence, so forth and so on. It came into existence

00:26:17 ► §

slowly, and we may talk about this, if it’s interesting, in more detail. But this is our story, I think,

00:26:27 ► §

that we were created by an unlikely confluence

00:26:31 ► §

of a neurological catalyst

00:26:34 ► §

and a foraging omnivorous monkey,

00:26:38 ► §

that that catalysis created a kind of paradise

00:26:43 ► §

in the mind and in the body

00:26:46 ► §

of the first intelligent beings on the planet.

00:26:50 ► §

And that when, for reasons that we couldn’t understand at the time,

00:26:55 ► §

the evolution of the climate of the planet,

00:26:58 ► §

the connection was broken,

00:27:01 ► §

we fell into history.

00:27:04 ► §

We lost our compass because this psychedelic experience

00:27:11 ► §

is the bridge between our species and the Gaian intent, the larger over structure of planetary unfolding

00:27:27 ► §

and without

00:27:28 ► §

this pipeline into the Gaian intent

00:27:33 ► §

history becomes

00:27:35 ► §

we try to make it up ourselves

00:27:37 ► §

we try to make up the agenda

00:27:40 ► §

and the only agenda we’ve been able to dream up

00:27:44 ► §

is to dominate each other, to conquer territory, to deal stuff to each other, and so forth and so on. object that was well underway 10,000 years ago turned into a kind of bargain

00:28:05 ► §

basement flea market

00:28:07 ► §

with no direction at all

00:28:10 ► §

and that’s what we’ve been doing for

00:28:11 ► §

several thousand years

00:28:13 ► §

well is there any question

00:28:16 ► §

at this point I mean that’s part of

00:28:18 ► §

the story but this is an answer to

00:28:20 ► §

your question believe it or not

00:28:22 ► §

I don’t want to interrupt

00:28:24 ► §

this question with so much more profound but this morning at breakfast to your question, believe it or not. I don’t want to interrupt his question

00:28:25 ► §

with so much more profound.

00:28:27 ► §

But this morning at breakfast,

00:28:28 ► §

I asked this question last night,

00:28:30 ► §

and we were discussing it,

00:28:32 ► §

and we still don’t have, I think,

00:28:33 ► §

a handle on what you meant

00:28:35 ► §

when you were saying the end of history.

00:28:38 ► §

What history?

00:28:40 ► §

And were you talking,

00:28:41 ► §

because every day is a history.

00:28:43 ► §

Well, we can go back to that

00:28:45 ► §

we’re close enough

00:28:46 ► §

I can see it from here

00:28:48 ► §

there are two ways of being

00:28:53 ► §

in the world

00:28:54 ► §

if you’re an intelligent creature

00:28:57 ► §

one is where

00:29:00 ► §

the present

00:29:02 ► §

is this hairline division

00:29:08 ► §

between the past and the future.

00:29:13 ► §

And the past exists in memory

00:29:16 ► §

largely for the coordination of some agenda in the future.

00:29:23 ► §

And that’s history.

00:29:25 ► §

That’s how the historical mind works.

00:29:28 ► §

It coordinates the past toward the future.

00:29:32 ► §

It’s the idea of progress.

00:29:34 ► §

It’s the idea that we are on our way somewhere

00:29:37 ► §

and each generation should take a step down the road.

00:29:42 ► §

You know, these kinds of metaphors of movement.

00:29:47 ► §

And then,

00:29:48 ► §

Mercilio talked about,

00:29:52 ► §

and we could adopt his terminology,

00:29:54 ► §

he talked about profane and sacral time.

00:29:58 ► §

And he said,

00:29:58 ► §

history is profane.

00:30:01 ► §

Every moment is unique

00:30:02 ► §

and every moment anticipates the future

00:30:07 ► §

and then he talked about

00:30:10 ► §

the other kind of time, sacral time

00:30:13 ► §

where every action is what he called

00:30:16 ► §

paradigmatic, that means

00:30:18 ► §

every act is a repetition

00:30:21 ► §

of a ritual act that occurred at the beginning.

00:30:27 ► §

And so every father is somehow the first father.

00:30:32 ► §

Every mother is the first mother.

00:30:34 ► §

And people are conscious in the living of their lives

00:30:37 ► §

of reenacting the paradigmatic activities.

00:30:42 ► §

This is what we mean by the wisdom of the ancestors.

00:30:45 ► §

The wisdom of the ancestors

00:30:47 ► §

is the paradigmatic

00:30:49 ► §

activity. And there is

00:30:52 ► §

a Tao. I mean, it’s real.

00:30:54 ► §

For instance, there is a way

00:30:56 ► §

I’m not sure I know it,

00:30:58 ► §

but there is a way

00:31:00 ► §

that McKenna’s have

00:31:02 ► §

picked up

00:31:03 ► §

small objects

00:31:06 ► §

for thousands of years, presumably.

00:31:09 ► §

Makenas, my people.

00:31:11 ► §

And if I pick up an object that way,

00:31:16 ► §

that’s the easy way for me to do it.

00:31:20 ► §

Because the Tao of the ancestors is blowing through the action.

00:31:25 ► §

If I leave the Tao of the ancestors and do it some other way,

00:31:31 ► §

it drains energy.

00:31:34 ► §

And so the unhistorical people

00:31:40 ► §

are always attempting to recreate an original perfection.

00:31:46 ► §

And the historical people are…

00:31:49 ► §

The unhistorical people are trying to create

00:31:52 ► §

an original perfection in the moment

00:31:54 ► §

through their existential validity,

00:31:58 ► §

through their being, through their soul, we say.

00:32:02 ► §

That’s what we mean when we say they have soul.

00:32:05 ► §

The historical psychology

00:32:08 ► §

is all about

00:32:10 ► §

this stretched dimension of obligation,

00:32:17 ► §

that there was a fall,

00:32:18 ► §

that something must be fixed,

00:32:21 ► §

that when it is fixed,

00:32:22 ► §

then there will be this sense of satisfaction. But until then,

00:32:27 ► §

somehow, you know, we are flawed. St. Augustine said, oh Felix Culpa, oh happy flaw, because

00:32:36 ► §

he saw that flaw as permitting the drama of redemption. You know, I would offer a big

00:32:43 ► §

no thank you to the drama of redemption

00:32:46 ► §

I would just like to go get loaded in the woods myself

00:32:49 ► §

but

00:32:50 ► §

so and here

00:32:54 ► §

let me see if I can now connect this

00:32:57 ► §

to what I wanted to say this morning

00:32:59 ► §

which is pretty close and maybe brings this all together

00:33:03 ► §

history is not something that we do pretty close and maybe brings this all together.

00:33:08 ► §

History is not something that we do.

00:33:12 ► §

This is part of what the problem has been.

00:33:16 ► §

We have thought of history as something that we do.

00:33:19 ► §

History is something that is done to us.

00:33:24 ► §

And therefore, we are not responsible.

00:33:26 ► §

This is the first thing to understand.

00:33:28 ► §

History is a process.

00:33:32 ► §

It’s like waves in the ocean, and you are a cork, and for the cork to struggle with its moral responsibility

00:33:37 ► §

for the waves in the ocean

00:33:39 ► §

is for it to woefully misperceive where in the cosmos it’s actually located.

00:33:49 ► §

See, what happened to…

00:33:51 ► §

There are two ways of seeing in the world.

