Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“These psychedelics, which in the Sixties and Fifties were simply called consciousness expanding drugs, a good old phenomenological description, if there is an iota of possibility that they expand consciousness then we must put out attention on this area. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is making our situation so very uncomfortable.”
“Where spiritual advancement is discussed, I want psychedelics to be discussed. Where transformative social visions are put forth, I want psychedelics to be part of the agenda.”
“The historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out so that the soul becomes visible, and the body becomes a process that you can command in the imagination.”
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449 - McKenna’s Speculations About 2012
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451 - Toad Venom & Other Things
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we are going to, at long last,
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listen to the final segment of a June 1994 workshop that Terrence McKenna led. And while you and I have heard Terrence
00:00:36 ►
wax eloquent about psychedelic experiences on many occasions,
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I think that you’re nonetheless really going to enjoy this talk.
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For example, he points out the obvious fact that a mushroom trip is simply a relationship between a human and a plant,
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which of course is a different order of being.
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But then he goes on to postulate that this relationship actually empowers or reveals yet another order of being human.
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or reveals yet another order of being human.
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It’s those little flights of fancy that cause me to pause my MP3 player from time to time and think about what he says.
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And I think you’ll find a number of such points in this interesting talk.
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So let’s get started.
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As old bush pilots say, we’re turning final here.
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The thing last night, as I said at the beginning
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but it may have been lost in the shuffle
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is a kind of indulgence
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to me because
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it’s a completely original idea
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and like all original ideas
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it has a strong
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runs a strong risk of being
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just simply wrong
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but because what it seeks
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to do is so grandiose and what it seeks to do is so
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grandiose and because it seems
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to do it to some
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degree and then that of course falls
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upon the eye of the
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beholder to assess
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it seems worth
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communicating
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as an example
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if you don’t
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choose to believe it or take it to your heart then as an example, if you don’t choose to believe it or take it to your heart,
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then as an example, what it can function for you as
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is a picture of the sorts of ideas that are out there,
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the kinds of insights that we can draw out.
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And people, always in these things, we discuss what could be done, insights that we can draw out and people
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always in these things we discuss
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what could be done
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what should be done
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what can we do other than what we’re doing
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to make that kind of a world
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come to be
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or come closer
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to be
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and my notion is simply
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art to be. And my notion is simply art. As I think I told you at some point, the idea is not to confront bad ideas, but to come up with good ideas.
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Otherwise, your enemies define the game, and you are the loyal opposition.
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And, you know, how many years have we been the loyal opposition,
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and hasn’t it been an unsatisfying experience?
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So, I think every single one of us has immense inner resources,
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and the psychedelics confirm that I and by inner resources I mean of intelligence and information and beauty
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and I think we would be happier people and this would be a better world if we spent more time bringing that out
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rather than opposing somebody else’s vision of what is happening.
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The I Ching says at one point,
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if evil is directly confronted and named,
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it perfects weapons to defend itself
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it says in any direct confrontation with evil
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you show it, you reflect too much of it
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back upon itself and it learns to defend itself
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and the strategy then is one of stealth, I think
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and beginning at least with then is one of stealth I think and you know beginning
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at least with
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oh I don’t know
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it’s just an art historical game
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but let’s say the pre-Raphaelites
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there have been these waves
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of aesthetic
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and social descent
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I mentioned
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the pataphysics movement
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in France in the 1890s.
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Dada and surrealism and the abstract expressionists and the beats and the hippies and the punks. I mean, these different tones, different adumbrations,
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but always the same message,
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which is that satisfaction and completion
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can’t be found within the official culture.
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And, you know, I came up into that.
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I was born and raised in an incredibly conventional situation by very loving parents in a pleasant environment.
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And I just couldn’t wait to break their hearts and get away to sin and the big cities and all of that.
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So the important message to take out of all of this,
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I think for people in your position
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who may or may not wish to grapple
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with abstract mathematical models of time
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or trade with naked aboriginals in steaming jungles,
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what can you take into your own life?
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It seems to me what the whole thing,
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the tension between these bohemian counter cultural critiques and
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bourgeois society is
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about is
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what I call
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the primacy of direct
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experience
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you know if you are
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inside a
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Christian world or a
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capitalist world
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or a Jewish world or a capitalist world or a Jewish world or a Republican world or a Democratic world.
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These are worlds of ideas. These are ideas. And we can live by ideas, but we can’t live by ideas ideas alone, it creates megalomania, it creates unbalance, it creates a grotesque parody of
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what life is supposed to be about. And what life, I think, is supposed to be about is
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the reclamation of the primacy of direct experience. And that means sex,
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and psychedelics,
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and dancing,
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and conversation,
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and good eating,
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and lots of exercise,
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and travel,
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and attention to what Wittgenstein called
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the present at hand
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the present at hand
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meaning what you can reach
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is what’s real
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and everything else
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becomes progressively more
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hypothetical, more abstract
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anticipating Wittgenstein
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talking about
00:08:04 ►
our reach,
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William Blake said,
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attend the minute particulars.
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This was his advice for life.
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Attend the minute particulars.
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Well, that’s good 18th century prose for pay attention to the details
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keep your eye on the ball
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the nexus of mystery and of being
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and the theater of our drama of redemption is the body
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the body the body and we have been thoroughly weirded out
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on the subject of the body
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because we have been the inheritors of a very complex
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head oriented
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abstraction
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devoted social system
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cultural theory.
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But we see the consequences of not feeling all around us.
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I mean, the toxification of the earth,
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the toleration of overpopulation,
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and the institutions that promote it
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is all achieved through a deadening of feeling.
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If we could feel what we are doing to the earth,
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to the elderly, to the young,
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to racial and social minorities,
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if we could feel the agony of what we do,
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we would stop doing it.
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But we have what we call reasons
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for why it is the way it is
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arguments, theories, blame
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it’s somebody else’s fault
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or the poor are always with us
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or something else
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but these are all evasions
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of the obligation to create a community based on love and tolerance.
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Hardly a radical notion,
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and yet incredibly difficult to bring into existence.
