442 - The Extraterrestrials Are Here!

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“One of the reasons I’m so fond of psychedelics is because they transcend rhetoric.”

“Meditation and all these other things I take to be co-options organized by beastly hoards of priests.”

“One of the most uncool things you can say to another human being is, ‘Could you explain to me what it is I just said?‘”

“We are held together by our expressed assumptions.”

Previous Episode §

441 - The Technology of Spirituality

Next Episode §

443 - The Legendary Venice Salon

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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 we’re now into the final

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ten days of our annual fun drive

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and thanks to a bunch of fellow

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salonners who have made donations during

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the past week, we are now funded

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through this coming October.

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And in addition to the fine people

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who have made donations to the salon,

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I also want to thank Tommy B,

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George R,

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Kyle H, Shuttermon, and Michael for posting a review about my novel, The Genesis Generation, on Amazon.

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Those reviews actually help almost as much as purchases, so thank you very much.

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Also, with summer coming soon, if you’re planning on traveling, then I’d like to recommend that you buy a copy of my book to carry with you. Now, it’s a big book, so I apologize if it’s a little heavier than you’d like, but the

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cover has a painting of an ayahuasca circle that was done by my friend Jarrett Johnson.

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The only text above it reads, The Genesis Generation, a psychedelic novel. And other than

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my name, that’s all that’s on the cover. So my hope is that if you have it

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with you during your travels this summer, well, somebody is bound to ask you about it, and who

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knows, that may be how you begin to find the others. Okay, that’s enough of a commercial.

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If you want to learn more about our fun drive, the information is in the short 15-minute podcast, number 438. But for now, let’s get back

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to this June of 1994 Terrence McKenna workshop that we’ve been kind of winding our way through

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these past few weeks. Now, in about 21 minutes from now, you’re going to hear Terrence talk about

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what it would be like to have your whole life digitally recorded. And I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you to think about how much this dystopian vision of his

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has actually become true with Facebook and all the rest.

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It’s really interesting, at least to me,

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how Terrence seems to have had a feeling for the situation we find ourselves in today,

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and yet this was almost 21 years ago that he gave this talk.

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It’s probably good that we were trapped into reading that passage, because I don’t know

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how many of you are astonished by what you heard. There’s a lot going on there, including

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a fair amount of megalomaniaia because this man has bent

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many lives

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to his agenda

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which he alone can

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understand the logic of

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I mean he wants to hunt

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this thing unto death

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because it has become for him

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the symbol of a

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principle that inscrutable

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thing is what I chiefly hate,

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he tells Starbuck.

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And I see it, I see Ahab as another reincarnation of Faust,

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another picture of a human being

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who seeks to go beyond what is humanly possible

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and by rising up into that Promethean domain

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sets themselves up for Greek fate

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to work its will with them.

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And if you know the book,

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you certainly know that this is what happens.

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So that’s enough of that.

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Does this all tie together

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do you see the logic in it

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I was thinking to myself today

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my whole life has been

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my whole public life has been about communication

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and ultimately

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what I perceive

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well

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to quote Herman Melville

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from the same chapter

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but a part I didn’t read

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reality outruns apprehension

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reality outruns

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apprehension

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it means it’s stranger than we can

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suppose

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and so I’m at the late age of 47

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beginning a kind of flirtation with the cryptic

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because somehow direct naming of the thing doesn’t work.

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The striking through the pasteboard mask to the reality below requires

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a stratagem.

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It requires stealth.

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It, uh,

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uh, yes.

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It doesn’t have a word.

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Well, because what we’re trying to do is

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say the unsayable.

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You know.

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No, say the unsayable.

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Yeah, Wittgenstein said, you know,

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beyond what can be known lies the realm of the unspeakable

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in the face of which the proper response is silence.

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But, you know, the only thing that cannot be said

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about the unspeakable is its true essence

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and the rest can be downloaded into poetic metaphor but we’re

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trying to here to actually get to the very heart of what it is to be who we are to be suspended

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in time you know our own personal lives are far more dramatic than history. I mean, you may live in an age of great wealth and stability and civil order,

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and yet still die like a dog of some disease.

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And that adventure for you will overshadow your place in history.

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The 20th century has been very chaotic.

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We are asked to make sense of a great deal,

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you know, from Marcel Proust to the Third Reich

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to Jackson Pollock to the moon flights,

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all of this stuff.

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And in a sense, we must make the effort

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to cognize what is happening

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because we have participated in its creation.

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And yet, as I said, it’s a continuous effort at education,

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trying to get at the unspeakable.

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One of the reasons I’m so fond of psychedelics

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is because they transcend rhetoric.

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You know, it’s not an argument for a point of view.

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It’s an experience which arises in the soma

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and therefore it has an existential validity

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that can’t be denied.

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I’m interested in whether you’ve used other shamanic techniques and what your experience with them is relative to psychedelics.

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Well, I’ve used breathing techniques.

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My experience is that they are, at best, very difficult to make work.

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I get a lot of flack for this,

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but what I’m interested in is so radical a transformation of human experience

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that I don’t see how it could come by any other means,

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nor would I personally wish it to.

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I mean, people say,

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wouldn’t it be great if you could achieve

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these states on the natch?

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If I woke up achieving these states on the natch,

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I would immediately define myself

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as with a severe medical problem

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that needed addressing.

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These are highly,

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we’re not talking

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meditation here.

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Did you experience the

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DMT state in a dream?

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Yes, but it was brief.

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It was as brief

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as DMT really

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is.

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I

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I don’t

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it troubles me to have to be so negative

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about all these other ways of doing things.

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You know, the generous and liberal and progressive impulse

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is to say everybody has a piece of the action.

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The Jews have the Kabbalah,

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the Vajrayanists have their yantras,

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somebody else has something else.

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The impulse is to be generous.

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The mushroom, which feels no obligation

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to political correctness,

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says something completely different.

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It says nobody has a clue.

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It’s just wrong

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all this stuff

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all of it, the stuff we don’t like

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the stuff we do like

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why this should be so

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I don’t know except that we’re so

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far away from the original

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wellsprings of

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inspiration

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we want this boundary

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dissolving experience

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now maybe in the past

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when diets were simpler

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and when people were simpler

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it was easier to achieve

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I mean I as a child

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was very satisfied with things like

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butterfly wings, opals, polished agates.

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I could just, pyrites, trilobites, I could just fall into these things

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and lose myself for hours in it.

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But as I grew more sophisticated, these things lost their hold over me

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and we are the most sophisticated

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and hence the most jaded people

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who have ever existed

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that’s why it’s amazing that DMT works so well

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that we can be reduced to the status

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of basically newborn infants

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but meditation and all these other things I take to be of basically newborn infants.

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But meditation and all these other things I take to be co-options

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organized by beastly hordes of priests.

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I’ll tell you what I’m thinking of,

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and I’m interested to know

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if you think there’s any value to this.

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Obviously, psychedelics for any individual

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are bound and dissolving.

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But there are a lot of people, I think, that are afraid of that.

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And I’m wondering if, sort of on a small community level,

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whether things like dancing or other kinds of group exercises,

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whether it’s chanting or that kind of thing,

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which seem to me to be boundary-dissolving,

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at least among the people that are participating in it,

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how many value is sort of a half-step?

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Well, my advocate for the great half-step is travel.

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That’s why we call it taking a trip.

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Because, you know, travel,

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and the further you go and the closer to the ground you stay the more mind-bending it is

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i mean if you were to leave this afternoon and drive to san francisco airport and fly to bangkok

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and go up country to burma for two weeks and take no money and just hang out with your return air

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ticket and then fly back here you might arrive back at Esalen and say,

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I’ve been in Burma for two weeks.

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And your co-workers might say,

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oh, we didn’t realize you’d gone.

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But into that experience, you could have packed, you know,

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an enormous amount of change and self-reflection and adventure.

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You could have had love affairs, religious conversions, episodes of gastric poisoning, all three and more.

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So I think people should travel.

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I think nomadism is a great thing.

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I think nomadism is a great thing and hopefully part of the future will be a kind of growing nomadism. It’s fascinating to me that you can carry a little computer and plug in to any telephone line and have your office snap into existence, waiting messages, who needs calls, you know.

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And so it’s possible to move around.

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I think we’re much more comfortable as nomads.

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I think an incredible stultification accompanied the invention of agriculture

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and that agriculturalists are just the most boring people.

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I mean, they suppress orgy.

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They like to get up and work hard.

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They work hard.

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That seems to be their main consideration.

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Travel is sort of a personal trip,

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just like psychedelics are a personal trip.

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I guess the last part of this is I wonder if there’s any,

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whether you can take it as, you can’t, I guess,

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take it as far as a psychedelic trip.

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Do you think there’s any value to trying to have a shared experience

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with groups of people moving to…

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You mean communities?

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Yes, a communal kind of, whether it’s a whole, you know,

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I mean, a town or whatever, or a group of 20 people or whatever.

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Do you think that that’s, there’s any value to the shared experience?

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I don’t know. I can get about as far

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as using sexuality

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as a platform for self-exploration

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which involves one or

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two other people depending on

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how loose you are.

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Community, I guess I am

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naturally a kind of a loner

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and highly suspicious.