00:33:57 ► §

There’s the world of space,

00:34:02 ► §

and this is the world that we have conquered. Literally, the phrase, the conquest of space and this is the world that we have conquered

00:34:05 ► §

literally the phrase

00:34:08 ► §

the conquest of space

00:34:09 ► §

we know what that means

00:34:11 ► §

the world of space is coordinated

00:34:14 ► §

through the eyes

00:34:16 ► §

and it is

00:34:18 ► §

the place where

00:34:20 ► §

history is enacted

00:34:21 ► §

but

00:34:23 ► §

there is another way of seeing,

00:34:27 ► §

and we pay lip service to it

00:34:29 ► §

without really understanding what it means.

00:34:33 ► §

The third eye, if you want to follow that metaphor,

00:34:36 ► §

or let’s just call it the inner eye,

00:34:39 ► §

the inner eye does not see space.

00:34:43 ► §

The inner eye sees time. And if you do not have an inner

00:34:51 ► §

eye, you are blind as a bat when it comes to time. And this is what we did. I mean,

00:35:00 ► §

we blinded ourselves at the beginning of history. We stabbed out the inner eye.

00:35:08 ► §

And this is why history is a blind groping Western history,

00:35:14 ► §

because we can’t see the landscape.

00:35:16 ► §

We closed off the inner vision that shows you the unfolding topology of time.

00:35:27 ► §

And the way we closed it off was by abandoning the psychedelic experience.

00:35:34 ► §

That’s what the psychedelic experience is.

00:35:36 ► §

It opens the inner eye, and what the inner eye sees is time.

00:35:44 ► §

You may not realize that’s what you’re seeing, but that is what

00:35:49 ► §

you’re seeing. In the same way that a person blind from birth, suddenly given eyes, might

00:35:54 ► §

say, is that the world? Is this stuff that I’m suddenly aware of the world? And so what we have to do is open this inner sight to time.

00:36:11 ► §

Now, think about it for a minute.

00:36:16 ► §

Plants exist in time.

00:36:21 ► §

They don’t need to know about space.

00:36:24 ► §

It’s a very, very tenuous concept for a plant

00:36:28 ► §

because they don’t have motility. It’s a rumored dimension that some of their more advanced

00:36:35 ► §

metaphysicians hypothesize, but they live in time. Now, an animal, an animal is a thing of space, of eyes, of legs, of coordination,

00:36:52 ► §

of fang and claw. It’s a thing in the environment. And as the higher animals, as you advance up the animal phylogeny, you see a slight claiming of the dimension of time

00:37:09 ► §

by these spatially fulfilled creatures called animals.

00:37:15 ► §

We are neither plant nor animal.

00:37:20 ► §

We are something else.

00:37:23 ► §

And we can exist in space and time if we will cultivate animal and plant connections. physical by exercising ourselves by honoring our bodies by understanding our

00:37:47 ► §

bodies building them putting them through various things it’s a tool it’s

00:37:53 ► §

our tool dropped into the world of three-dimensional space and how can we

00:37:59 ► §

be like plants how can we open the inner vision to the world of time

00:38:05 ► §

by flooding our nervous system

00:38:10 ► §

with the same alkaloids

00:38:12 ► §

that they maintain in their living tissue

00:38:16 ► §

for the purpose of stabilizing

00:38:19 ► §

in that environment?

00:38:20 ► §

A human being is a kind of plant-animal combination when they are at perfection. That’s

00:38:28 ► §

why shamanism is such a high ideal, because what shamanism really is is a symbiosis with

00:38:37 ► §

the plant world that opens you to the landscape of time. And to ordinary people, it’s pure magic. They can’t see it.

00:38:48 ► §

And yet to you, you the shaman, it’s as obvious as the spatial world. So this co-evolvement

00:39:25 ► §

So this co-evolvement between human beings and plants is quite necessarily the concomitant to our intelligence. Our intelligence is simply a triangulation of higher dimensionality. That’s what intelligence is. And this word dimension, I mean, don’t be scared off by it. If somebody tells you that a system has 11 dimensions,

00:39:30 ► §

all they mean is that there are 11 variables necessary to define it.

00:39:35 ► §

There’s no arm waving or you have to go to Harvard or something.

00:39:39 ► §

It’s just, you know, there are 11 variables necessary to define it.

00:39:44 ► §

In 3D, 3, in 4, 4

00:39:47 ► §

the reason I think this is important

00:39:51 ► §

is because

00:39:52 ► §

we need to open our inner eyes

00:39:58 ► §

to time

00:39:59 ► §

because something is about to happen

00:40:03 ► §

in the time world that we need to anticipate.

00:40:09 ► §

This is what I call this transcendental object toward which we are being pulled. by people without inner eyes, i.e. science,

00:40:25 ► §

is a woefully simplistic notion.

00:40:33 ► §

The way science views time is as a perfectly flat plane,

00:40:40 ► §

utterly featureless at all levels of magnification.

00:40:47 ► §

Now, the reasons for this,

00:40:48 ► §

there are historical reasons for this,

00:40:50 ► §

there are psychological reasons.

00:40:52 ► §

The historical reasons are

00:40:53 ► §

science began with the Greeks

00:40:56 ► §

who were master geometers

00:40:59 ► §

and they sought to model the cosmos

00:41:06 ► §

using the perfect objects of Greek mathematics,

00:41:11 ► §

the perfect sphere, the perfect cube,

00:41:15 ► §

the dodecahedron, so forth and so on.

00:41:17 ► §

One by one, these perfect mathematical objects

00:41:22 ► §

have been found inadequate to the description of nature.

00:41:26 ► §

For example, the most spectacular and well-understood example,

00:41:31 ► §

up until the time of Copernicus,

00:41:36 ► §

the orbits of the planets were described using perfect circles

00:41:41 ► §

because the planets were thought to be gods,

00:41:44 ► §

and thus what else could they do but move in perfect circles because the planets were thought to be gods and thus what else could they do

00:41:46 ► §

but move in perfect circles

00:41:48 ► §

anything less would compromise their godliness

00:41:52 ► §

but it was found that when you used perfect circles

00:41:55 ► §

to compute the orbits of the planet

00:41:57 ► §

you never got it right

00:41:59 ► §

what you had to do was drop in smaller perfect circles

00:42:03 ► §

and as observational accuracy increased, yet

00:42:07 ► §

smaller circles. These are the famous Ptolemaic epicycles. And so finally, in order to compute

00:42:15 ► §

the position of a planet, you had a perfect circle with perfect circles with a perfect

00:42:20 ► §

circle going around. Did you get the idea idea and by this tormented method

00:42:26 ► §

you could predict

00:42:27 ► §

with reasonable accuracy

00:42:29 ► §

the location of the planets

00:42:31 ► §

well it took Copernicus

00:42:34 ► §

with help from Kepler

00:42:36 ► §

to come along and say

00:42:38 ► §

this is all nonsense

00:42:39 ► §

ellipses

00:42:42 ► §

describe the motion

00:42:44 ► §

of the planets

00:42:46 ► §

and when that adjustment was made

00:42:49 ► §

all that Ptolemaic nonsense fell away

00:42:54 ► §

so one by one the perfect mathematical objects of the Greeks

00:43:00 ► §

have been put aside as inadequate in and of themselves

00:43:03 ► §

to describe nature.

00:43:05 ► §

But there’s one glaring exception to this.

00:43:10 ► §

The original assumption that time is invariant was retained.

00:43:17 ► §

The idea that time is a perfectly smooth surface.

00:43:23 ► §

And what I mean by that, to give you an idea of what a perfectly smooth surface. And what I mean by that,

00:43:29 ► §

to give you an idea of what a perfectly smooth temporal surface,

00:43:32 ► §

what its consequences are,

00:43:36 ► §

if you study statistics for 10 minutes, the first thing they tell you is chance has no memory.