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And perhaps the world will transform itself in 2012
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and we need have no further concern
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about all these things
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but perhaps not
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we need to live our lives
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in the light of the assumption
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of an open future
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not an absolutely free future,
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but not a determined future,
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an open future
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in which acts of human authentication,
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acts of human authenticity
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push forward the universal project
00:11:07 ►
of the conservation of novelty.
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You know, Martin Heidegger,
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the German metaphysician,
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the way he got it together
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was he said what life is for
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is what he called
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care for the project of being called care for the project of being
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care for the project of being
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this is what we are called to
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again Heidegger’s phrase
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we are called to care for the project of being
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and that means
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an appreciation of the minute particulars
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an appreciation and a recognition of difference.
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An appreciation and a recognition of our position in the cosmos,
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which is both insignificant and paradoxically grandiose at the same time.
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You know, Pascal said,
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Man is a reed bent by the wind, but he is a thinking reed.
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And that’s the paradox of our being, our fragileness in nature,
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and yet the supernatural grandiosity that we sense in the hallways of our souls.
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And shamanism is not religion, really, at its fundamental level.
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It’s the science of direct experience.
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It’s the science of direct experience.
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Other forms of science may deal with the states of the quanta or the orbits of the Pleiades,
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but shamanism is the science of direct experience.
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And its laboratory is the human body
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and the human nexus in space and time. You know, you’re given on average 60, 70 years and on average 145 pounds of meat. This is what you’re dealt, the meat and the time and then it’s up for you
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up to you
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to sort this out and make of it
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what you will
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and the
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the entropic path
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the downward path
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into
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blame, unhappiness
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self-blocking
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so forth and so on
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that’s always there.
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You can release yourself into the river of consequences
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and take no responsibility for who you are.
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But the higher stakes game, the more interesting game,
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The higher stakes game, the more interesting game, is to see the whole thing as an opportunity.
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Heidegger, I’m amazed I’m quoting Heidegger so much this morning, Heidegger again, he said, the body is not a thing, nor is it a process, which is surprising because that’s considered an advanced view, that it is a process which is surprising
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because that’s considered an advanced view
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that it is a process
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he said it is not a thing
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nor is it a process
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it is a window of opportunity
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which opens into eternity
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it’s a window of opportunity
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but opportunity implies the non-exercise of itself.
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An opportunity is something which you must seize.
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It doesn’t press itself upon you.
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It doesn’t force itself upon you.
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It merely is there if you want to use it.
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And my approach to life and the whole
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Megillah is that it’s like a puzzle.
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It’s a mystery. It is a koan.
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And salvation occurs
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simultaneously through an act of love.
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That’s not news, but here’s news.
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Simultaneously through an act of love
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and an act of rational apprehension,
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understanding.
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Love without understanding is not the full story.
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Real love requires understanding.
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Rational apprehension is a kind of penetration of the beloved person, nation, ecosystem, whatever the beloved is.
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Understanding is the higher dispensation.
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dispensation and these psychedelics
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which
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you know in the 60s and
00:16:08 ►
50s were simply called consciousness
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expanding drugs
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good old phenomenological
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description if there is an
00:16:16 ►
iota of possibility
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that they expand
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consciousness
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then we must put our
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attention on this area because it is the absence of
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consciousness that is making our situation so very uncomfortable.
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People going for the fast buck, people elbowing their neighbor and their neighbor’s concerns
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out of the way, trampling over each other.
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Low consciousness activity is the problem.
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And as concerned people, as intelligent people,
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as people of wealth and leisure,
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and you may think you’re scraping bottom,
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but the lowest among us here
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is still in the upper 5% of the elites of this planet
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because you just don’t get here any other way.
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So upon us devolves a certain responsibility,
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not only for ourselves,
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but the average human being on this planet is a 23-year-old
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black woman with two children. A certain responsibility toward that compressence of the human experience.
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So, the thing I just want to leave you with is that though this has been very heady and egg-heady, which is how I am, we have talked ideas, but we have not laid out a method or a dogma or a program.
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or a program.
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There’s nothing to sign up for.
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There’s no higher level of initiation if you give me $1,500 or anything like that.
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What we have been celebrating here is an experience.
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And we haven’t had the experience.
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We’ve just talked about it and analyzed it and anticipated it.
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But it is there to be had, out there in nature, with nothing between you and it.
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You know, to steal from Van Morrison, no guru, no method, no teacher.
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Just you and me
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and mother nature
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in the garden
00:18:49 ►
in the garden
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wet with rain
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and you may choose to hear this message
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and then life will continue for you as it has
00:19:03 ►
with the tools you have in your toolkit.
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Or you can choose to go out there and meet it.
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But it’s not an easy path because it’s the real path.
00:19:16 ►
And the fear is real, and the risk is real, and the reward is real.
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It’s beyond hype, which is for us almost unimaginable
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because everything comes clothed in
00:19:31 ►
flamboyant self-anticipation
00:19:35 ►
and it’s in a sense a secret
00:19:39 ►
and yet paradoxically a secret
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which can be freely told of as we’ve told of it here.
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But the human mind has an incredible capacity to turn away from challenge, opportunity, risk.
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risk so
00:20:03 ►
what I want to remind you is
00:20:06 ►
that we
00:20:07 ►
only circled around
00:20:10 ►
the mystery
00:20:11 ►
we used our intellectual flashlights
00:20:14 ►
we saw glimpses
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of it but the real
00:20:18 ►
meat
00:20:20 ►
of this path
00:20:22 ►
is you know alone
00:20:24 ►
in silent darkness
00:20:26 ►
on five grams
00:20:28 ►
or something or something
00:20:30 ►
Plotinus the great
00:20:32 ►
neoplatonist philosopher
00:20:34 ►
of the Byzantine Empire
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and a great mystic
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spoke of the mystical
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apotheosis
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as the flight of
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the alone to the alone and I’ve always I’ve always thought that
00:20:51 ►
was an excellent program for how to meet the psychedelic experience it is a mystery. It is not an unsolved problem. It’s a true mystery. And we are not accustomed
00:21:10 ►
to this. I’ve searched the world for mysteries and I’ve found illusions, fraud, misunderstanding,
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misunderstanding, obfuscation, impenetrable complexity,
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but never true mystery,
00:21:39 ►
except in this one tiny, tiny area of the chemical and biological world. And there, for, I guess because, you know, in the greater plan, everything must exist.