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It seems to me it’s a huge distraction, all that.

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I’ve known people who’ve given their lives to community

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and in candid moments they express enormous bitterness.

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I mean, I won’t name this person,

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but I’ve never forgotten.

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I once was with one of the great communards,

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a name you would all recognize.

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And we walked up above the community

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that she had helped build.

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And here was this vista of buildings

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and water collection supplies

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and gardens and so forth

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and she turned to me and she said

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you know what I think about community

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and I said what

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and she said I think it sucks

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and I was shocked

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I mean I was there to be converted

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I was thinking gee look at how

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beautiful this is and I live alone

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with my moldering books and my cat

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and wouldn’t it be nice to thus and so?

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But I think we’re very far.

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How can we do it?

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The way to do it is to have a lot of psilocybin,

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no economic responsibilities

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because the last time we were in that space

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they hadn’t been invented yet

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a lot of group sex

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and how can you do that in a world of epidemic

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fatal sexually transmitted diseases

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you are a progressive

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aren’t you

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it’s coming

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the subject of teledildonics was raised You are a progressive, aren’t you? It’s coming.

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The subject of teledildonics was raised.

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Teledildonics is a word that Howard Rheingold invented,

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and he’s been taken to lunch more times for inventing this one word.

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Well, this is coming.

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I don’t know what I think about it.

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You have to understand,

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when you get into these areas,

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you’re talking to an Irish Catholic.

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We get real reluctant

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when it comes to having sex

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with small household appliances.

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Nevertheless.

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Nevertheless.

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nevertheless oh brain machines

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brain machines are like flying machines

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we’re going to have to have a lot of them that don’t work

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before we get one that does

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and I wish all

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those people good luck. And everybody says the same thing about brain machines, which

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is it sure helps if you’ve got some good pot to smoke, which essentially blows the brain

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machine away. Because, you know, if you have good pot to smoke, who in the world, I mean, I don’t like them very much.

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They range, however, from very simple ones

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to very, very complex ones.

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This is quite a thing in Europe.

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It isn’t such a deal here.

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I saw a wonderful one recently that uses the sun.

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You keep your eyes closed and it has a small little tube.

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You blow into it and the harder you blow the faster

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it spins and it’s

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quite effective

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well I think that’s the very best one

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and it’s three dollars

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versus the three hundred

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or three thousand

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what I love about that

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since you mentioned it

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is that that little

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object, there is nothing really, it’s made of molded that little object there is nothing really

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it’s made of molded plastic

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but there’s nothing high tech about it

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you could have made one

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15,000 years ago

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and what you do is you hold it up to the sun

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and this thing is like a propeller

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is splitting the light

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and the speed of the propeller

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is controlled by your breath through a tube

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so you have a physiological

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feedback loop

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it’s brilliant

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and it could have existed any time

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in the last 20,000 years

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but was made in the 80s sometime

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yeah

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we haven’t talked a great deal

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about sexuality

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and how what we’re going to do with all that in the electronic dispensation to come.

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I assume that leaving your body doesn’t mean leaving the impression of your body behind,

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and that the body may become

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sort of like a phantom limb phenomenon.

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You know, you don’t have one

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but you can feel it anyway kind of thing.

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And certainly, you know,

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handshakes among phantom limbs

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don’t transmit very many viral diseases.

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I don’t think the Irish Catholics

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will lead the frontal assault

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on developing teledildonics.

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We’ll leave

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that to

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some other

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subset of society.

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But this is coming.

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This is all absolutely coming.

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In fact,

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long-distance sexual encounters between people.

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I mean, you only have to look…

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Like, for instance, take phone sex, for example.

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If you were to describe this to someone in 1950,

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they would think that you didn’t understand human psychology

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and that such a preposterous thing would never fly.

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It’s a $9 billion industry in the United States.

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Apparently, then, what this means is,

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though we may tisk and toss our heads

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in good Calvinistic disapproval.

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It’s coming and a lot of people want it.

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And teledildonics will naturally accompany telepresence.

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Right now, they are not developing but preparing to ship a suit, a spandex suit,

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with all kinds of little flexors built in inch by inch by inch

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so that when you reach for a round object in the virtual reality,

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the flexors are activated and your finger, you learn to relax and then you can actually feel your hand close over this smooth, shiny object.

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It doesn’t exist except in electronic virtual space.

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And we don’t have to, I don’t think a lot of stress has to be placed

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on electronic duplication of tactility.

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We are so visually cued that a virtual reality that only satisfies your visual senses is pretty astonishing.

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And of course these things are trivial these days,

00:21:21 ► §

but again, when you put in the asymptotic curve of developing technology

00:21:26 ► §

they are very quickly going to become very impressive we need to break through in computational

00:21:32 ► §

speed of an order of magnitude and then these things won’t be choppy cartoons anymore there’ll

00:21:39 ► §

be things you can step off into and walk around. Obviously, in that process,

00:21:45 ► §

the design goal should be a virtual reality

00:21:50 ► §

where you are forced to exclaim,

00:21:53 ► §

I can’t tell if it’s 15 milligrams of psilocybin or Sony

00:22:00 ► §

because the hallucinations will become the

00:22:06 ► §

furniture of VR.

00:22:08 ► §

We’re not going to just simply recreate

00:22:10 ► §

Newtonian space in there.

00:22:12 ► §

We don’t have to.

00:22:13 ► §

We can create any kind of an environment

00:22:15 ► §

we can imagine.

00:22:18 ► §

I think when the television

00:22:19 ► §

was first invented, the general

00:22:21 ► §

consensus was there goes the intellect

00:22:24 ► §

of the polis, and then along

00:22:26 ► §

comes Longmore Man,

00:22:28 ► §

which is

00:22:30 ► §

sort of the opposite direction

00:22:32 ► §

that the electronic contraptions

00:22:34 ► §

of our current era offer

00:22:36 ► §

a heightened

00:22:37 ► §

and

00:22:39 ► §

improved intellect.

00:22:41 ► §

Well, I think the

00:22:44 ► §

real uses of these things, that the

00:22:46 ► §

proper use for

00:22:48 ► §

virtual reality technology

00:22:50 ► §

is to turn our minds

00:22:52 ► §

inside out, to build

00:22:54 ► §

soul scapes.

00:22:57 ► §

I mean, we are

00:22:58 ► §

all primates of

00:23:00 ► §

a certain species. We dress

00:23:02 ► §

differently, we color our hair, we do

00:23:04 ► §

this and that, but we’re all pretty much

00:23:06 ► §

alike. Where we differ is

00:23:08 ► §

in the mind.

00:23:09 ► §

And if, as one

00:23:11 ► §

now learns to talk,

00:23:15 ► §

in the future

00:23:16 ► §

children were to begin

00:23:18 ► §

to build their realities

00:23:20 ► §

and nothing was ever

00:23:22 ► §

erased and everything was always

00:23:24 ► §

kept,

00:23:27 ► §

well then by the time you were 20 years old,

00:23:33 ► §

you’d have a virtual reality the size of Manhattan in virtual space and that would be who you truly are.

00:23:36 ► §

Your fears, your hopes, your fantasies, your triumphs, your failures.

00:23:41 ► §

And if you truly wanted to be intimate with someone,

00:23:45 ► §

you wouldn’t invite them up to your apartment to look at your etchings

00:23:49 ► §

or listen to your stereo.

00:23:52 ► §

You would invite them into your reality, your secret playhouse.

00:23:58 ► §

And there would be levels.

00:24:00 ► §

You wouldn’t let just anyone go in all the way.

00:24:04 ► §

And there would be things you shared with your friends

00:24:06 ► §

things you shared with your lovers

00:24:08 ► §

and things you shared with nobody presumably

00:24:11 ► §

and these virtual realities once created will last forever

00:24:15 ► §

in the same way that a mollusk makes a nascent shell

00:24:21 ► §

that it leaves as its legacy in nature so So in a sense, the past will cease to

00:24:28 ► §

exist. People who grow up in that kind of an environment will leave an electronic record of

00:24:36 ► §

themselves so virtually complete that it will be as though they have come into existence forever.

00:24:44 ► §

Not from their point of view, of course.

00:24:46 ► §

From their point of view, they eventually go into the yawning grave.

00:24:49 ► §

But from the point of view of all the rest of us,

00:24:52 ► §

once they come into existence,

00:24:54 ► §

their virtual reality will be there to explore forever.

00:24:59 ► §

I have a videotape of my son’s birth.

00:25:02 ► §

And I sort of wondered, you know,

00:25:04 ► §

if you would have a videotape of my own birth, it And I sort of wondered, you know, if you wrote a videotape of my own birth,

00:25:06 ► §

then why?

00:25:06 ► §

You know, it wasn’t possible for me to have such a…

00:25:09 ► §

Well, your son, I’m sure,

00:25:12 ► §

will someday ask you for that videotape

00:25:15 ► §

to incorporate into his ever-growing museum

00:25:21 ► §

about himself.

00:25:23 ► §

Yes.

00:25:22 ► §

museum about himself.

00:25:23 ► §

Yes.

00:25:30 ► §

When you speak of our minds differing,

00:25:31 ► §

is it not how we’ve accessed what’s

00:25:34 ► §

in there? I mean, the difference

00:25:36 ► §

is how close we are

00:25:38 ► §

to

00:25:38 ► §

what is available.