00:43:40 ► §

The second thing they tell you is that if you flip a coin,

00:43:50 ► §

The second thing they tell you is that if you flip a coin, its odds of coming up heads or tails are 50-50.

00:44:01 ► §

But now notice that if the odds were really 50-50, the coin would land on its edge every single time. And this is the rarest of all consequences

00:44:05 ► §

in coin tosses.

00:44:07 ► §

I mean, you can live a life in low bars

00:44:10 ► §

and never see a coin land on its edge.

00:44:14 ► §

Of course, if the bar is sticky enough, you might.

00:44:19 ► §

So some strange force,

00:44:21 ► §

some magical force,

00:44:24 ► §

decides whether this coin will be heads or tails.

00:44:29 ► §

The possibilities are that it will be heads or tails, but it can’t be both. class of the possible, one outcome is selected for what Alfred North Whitehead calls the

00:44:48 ► §

formality of actually occurring. The formality of actually occurring. Well, in a sense, science

00:44:57 ► §

then is revealed as the domain that tells us what is possible.

00:45:07 ► §

If you want to know if something is possible,

00:45:09 ► §

you ask a scientist.

00:45:12 ► §

But no scientist can tell you,

00:45:14 ► §

out of the class of the possible,

00:45:18 ► §

why it is that certain possible things will actually occur,

00:45:20 ► §

and other possible things will not occur.

00:45:25 ► §

In fact, they will tell you this is not a fair question.

00:45:32 ► §

So in order to do science,

00:45:36 ► §

there has to be this assumption of temporal invariance.

00:45:41 ► §

This is because science is built on the concept of experiment. Without

00:45:49 ► §

experiment, there is nothing that you can call modern science. And built into the concept

00:45:56 ► §

of an experiment is a very untested and not deeply examined idea

00:46:05 ► §

which is that you can restore

00:46:08 ► §

what scientists call initial conditions.

00:46:13 ► §

In other words, the way experiment works

00:46:15 ► §

is they say set up the apparatus this way,

00:46:18 ► §

do the procedure this way,

00:46:21 ► §

and theory tells us that this will be the result now do it now get the

00:46:29 ► §

result now and then they say now do it again and get the same result this do it

00:46:38 ► §

again part of the thing contains within it the assumption that you can do it again, that you can restore

00:46:47 ► §

initial conditions, when in fact this is not true. Suppose we want to do a very simple experiment.

00:46:57 ► §

We want to measure how far a ball bearing will roll if we roll it down an inclined plane of 45 degrees that’s 12 inches long.

00:47:07 ► §

So we pick up our ball bearing, we carry it to the top of the plane, we release it, and

00:47:14 ► §

the ball rolls down, and we measure how far it goes. Then we say, do it again. That means

00:47:22 ► §

restore the initial conditions. So we pick up the ball bearing,

00:47:26 ► §

we carry it to the top of the ramp,

00:47:28 ► §

we let it go, and the thing happens again.

00:47:31 ► §

In this simple example,

00:47:34 ► §

initial conditions appear to have been restored

00:47:38 ► §

because basically we are assuming so.

00:47:41 ► §

Notice you never step in the same river twice

00:47:46 ► §

and it took my friend Ernie Wall

00:47:49 ► §

five years ago to point out

00:47:51 ► §

that if that’s true

00:47:53 ► §

you never step in the same river once

00:47:55 ► §

but that’s another story

00:47:58 ► §

so my point is

00:48:02 ► §

that the people who created

00:48:04 ► §

the idea of time as a perfect surface, their inner eyes were closed. They had been closed long ago by the rise of the phonetic alphabet, by the rise of monotheism, by the rise of certain kinds of cultural values, and by the absence of a psychedelic experience.

00:48:29 ► §

Western civilization is the bundled group of civilizations

00:48:36 ► §

that have been most distant from plant hallucinogens

00:48:41 ► §

for the longest time.

00:48:50 ► §

And all this shamanism that seems so mysterious to us is simply because we have lost touch

00:48:53 ► §

with something that is as obvious to those

00:48:58 ► §

who have not lost touch with it

00:49:01 ► §

as the three-dimensional world we see around us

00:49:04 ► §

is to ourselves.

00:49:08 ► §

A part of what I’ll talk about in the course of these meetings is a theory of time that

00:49:20 ► §

is derived from the I Ching, the I Ching being a very old Chinese oracular system

00:49:29 ► §

with its roots in Central Asian shamanism and so forth and so on.

00:49:33 ► §

I don’t want to talk about that this morning,

00:49:36 ► §

but the reason I mention it is because there was a fellow here last week

00:49:40 ► §

who was a scholar of the weird, W-Y-R-D,

00:49:46 ► §

the weird being a Celtic theory of magical connection

00:49:53 ► §

that basically sees all of reality as a kind of wave mechanical jello

00:50:02 ► §

through which resonance and influence is being conveyed.

00:50:08 ► §

And as he unfolded this for me, it was very clear to me

00:50:13 ► §

that it was very much like what I had discerned in the worldview

00:50:19 ► §

of the people who created the I Ching.

00:50:22 ► §

And it’s very much what I discern on another level

00:50:26 ► §

in the worldview, mathematics, mythology,

00:50:32 ► §

and psychology of the classic Maya.

00:50:37 ► §

So what is becoming apparent more and more,

00:50:42 ► §

and through the work of people like on one level Ralph Abraham’s

00:50:47 ► §

archaeo mathematical archaeology and Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field is that there is a reality

00:50:57 ► §

which we’re not seeing which is we can only make our way toward it by the most tortured of intellectual constructs.

00:51:08 ► §

You know, I mean, we talk about quantum non-locality.

00:51:11 ► §

We talk about synchronicity, but we don’t see it.

00:51:16 ► §

We construct, we’re like blind people,

00:51:20 ► §

you know, polishing a Cadillac in darkness or something working from theory we don’t know what

00:51:29 ► §

we have but there is a way to actually see it to have it snap into being for you in the same way

00:51:38 ► §

that this world comes into focus and by opening your eyes and and experientially, the way to force it, as it were,

00:51:48 ► §

is through the psychedelic experience.

00:51:52 ► §

But then, in the face of that, the proper response is

00:51:56 ► §

you have to assimilate the psychedelic experience,

00:52:00 ► §

which means you have to be stoned without taking anything,

00:52:06 ► §

not chemically stoned, but intellectually stoned.

00:52:10 ► §

In other words, you have to use your time in those places

00:52:14 ► §

to understand the rules of that game

00:52:18 ► §

and then continue to play that game when you’re out of it,

00:52:24 ► §

when you’re back here

00:52:26 ► §

in the here and now

00:52:28 ► §

and

00:52:29 ► §

cultivate these shamanic

00:52:34 ► §

skills and I don’t think it can be done

00:52:36 ► §

without an ideology

00:52:37 ► §

it is a feeling

00:52:40 ► §

toned thing

00:52:41 ► §

it is a feeling toned thing

00:52:44 ► §

but without a matrix of conceptual

00:52:47 ► §

over-structure to pour the feeling into, the feeling will fade. The feeling will fade over

00:52:57 ► §

time, and then you’ll have to renew it, which isn’t such a terrible thing. but it is very nice to bring it out and to have it with you as

00:53:07 ► §

something that you can call on. And what does it boil down to? Well, one definition of a

00:53:16 ► §

shaman or of shamanism that I really like is a shaman is someone who understands how the world really works.