00:21:47 ►
And so, therefore, must magic.
00:21:51 ►
But it is, the doorway to it, the doorway into that world,
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is a very confined spot in the vast data field of this world.
00:22:02 ►
And you could miss it,
00:22:06 ►
although I’m doing my best to make sure
00:22:08 ►
that that doesn’t happen.
00:22:10 ►
Where spiritual advancement is discussed,
00:22:13 ►
I want psychedelics to be discussed.
00:22:18 ►
Where transformative social visions are put forth,
00:22:24 ►
I want psychedelics to be part of the agenda.
00:22:29 ►
To me, the only thing you can compare it to is sexuality on one level.
00:22:37 ►
But it’s different from sexuality because sexuality is written into the bones.
00:22:43 ►
Because sexuality is written into the bones.
00:22:47 ►
Very few people can go from birth to the grave and escape it in some form, some confrontation.
00:22:52 ►
I mean, even the celibate monk,
00:22:54 ►
basically his life is a confrontation with sexuality in that form.
00:23:01 ►
The psychedelic experience is very different
00:23:05 ►
you can go from birth to the grave
00:23:09 ►
and never even hear of it
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and millions and millions of people have
00:23:15 ►
but they were
00:23:17 ►
and I don’t say this in a blaming sense
00:23:22 ►
it’s a tragedy
00:23:24 ►
they were infantilized by their circumstances in time and space.
00:23:30 ►
They never experienced that dimension of freedom.
00:23:36 ►
It’s like having an automobile and you drive it around and it seems to work fine,
00:23:42 ►
but there’s this button on the dashboard and you never investigate to find out, you know,
00:23:49 ►
what it does, what it is.
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And there is in us this switch
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which can only be thrown by forming,
00:23:58 ►
well, until the era of modern science very recently,
00:24:03 ►
could only be thrown by forming a relationship with a plant
00:24:08 ►
with an entirely different order of being
00:24:13 ►
and when that switch is thrown
00:24:18 ►
this entire other dimension of humanness is revealed and
00:24:25 ►
it is
00:24:27 ►
you can tell even if
00:24:30 ►
you’ve never been there from the excited
00:24:32 ►
testimony hysterical
00:24:34 ►
denunciations and
00:24:36 ►
passionate defenses
00:24:37 ►
that it is an area
00:24:39 ►
charged with meaning
00:24:42 ►
for the human
00:24:43 ►
experience so I hope that this charged with meaning for the human experience.
00:24:50 ►
So I hope that this get-together inspires you to go further and go deeper.
00:24:54 ►
I think that there’s no other game in town.
00:24:59 ►
Doing art without this in your experience is essentially like trying to do art without good light.
00:25:11 ►
Trying to live a life without the illumination of this experience is a far more difficult thing.
00:25:20 ►
Because what do you have to guide you?
00:25:22 ►
because what do you have to guide you?
00:25:27 ►
The secular faiths, the religious faiths and the obvious confusion that both have spread in their wake.
00:25:34 ►
Sexuality is a path to a kind of authenticity
00:25:40 ►
but it has to be negotiated with another human being
00:25:45 ►
in a very careful and subtle dance of energy.
00:25:49 ►
This is not like that.
00:25:52 ►
This is something where there is a subtle dance of energy
00:25:57 ►
but it’s not with another human being.
00:26:00 ►
It’s with, and then you can either think of it as a mushroom
00:26:04 ►
or God or the universe itself,
00:26:08 ►
or Gaia. It will take all those projections with equal ease. So somehow, each of you from
00:26:19 ►
different pasts and with different futures have come through this place where we were all cotangent for four days.
00:26:30 ►
And if you are not a psychedelic person and you, through the fact of having been here, become one, then you will look back on this weekend
00:26:45 ►
as a primary turning point in your process
00:26:50 ►
of simply growing and growing up.
00:26:56 ►
And for those of you, if that happens to you,
00:27:03 ►
that is the satisfaction of my work.
00:27:10 ►
As I say, I don’t think of myself as a guru.
00:27:13 ►
I think of myself as a doorman.
00:27:16 ►
And I’m very happy to see people pass into the four star experience that lies through the fogged and etched glass.
00:27:33 ►
And that’s really all I have to say.
00:27:37 ►
I’ll entertain loose end questions
00:27:41 ►
or if anybody wants to say anything
00:27:43 ►
or whatever needs to be done, now we can do it.
00:27:47 ►
But thank you very, very much.
00:27:49 ►
And I look forward to seeing you all downstream some sooner, some later,
00:27:55 ►
eventually at the general judgment,
00:27:59 ►
whether it occurs in 2012 or on some more extended scale,
00:28:01 ►
whether it occurs in 2012 or on some more extended scale,
00:28:05 ►
we will all stand in the same place.
00:28:11 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:28:13 ►
I had asked you once to give me your definition of the soul.
00:28:19 ►
I’ve heard many people try to define it
00:28:20 ►
and I’d just like to hear your definition.
00:28:24 ►
Yeah, well, it’s a complicated thing. It has a long history try to define it and I’d just like to hear your definition.
00:28:27 ►
Yeah, well, it’s a complicated thing.
00:28:28 ►
It has a long history because the idea of spirit
00:28:31 ►
is in there
00:28:33 ►
and so is the idea of intellect.
00:28:36 ►
And these spirit, soul, intellect,
00:28:38 ►
various philosophies
00:28:40 ►
have moved them around.
00:28:42 ►
I think of the soul
00:28:44 ►
as a kind of…
00:28:49 ►
Well, you know how I think we can assume
00:28:53 ►
that we all have a pancreas?
00:28:56 ►
But probably no one here has ever seen their pancreas.