00:25:42 ► §

An availability that I’m not sure

00:25:44 ► §

we know the boundaries of.

00:25:46 ► §

Isn’t that it?

00:25:49 ► §

Isn’t that it?

00:25:50 ► §

Well, it has to do with the path that we’ve each taken through the data stream.

00:25:58 ► §

I mean, one of the most uncool things you can say to another human being is,

00:26:04 ► §

could you explain to me what it is I just said?

00:26:09 ► §

Because that shatters the illusion

00:26:12 ► §

that we’re all trying to maintain,

00:26:14 ► §

which is you understand me, I understand you,

00:26:18 ► §

we agree, you know, Woody Allen is funny,

00:26:21 ► §

Hitler isn’t, so forth and so on.

00:26:23 ► §

But if you start asking,

00:26:26 ► §

then you asked for it

00:26:28 ► §

and you hear that, you know,

00:26:31 ► §

they think Hitler is funny

00:26:33 ► §

and Woody Allen isn’t funny.

00:26:35 ► §

And so we are held together

00:26:37 ► §

by our expressed assumptions.

00:26:40 ► §

And this is tricky.

00:26:43 ► §

I get this all the time

00:26:44 ► §

because often I give talks like this

00:26:46 ► §

and then they’re turned over to a professional typist

00:26:50 ► §

who transcribes them.

00:26:52 ► §

And so I get to see what somebody thinks I’m saying

00:26:56 ► §

and they type it out.

00:26:58 ► §

And sometimes there are sentence-long malapropisms

00:27:02 ► §

where every word has been slightly tweaked

00:27:05 ► §

to give a completely

00:27:08 ► §

different word, you know, instead of

00:27:10 ► §

going upstairs, apples and oranges.

00:27:12 ► §

These are called

00:27:13 ► §

mandragodans or something like that.

00:27:16 ► §

But

00:27:17 ► §

communicating is a big problem.

00:27:20 ► §

That’s why we need art

00:27:21 ► §

and that’s why I think this electronic

00:27:24 ► §

thing is going to turn out to be very boundary dissolving, more than we realize.

00:27:30 ► §

I mean we not only are going to become our art, I will become my art, I may end up becoming your art as well. understand that. But when you go out, when you take suicide, for example, what you’re

00:27:46 ► §

doing is going in. Where are you going if you’re going out? I know I’m using words,

00:27:53 ► §

but that’s what we have to work with, right?

00:27:55 ► §

Well, I think, you know, the great cliché of the new age is that there’s no difference

00:28:02 ► §

between the inside and the outside and they

00:28:05 ► §

will maintain that vehemently until you whip out psychedelic substances and then suddenly

00:28:13 ► §

this distinction which was previously denied to have any importance becomes very very important

00:28:20 ► §

and people say well can’t you do it naturally? I say, well, what do you mean? This came from a plan.

00:28:26 ► §

They say, no, no, I mean, can’t you do it without any help from the outside?

00:28:32 ► §

I say, well, I thought you just said the inside and the outside were the same thing.

00:28:36 ► §

Well, yes, but in this particular case,

00:28:40 ► §

somehow great stress is laid on doing it from the inside out.

00:28:45 ► §

Are you awakening something that is inside by taking it?

00:28:51 ► §

I think that you can semantically argue about this,

00:28:56 ► §

but to try and communicate with someone

00:28:59 ► §

who isn’t just interested in verbal somersaults,

00:29:03 ► §

the answer is no.

00:29:04 ► §

The thing you’re contacting is not yourself.

00:29:09 ► §

I mean, think of the word self.

00:29:11 ► §

By definition, the self is that which is most familiar,

00:29:18 ► §

most well-known.

00:29:21 ► §

Well, if you then have an experience

00:29:23 ► §

that is utterly terrifying, completely alien,

00:29:26 ► §

and beyond anything you ever conceived of, to call it the self is to do some kind of weird

00:29:35 ► §

injustice to the meaning. The answer, where I’m coming from, I’m sure you know where I’m coming from, but the sense of, in Zen, for example,

00:29:47 ► §

that all things are in there.

00:29:49 ► §

It’s just a question of,

00:29:52 ► §

I mean, we all have all of this.

00:29:57 ► §

Yeah, I would agree with that.

00:29:58 ► §

As long as you add that all things are out here as well.

00:30:02 ► §

I will.

00:30:03 ► §

Yeah, that’s it.

00:30:04 ► §

I’m happy to do that.

00:30:05 ► §

The inside-outside distinction is just…

00:30:08 ► §

Words.

00:30:09 ► §

There’s just stuff.

00:30:11 ► §

And when you start going,

00:30:14 ► §

traveling,

00:30:16 ► §

making this trip,

00:30:19 ► §

you are feeling that you’re going inside-out.

00:30:25 ► §

It’s… Well… feeling that you’re going inside us it’s

00:30:26 ► §

it’s

00:30:28 ► §

the curiosity is fed

00:30:32 ► §

John Crowley

00:30:35 ► §

an American novelist

00:30:37 ► §

who some of you

00:30:38 ► §

if you haven’t read him

00:30:39 ► §

he wrote a wonderful book

00:30:41 ► §

called Little Big

00:30:42 ► §

and in that book he says,

00:30:45 ► §

the further in you go, the bigger it gets.

00:30:50 ► §

And that is literally true.

00:30:52 ► §

And that means that the distinction between building a starship

00:30:56 ► §

and going to Andromeda in it,

00:30:58 ► §

and going into your mind,

00:31:01 ► §

is simply a problem of a lower dimensional way of slicing the information. That’s my

00:31:09 ► §

faith, that the imagination is where we’re going to live. And this is the last thing

00:31:17 ► §

I’ll say, but this is new to me and very interesting. What has been secured recently in quantum physics is that non-locality

00:31:28 ► §

a la Bell’s theorem is real. It isn’t a peculiar iridescence on the theory. It’s real. It’s

00:31:39 ► §

just real and you can do experiments to prove that it’s real.

00:31:47 ► §

Well, now, what’s interesting about that is that it shows that information is non-local.

00:31:52 ► §

Information is non-local.

00:31:55 ► §

But what’s important is to realize

00:32:00 ► §

that matter is simply a form of information.

00:32:07 ► §

Matter is a form of information.

00:32:09 ► §

It’s the kind of information that comes bound to energy.

00:32:14 ► §

And so if information is non-local,

00:32:19 ► §

and if matter is a subset of information,

00:32:25 ► §

then matter too, in some sense, is non-local.

00:32:29 ► §

And what that means is

00:32:31 ► §

you don’t need starships to go to Zemebel Ganubi.

00:32:35 ► §

You can walk there from here

00:32:37 ► §

if you know the way.

00:32:40 ► §

If you know the way.

00:32:42 ► §

And what we’re trying to find out is the way

00:32:45 ► §

because we’re locked inside Newtonian physics

00:32:48 ► §

which says you’re on a drop of solid matter

00:32:53 ► §

whirling around a star.

00:32:55 ► §

The only way to get to another drop of matter

00:32:57 ► §

around another star is to submit yourself

00:33:00 ► §

to the exertions of Newtonian mechanics

00:33:04 ► §

and fly a ship there.

00:33:06 ► §

But if in fact at the quantum mechanical level

00:33:09 ► §

information is non-local,

00:33:12 ► §

then I believe that what we call the imagination

00:33:15 ► §

and especially the psychedelic or the dreaming imagination

00:33:19 ► §

is just the random roving and scanning of the mind at rest

00:33:25 ► §

through the universal data field,

00:33:28 ► §

and that everything we see in these states is ontologically real.

00:33:35 ► §

It’s as real as we are.

00:33:37 ► §

And what you see that you can’t understand,

00:33:40 ► §

you neither remember nor cling to,

00:33:43 ► §

because it is unspeakable and beyond rational apprehension.

00:33:49 ► §

But what is just at the edge of rational apprehendability

00:33:53 ► §

we retain as the visionary experience

00:33:57 ► §

and the compass of our life’s quest.

00:34:01 ► §

And a technology of the imagination

00:34:04 ► §

is what we’re talking about here. A technology that lets

00:34:09 ► §

us go into the imagination. I remember being told literally at my mother’s breast, if wishes were

00:34:17 ► §

horses, beggars would ride. And that’s what we’re looking for here we’re looking for a world where wishes are horses

00:34:27 ► §

and beggars do ride

00:34:30 ► §

and it requires a flip in language

00:34:33 ► §

a flip in perception

00:34:35 ► §

and through technology

00:34:38 ► §

shamanically directed

00:34:40 ► §

and aesthetically critiqued

00:34:46 ► §

and inspired, I think

00:34:47 ► §

we will go to it. I think Plato was

00:34:50 ► §

right. The good and the true

00:34:52 ► §

are the beautiful.