00:53:26 ► §

That’s all it’s about.

00:53:29 ► §

And not how people say it works, or how it seems to work,

00:53:34 ► §

or how it sometimes works, but how it really works.

00:53:38 ► §

And that’s all science aspires to as well.

00:53:41 ► §

A scientist wants to be somebody who understands how the world really works.

00:53:46 ► §

The problem is the world they end up talking about

00:53:49 ► §

is the black hole at the core of the Andromeda galaxy

00:53:53 ► §

and the strange quark

00:53:55 ► §

when what you want to know is why your girlfriend left you

00:53:58 ► §

and why you can’t make money and so forth and so on.

00:54:02 ► §

How does the world really work?

00:54:06 ► §

And the way you measure progress on the shamanic path, I think,

00:54:12 ► §

is by how smoothly the world is functioning for you.

00:54:16 ► §

Even in the Bible it says something about the mountains will become valleys

00:54:24 ► §

and the way will be made straight.

00:54:28 ► §

All it means is, it’s that thing I was talking about a few minutes ago,

00:54:31 ► §

the Tao of the ancestors.

00:54:33 ► §

To my mind, in a perfect world, there would only be Tao

00:54:40 ► §

and it would be perceived as purely ego.

00:54:46 ► §

Do you see how that would work?

00:54:48 ► §

In other words, you would always do the right thing

00:54:51 ► §

because it was the right thing.

00:54:54 ► §

That’s what we’re trying to reach,

00:54:56 ► §

a place where there is only Tao

00:54:58 ► §

and all that is perceived is will.

00:55:02 ► §

But will then is Tao.

00:55:09 ► §

You’ve finally gotten it right. That’s why if people can dance in waterfalls, if they can do all these astonishing things, that’s how they do it,

00:55:17 ► §

by becoming nothing more than a vessel for the pure intent of the Tao. Yeah. When you said a shaman can see how it really works,

00:55:28 ► §

well, that’s still the viewpoint

00:55:29 ► §

from his own personal subjective reality.

00:55:32 ► §

So if you get two shamans together,

00:55:35 ► §

you can almost guarantee they wouldn’t agree.

00:55:38 ► §

Particularly if you take a geographic instance.

00:55:40 ► §

You take a shaman from Turkey

00:55:41 ► §

and take a shaman from Mexico,

00:55:42 ► §

they both have their own background

00:55:46 ► §

and so when you say really

00:55:48 ► §

anytime somebody tells me about reality

00:55:50 ► §

I say reality is subjective

00:55:52 ► §

well

00:55:54 ► §

it is and it isn’t

00:55:55 ► §

in other words

00:55:56 ► §

you know the great

00:56:00 ► §

work on shamanism

00:56:02 ► §

is Mersiliad’s

00:56:04 ► §

shamanism the archailiad’s Shamanism, the Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

00:56:10 ► §

And the fact that there can even be a global phenomenon called shamanism

00:56:15 ► §

means there are certain distinguishing features in all times and places.

00:56:21 ► §

I mean, you are right that there might be disagreement between the Turkish shaman

00:56:27 ► §

and the Amazonian shaman, but I maintain not if you can get a clear enough channel of communication.

00:56:36 ► §

In other words, there are cultural differences, linguistic differences, but finally both guys are

00:56:43 ► §

looking at the same mountain, or both people.

00:56:47 ► §

They’re just looking through different eyes.

00:56:51 ► §

Iliad was able to define a number of cross-cultural indices

00:56:56 ► §

that seem archetypically true of shamanism.

00:57:02 ► §

I mean, shamanism is about a supramundane world,

00:57:09 ► §

sometimes imagined as in the sky,

00:57:12 ► §

sometimes imagined as below the earth.

00:57:15 ► §

The shaman must attain a superhuman condition

00:57:19 ► §

to translate his or herself into that domain.

00:57:31 ► §

It’s the domain, the proper theater for curing and for the recovery of the soul, which is curing,

00:57:35 ► §

or the guiding of the soul into the after death.

00:57:43 ► §

One of the things that’s so interesting to me is I’ve never met a shaman who said

00:57:49 ► §

that they had it all figured out. It is an exploratory dimension. Curiosity, not orthodoxy,

00:57:58 ► §

is the defining characteristic of true shamans. and where curiosity begins to give way to orthodoxy and ritual,

00:58:11 ► §

then you’re on your way to priestcraft.

00:58:15 ► §

The thing that is so astonishing about the psychedelic experience

00:58:20 ► §

at reasonably intense doses

00:58:23 ► §

is that you discover the landscape that you may

00:58:28 ► §

previously have only known from reading Mersiliad and Erich Neumann and these people.

00:58:37 ► §

But what we need, you’re quite right, are better descriptions so that we can know what we’re talking about

00:58:46 ► §

you know once the new world

00:58:48 ► §

meaning North and South America

00:58:51 ► §

was known only from the

00:58:53 ► §

uncollated journals of travelers

00:58:57 ► §

and somebody would write

00:58:59 ► §

that at noon

00:59:01 ► §

we passed a great river

00:59:03 ► §

flowing into our left.

00:59:06 ► §

I estimate its volume as twice that of the Rhine,

00:59:11 ► §

but we have no time to ascend it.

00:59:14 ► §

Well, then perhaps ten years would pass

00:59:15 ► §

and someone else would then ascend it.

00:59:17 ► §

So slowly, from the notebooks of travelers,

00:59:21 ► §

a seamless quilt of accounts could be put together and then you begin

00:59:26 ► §

to draw maps. But we’re not at that stage with shamanism yet. I mean, I had a guy who was wearing

00:59:34 ► §

a penis sheath say to me one time, don’t think that because we are so different from you, that this, this, meaning the psychedelic experience,

00:59:46 ► §

is easy for us.

00:59:48 ► §

It’s not easy for any human being.

00:59:52 ► §

And I think that’s true.

00:59:53 ► §

We imagine that somehow we’re the odd one out.

00:59:58 ► §

But I met great caution among shamans in the Amazon.

01:00:03 ► §

They had a healthy respect of those places. I was

01:00:06 ► §

the guy who wanted to go in and shine my flashlight around and sketch the walls and make the maps.

01:00:14 ► §

And they said, you know, no, no, we’ve got sick people. We’ve got problems. We just want

01:00:19 ► §

to get in there, fix it, wire it, and get out. So I guess that’s the difference between medical research and being the village doctor.

01:00:32 ► §

Could you compare and contrast the experience that comes through the plants from psilocybin and the experience that comes from a synthetic, specifically MDMA?

01:00:57 ► §

Sure. I mean, well, psilocybin can be contrasted to any compound. It’s different from all other compounds, including all other psychedelics. Psilocybin is very interesting and should be studied more deeply because it does

01:01:07 ► §

things that are quite miraculous, that are very close to the surface. In other words,

01:01:15 ► §

ordinary scientific methods of research, I think, could get at some of this.

01:01:22 ► §

I think could get at some of this.

01:01:27 ► §

The first thing that is astonishing about psilocybin is that of all the psychedelics

01:01:31 ► §

with the possible exception of DMT,

01:01:38 ► §

which is a whole special case,

01:01:41 ► §

psilocybin is the most easily capable of generating visions. And that fascinated

01:01:49 ► §

me. I took a lot of LSD and I was really hyped for LSD. I had read, I was waiting, I was

01:01:57 ► §

fully informed and prepared by the time I got to my first LSD trip, and I was somewhat puzzled by it. It did completely take me apart,

01:02:07 ► §

and I thought many strange things and had many insights,

01:02:11 ► §

but I had thought that it would be like the Havelock Ellis description,

01:02:17 ► §

the ruined cities dripping with jewels,

01:02:21 ► §

the vast jungles, the strange machinery, all that. Later I discovered that by smoking

01:02:29 ► §

good Bombay black hash on LSD, you can sort of coax that into existence. But an easier

01:02:38 ► §

thing is psilocybin. Psilocybin just causes you to hallucinate furiously.