00:29:02 ►
Well, that’s because it’s in a place,
00:29:04 ►
it’s in a dimension that’s
00:29:05 ►
rarely revealed
00:29:08 ►
i.e. within
00:29:09 ►
the confines of
00:29:11 ►
the tissue of your body
00:29:13 ►
I think of the soul as a
00:29:15 ►
hyper-dimensional organ
00:29:18 ►
it’s
00:29:19 ►
an organ
00:29:20 ►
that you can’t see
00:29:24 ►
like the pancreas.
00:29:26 ►
But if you open up the body, you will see the pancreas.
00:29:30 ►
You won’t see the soul.
00:29:33 ►
But if you were to rise up into a higher mathematical dimension,
00:29:40 ►
a human being would look like a worm
00:29:43 ►
because the worm would extend from birth to death.
00:29:49 ►
All the intermediate states would be there.
00:29:51 ►
The entire lifetime would be perceived in a single moment.
00:29:58 ►
And that’s how I think of the soul.
00:30:02 ►
The soul is not who you are now.
00:30:07 ►
The soul is who you are and will be and have been.
00:30:10 ►
So it’s yourself extended in time.
00:30:16 ►
You know, Plato said,
00:30:17 ►
time is the moving image of eternity.
00:30:21 ►
And what we were doing last night in a way
00:30:25 ►
was looking at snapshots of that moving image
00:30:33 ►
I think that at death
00:30:37 ►
if the soul survives
00:30:41 ►
then in a sense what happens is
00:30:44 ►
you flow back through your entire life
00:30:47 ►
and it exists all at once in a single moment.
00:30:54 ►
I mean, that’s the paradox of hyperspace,
00:30:57 ►
that what is serially presented in Newtonian space is holistically apprehended in hyperspace.
00:31:11 ►
And similarly, there is a group soul, a group mind,
00:31:16 ►
and all the same processes apply.
00:31:20 ►
In a way, the transcendental object at the end of time
00:31:24 ►
is history.
00:31:27 ►
History, you know, I think I said, at least I think, that history is like a psychedelic experience.
00:31:37 ►
And we are building toward the apotheosis, the place where language fails, where you the ego dissolves, you can
00:31:46 ►
no longer make sense of it
00:31:48 ►
it’s been getting weirder and weirder
00:31:49 ►
and finally the speed
00:31:52 ►
at which the weirdness is accumulating
00:31:54 ►
just avalanches
00:31:56 ►
over you and you can
00:31:57 ►
no longer make sense of it
00:32:00 ►
but
00:32:01 ►
an idea which I didn’t talk about
00:32:04 ►
very much in this workshop
00:32:06 ►
but that’s dear to my heart
00:32:08 ►
is the idea
00:32:10 ►
of the philosopher’s stone
00:32:12 ►
in the
00:32:14 ►
16th century in Europe
00:32:15 ►
before
00:32:18 ►
the rise of modern
00:32:20 ►
science and chemical theory
00:32:22 ►
the ontological
00:32:23 ►
distinction between
00:32:25 ►
world and self
00:32:27 ►
was not as strongly
00:32:29 ►
defined as it is
00:32:31 ►
in modern people
00:32:33 ►
and consequently
00:32:35 ►
people working with
00:32:37 ►
substances
00:32:38 ►
entered into a kind
00:32:42 ►
of participation
00:32:43 ►
mystique
00:32:45 ►
in which the contents of the unconscious
00:32:48 ►
were actually projected onto matter.
00:32:53 ►
And Carl Jung made much of this
00:32:56 ►
because he realized that these alchemical texts,
00:32:59 ►
which are so cryptic and bizarre,
00:33:02 ►
could be treated like dreams because they were downloads of
00:33:08 ►
unconscious material. But I think that the alchemists were in a sense on the right track
00:33:16 ►
in that what is being sought in the concrescence, what the essence of the thing at the end of the world is,
00:33:25 ►
is it’s a union of spirit and matter,
00:33:29 ►
is what it is.
00:33:31 ►
And it’s a union of spirit and matter
00:33:33 ►
that occurs in such a way
00:33:36 ►
that each retains the characteristics
00:33:40 ►
that it brought into the union.
00:33:43 ►
In alchemical terms, this is called a coincidencia positorum.
00:33:49 ►
In modern terms, it’s not allowed.
00:33:51 ►
It’s a logical contradiction.
00:33:54 ►
But I think that the essence of understanding the world
00:33:58 ►
is to be able to hold a logical contradiction in your mind
00:34:04 ►
and not force things to be either or.
00:34:10 ►
And the philosopher’s stone is the idea
00:34:13 ►
that you could have a kind of matter,
00:34:16 ►
I mean, think of it as a small pebble,
00:34:19 ►
which is yet somehow made of mind
00:34:23 ►
and hence is an object freely commandable
00:34:28 ►
in the imagination.
00:34:30 ►
And they sought this.
00:34:32 ►
They tried to make this.
00:34:34 ►
This was a technological agenda
00:34:36 ►
from 1540 up until the Thirty Years’ War.
00:34:43 ►
And the universal panacea,
00:34:46 ►
you know, the panas super substantiales,
00:34:50 ►
all these terms for this lapis,
00:34:53 ►
this stone.
00:34:55 ►
And what it is,
00:34:56 ►
is it’s a place in space and time
00:34:59 ►
where anything can happen.
00:35:02 ►
Anything can happen.
00:35:04 ►
So imagine that
00:35:07 ►
what we are involved in
00:35:09 ►
collectively and each of us
00:35:11 ►
is an effort to give birth
00:35:14 ►
to the soul
00:35:16 ►
to somehow cause
00:35:18 ►
the soul to come into existence
00:35:19 ►
one way of thinking about this
00:35:22 ►
I think I said this earlier
00:35:23 ►
but it probably means more now,
00:35:25 ►
is that the historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out
00:35:33 ►
so that the soul becomes visible and the body becomes a process that you can command in the imagination.
00:35:49 ►
Do you understand what that would look like?
00:35:52 ►
So then here’s the comic book version
00:35:55 ►
of what I’m talking about.