00:34:54 ► §

And that beauty,

00:34:56 ► §

simply the pursuit of beauty

00:34:58 ► §

with no moral

00:34:59 ► §

hand-wringing about it

00:35:02 ► §

is a sufficiently

00:35:03 ► §

stable setting of life’s

00:35:06 ► §

compass that it will carry

00:35:07 ► §

you into paradise

00:35:09 ► §

the good, the true

00:35:11 ► §

and the beautiful are

00:35:13 ► §

facets of the same

00:35:15 ► §

transcendental object and it is

00:35:17 ► §

our destiny to

00:35:19 ► §

mirror it, to anticipate

00:35:21 ► §

it and in our individual

00:35:23 ► §

and collective

00:35:24 ► §

death and transfiguration

00:35:27 ► §

to become

00:35:29 ► §

part of it

00:35:31 ► §

yeah

00:35:33 ► §

are you talking about the intricate universe then?

00:35:36 ► §

by implication

00:35:38 ► §

yeah

00:35:38 ► §

I mean it’s late in the day

00:35:42 ► §

to take all that on

00:35:43 ► §

but it is very interesting that David Bohm who was thought to be a kind of a garrulous crank by straight physicists for years and years, it is now being understood that we’re on the brink of a retroactive revolution in physics.

00:36:03 ► §

retroactive revolution in physics,

00:36:08 ► §

David Bohm has a better theory of the quanta than the Copenhagen school.

00:36:10 ► §

And his theory gives the same level of predictive refinement

00:36:17 ► §

that the Copenhagen model gives.

00:36:20 ► §

What it does that the Copenhagen model doesn’t do is it allows for non-locality.

00:36:30 ► §

What it gets rid of that the Copenhagen school was never able to swallow or spit out,

00:36:37 ► §

and which hatched some of the most turgid scientific prose ever written in the history of science is it gets rid of the damned uncertainty principle

00:36:48 ► §

and all the arm-waving and mystic hoopla that went with that.

00:36:53 ► §

It turns out that was what a child might have supposed it to be,

00:36:59 ► §

a product of messy thinking.

00:37:03 ► §

And if we’re willing to accept non-locality,

00:37:06 ► §

then Bohm’s physics will probably triumph

00:37:09 ► §

over the kind of quantum physics

00:37:11 ► §

that’s been in place for 70 years.

00:37:14 ► §

That’s very exciting

00:37:15 ► §

because he secures the idea of an implicate order

00:37:19 ► §

and a holographic universe

00:37:21 ► §

and a progressive revealing of a plenum.

00:37:26 ► §

All things near and dear to the discussion at hand.

00:37:32 ► §

Yeah?

00:37:33 ► §

There’s one silly thought that’s bothering me about the fact that the,

00:37:41 ► §

when you were describing the three stages of taking the psilocybin,

00:37:45 ► §

particularly from the point of view of the early Sentinette 8,

00:37:51 ► §

that the first two stages seemed to have some obvious survival benefit,

00:38:03 ► §

acuity, etc.

00:38:05 ► §

The third stage seems to have an obvious survival negative.

00:38:09 ► §

If they’re laying flat on their back by the campfire…

00:38:13 ► §

Easy prey.

00:38:14 ► §

Easy prey, and if everybody did it…

00:38:18 ► §

Well, nobody ever said that it was easy.

00:38:21 ► §

that it was easy.

00:38:27 ► §

Well, yes, I mean, obviously not everybody could get that loaded at once

00:38:31 ► §

or the entire social group could become dinner

00:38:35 ► §

for some paleolithic predator.

00:38:40 ► §

I think, though, that it’s at that higher dose level

00:38:44 ► §

that you get this language-like activity and probably that is such an incredible adaptive advantage that a few people being munched as they dreamed around the fire was probably something nature was able to put up with.

00:39:09 ► §

Anyway, predators won’t approach fire.

00:39:13 ► §

I mean, maybe this is why people

00:39:15 ► §

built fires at the mouths of caves

00:39:17 ► §

and then all went inside

00:39:19 ► §

so they could get loaded

00:39:20 ► §

and not have to worry about anyone bothering them.

00:39:24 ► §

But yes, you’re right.

00:39:26 ► §

The third stage is not as obvious in a Darwinian sense.

00:39:31 ► §

To appreciate the evolutionary power of the third stage,

00:39:36 ► §

I think you have to experience it.

00:39:38 ► §

The other two, you can make a logical argument

00:39:41 ► §

in the normal fashion that these arguments are made in evolutionary theory. But to appreciate

00:39:48 ► §

the power of the third stage

00:39:51 ► §

you pretty much have to experience and probably not too many

00:39:56 ► §

primatologists have. But I

00:40:00 ► §

imagine those that have are the younger crowd.

00:40:04 ► §

The nice thing about this particular paradigm

00:40:07 ► §

is it doesn’t have much competition. This is really the central problem for evolutionary

00:40:15 ► §

biology is the origin of consciousness, and yet there isn’t progress. There aren’t even

00:40:23 ► §

factions. Some of you may have seen that series

00:40:27 ► §

that was originally produced for Dutch TV

00:40:30 ► §

that had Sheldrake and Dennett

00:40:33 ► §

and all those people in it.

00:40:35 ► §

And it was pretty clear that biology

00:40:38 ► §

is out to lunch as far as quantum physics is concerned.

00:40:44 ► §

It was recently shown in New York,

00:40:46 ► §

but I think it was done over a year ago.

00:40:49 ► §

It’s a very long 15 hours.

00:40:50 ► §

Yeah.

00:40:51 ► §

Yeah, Dennett’s book,

00:40:53 ► §

I don’t recommend that you believe it

00:40:57 ► §

or even take it seriously,

00:40:58 ► §

but it’s interesting reading

00:41:00 ► §

to see how the radical materialist reductionists think.

00:41:06 ► §

I’m talking about the book Consciousness Explained.

00:41:10 ► §

It should be called Consciousness Explained Away.

00:41:15 ► §

But in fact, nothing is explained.

00:41:18 ► §

How we go from a chemical process, an electrical process,

00:41:23 ► §

a neurophysiological process to a thought

00:41:26 ► §

is a complete mystery that, you know, and there have been many different approaches.

00:41:33 ► §

They now, using CAT scans and this sort of thing present people with choices

00:41:46 ► §

and watch different parts of the brain light up and this sort of thing.

00:41:51 ► §

But this is not thinking in the ordinary sense.

00:41:54 ► §

This is tracking of behavioral intent.

00:41:58 ► §

It’s a far cry from being able to tell whether someone is thinking about Heidegger or Hegel by looking

00:42:05 ► §

at their CAT scan. I don’t even know

00:42:08 ► §

if that’s in the works.

00:42:11 ► §

Maybe you

00:42:12 ► §

could elaborate on a point that I think

00:42:13 ► §

I missed somehow.

00:42:16 ► §

The use of

00:42:17 ► §

hallucinogens will,

00:42:19 ► §

your theory is,

00:42:20 ► §

cause the change in these people that

00:42:23 ► §

caused our civilization to develop. Is

00:42:26 ► §

this because it was a learning experience or because it actually modified their brain

00:42:30 ► §

structure and that was passed on to their descendants?

00:42:33 ► §

It changed their behavior and that caused different selective pressures to work themselves

00:42:41 ► §

out because the behavior of an animal is what exposes it to various forms of risk and that sort of thing.

00:42:49 ► §

And so when the behavior changed, the nature of the collective genome and the way it was reacting to selective pressure changed.

00:43:27 ► §

And so it’s an actual, it’s suppressed genetic programming toward male dominance, but did not modify it. in the direction of more information processing generally and probably more image-dedicated information.

00:43:30 ► §

How did that enhance cerebral capacity?

00:43:34 ► §

This processing?

00:43:37 ► §

Well, they’ve done experiments with rats

00:43:41 ► §

that show that in dull environments,

00:43:48 ► §

they have a much lower brain weight

00:43:51 ► §

than in environments where they are presented with rich stimuli.

00:43:56 ► §

And so it’s clear that what psilocybin represented

00:44:01 ► §

was an incredible enriching of social existence. I mean, it’s

00:44:06 ► §

the difference between

00:44:07 ► §

a group that never

00:44:10 ► §

intoxicates itself, never

00:44:12 ► §

dissolves social boundaries, and one that

00:44:14 ► §

does, and then creates

00:44:16 ► §

poetic flights of fancy

00:44:18 ► §

sexual excesses, so forth and so on.

00:44:20 ► §

The stimulated brain would pass on

00:44:21 ► §

the photo-stimulated brain as an evolutionary

00:44:24 ► §

change.

00:44:25 ► §

Well, if the behaviors

00:44:28 ► §

conferred adaptive advantage

00:44:32 ► §

and this I thing,

00:44:36 ► §

see, but your point,

00:44:38 ► §

or you’re in an area

00:44:40 ► §

of an interesting point,

00:44:42 ► §

which is if we artificially enhance ourselves in some way

00:44:50 ► §

then evolution usually doesn’t continue in that direction and one puzzle is why do we have such as a species diminished eyesight

00:45:05 ► §

is a real problem

00:45:07 ► §

for human beings

00:45:08 ► §

and it may be because for a long time

00:45:11 ► §

psilocybin

00:45:12 ► §

was actually masking

00:45:15 ► §

degradative mutations

00:45:18 ► §

around

00:45:19 ► §

the evolution of eyesight

00:45:21 ► §

so there’s a lot

00:45:23 ► §

that isn’t clear

00:45:25 ► §

in how all this worked,

00:45:27 ► §

but I think it is clear that stimulation

00:45:30 ► §

increases brain size,

00:45:33 ► §

and then as to whether it is passed on or not,

00:45:37 ► §

that depends on whether the behaviors

00:45:40 ► §

that arise out of that

00:45:42 ► §

confer an adaptive advantage.