01:02:47 ► §

And I don’t understand how people can take this so casually.

01:02:52 ► §

I mean, maybe we need to talk about the taxonomy of hallucination.

01:02:59 ► §

When I say hallucination, I’m not talking about the walls breathing or something like that. I’m not

01:03:07 ► §

even talking about those little things that look like fans that go do-do-do-doot, do-do-do-doot,

01:03:14 ► §

that cover everything like wallpaper, you know, when you open your eyes. I mean, those

01:03:20 ► §

are hallucinations of some sort. I think they’re called hypnagogia or edetic phosphenes or something.

01:03:27 ► §

But that’s all in the visual pathway.

01:03:30 ► §

That’s about the eye.

01:03:32 ► §

What I’m interested in at that point is not the eye but the mind.

01:03:36 ► §

And on psilocybin, my God, you know,

01:03:41 ► §

red velvet draperies are raised to an enormous organ tone and that you just sail off into the most grandiose and extravagant architectonic unfoldment. for it. You don’t know whether you’re in a cyber remake of Shark Cathedral

01:04:05 ► §

or you’re inside somebody’s television

01:04:08 ► §

set or you’re walking around

01:04:10 ► §

inside some kind of organism

01:04:11 ► §

from our tourists or what

01:04:14 ► §

is going on. And after

01:04:16 ► §

a good psilocybin trip

01:04:18 ► §

your eyes

01:04:19 ► §

are like bugging out

01:04:22 ► §

of your head. I mean you have spent

01:04:23 ► §

it’s like going to Upper Madison Avenue

01:04:26 ► §

with money in your pocket.

01:04:27 ► §

You have just been looking and looking and looking

01:04:31 ► §

for hours and hours.

01:04:34 ► §

And this stuff,

01:04:36 ► §

before I got, or as I was getting into all this,

01:04:40 ► §

my interest was Jungian psychology and art history.

01:04:44 ► §

The fields which set you up

01:04:45 ► §

for being able to recognize

01:04:47 ► §

motifs, trace them

01:04:49 ► §

through time, and understand

01:04:52 ► §

how the various art

01:04:53 ► §

movements of whatever centuries you’re

01:04:55 ► §

looking at fit together,

01:04:57 ► §

and plus a deep faith

01:04:59 ► §

in the archetypal

01:05:02 ► §

foundations

01:05:03 ► §

of human imagery and so forth.

01:05:06 ► §

None of that was there.

01:05:08 ► §

It was, as I said, a Niagara of alien beauty.

01:05:12 ► §

It was beyond anticipating.

01:05:17 ► §

It was that I, Joe Nobody, in an hour,

01:05:23 ► §

seemed to be seeing more art of higher quality

01:05:26 ► §

than the human family had produced in the last thousand years.

01:05:32 ► §

And for me, it was, first of all, an absolute aesthetic ecstasy

01:05:38 ► §

to see that much stuff, to hit the main frame,

01:05:43 ► §

and then say, oh, I see. So this is what they’re talking about,

01:05:48 ► §

not all that babbling about looking at the folds of your trousers and, you know, but this,

01:05:54 ► §

this is something. I mean, this is civilization shattering stuff. I don’t see how they keep the lid on it. And I still don’t see how they keep the lid on it.

01:06:07 ► §

However, that, it turns out, is not the most interesting.

01:06:11 ► §

Well, it may be the most interesting.

01:06:14 ► §

It is not the most unique feature of psilocybin.

01:06:18 ► §

Without doubt, in my mind,

01:06:20 ► §

the most unique feature of psilocybin

01:06:23 ► §

is that it speaks. It speaks in your native

01:06:28 ► §

tongue. And that is absolutely confounding to the rational mind. I mean, that’s what

01:06:37 ► §

makes a believer out of most skeptics. Because, you know, drugs, of course, you can imagine

01:06:43 ► §

that a drug would mess with your mind and

01:06:46 ► §

you would see strange things that doesn’t seem too over the top but that you could take a drug

01:06:52 ► §

that would drop a heavy hand on your shoulder and say my friend there are a few things you need to

01:07:00 ► §

understand number one number two meanwhile know, you’re bursting into

01:07:07 ► §

tears. You’re reacting furiously because it’s right. It’s wiser than you could have

01:07:13 ► §

possibly imagined. And it knows you better than you know yourself. And this is astonishing to me.

01:07:28 ► §

Who’s in there?

01:07:30 ► §

Who’s in there?

01:07:31 ► §

Is it the mushroom?

01:07:33 ► §

Is it just straightforwardly that this thing growing on a cow pie in the pasture

01:07:39 ► §

somehow has the capacity to unfold itself in my mind

01:07:45 ► §

and lecture me on quantum physics, art history,

01:07:48 ► §

the history of the galaxy, the destiny of the species,

01:07:53 ► §

or what is going on there exactly.

01:07:59 ► §

When someone tells you stuff you’ve never heard before,

01:08:03 ► §

as fast as you can take it in,

01:08:06 ► §

the only mode we know for that is conversation.

01:08:13 ► §

And so you must assume you’re having a conversation

01:08:17 ► §

with someone at that point.

01:08:21 ► §

And the information is, you know, so puzzling. I mean, I believe that on a good

01:08:29 ► §

psilocybin trip, you not only see things no one has ever seen before, but what you’re seeing,

01:08:37 ► §

no one will ever see again. That’s how big it is in there, It is beyond the ken of the human imagination. Why is it like that? it, that these molecules not only give trips, they record them.

01:09:11 ► §

And when you take a substance that has been in use by human beings for half a million years, let’s say,

01:09:20 ► §

you walk into the largest database on the planet

01:09:25 ► §

of dreams, of hopes, of aesthetic insights.

01:09:30 ► §

Not only the human world, but all the other worlds

01:09:34 ► §

that the mushroom claims to have flourished in.

01:09:38 ► §

Because it is not a terrestrial organism.

01:09:41 ► §

It’s engineered for deep space.

01:09:44 ► §

It can percolate between the stars in the course of a

01:09:49 ► §

million years. At sublight speed, it could percolate across the galaxy. And a million years

01:09:57 ► §

is a tiny fraction of the time that it may have been in existence. The miracle is that it will have anything to do with us,

01:10:06 ► §

that it is a being so enlightened, so unperturbed,

01:10:13 ► §

that it will actually stop whatever it’s doing and talk to you.

01:10:19 ► §

And you have the feeling when you’re dealing with it,

01:10:21 ► §

it’s totally claiming all of your attention,

01:10:25 ► §

but you have the feeling that it is something

01:10:27 ► §

much more like the bell

01:10:29 ► §

the ITT international phone

01:10:32 ► §

net or something

01:10:33 ► §

that many of these conversations

01:10:35 ► §

are going on and it will

01:10:37 ► §

answer any question you can

01:10:39 ► §

ask the bigger you can

01:10:41 ► §

frame it the easier it

01:10:43 ► §

is for it to answer it.

01:10:45 ► §

And so it shows you, you know, the rise and fall of world species and civilizations, galaxies like grains of sand.