00:35:56 ►
Here we have the Philosopher’s Stone.
00:35:58 ►
I have just, by a crypto-biological process,
00:36:03 ►
regurgitated it into my hand, and here it is.
00:36:07 ►
Okay, so it’s my soul objectified outside my body.
00:36:13 ►
It’s a holographic matrix of space and time.
00:36:17 ►
When you look into it, you can see stars in there.
00:36:22 ►
And if you need to go somewhere
00:36:25 ►
you stretch it out
00:36:28 ►
and sit on it
00:36:29 ►
and it carries you there
00:36:32 ►
and if you’re hungry
00:36:35 ►
you eat it
00:36:37 ►
and if you need a shower
00:36:39 ►
it becomes a levitating shower head
00:36:43 ►
above your head from which warm water pours
00:36:47 ►
and if you need to know something
00:36:49 ►
you ask it
00:36:51 ►
and if you need to wear something
00:36:54 ►
it becomes it
00:36:55 ►
and what it is is it’s a union of matter
00:36:59 ►
in your imagination
00:37:01 ►
and you say well such a thing could only happen
00:37:06 ►
in a dream
00:37:06 ►
well quite right
00:37:09 ►
I think we may be headed into
00:37:12 ►
a dream either the after
00:37:14 ►
death dream or the
00:37:15 ►
nano cyber technological
00:37:17 ►
dream or the pharmacoshamanic
00:37:21 ►
dream
00:37:21 ►
we are headed into some kind of
00:37:24 ►
a dream we are going to live in the imagination.
00:37:27 ►
And the imagination is the domain of the soul.
00:37:33 ►
I mean, I’m not kidding.
00:37:37 ►
We are going to live in the imagination.
00:37:41 ►
It will cease to be metaphor.
00:37:43 ►
It will become real estate.
00:37:48 ►
That’s how real the imagination is going to be.
00:37:52 ►
And it may be virtual reality, pharmacological reality,
00:37:57 ►
after-death reality, nanotech reality.
00:38:00 ►
We’ll find a way.
00:38:02 ►
We will find a way.
00:38:04 ►
Because I think
00:38:06 ►
that this union of spirit and
00:38:07 ►
matter is an agenda
00:38:10 ►
in the human
00:38:11 ►
program that runs
00:38:14 ►
very, very deep.
00:38:16 ►
This is why we spoke
00:38:17 ►
for the first time.
00:38:19 ►
Language is a union of spirit
00:38:22 ►
and matter. The spirit
00:38:24 ►
of the thinking mind and the very ephemeral matter of the air,
00:38:30 ►
which can carry an acoustical signal.
00:38:33 ►
The word is on its way to becoming flesh.
00:38:38 ►
Wasn’t that the promise?
00:38:41 ►
And similarly, the flesh is on its way to becoming word
00:38:45 ►
that’s what all that raving
00:38:47 ►
is all about
00:38:49 ►
the language is
00:38:51 ►
a partial condensation
00:38:54 ►
of the philosopher’s stone
00:38:56 ►
so is
00:38:57 ►
a 747
00:38:59 ►
it will carry you
00:39:01 ►
places all technology
00:39:03 ►
is the effort to create ultimately the ultimate tool.
00:39:10 ►
The ultimate tool.
00:39:13 ►
And what can the ultimate tool do?
00:39:16 ►
And what is the ultimate tool for?
00:39:19 ►
The ultimate tool can do anything.
00:39:24 ►
Obviously that’s what the ultimate tool can do anything.
00:39:27 ►
Obviously, that’s what the ultimate tool is.
00:39:29 ►
Well, now it’s very interesting that we have arrived in the last 40 years or so
00:39:35 ►
into the realm of the cybernetic machine
00:39:39 ►
because it has a different ontos than previous tools.
00:39:47 ►
I don’t know how much you know about computers,
00:39:49 ►
but think of what all a computer is,
00:39:52 ►
even the most sophisticated of computers,
00:39:55 ►
is an enormous set of switches.
00:40:00 ►
And so here you have a machine with 50 million switches.
00:40:09 ►
Set the switches one way, and it will predict the weather.
00:40:16 ►
Set the switches another way, and it will give you a hell of a chess game.
00:40:22 ►
Set the switches another way, and it will balance your checkbook. The computer begins to look like
00:40:26 ►
the crudest approximation
00:40:28 ►
of the union of spirit and matter.
00:40:31 ►
And look at it.
00:40:33 ►
There it is.
00:40:33 ►
Gallium arsenide, silicon, gold, platinum.
00:40:39 ►
But what is flowing through it?
00:40:42 ►
Electrons.
00:40:43 ►
But these electrons flow
00:40:45 ►
according to the architectonic
00:40:47 ►
plans
00:40:49 ►
of thought
00:40:51 ►
it’s thought that flows
00:40:53 ►
in the computer
00:40:55 ►
not it’s thought, our thought
00:40:58 ►
we tell it what to think
00:41:00 ►
and it thinks it
00:41:01 ►
and as the computer shrinks
00:41:04 ►
and as the data storage increases
00:41:07 ►
more and more spirit
00:41:10 ►
is being stored
00:41:12 ►
in less and less matter
00:41:15 ►
and you know we talked about virtual reality
00:41:19 ►
we talked about implants
00:41:20 ►
that could create dream states
00:41:23 ►
or maybe we didn’t but it was on my mind
00:41:26 ►
all of these things
00:41:29 ►
and so I think you know that
00:41:32 ►
through technology we are taking
00:41:36 ►
our oldest intuitions
00:41:38 ►
call it the intuition of the dream time
00:41:41 ►
and creating it so that it is real
00:41:45 ►
and the alchemical union
00:41:48 ►
which was abandoned
00:41:51 ►
by early modern science
00:41:54 ►
actually will reemerge
00:41:57 ►
as a reasonable
00:41:59 ►
scientific endeavor
00:42:02 ►
once the new sciences
00:42:04 ►
of information theory
00:42:06 ►
and chaos theory
00:42:07 ►
and complexity theory
00:42:09 ►
and so forth and so on
00:42:12 ►
are put in place.