00:45:47 ► §

Yeah.

00:45:48 ► §

Yesterday you spoke about psilocybin as,

00:45:53 ► §

this is what I heard, as an entity almost,

00:45:58 ► §

the mushroom having a consciousness of its own that spoke to you.

00:46:03 ► §

And I’m wondering why you think that

00:46:06 ► §

rather than it being something that opened you up

00:46:09 ► §

to that level of consciousness in yourself

00:46:12 ► §

that is speaking to yourself.

00:46:16 ► §

Well, I guess because other psychedelics don’t do that.

00:46:21 ► §

Even other psychedelics,

00:46:22 ► §

which I would in a sense call stronger. Well, LSD

00:46:28 ► §

is a good example. I mean, LSD will completely dissolve your boundaries and leave you in

00:46:36 ► §

some pretty unfamiliar territory. But it’s very rare to have someone tell a story about encountering

00:46:48 ► §

an entity or a voice on pure LSD. Ayahuasca, which has all the trappings of an ancient

00:47:00 ► §

aboriginal shamanic hallucinogen. It doesn’t speak in my experience.

00:47:08 ► §

I mean, occasionally under some extreme situation,

00:47:12 ► §

it might say a word or two.

00:47:16 ► §

But what ayahuasca is,

00:47:19 ► §

is it’s like the eye of a camera.

00:47:21 ► §

You just become this roving and scanning, disembodied, seeing thing.

00:47:28 ► §

But psilocybin raves. It raves and raves and raves and raves and raves and raves and raves

00:47:37 ► §

and you’re just sitting there saying, uh-huh, I see, right, got it, yes, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

00:47:45 ► §

I mean, that’s an extraordinary thing.

00:47:49 ► §

Now, of course, a critic, a skeptic could say,

00:47:53 ► §

well, it’s just activating a function in the psyche

00:47:57 ► §

that you perceive as an other and it’s talking to you.

00:48:01 ► §

Well, I have no problem with that.

00:48:03 ► §

I mean, I assume that when I talk to you. Well, I have no problem with that. I mean, I assume that when I talk to you,

00:48:06 ► §

we’re activating a structure in the psyche that I perceive as other and that it’s talking to me. I

00:48:13 ► §

mean, this kind of waving the magic wand of words to get rid of the phenomenon. And then people say,

00:48:22 ► §

well, how do you know you’re not talking to yourself

00:48:25 ► §

well the obvious answer is

00:48:27 ► §

because I know myself

00:48:29 ► §

it’s very hard for me to surprise me

00:48:33 ► §

and yet this thing on psilocybin

00:48:36 ► §

surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise

00:48:39 ► §

just as if I were to have met someone

00:48:42 ► §

in a bar of a foreign hotel

00:48:45 ► §

who turns out to have a whole different history and life

00:48:49 ► §

and a set of philosophies that they just want to pour into me

00:48:53 ► §

in a long evening of raving conversation.

00:48:57 ► §

It’s much more like that.

00:48:59 ► §

So I’ve been through personally a lot of changes

00:49:03 ► §

about the voice inside the mushroom,

00:49:07 ► §

ranging from that the mushroom is simply an extraterrestrial,

00:49:14 ► §

that this is what a certain segment of society has been looking for, hoping for,

00:49:20 ► §

and lo and behold, here it is. And they don’t come in billion-ton beryllium ships handing out technological goodies and curing cancer. It doesn’t work that way, apparently. if science at some point decided that the genetic sequencing of the mushroom

00:49:47 ► §

showed it to be so substantially different from any other life form on the planet

00:49:52 ► §

that it must have emerged in another ecosystem.

00:49:56 ► §

Even if it is an extraterrestrial, it’s probably been here older, longer than we have,

00:50:04 ► §

which raises the question, you know, who is the intruder?

00:50:10 ► §

If it came from Zenebel Ganubi a hundred million years ago,

00:50:14 ► §

it might still consider itself the primary intelligent entity on the planet.

00:50:22 ► §

The trick with extraterrestrial intelligence as I under, or the limitation that plagues all the

00:50:30 ► §

enthusiasts of flying saucers and

00:50:32 ► §

secret bases and all that stuff is that

00:50:37 ► §

extraterrestrials are a lot weirder

00:50:39 ► §

than we think. They are not the cheerful, bipedal, cat-eyed, syringe-wielding aliens of Hollywood.

00:50:51 ► §

The likelihood of that is as likely as an Italian restaurant in the Andromeda Galaxy.

00:51:00 ► §

To even suppose extraterrestrials are like that is to betray an incredible parochialism of mind.

00:51:09 ► §

Now, the key with extraterrestrials

00:51:11 ► §

is to know one when it’s in front of you.

00:51:14 ► §

And a mushroom, if you think about it,

00:51:18 ► §

is a very interesting potential candidate

00:51:22 ► §

because, well, for a number of reasons. First of all, mushrooms

00:51:28 ► §

are what are called all fungi or what are called primary decomposers. That means they

00:51:34 ► §

live only on dead matter. It’s the only carmalist position in the food chain compared to the vegetarianism of Buddhists

00:51:46 ► §

it’s a much more

00:51:48 ► §

morally defensible position

00:51:50 ► §

I mean vegetarianism

00:51:51 ► §

to those of us who know and love

00:51:54 ► §

intelligent plants

00:51:55 ► §

looks just like a cannibalistic

00:51:58 ► §

orgy of some sort

00:52:00 ► §

you get no points for

00:52:02 ► §

vegetarianism

00:52:03 ► §

but there is this one position in the food chain

00:52:09 ► §

that is karma free

00:52:10 ► §

and the fungi occupy it

00:52:13 ► §

the other thing is

00:52:15 ► §

the way the mushroom reproduces itself

00:52:18 ► §

is through spores

00:52:19 ► §

and these spores are in the 5 angstrom range

00:52:25 ► §

they’re small

00:52:26 ► §

and a single Strophariacudensis mushroom

00:52:31 ► §

a single mushroom

00:52:33 ► §

in the course of its life

00:52:36 ► §

will shed for about 6 weeks

00:52:40 ► §

3 million spores a minute

00:52:42 ► §

one mushroom well the number of spores a minute. One mushroom.

00:52:46 ► §

Well, the number of spores being released then

00:52:50 ► §

into the terrestrial environment

00:52:52 ► §

is in the, you know, megazillions.

00:52:57 ► §

And some of these spores

00:53:00 ► §

actually are so small

00:53:03 ► §

that they percolate out

00:53:05 ► §

to the outer reaches of the atmosphere

00:53:07 ► §

where Brownian motion

00:53:09 ► §

and incoming cosmic radiation and so forth

00:53:13 ► §

they actually sort of bubble off

00:53:16 ► §

into space

00:53:18 ► §

over very long periods of time

00:53:21 ► §

and you know it’s a cliche

00:53:23 ► §

that we all have within us

00:53:27 ► §

material that was once

00:53:29 ► §

in the heart of stars.

00:53:32 ► §

You hear this all the time,

00:53:34 ► §

that in the course of cosmic cycling

00:53:36 ► §

the atoms of your body

00:53:37 ► §

once burned in the cores

00:53:39 ► §

of distant stars.

00:53:41 ► §

Well, if that’s true,

00:53:42 ► §

then some small number

00:53:44 ► §

of the atoms in your body didn’t burn in the cores

00:53:48 ► §

of distant stars, but were part of planets in orbit around those stars. And in other words, the

00:53:54 ► §

universe is a churning and dynamic place. Over a million years, 10 million years, it’s no small matter for a small particulate structure to percolate

00:54:09 ► §

throughout a structure the size of the galaxy. Well, the galaxy has over 6 billion stars

00:54:16 ► §

in it. And so I think that one of the easiest predictions you can make that is like paradigm shattering and so forth

00:54:27 ► §

and so on, and yet on the face of it trivial, is the prediction that science will eventually reach

00:54:34 ► §

the conclusion that space is no barrier to life. In some quarters, this conclusion has already been reached that viruses spores

00:54:45 ► §

plasmoids

00:54:47 ► §

episomes

00:54:50 ► §

these small

00:54:51 ► §

pieces of genetic material

00:54:53 ► §

can in fact survive

00:54:55 ► §

in outer space and perhaps

00:54:58 ► §

you know there’s even a school of thought

00:55:00 ► §

that holds that they don’t survive in outer

00:55:02 ► §

space it’s the best place

00:55:04 ► §

for them.

00:55:10 ► §

That the warm pond theory of the origin of life is now under some attack.

00:55:16 ► §

And the thought is that perhaps the earliest biological molecules arose in comets,

00:55:27 ► §

in icy smush of methane and water in orbit around distant stars. Also, you know, further complicating the view of life and its origins, in the past ten years these very

00:55:34 ► §

deep hot springs on the floor of the Pacific Ocean have been discovered that are hydrogen sulfide vents

00:55:45 ► §

that are under thousands of feet of water.