01:10:57 ► §

I mean, it says, been there, done that.

01:11:01 ► §

It’s all here.

01:11:13 ► §

that. It’s all here. And so I think that the Gaian mind produces these things and that they are like pheromones. They are information-bearing chemicals. And it’s a great mystery. It is the mystery. I have scoured this planet,

01:11:27 ► §

done yoga, done this, done that,

01:11:31 ► §

scratched pentacles in sand,

01:11:34 ► §

made monstrous offerings at crossroads

01:11:38 ► §

under the dark of a scorpionic moon,

01:11:42 ► §

done it, been there, all that stuff.

01:11:45 ► §

Nothing works. It’s all horseshit.

01:11:47 ► §

Nothing works except this.

01:11:50 ► §

And this works, not a little, not 50%, but 1,000%.

01:11:56 ► §

It’s like the thing that you have been most trained to accept doesn’t exist.

01:12:03 ► §

It does exist. They were wrong. They lied to you for some weird reason.

01:12:09 ► §

This is the secret which is not supposed to be told. And why I can tell it, I’m not sure. Nobody

01:12:17 ► §

ever came to me and said, you mustn’t. You’re part of the brotherhood. You’re an initiate. You must keep silent.

01:12:26 ► §

Nobody ever said that to me.

01:12:30 ► §

And I’ve never been initiated by anybody particularly.

01:12:37 ► §

I learned this stuff by reading the Boston Museum botanical leaflets and then, you know, putting tummy on the line.

01:12:41 ► §

And it’s a secret which dwarfs

01:12:46 ► §

the enterprise of human

01:12:48 ► §

history and all that

01:12:50 ► §

is required for you

01:12:51 ► §

to be a part of it

01:12:53 ► §

is a simple act of courage

01:12:56 ► §

you know nobody

01:12:57 ► §

goes to the ashram at nine

01:13:00 ► §

o’clock in the morning with their knees

01:13:02 ► §

knocking in terror

01:13:03 ► §

and dread at what they

01:13:06 ► §

know is about to sweep over

01:13:08 ► §

them, that’s because

01:13:09 ► §

yoga doesn’t do that

01:13:12 ► §

nothing puts you

01:13:14 ► §

on the line like this does

01:13:15 ► §

because this is what you say you

01:13:18 ► §

want, you know

01:13:19 ► §

it’s easy to be on the

01:13:21 ► §

spiritual path, you know

01:13:23 ► §

you just try one screwy thing after another

01:13:27 ► §

and go forward. But when you arrive at this level, the name of the game changes. You sought

01:13:35 ► §

the answer. You got it. Now what are you going to do with it? It’s terrifying to me. I have no doubt that if I wanted to be the monk on Cold Mountain

01:13:50 ► §

and go up into the mist and chop wood,

01:13:55 ► §

and every once in a while the village people,

01:13:58 ► §

every year or two, would say,

01:14:00 ► §

oh yes, he’s still up there, we glimpsed him naked in the snow.

01:14:05 ► §

He lives in a cave.

01:14:06 ► §

I could do that.

01:14:08 ► §

But the price you pay

01:14:10 ► §

when you finally find the tool

01:14:12 ► §

of ultimate transcendence

01:14:14 ► §

is that you will become incomprehensible

01:14:17 ► §

to your fellow human beings

01:14:19 ► §

because they are not where you are.

01:14:23 ► §

They are caught up in the idols of the tribe.

01:14:26 ► §

They live in the anthill.

01:14:28 ► §

They’re worrying about the oil leaks in their Jaguar.

01:14:35 ► §

But it’s a different thing.

01:14:37 ► §

All other spiritual disciplines

01:14:39 ► §

drive with the accelerator to the floor.

01:14:46 ► §

That’s how you do it.

01:14:49 ► §

When you come to psychedelics,

01:14:54 ► §

suddenly there arises a great interest in locating the brakes.

01:14:58 ► §

The brakes become all important because you can now proceed at whatever rate you wish.

01:15:03 ► §

It’s no longer what Baba says or when the next workshop

01:15:08 ► §

by Dr. So-and-so is held. It’s now you have been given the power to move as far and as

01:15:16 ► §

fast into this dimension as you want. And the joys are absolutely real, and so are the risks.

01:15:26 ► §

We don’t know what the limits of the human mind are.

01:15:29 ► §

We don’t know how much you can gaze upon

01:15:33 ► §

and still play any role in the social community.

01:15:39 ► §

I mean, I’m a graduate of the H.P. Lovecraft School of this stuff.

01:15:43 ► §

There are some truths too bizarre

01:15:46 ► §

for the mind to even brush against.

01:15:50 ► §

And I’ve had that feeling with the mushroom.

01:15:53 ► §

I mean, sometimes, because we have dialogues,

01:15:57 ► §

Hasidic, great, raving Hasidic dialogues,

01:16:02 ► §

and one of the things I have said to it at times

01:16:05 ► §

is show me yourself.

01:16:09 ► §

Show me what you are not for the talking monkeys.

01:16:14 ► §

Show me what you are for yourself.

01:16:17 ► §

And it’s terrifying.

01:16:18 ► §

I mean, the temperature drops about 15 degrees

01:16:21 ► §

in about 15 seconds,

01:16:24 ► §

and there’s a low organ tone,

01:16:27 ► §

and black draperies begin to rise,

01:16:29 ► §

and after about two minutes of this,

01:16:32 ► §

you just say,

01:16:33 ► §

that’s enough, thank you,

01:16:37 ► §

of what you are for yourself.

01:16:39 ► §

Let’s go back to the dancing mice,

01:16:41 ► §

the cheerful paisleys,

01:16:43 ► §

my relationship,

01:16:46 ► §

and what we think about human history,

01:16:49 ► §

but no more,

01:16:51 ► §

because it is beyond comprehension.

01:16:54 ► §

It’s the real thing, folks,

01:16:56 ► §

what all these people were talking about

01:16:59 ► §

on the mountains, in the cave.

01:17:01 ► §

And the strange thing is, it’s among us.

01:17:04 ► §

It’s completely among us and uh

01:17:08 ► §

can be pursued by anybody by any free thinking human being and i don’t ultimately know what it

01:17:17 ► §

means out of it i it’s given me i believe a complete map of human history. That’s the equivalent of trading a knife and a can of sardines

01:17:29 ► §

to a starving wetoto in some baboon asshole outpost on a river.

01:17:37 ► §

It meant nothing to it to give me a complete map of human history

01:17:42 ► §

and a new vision of higher mathematics.

01:17:46 ► §

They’ve got trade goods like that lined up from here to Hosanna.

01:17:51 ► §

And so it’s just all about what you are willing to ask for.

01:17:57 ► §

I don’t know what it means.

01:17:59 ► §

I don’t believe in believing.

01:18:01 ► §

I don’t believe in drawing conclusions.

01:18:01 ► §

I don’t believe in believing.

01:18:04 ► §

I don’t believe in drawing conclusions.

01:18:10 ► §

But I do believe that life is a staggering opportunity for adventure.

01:18:13 ► §

I mean, people who are complaining that things are too dull haven’t the faintest notion of how weird it can get in a hurry

01:18:20 ► §

if that’s what you’re interested in.

01:18:22 ► §

Yeah.

01:18:23 ► §

And now, from the chemist’s bench, MDMA.

01:18:29 ► §

Yes.

01:18:31 ► §

MDMA, these, well, first of all,

01:18:37 ► §

all drugs are different from each other.

01:18:40 ► §

They do different things.