00:42:13 ►
We are in a position
00:42:15 ►
to create the philosopher’s stone.
00:42:20 ►
And, you know,
00:42:20 ►
it will not only carry you through space,
00:42:23 ►
it will carry you through time.
00:42:25 ►
I think that’s what’s going on at 2012,
00:42:29 ►
that technology, which appears to be just a secular concern
00:42:35 ►
of capitalism and scientific R&D,
00:42:41 ►
is in fact a sacred a sacred calling
00:42:47 ►
and that the purpose
00:42:50 ►
of it is to mirror the mind
00:42:52 ►
of human beings
00:42:53 ►
through the perfection
00:42:56 ►
of the tool
00:42:57 ►
and that the perfect tool
00:42:59 ►
when it arrives
00:43:01 ►
will end the historical
00:43:03 ►
process which was the tool making process and, will end the historical process,
00:43:07 ►
which was the tool-making process. And it will end it by virtue of the fact that, among other features,
00:43:13 ►
the Philosopher’s Stone allows you to move through time.
00:43:18 ►
And that’s why that graph comes down to that place in 2012
00:43:24 ►
and then can’t be propagated any further
00:43:27 ►
because it’s a picture of a serial linear society unfolding
00:43:33 ►
and at that point the serial linear society
00:43:38 ►
becomes an anachronism.
00:43:43 ►
Yeah.
00:43:44 ►
You’re always Catholic becomes an anachronism. Yeah.
00:43:46 ►
You’re a raised Catholic,
00:43:49 ►
and at the end there’s always the the shoots and the goats,
00:43:51 ►
and then the Qur’ans, the believers, and the unbelievers.
00:43:55 ►
And you see…
00:43:56 ►
What do you mean, who eats it?
00:44:04 ►
Well, I have two impulses here. well
00:44:06 ►
I have two impulses here
00:44:08 ►
one is to say nobody eats it
00:44:11 ►
that’s just a bad fairy tale
00:44:14 ►
and a lot of people
00:44:17 ►
this is something that sometimes brings people
00:44:19 ►
clawing their way out of their seats to get at me
00:44:23 ►
but it goes back to what I said earlier
00:44:25 ►
I think redemption is an act
00:44:28 ►
of intellectual apprehension
00:44:31 ►
and I
00:44:32 ►
had a professor when I went to
00:44:34 ►
college, Joe Tussman
00:44:36 ►
and what he claimed
00:44:39 ►
was
00:44:40 ►
that intelligence is
00:44:42 ►
something that you can teach
00:44:44 ►
that we have been entirely misled to was that intelligence is something that you can teach,
00:44:48 ►
that we have been entirely misled to think of intelligence as something innate
00:44:51 ►
that you’re born with.
00:44:53 ►
And he was a teacher,
00:44:56 ►
and he seemed to make good on his premise.
00:45:01 ►
So if evil exists,
00:45:05 ►
and I’m not sure it does,
00:45:07 ►
it is ignorance,
00:45:09 ►
which is a Hindu position,
00:45:13 ►
you know,
00:45:13 ►
avidya,
00:45:14 ►
avidya,
00:45:16 ►
obscuring,
00:45:18 ►
avidya,
00:45:19 ►
ignorance.
00:45:20 ►
So I think that
00:45:22 ►
there is an obligation
00:45:24 ►
to understand obligation to understand.
00:45:28 ►
To understand.
00:45:30 ►
I’m not putting aside the obligation to love and to feel,
00:45:35 ►
but those obligations seem to have their defenders everywhere.
00:45:40 ►
But there is an obligation to understand.
00:45:48 ►
And ignorance is ignorance it’s not a good thing
00:45:50 ►
there’s no way it is good to not know something
00:45:54 ►
and you know one of the things that I come up against
00:45:58 ►
and we had a humorous brush with it last night
00:46:04 ►
is that this thing that I talk about,
00:46:07 ►
the time wave,
00:46:08 ►
requires a knowledge of history,
00:46:11 ►
a slight knowledge.
00:46:13 ►
Nobody has it.
00:46:15 ►
Nobody has it.
00:46:17 ►
And, you know, I go to Germany
00:46:18 ►
and I lecture this stuff
00:46:20 ►
and when I first started going to Europe
00:46:22 ►
I thought, oh, well, this will really be fun.
00:46:24 ►
These Europeans, it’s a better educational system. stuff and when I first started going to Europe I thought oh well this will really be fun these Europeans
00:46:25 ►
it’s a better educational
00:46:28 ►
system they’ll know
00:46:30 ►
what’s up they don’t know what’s up
00:46:32 ►
you know I talk about Otto
00:46:34 ►
the Great they can’t place him within
00:46:36 ►
500 years
00:46:37 ►
generally the audiences
00:46:40 ►
occasionally someone can
00:46:41 ►
well amnesia
00:46:44 ►
is a pathology
00:46:46 ►
in the individual
00:46:48 ►
if you have an individual
00:46:50 ►
who can’t account for where they were
00:46:52 ►
in 1990 then you need
00:46:54 ►
to look into
00:46:55 ►
what was it a blow on the head
00:46:57 ►
a long drunk
00:46:59 ►
what happened to you
00:47:01 ►
and yet in ourselves we accept
00:47:03 ►
this weird history-less thing.
00:47:07 ►
And it’s going to bite us in the ass.
00:47:12 ►
You know, it’s a cliche to say
00:47:14 ►
those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it.