00:55:50 ► §

No light ever reaches these places

00:55:53 ► §

and they are islands of biology at the bottom of the sea,

00:56:00 ► §

a special form of biology that can use hydrogen sulfide energy cycles in place of

00:56:08 ► §

photosynthesis. Well, this

00:56:11 ► §

is pretty alien chemistry. Those things

00:56:15 ► §

have never seen the light of the sun. The sun could go out

00:56:20 ► §

and those colonies of life would

00:56:23 ► §

persist for as long as these hydrogen sulfide vents

00:56:27 ► §

continue to flow at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

00:56:32 ► §

Well, we know that the Jovian moon Europa

00:56:35 ► §

is apparently nearly all water.

00:56:40 ► §

It’s entirely possible that there’s hydrogen sulfide venting

00:56:43 ► §

at the bottom of the Europan Ocean.

00:56:46 ► §

And so there could be life there.

00:56:53 ► §

I’m still discussing the possibility that the mushroom is an extraterrestrial.

00:56:59 ► §

We have been decoding DNA since 1950.

00:57:25 ► §

We have been decoding DNA since 1950, and it seems reasonable to suggest that any organism anywhere in the cosmos that called itself intelligent would proceed to intellectually elucidate its chemical basis. And once you understand your chemical foundation,

00:57:28 ► §

you are within reach of altering your chemical,

00:57:33 ► §

your physical structure.

00:57:34 ► §

In other words, writing your own script.

00:57:37 ► §

We don’t have to be 145-pound monkeys.

00:57:41 ► §

We could be anything we wanted

00:57:44 ► §

if we could write the script of DNA well when you look at the

00:57:48 ► §

mushroom carmalus in the food chain able to percolate through the galaxy without technology

00:57:57 ► §

filled with bizarre alien information and utterly unobtrusive and humble in the way that it fits itself into the ecology.

00:58:08 ► §

I mean, you want a house in Malibu, it wants a cow flop in a pasture. I’d call that humble.

00:58:17 ► §

The fact that it has all these qualities and the fact that it’s frantic to have a conversation suggests that it might just be an extraterrestrial.

00:58:29 ► §

And I’ve always felt, you know,

00:58:31 ► §

we have a kind of funny relationship

00:58:32 ► §

to this idea of extraterrestrial

00:58:35 ► §

because we want it to be on the cover of time.

00:58:41 ► §

In other words, we want it to come down

00:58:43 ► §

through the sanctioned machinery of truth-making

00:58:47 ► §

of our society. We want Carl Sagan to interrupt Jeopardy to announce that it’s in fact true,

00:58:58 ► §

you know, and then we would, or we want it to land in United Nations Plaza or something like that.

00:59:05 ► §

The fact is, if it were to land in United Nations Plaza today, it would be no weirder than what has been going on for a long, long time.

00:59:17 ► §

I mean, it’s only that we don’t take our own minds seriously that we can hold off the notion of the extraterrestrial

00:59:26 ► §

apparently it doesn’t

00:59:28 ► §

deal government to

00:59:30 ► §

government, it doesn’t

00:59:32 ► §

come for a worldwide

00:59:33 ► §

television hookup

00:59:35 ► §

it’s in the confines of your

00:59:38 ► §

bedroom after 3am

00:59:40 ► §

on 5 grams of

00:59:42 ► §

psilocybin with the phones

00:59:43 ► §

unplugged.

00:59:45 ► §

And then, you know, not coming from Alpha in Sagittarius,

00:59:52 ► §

but just coming from out of the depths of your own imagination,

00:59:56 ► §

it manifests, and it’s convincing.

01:00:00 ► §

I cannot imagine a more convincing demonstration of alienness. Nothing could be more alien than these tryptamine places and entities.

01:00:13 ► §

So this is a great frontier for exploration.

01:00:18 ► §

And then if I don’t take psilocybin for months,

01:00:21 ► §

take psilocybin for months

01:00:22 ► §

sort of the

01:00:24 ► §

heat of the alien

01:00:28 ► §

of it sort of flows

01:00:30 ► §

away and I begin

01:00:32 ► §

to think

01:00:32 ► §

well I have a series of downloads

01:00:36 ► §

as I pull away from

01:00:37 ► §

the utterly alien

01:00:39 ► §

explanation and the first one is

01:00:41 ► §

Gaian mind

01:00:43 ► §

that it is an entity, but it’s not alien, it’s the planet, and it cares for me and it cares for you and it cares for the oceans and the forests and so forth and so on. I finally am able to struggle up on the beach of Yung Island.

01:01:08 ► §

And there I convince myself,

01:01:13 ► §

it must just be that the human mind is haunted by the archetypes of the collective unconscious,

01:01:16 ► §

that Amin Ra slides into Vishnu,

01:01:21 ► §

who turns into Tikatslepokal

01:01:25 ► §

but I don’t really think

01:01:29 ► §

that that is a sufficiently deep explanation

01:01:34 ► §

one of the things when I first started

01:01:36 ► §

growing mushrooms and talking about them

01:01:39 ► §

was I thought that we would be able to settle

01:01:42 ► §

this extraterrestrial thing

01:01:44 ► §

because I too have a measure of naivete.

01:01:49 ► §

And I thought that psychologists,

01:01:52 ► §

that somewhere there were people smarter than I was,

01:01:55 ► §

maybe like in information theory or game theory,

01:01:59 ► §

who would say, oh, well, if you’re talking to someone

01:02:03 ► §

and you want to know whether they’re you or not,

01:02:06 ► §

there’s a series of trick questions that you can ask

01:02:10 ► §

that will flush the issue into the light

01:02:15 ► §

and they won’t be able to hide.

01:02:17 ► §

I’ve never been able to do that.

01:02:20 ► §

I’ve never been able to construct a conversation so clever

01:02:25 ► §

that I trapped it.

01:02:27 ► §

I said, that’s it. You are a part

01:02:30 ► §

of me. You are

01:02:31 ► §

only pretending to be an

01:02:33 ► §

extraterrestrial.

01:02:36 ► §

But I, again,

01:02:37 ► §

if any of you are chess players or

01:02:39 ► §

logicians, this is something to

01:02:42 ► §

consider. There’s a great

01:02:43 ► §

science fiction story, 20, 30 years old,

01:02:47 ► §

I think it’s called First Contact,

01:02:49 ► §

which is all about the psychology of contact.

01:02:53 ► §

Because when two intelligent species come together on equal terms,

01:03:00 ► §

it’s an incredible enterprise filled with opportunity and risk, the biggest risk there is, the risk of species extinction.

01:03:13 ► §

Because when you’re out there among the stars and you encounter, and that was the situation, this crew from Earth, they encountered this ship.

01:03:24 ► §

And they realized, you know, this is a great cultural frontier,

01:03:27 ► §

a great opportunity for mankind,

01:03:30 ► §

but we don’t know who’s in this ship.

01:03:33 ► §

We don’t know their psychology, their philosophy, anything about them.

01:03:36 ► §

So we must not give anything away in case they’re not friendly.

01:03:43 ► §

We must especially not give away our point of origin

01:03:48 ► §

because then they could go there. And then this very interesting poker game is played

01:03:55 ► §

between these two forms of intelligent life, each wanting something from the other each with very important secrets

01:04:05 ► §

that it must keep

01:04:07 ► §

and that’s sort of

01:04:09 ► §

the situation

01:04:11 ► §

that you get into with these

01:04:13 ► §

entities which you

01:04:15 ► §

hear on psilocybin

01:04:17 ► §

and which you see on DMT

01:04:19 ► §

you actually at last

01:04:22 ► §

what has been a voice

01:04:24 ► §

becomes a three dimensional

01:04:26 ► §

entity

01:04:28 ► §

I think of them as

01:04:30 ► §

meme traders

01:04:31 ► §

they trade ideas

01:04:35 ► §

they want

01:04:36 ► §

ideas and they have ideas

01:04:39 ► §

to trade

01:04:40 ► §

think of them sort of as like primitive

01:04:42 ► §

art collectors

01:04:44 ► §

they’ve come here for

01:04:46 ► §

because they love our primitivism

01:04:49 ► §

and our naivete and the wonderful childishness

01:04:53 ► §

of our physics and our

01:04:55 ► §

biology and so they want ideas

01:04:59 ► §

and they will leave ideas

01:05:02 ► §

but again their level of intelligence

01:05:05 ► §

is very hard to gauge

01:05:09 ► §

because, well, for many reasons.

01:05:14 ► §

I’m from Colorado,

01:05:15 ► §

and above 9,000 feet in the Colorado mountains,

01:05:20 ► §

there’s a kind of animal called a pack rat.

01:05:24 ► §

there’s a kind of animal called a pack rat.

01:05:31 ► §

And in the old gold towns of the California gold rush that were built at high altitude,

01:05:33 ► §

when these towns were abandoned,

01:05:35 ► §

the pack rats moved in.

01:05:38 ► §

And the interesting thing about pack rats

01:05:40 ► §

is that they steal.

01:05:42 ► §

They steal things, but they don’t really steal

01:05:46 ► §

because they always leave something.

01:05:50 ► §

They’re trader rats.