01:18:43 ► §

The MDMA, if we just speak in a language that ordinary pharmacologists would approve of,

01:18:51 ► §

MDMA is a cyclicized amphetamine that seems very useful in the hands of therapists

01:19:00 ► §

who are trying to coax people into a deeper level of self-reflection

01:19:06 ► §

about their personal dilemmas.

01:19:09 ► §

It’s a kind of catalyst for reflexive thought

01:19:14 ► §

and very effective, although most effective

01:19:20 ► §

in the hands of someone who can guide that.

01:19:23 ► §

in the hands of someone who can guide that,

01:19:31 ► §

it isn’t in the same league as these psychedelics.

01:19:34 ► §

I guess what we should say here is, bear in mind, there are many, many, many, many kinds of altered states.

01:19:40 ► §

There’s dreaming, there’s orgasm, there’s fury, there’s dreaming there’s orgasm there’s fury

01:19:45 ► §

there’s fear

01:19:47 ► §

and these are the ordinarily accessible ones

01:19:50 ► §

there’s also what happens on two vodka gimlets

01:19:56 ► §

there’s what happens when you take Valium

01:20:00 ► §

or when you take Prozac

01:20:02 ► §

or Ritalin

01:20:04 ► §

or Amphetamine or MDA or things like Tropanes,

01:20:10 ► §

which have been used by shamans all over the world, but which I don’t have any interest

01:20:19 ► §

at all in.

01:20:20 ► §

Tropanes being the solanaceous plants,

01:20:27 ► §

alhylcyamine, atropine,

01:20:31 ► §

these things which create states of complex delusion.

01:20:33 ► §

There’s no doubt about it.

01:20:36 ► §

You do walk off into your own private Idaho.

01:20:39 ► §

But it’s not transcendental.

01:20:42 ► §

It’s watery and occult and about power and about illusion.

01:20:47 ► §

It’s great for magic, but magic is not great for the soul,

01:20:53 ► §

so bear that in mind.

01:20:54 ► §

As to why these things are different,

01:20:59 ► §

I think drugs have morphogenetic fields,

01:21:03 ► §

and MDMA, which was invented in 1914,

01:21:10 ► §

it’s a kind of empty skyscraper.

01:21:16 ► §

It’s being slowly inhabited by the trips of the people who take it,

01:21:21 ► §

but the people who take it are all probably tend to be upper

01:21:27 ► §

middle class, white, English speaking people of privilege, so we’re not getting a deep

01:21:33 ► §

slice of, a deep demographic slice. As to whether or not I approve of it

01:21:45 ► §

I pretty much approve of it

01:21:48 ► §

I approve of whatever works

01:21:50 ► §

the pharmacological profile is a little unsettling

01:21:53 ► §

in other words it does do things

01:21:56 ► §

to the architecture of the nervous system

01:22:01 ► §

that is debatably not a good thing, but you can block that effect

01:22:10 ► §

with Prozac. Apparently there’s a toxic molecular subspecies in the MDMA that is reuptaken with

01:22:20 ► §

the serotonin, but Prozac being a serotonin blocker

01:22:25 ► §

will actually block this effect of the MDMA.

01:22:31 ► §

Well, I’m not advocating that you take Prozac or MDMA,

01:22:35 ► §

but I also don’t think people should be treated like children,

01:22:39 ► §

so you should know this.

01:22:41 ► §

If you are taking a lot of MDMA,

01:22:41 ► §

You should know this.

01:22:44 ► §

If you are taking a lot of MDMA,

01:22:47 ► §

I think it might not be a bad idea to discuss your situation with a pharmacologist,

01:22:53 ► §

not with a psychiatrist.

01:22:55 ► §

But I mean to discuss the chemical nature

01:22:57 ► §

of what you’re doing.

01:22:59 ► §

Yeah?

01:22:59 ► §

I don’t want to check that spider web.

01:23:02 ► §

It almost looks like a black widow

01:23:04 ► §

right underneath your cushion. Right under my cushion

01:23:07 ► §

I squashed it?

01:23:11 ► §

I didn’t

01:23:12 ► §

no it’s not a black widow

01:23:15 ► §

but scram

01:23:17 ► §

it’s a small tarantula

01:23:19 ► §

there he goes

01:23:22 ► §

good you’re paying attention

01:23:27 ► §

yes

01:23:27 ► §

referring back to a couple things you mentioned

01:23:31 ► §

you mentioned about the guy in the tent

01:23:33 ► §

and

01:23:34 ► §

first thing is I’m curious to know what you might think

01:23:37 ► §

that is and

01:23:39 ► §

you made the statement we’re being pulled toward a

01:23:41 ► §

transcendental object

01:23:42 ► §

and

01:23:43 ► §

is there what do you think the relationship is

01:23:49 ► §

between what we’re being pulled toward and the dying intent?

01:23:53 ► §

Is that intent directed towards the thing we’re being pulled towards?

01:23:57 ► §

Yeah, I think so.

01:23:58 ► §

I mean, I think that we have a low-dimensional slice of the process,

01:24:04 ► §

so we see it as unfolding in time,

01:24:09 ► §

but at a higher level, it’s sort of a done deal.

01:24:13 ► §

I’m not a determinist exactly,

01:24:17 ► §

but I think things are more predetermined than we tend to think.

01:24:22 ► §

I don’t think you can assume, as many people do, that humanity is an abomination

01:24:29 ► §

and that we’ve escaped from nature’s control and that this is just a terrible mistake.

01:24:37 ► §

It’s not a terrible mistake. It’s a temporary disequilibrium that is somehow necessary to the planetary intent.

01:24:48 ► §

The Gaian intent, because Gaia, if we believe that the planetary intent is intact,

01:24:55 ► §

then apparently the Gaian intent is willing to sacrifice a huge amount for this human experiment.

01:25:06 ► §

It’s accepting the extinction of species,

01:25:10 ► §

the toxification, the clearing of the environment.

01:25:13 ► §

And when I look through the inventory of natural situations,

01:25:20 ► §

trying to find a similar situation where this kind of thing goes on,

01:25:25 ► §

where I find it is in the interuterine environment immediately before birth,

01:25:33 ► §

before transition.

01:25:35 ► §

That, you know, I mean, suppose if fetuses had political voices

01:25:41 ► §

other than the Christian right, they might say something like this.

01:25:47 ► §

You know, we’ve lived in this amniotic ocean.

01:25:51 ► §

It’s been wonderful.

01:25:53 ► §

And now we’ve used up all the resources.

01:25:56 ► §

And the walls are closing in.

01:25:59 ► §

And apparently we’re going to be crushed and strangled to death

01:26:03 ► §

in the birth canal.

01:26:06 ► §

And what it really is, is we’ve used up all the food in the egg.

01:26:11 ► §

We’ve used up all our resources.

01:26:14 ► §

And so nature is pushing us at a fairly intense rate

01:26:22 ► §

towards some kind of transformation.

01:26:26 ► §

And we talked the other night, I think,

01:26:30 ► §

about, you know, is nature the baby?

01:26:35 ► §

Or is nature the placenta?

01:26:38 ► §

And in other words, are we supposed to take care of nature

01:26:41 ► §

and nurture it and preserve it?

01:26:44 ► §

If it’s the baby, that’s appropriate.

01:26:46 ► §

If it’s the placenta, that’s grotesque.

01:26:49 ► §

If it’s the placenta, it’s supposed to be buried under the old apple tree

01:26:53 ► §

and we push on to new and different states of being.

01:27:00 ► §

I think nature is a transcendental engine.

01:27:04 ► §

Last night I spoke of it as a novelty, conserving engine.