00:47:18 ►
But that’s all very fine if you’re running around
00:47:22 ►
throwing spears and pulling catapults around
00:47:26 ►
but if you have atom bombs
00:47:28 ►
you can’t be
00:47:29 ►
so stupid
00:47:30 ►
so one of the things
00:47:33 ►
that I
00:47:34 ►
that occurs to me is
00:47:37 ►
we human
00:47:40 ►
beings come equipped with
00:47:41 ►
something called the unconscious
00:47:43 ►
mind
00:47:44 ►
discovered by Freud and Jung in Vienna beings come equipped with something called the unconscious mind discovered
00:47:46 ►
by Freud and Jung
00:47:47 ►
in Vienna
00:47:49 ►
for us but apparent
00:47:52 ►
throughout history
00:47:53 ►
the unconscious mind
00:47:55 ►
and part of this technological
00:47:58 ►
and historical
00:48:00 ►
crisis that we’re in
00:48:01 ►
has to do with the fact that
00:48:04 ►
we can no longer afford this luxury. This is fine if you’re, as I say, chipping flint or running around howling at the moon. Then you can have an irrational and out-of-control component
00:48:27 ►
driving its social systems and social decisions.
00:48:32 ►
So part of what we all have to do is get smarter.
00:48:38 ►
And psychedelics, consciousness-expanding drugs,
00:48:41 ►
expand consciousness.
00:48:44 ►
And so do these technologies.
00:48:48 ►
And I think I said to you the little joke
00:48:50 ►
about how a computer is simply a drug that you can’t swallow.
00:48:57 ►
In the future, that won’t be true.
00:48:59 ►
I mean, the computers of the future will be the size of double-aught capsules or smaller.
00:49:09 ►
And they probably will be taken internally and just insert themselves in your tissue
00:49:16 ►
and grow gold fibers into your brain systems and interact with you.
00:49:23 ►
Well, now, are we talking about a drug or a machine?
00:49:26 ►
And the answer is that biology is very machine-like
00:49:31 ►
at the micro-physical level.
00:49:34 ►
You know, the genes are being read,
00:49:36 ►
the ribosomes are connecting the proteins together.
00:49:39 ►
The whole thing looks rather like a factory
00:49:43 ►
of moving mechanical parts.
00:49:46 ►
But the databases that are being created
00:49:50 ►
and the protocols for moving through them
00:49:54 ►
are permission to a new level of intelligence.
00:50:00 ►
The Internet, I find, truly awesome.
00:50:04 ►
I mean, when you get in there,
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I start out from my home in Occidental,
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and then I ask a question,
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which requires that the internet access
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the main computer at Shibuya University in southern Tokyo.
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We’re there.
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If I’m not paying attention,
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I don’t even realize that we are now
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talking to the university computer there.
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But then we need a certain image
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of a certain painting.
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Well, it turns on, it’s online
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in a database at the Hermitage
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in St. Petersburg.
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We are there.
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And in a session, you know,
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you may move around the world ten times.
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I have an automatic system on my computer at home
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that goes on in the middle of the night
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and has a series of key words programmed into it,
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things I’m interested in.
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And in the quiet hours of the night,
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my computer moves from one university data system to another,
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looking for files and downloading them into my system
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so that when I get up in the morning,
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I have these files on screen.
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I mean, I’m interested in a dying cult in Iran,
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a religion that’s existed for a very long time but is now down to a few hundred people.
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Well, there’s a scholar in Leipzig who is interested in this.
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There are some people at the UN.
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We carry on a little interest group.
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And there are even real Mandaeans in our interest group, actual members of this dying religion. It’s
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a special concern of mine. And I’m fairly confident I’m connected up to 90% of the people in the world who care about this, because so few do care. So
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you build these interest groups. You can expand your eccentricity. It’s a tremendous permission
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for eccentricity and community, because you find the other eccentrics who are into the same weird subset of knowledge
00:52:26 ►
that you are. And then the
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other thing is, general knowledge
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is much more accessible
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and available.
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You know, schools
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have not changed
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essentially in 200 years.
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And yet, education
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is the thing which
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allows us to be democratic societies
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and to control our industrial policies
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and make informed decisions.
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Think of the change that has occurred in society
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in those 200 years
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and people are still going to the little red schoolhouse
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and sitting at their desks.
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I mean, yes, we have playgroup and, you know,
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indirect lighting, but hardly the revolution
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that we’re looking for.
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Anything else? I’m just rambling here.
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In terms of language in this internet,
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does everybody speak English?
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Basically. I mean, that’s basically it.
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And that will be,
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that’s,
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but I think that’s necessary.
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And English is clearly,
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at this point,
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for historical reasons,
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the richest language in the world.
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I mean, because it has so many technical subsets
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and geographical subsets.
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I mean, you know, England alone,
00:53:55 ►
you move through linguistic zones
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and you can’t understand what people are saying
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and neither can the Londoners with you, for that matter.
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And then, you know, you go to India,
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where Hinglish is spoken widely,
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and that’s a whole experience.
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One world language seems to me
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a fairly conservative but necessary thing
00:54:20 ►
to put on the agenda.
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What sort of breakthrough do you think we can make
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with virtual reality in education?
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In education?
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Well, for instance, an application for virtual reality
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that’s very big right now is
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archaeologists have gotten on to this
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and love it because you can
00:54:44 ►
let’s imagine a city like Zebel Chaltun
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it was continuously inhabited
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for 1500 years
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so you just feed in the plans
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for every 50 year increment
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and then you can walk the streets
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of this city
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and look at astronomical arrangements,
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see how at the close of Bakhtun 8
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they apparently destroyed a fortification
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and moved it 100 feet further west.
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And so at the University of Pennsylvania
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and places where the Maya thing is
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being pushed hard, they’re building up basically a virtual database of the Mayan civilization.
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And, you know, this sounds to me much more exciting than reading about Tikal or poring over maps or even slides and film,
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to be able to walk through Imperial Tikal on a festival day
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at the close of Bakhtun 9
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and see the reconstructed friezes and everything.
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And they’re not doing that for education or entertainment.
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They’re doing it as an adjunct to the discipline of archaeology.
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But it obviously will later be sold into the, quote,
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education slash entertainment market.
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So that’s one use.
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To me, the exciting thing about virtual reality
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is that we will be able to show each other our dreams
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it’s another way of objectifying the soul
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what we’ve been talking about
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a child of five given a virtual reality
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tool kit will begin to build
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their world
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and by the time you’re 20,
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your world will be, I don’t know,
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the size of Manhattan.
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And that’s you, that’s yours.
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And nobody can walk those streets
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without your permission.