01:05:52 ► §

And so there are many stories

01:05:54 ► §

of people living in these high-altitude towns,

01:05:57 ► §

like, for instance,

01:05:58 ► §

trading 7-up bottle caps

01:06:02 ► §

for gold nuggets,

01:06:08 ► §

which the pack rat at some time stole from someone and took to its nest

01:06:11 ► §

and people trading

01:06:12 ► §

dimes for diamond rings

01:06:16 ► §

and this sort of thing

01:06:17 ► §

so it’s a relationship like that

01:06:20 ► §

as I told you yesterday

01:06:23 ► §

when you ask the mushroom to reveal its true essence,

01:06:29 ► §

you can’t stand it. You can’t look upon it. It understands that it must come to you through

01:06:37 ► §

a series of strong filters. And of course, you don’t relate to it that way you’re just the little monkey pleading for the

01:06:46 ► §

vision but it somehow knows that you can only stand a certain level of weirdness and then fear

01:06:53 ► §

will lock in um and thanks god for it because you know otherwise you don’t want to be like one of

01:07:02 ► §

these characters in an hp.P. Lovecraft story

01:07:05 ► §

who just sits in a locked ward somewhere

01:07:09 ► §

going bibble, bibble, bibble

01:07:11 ► §

because you looked over the edge

01:07:13 ► §

and the thing was not veiled

01:07:15 ► §

and you saw too much

01:07:18 ► §

it’s a kind of romantic notion

01:07:21 ► §

but I think it can happen

01:07:22 ► §

when you were talking earlier about a romantic notion, but I think it can happen. Yeah.

01:07:28 ► §

When you were talking earlier about how psilocybin speaks to you and ayahuasca

01:07:31 ► §

didn’t in that example, I had a conversation last night

01:07:34 ► §

with somebody who was talking about

01:07:37 ► §

ayahuasca and that there had definitely been a verbal

01:07:40 ► §

communication, very clear and extended.

01:07:43 ► §

And I’m wondering if, because I assume that you’ve heard a lot of stories,

01:07:49 ► §

do you think that people have slight differences in their brain chemistry

01:07:53 ► §

that makes them react to different drugs differently?

01:07:56 ► §

And specifically, do you think there’s any gender difference

01:07:59 ► §

in the way people react to particular drugs?

01:08:03 ► §

Well, yeah. I mean, yes and yes and yes.

01:08:07 ► §

There is nothing more variable in human beings

01:08:12 ► §

than our reactions to drugs.

01:08:15 ► §

Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shulgin at Cal.

01:08:22 ► §

It was actually in forensics, believe it or not, and the name of the

01:08:26 ► §

course was

01:08:26 ► §

The Biochemical Basis of Individuality.

01:08:31 ► §

Part of it was all about getting

01:08:34 ► §

sperm samples from

01:08:36 ► §

rape victims and this sort of thing

01:08:38 ► §

because the biochemical

01:08:40 ► §

basis of individuality is a way

01:08:42 ► §

of tracing people who commit crimes.

01:08:46 ► §

But in the course of studying this, a lot of information has been built up. At one point in the class,

01:08:54 ► §

we passed around a little vial that had some kind of chemical in it. And in a class of 600 people,

01:09:09 ► §

maybe five or six people reacted very, very dramatically to this stuff

01:09:14 ► §

and said it was the most horrible thing they’d ever smelled.

01:09:17 ► §

Everybody else smelled nothing.

01:09:20 ► §

This is a gene,

01:09:23 ► §

a marker gene for this sensitivity to this thing.

01:09:27 ► §

Children metabolize drugs backward.

01:09:33 ► §

If you have a hyperactive child, in the past they were given amphetamine.

01:09:39 ► §

Why? To slow them down.

01:09:42 ► §

Children metabolize drugs backward.

01:09:41 ► §

to slow them down.

01:09:44 ► §

Children metabolize drugs backward.

01:09:50 ► §

Exactly why this happens isn’t well known.

01:09:56 ► §

So, yes, nothing is more shifting than the chemical regime of your body.

01:10:01 ► §

You know, what you ate for breakfast,

01:10:04 ► §

when you had sex last

01:10:06 ► §

prescription drugs that you might be taking

01:10:09 ► §

substances in the environment

01:10:15 ► §

that have triggered your immune system

01:10:17 ► §

at a subconscious level

01:10:19 ► §

you don’t even know that new antibodies

01:10:21 ► §

are being made in response to this stimulus in the environment.

01:10:26 ► §

So, and then as far as gender difference, surely this must be so, because gender difference

01:10:36 ► §

is largely regulated by hormones, and hormones are interestingly close in chemical structure to neurotransmitters

01:10:46 ► §

and in some cases even doing double duty.

01:10:49 ► §

So yes, it’s not only that we are different from each other

01:10:53 ► §

and that men and women are different from each other,

01:10:56 ► §

it’s that you are different from who you were a week ago

01:10:59 ► §

and who you will be in a week.

01:11:01 ► §

Part of the great fun of taking psychedelics is that there’s no such thing

01:11:07 ► §

as a certain good trip. You never know. You never ever know really what you’re going to

01:11:19 ► §

get. I mean, you can become experienced, but that first throw of the dice is highly uncertain.

01:11:29 ► §

So what people have to do who are interested in these things is, I think that there needs to be a preliminary period of exploration with guides and in an informed environment. In other words, there are books

01:11:48 ► §

and journals and papers that you should read. And this is how I did it. I mean, I started

01:11:55 ► §

out basically taking everything but paying attention. And certain things I found I just didn’t like. They made me uncomfortable. They

01:12:08 ► §

seemed, I just had an aversion to them. And they had an aversion to me. I’m thinking specifically,

01:12:17 ► §

and this is, I think most people share my opinion in this matter, but not all. And that is that these tropanes, these solanaceous drugs,

01:12:28 ► §

you know, they will mess with you, but good. Hallucinations, delusions, illusions, visions,

01:12:39 ► §

on and on and on. And yet, we don’t even, in drug freaked out society of ours we don’t even bother to make

01:12:49 ► §

them illegal because it’s so generally felt that this is more like being poisoned than like

01:12:58 ► §

tripping and yet whole civilizations have built themselves around this kind of experience.

01:13:07 ► §

In the Southern California, the Southern California Indians,

01:13:12 ► §

the Catalina and Luiseno Indians,

01:13:15 ► §

had this religion called the Tolas religion

01:13:18 ► §

that was based around Jimson weed, which is a source of this stuff.

01:13:28 ► §

around gypsum weed, which is a source of this stuff. And I can tell you interesting drug stories about people taking these things, but it doesn’t cause me to want to take them.

01:13:34 ► §

I can tell you interesting stories about me taking them that don’t make me want to take them some people love LSD I I’m not

01:13:45 ► §

really that fond of it I found it hard

01:13:49 ► §

edged and psychoanalytical and not in

01:13:53 ► §

often not integrative I would often come

01:13:56 ► §

down from acid trips with the only thing

01:14:00 ► §

I had learned was that I wasn’t sure I

01:14:02 ► §

ever wanted to do that again, you know, but I have

01:14:07 ► §

friends who swear by it. So you have to explore these things and find what works. And I don’t

01:14:16 ► §

think it’s the people who say, you know, I’ve taken everything, I’ve taken everything with

01:14:22 ► §

everything else and so forth and so on. That isn’t the essence of sophistication. The essence of sophistication is high doses on the things which work for you.

01:14:47 ► §

most of these drugs at high and low doses and no matter how weird you think your last trip was there’s something out there that will shrink it to

01:14:52 ► §

insignificance because it just seems to get weirder and weirder and weirder and

01:14:58 ► §

weirder and weirder there’s no limit to it the The further in you go, the bigger it gets. I have a friend who says of psilocybin,

01:15:07 ► §

every time I take it, I try to stand more.

01:15:12 ► §

I try to stand more.

01:15:14 ► §

Well, that’s an attitude that says

01:15:16 ► §

that it’s never really comfortable

01:15:17 ► §

because as soon as it feels comfortable,

01:15:20 ► §

he asks it to lift one more veil

01:15:23 ► §

and then he’s immediately uncomfortable with it

01:15:26 ► §

because new dimensions

01:15:28 ► §

come into it

01:15:32 ► §

you said earlier that

01:15:36 ► §

with DMT you can see the entities

01:15:39 ► §

that you hear with psilocybin

01:15:40 ► §

and I’m wondering if there’s enough of a chemical similarity

01:15:43 ► §

to postulate that they come from the same

01:15:45 ► §

extraterrestrial origin.

01:15:48 ► §

How does that fit in together?

01:15:50 ► §

Well, it sort of fits and it sort of doesn’t.

01:15:54 ► §

To my mind, the really interesting

01:15:57 ► §

family of chemicals, I mean,

01:16:00 ► §

there are all kinds of tranks and speed

01:16:03 ► §

and tropanes

01:16:05 ► §

and delirians

01:16:06 ► §

and what do they call them

01:16:08 ► §

the

01:16:08 ► §

the things like ketamine

01:16:12 ► §

the

01:16:13 ► §

dissociative anesthetics

01:16:16 ► §

thank you

01:16:17 ► §

all of these things

01:16:18 ► §

what I’m interested in

01:16:20 ► §

are the tryptamines

01:16:22 ► §

especially and the indoles the indoles are the tryptamines especially and the indoles. The indoles are the larger class,

01:16:28 ► §

but it’s still out of the millions of compounds that drive the engine of nature. The indoles

01:16:35 ► §

are LSD, the beta-carbolines, harmin, harmaline, tetrahydroharmin, and their relatives, ibogaine, which we haven’t talked about, psilocybin and DMT.