01:27:09 ► §

Transcendentalism and novelty are to me the same thing.

01:27:13 ► §

I think nature would never be content with a climaxed ecosystem at equilibrium. It will always send asteroid impacts,

01:27:26 ► §

rivers flooding their

01:27:28 ► §

banks, viral

01:27:29 ► §

plague, because it likes to

01:27:31 ► §

shuffle the deck

01:27:33 ► §

because what it wants

01:27:35 ► §

is something it doesn’t have yet.

01:27:38 ► §

But we are

01:27:39 ► §

it

01:27:41 ► §

novelty has lodged in

01:27:43 ► §

us.

01:27:48 ► §

Novelty is not raging among the termites or the seaweeds of this planet.

01:27:51 ► §

Their times came and went.

01:27:53 ► §

It’s concentrated in the mammalian order,

01:27:57 ► §

in the primates, in the homo sapiens.

01:28:00 ► §

And I think that life left the ocean

01:28:06 ► §

and that was an enormous dimensional transition.

01:28:12 ► §

Life left the wordless, unlanguaged world

01:28:15 ► §

of the brute mind

01:28:17 ► §

and that was an enormous transition.

01:28:22 ► §

And so we are poised on another one of these transitions. Somebody faxed me a thing

01:28:29 ► §

last week. It amused me. It said, it was just a big sign. There was no message with it. And it

01:28:35 ► §

said, when you strip away the hype, it’s just another concrescence. And that’s what it is.

01:28:43 ► §

It’s just another concrescencecence they come along every million or so

01:28:47 ► §

or hundred million years

01:28:49 ► §

and we have the great good fortune

01:28:53 ► §

to be very near the cusp

01:28:56 ► §

of one of these things

01:28:58 ► §

and my fantasy is that a hundred years from now

01:29:02 ► §

this planet will be empty of human life.

01:29:06 ► §

That, you know, the cities will be falling into ruin.

01:29:11 ► §

We will have gone.

01:29:13 ► §

Where? I’m not sure.

01:29:16 ► §

But I can feel it, you know, I mean, like the growth of the Internet,

01:29:21 ► §

the rise of psychedelic compounds.

01:29:24 ► §

I mean, we don’t know where we’re headed, but we’re,

01:29:28 ► §

you know, oiling the wagon wheels, putting the dogs and the old lady into the wagon, and we’re

01:29:37 ► §

headed west to Oregon, to the Ohio Valley, somewhere. But this time it’s not in three-dimensional space.

01:29:47 ► §

We’ve finished that process.

01:29:51 ► §

And my motivation in talking to people like this

01:29:55 ► §

is I think that you become…

01:30:03 ► §

Well, I was almost going to say as I am, but that’s too horrifying to contemplate,

01:30:09 ► §

but you become psychedelic by taking psychedelics, and what psychedelic means is free of anxiety,

01:30:17 ► §

because you have the larger picture. People need to be able to rationally think in terms of 10 million years

01:30:26 ► §

a million years

01:30:28 ► §

50,000 years

01:30:31 ► §

to get the context of what’s happening

01:30:36 ► §

and then the idea that somehow

01:30:38 ► §

since the Renaissance we could have broken loose

01:30:42 ► §

from God’s yoke

01:30:44 ► §

and created some kind of an abomination

01:30:47 ► §

just turns out to be one more fantasy

01:30:50 ► §

of the engineering mentality

01:30:53 ► §

and that we are involved in a very dramatic process.

01:31:00 ► §

We have turned a corner in the fractal labyrinth of becoming

01:31:05 ► §

and suddenly we get a shot of a vista we never suspected.

01:31:13 ► §

But clearly we’re going to live in the imagination.

01:31:17 ► §

And whether that means no bodies at all

01:31:21 ► §

or some kind of electronic coral reef on the moon that we all march into whether

01:31:30 ► §

it means lucid dreaming forever or what exactly it means we don’t have to understand at this point

01:31:37 ► §

how the eyes will be dotted and the t’s crossed all we have to understand is that this is where we’re headed.

01:31:47 ► §

And it’s been on paper since William Blake. He said, you know, the divine imagination

01:31:53 ► §

is the course of futurity. Well, here we are in futurity, folks. And I am not technophobic at all. I’m politically phobic but I think technology is

01:32:10 ► §

nothing more than biology pursued by other means which is a paraphrase of

01:32:17 ► §

Clausewitz’s definition of war you know. He said war is politics pursued by other means

01:32:25 ► §

but I think

01:32:26 ► §

technology is

01:32:29 ► §

biology pursuing

01:32:30 ► §

other means because if you look

01:32:33 ► §

at the history of biology

01:32:34 ► §

what it has clearly placed great premium

01:32:37 ► §

on is the acceleration

01:32:39 ► §

of change

01:32:40 ► §

you’re listening to the psychedelic, where people are changing their lives

01:32:47 ► §

one thought at a time. Before I forget it, if you’re new here to the salon, you may not be

01:32:54 ► §

aware of the trilogues that were held between Terence McKenna and the two men that he mentioned

01:32:59 ► §

in this talk, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake. But if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

01:33:05 ► §

you’ll remember the 40 or so podcasts of these trilogues that I did, beginning with my podcast

01:33:10 ► §

number 58, posted in November of 2006, right after Ralph Abraham gave me his big box of tapes from

01:33:18 ► §

these events. So if you haven’t listened yet to these trilogues, you probably owe it to yourself

01:33:23 ► §

to do so. They’re really packed with all kinds of new and interesting ideas,

01:33:28 ► §

and I’ll put a link to that archive in the program notes for today’s podcast,

01:33:32 ► §

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:33:37 ► §

Okay, and now this absolutely has nothing to do with anything other than

01:33:41 ► §

it’s another one of my seemingly endless stories.

01:33:44 ► §

But when Terrence said that you could spend a lifetime in low bars with anything other than it’s another one of my seemingly endless stories.

01:33:48 ► §

But when Terrence said that you could spend a lifetime in low bars and never see a tossed coin land on its edge,

01:33:51 ► §

well, it doesn’t actually take an entire lifetime.

01:33:55 ► §

I actually did see exactly that happen,

01:33:58 ► §

in a low bar in the Philippines, a long-opposed city to be exact.

01:34:03 ► §

There were several of us naval officers

01:34:05 ► §

there and we all saw it happen. But now that I think of it, we were probably pretty drunk at the

01:34:12 ► §

time and the bar girls had already taken a lot of our money on their other bar tricks that they used

01:34:17 ► §

to separate drunken sailors from their money. That quarter did land on its edge of that I’m sure,

01:34:23 ► §

but now that I think of it, it must have been a trick there.

01:34:27 ► §

Now I wish I hadn’t even started telling that story, because I think it was a bar trick.

01:34:32 ► §

I hadn’t thought of that before. It’s kind of like hearing the truth about Santa Claus for the first time.

01:34:38 ► §

Anyhow, before I go, I want to let you know about a couple of Reddit AMAs that I did this past week.

01:34:45 ► §

to let you know about a couple of Reddit AMAs that I did this past week. The first one was on the Psychonaut subreddit, and the second one was on the MDMA Therapy subreddit. I’d actually never

01:34:52 ► §

participated in one of the Reddit Ask Me Anythings before, and I’m pleased to report that it was a

01:34:58 ► §

really good experience. So if you’re interested in what was discussed, you can surf on over to

01:35:03 ► §

our program notes, and you’ll find the links to those transcripts there.

01:35:08 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:35:12 ► §

Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.