01:16:49 ► §

Now, the only major hallucinogen that is not an indole is mescaline. And mescaline has

01:16:57 ► §

enthusiastic adherence. I’m not fond of it because as a drug the profile is not good a a full dose of mescaline for 145 pound

01:17:09 ► §

human being is 700 milligrams that’s too much that’s too much it’s a crude drug to put it

01:17:19 ► §

crudely because one way of thinking about the toxicity of drugs

01:17:25 ► §

is the less you have to take, the better it is.

01:17:29 ► §

That’s why LSD, by that measure, is the winner going away.

01:17:37 ► §

If it takes 700 milligrams of mescaline to get one person off,

01:17:43 ► §

of mescaline to get one person off,

01:17:46 ► §

700 milligrams of LSD will get off 1,400 people.

01:17:52 ► §

So that’s the differential between those two.

01:17:58 ► §

Psilocybin is in the middle range there.

01:18:00 ► §

It takes 10 times as much psilocybin or 100 times as much psilocybin as LSD, but

01:18:09 ► §

one-tenth as much psilocybin as it does mescaline. When I first started experiencing DMT and

01:18:19 ► §

psilocybin, I, like you, assumed that they must be, it’s coming from a similar place.

01:18:26 ► §

It’s coming from a similar place, but it’s not coming from exactly the same place.

01:18:35 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:18:42 ► §

I hope that you listened closely to Terrence when he said that regarding a psychedelic

01:18:47 ► §

experience that you never know what’s going to happen. I know that the old timers here understand

01:18:53 ► §

that quite well, but if you are new to this community, it will probably do you well to pay

01:18:58 ► §

attention to that statement. The only way to become an elder around here is to always, as in always,

01:19:04 ► §

treat these substances with great respect.

01:19:08 ► §

Just be careful out there, okay?

01:19:10 ► §

Also, you remember when Terrence was asked the question about there possibly being voices to be heard while under the influence of ayahuasca as well as mushrooms?

01:19:20 ► §

Well, I remember it because I planned on mentioning that myself.

01:19:23 ► §

I, for one, actually do hear a voice, loud and clear, while having an ayahuasca experience.

01:19:29 ► §

So, I was pleased that he was asked the question, but I’m going to have to go back and re-listen

01:19:34 ► §

because I don’t remember him actually answering that question.

01:19:37 ► §

Maybe he did, I just might have been drifting around a little bit.

01:19:41 ► §

Actually, I have to admit that my mind did wander a little while I was listening to this

01:19:45 ► §

talk with you just now. I guess that I planted the seed of an idea in my head when I was talking

01:19:51 ► §

about carrying a copy of my novel with you if you were traveling this summer. What I was thinking

01:19:56 ► §

about is how drastically something like a little trip at the end of the summer can change one’s

01:20:01 ► §

life. At least if you let it, because, well, that’s what happened to me.

01:20:06 ► §

The town I was living in during my high school years was basically a farm community.

01:20:10 ► §

There were less than 10,000 people living there, and during the winter it was really dull.

01:20:16 ► §

But due to the fact that it was, at the time, the Midwest center for the Del Monte Canning Company

01:20:21 ► §

and for Continental Can, well, both of their factories there meant that the summer work for teens

01:20:27 ► §

or anyone in their early 20s was as much as you wanted during the summer.

01:20:32 ► §

In fact, almost everybody that I knew worked in one of those factories

01:20:35 ► §

or else out on the farms that were sending peas, corn, and asparagus into our town for canning.

01:20:41 ► §

Now, most of us worked 10-hour days, 7 days a week,

01:20:45 ► §

and so our work and play became intermingled.

01:20:48 ► §

Getting off at midnight was the best

01:20:49 ► §

because we could go out and drink

01:20:51 ► §

without much worry about being caught

01:20:52 ► §

because we were underage, but the cops were in bed.

01:20:57 ► §

But one night, late in the summer of 1961,

01:21:00 ► §

a friend of mine suggested that we take his car

01:21:03 ► §

and drive to Mexico at the end of the summer.

01:21:05 ► §

So, long story short, at the end of August, we got into his 1952 Studebaker

01:21:12 ► §

with its four recap snow tires and headed first to New Orleans,

01:21:17 ► §

where we were quite shocked when we saw the segregated restrooms,

01:21:21 ► §

segregated drinking fountains, and segregated streetcars.

01:21:25 ► §

You know, for a couple of small-town Midwestern boys, it was a real eye-opener.

01:21:30 ► §

From there, we went on to Houston, where we visited with a friend of mine

01:21:34 ► §

who was the head sailing instructor at Houston Yacht Club.

01:21:37 ► §

And there I met his assistant, who the following summer hired me as an assistant.

01:21:42 ► §

And for the next three summers, I had the greatest job a college

01:21:45 ► §

student could have. Not only did I get to spend my summer sailing, I was getting paid even more

01:21:50 ► §

than my father was earning at the time. Anyway, back to our little summer trip. From Houston,

01:21:56 ► §

we made it all the way to Mexico City and then back to the Chicago area. We went through almost

01:22:01 ► §

four cases of engine oil, but the tires, well, they made it almost all the way back.

01:22:06 ► §

Our single blowout took place about 50 miles from home.

01:22:10 ► §

Now, why am I wasting your time with this story, you ask?

01:22:13 ► §

Well, I remember at the time my friend and I took off that most of our friends and family were still trying to talk us out of it

01:22:19 ► §

because, oh, because of all the things that could go wrong, I guess.

01:22:23 ► §

However, nothing went wrong.

01:22:25 ► §

It was just the opposite, and as a result of my visit in Houston and the summer job that it led to,

01:22:31 ► §

I wound up sailing in a wooden square-rigged sailing ship across the Pacific

01:22:35 ► §

and then on to working as a stuntman in the movie that the ship was being used in.

01:22:40 ► §

And that trip, and the summer on the movie set on the beach in Hawaii,

01:22:44 ► §

was perhaps the most fun I ever had in a single stretch.

01:22:48 ► §

However, all good things must come to an end, they say,

01:22:51 ► §

and the draft was chasing me,

01:22:53 ► §

so I had to leave my great adventure long before I really wanted to,

01:22:57 ► §

and, well, 24 months later,

01:22:59 ► §

I found myself sitting in a gun turret on a destroyer off the coast of Vietnam

01:23:03 ► §

and launching five-inch shells at people with whom I had no quarrel.

01:23:08 ► §

Now, if you’re wondering why so many vets, not just Vietnam vets, but essentially anyone who was in combat, can sometimes be a little screwed up, well, that’s why.

01:23:17 ► §

Nothing can quite prepare one for a swift change from paradise to war.

01:23:22 ► §

But that’s not my point. My point is that, as you’ve heard Terrence

01:23:26 ► §

McKenna say on several occasions, travel is the next best thing to a psychedelic drug when it

01:23:32 ► §

comes to dissolving barriers. Now, what isn’t mentioned, but is equally important, is that

01:23:38 ► §

once those barriers are gone, you’re open to all kinds of new experiences coming your way.

01:23:43 ► §

That little trip that we whipped up during a late-night conversation

01:23:46 ► §

turned out to be a life-changing experience for me,

01:23:50 ► §

when I think of all that it led to, at least.

01:23:52 ► §

Had we not stopped in Houston on our way to Mexico,

01:23:54 ► §

I most likely wouldn’t have been offered the job the following summer.

01:23:58 ► §

And that job led not just to the chance to sail in a large wooden ship,

01:24:02 ► §

but it also led me to law school at the University

01:24:05 ► §

of Houston, where I met the mother of my children. That little side trip actually changed my life.

01:24:11 ► §

Now, my friend, who had the Studebaker that we drove, didn’t seem to get as much out of it.

01:24:16 ► §

In June of 2010, I went back to our little town for our 50th high school reunion. My friend had

01:24:22 ► §

been our senior class president, and I was the vice

01:24:25 ► §

president, so I was really looking forward to seeing him, because he’d never actually left that

01:24:29 ► §

little town and still lived in a farm on the edge of town. Over half of our class showed up for that

01:24:34 ► §

reunion, but he didn’t make it. He had to get up early to feed his cows, I was told. The moral of

01:24:41 ► §

the story, I guess, is that a summer trip can make a lasting impact on your life.

01:24:45 ► §

So even if you have to stretch a bit, and even if you have to put up with people telling you to work all summer and save every penny,

01:24:53 ► §

well, my advice is to ignore them.

01:24:55 ► §

Instead, head to wherever your dreams take you.

01:24:58 ► §

It can change your life if you let it.

01:25:00 ► §

You have to let it, though.

01:25:02 ► §

And if you’re carrying a copy of the Genesis Generation

01:25:05 ► §

with you, who knows? You may find some of the others out there on the trail with you.

01:25:11 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there, my friends..