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And if you love someone,
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and you give them permission,
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they can literally walk into your dreams.
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Your dreams when you were five, when you were ten, when you were fifteen,
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your fascist phase, your Mozart phase, your, you know, whatever.
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And that is that four-dimensional centipede of the soul
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that I’m talking about
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it’s not it itself
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but it’s an imprint of it
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a download of it
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we will build our dreams
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and then live in them
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and share them
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and imagine
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I mean suppose you want to build a building
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and suppose you want it to be
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10 stories high
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and suppose in the design process
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you decide that actually it would be better
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if it was 100 stories high
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imagine what this does to the budget
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of that building
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in virtual reality
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one zero is what it takes
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to make the ten story building
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a hundred story building
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where it says number of stories
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you add one zero
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and suddenly now it’s a hundred stories high
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no muss, no fuss
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no zoning commission problems
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no material delivery problems
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because it’s made of light
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it’s made of mind
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a very interesting exercise to do in your own mind
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is sit down somewhere under a tree
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and imagine that you could live in any way,
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in any fashion you wanted,
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in any environment you wanted.
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In other words, design your own flying saucer, let’s say. Well, at first, you know, if you’re like me, at first
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it’s just very nice. You know, it’s Italianate, modern, or something, and we’ll hang my favorite
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Pollock over here. In other words, at first it’s just as if I had won the lottery, and like I’m suddenly
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staggeringly rich, and so I can, but then you say, well, but wait, I can do anything.
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I don’t have to have a Pollock. I could have Pollock. I don’t have to. If I want a ceiling 700 feet high, done.
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7,000 feet high, done.
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And then you realize, oh my God, I’m in the imagination.
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I can have it any way I want.
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And it’s a dizzying prospect.
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I mean, it’s very interesting. Would you have a body?
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What kind of body would it be? Would you, how would you spend your days? You know, would you build the world’s greatest art collection? Or, you know, you could become a bumblebee.
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You could do anything.
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And it’s such a dizzying thing when it begins to open up
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in front of you.
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And then finally you realize
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that with that kind of power,
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if you had that kind of power,
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there is an automatic desire, I think,
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to begin to pull it in and say,
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well, I think I’ll not wear clothes.
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I think I’ll live in nature.
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I think I’ll…
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In other words, the stuff obsession
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falls away
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when you can have anything
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and you begin to find your way
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back to some kind of bedrock
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and I think I’ve told you
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or I’ve told some of my groups
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my vision of a kind of perfect
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future beyond
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2012 let’s say
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is a world where everyone is living as
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Amazon rainforest Indians live, or close to that level. In other words, naked, very little
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work to do, plenty of food, everybody is sexually comfortable with themselves and everybody else, so forth and so on.
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What it looks like is an aboriginal paradise of some kind.
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But if you displace yourself from the point of view of an exterior observer
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and step into the body of one of these people in this world,
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into the body of one of these people in this world, you discover that when you close your eyes, there are menus hanging in space. And by looking, the equivalent of pointing and
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clicking, you move into a cultural architecture of some sort
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that is completely virtual.
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And that’s where people spend a lot of their time.
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This could be done.
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I mean, this will be done.
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We do it already,
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except that the interface, as they say, is very clumsy.
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You know, you have to sit in an orthopedic chair
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and stare at a flickering phosphine screen.
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But these are all just technical details to be worked out.
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So I think that this idea of a neo-archaism,
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an archaic revival,
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No archaism, an archaic revival will end with an aboriginal exterior in dynamic balance with a reconstituted earth,
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but that the interior horizon of transcendence will be a virtual cultural landscape
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that will be wilder than Blade Runner,
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more dynamic than Dune,
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more anything than anything that you can imagine.
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And we will be living then in the imagination
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and yet celebrating the body in three dimensional
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space
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and history will be over
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then
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and we will understand what it means
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to have history be over
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because we will be living the way people lived
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before the first
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furrow was plowed
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you said earlier that part of furrow was plowed.
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You said earlier that part of
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I guess the mystical quest
01:04:10 ►
is love and then you said you want to
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emphasize that it’s also understanding.
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And I’m just having a lot of trouble
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incorporating that love
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in this realm of the
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imagination. I see myself, if I can have anything
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I want, the first thing that kicks in is
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greed and then maybe
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what happens is I let go of that
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and I don’t need things anymore
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to be safe. But I still can’t incorporate
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and imagine this whole thing
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where
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whatever love is would fit in.
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Well, love is
01:04:39 ►
not a dimension,
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a dimensioned
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constant, as they say. In other words, I think the love
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you carry in, we, I think we are pretty well wired for love or we wouldn’t have gotten
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this far. I mean, it’s been hell for the last five million years. There’s been a lot of upheaval,
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a lot of burying of miscarriages
01:05:10 ►
and small infants near the caved front
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and that sort of thing.
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Love springs from biology
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and we are fully biologically empowered beings.
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The love that springs from understanding is the intimacy that comes from penetration of another point of view.
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I mean, the vocabulary is necessarily sexual, but I think of love as a solvent.
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It really penetrates any situation. It just washes through and touches all levels of a situation. It may be the unique complement
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that we bring to this mix. You know, I mean mean our machines may think faster
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image better
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so forth and so on
01:06:08 ►
but love
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seems to actually be
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the thumb print of divinity
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upon our biology
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because it doesn’t seem
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necessary
01:06:21 ►
even sexuality
01:06:25 ►
is not particularly necessary
01:06:28 ►
in its intensely emotionally
01:06:31 ►
realized form
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there are fish where the female lays the eggs
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and an hour later the male swims over them
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and ejaculates
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well what kind of community is based on this kind of intimacy?
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It may not even enter these fish’s minds
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that there is a relationship.
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In other words, the female lays eggs,
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the male ejaculates,
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that no member of that species
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may have ever put together the fact
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that these things somehow have a causal relationship.
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Yeah.
01:07:07 ►
A quick question about the unconscious.
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Now that we can no longer afford it,
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and I can see why with reference to Adam Bonds,
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what do you think it was for originally?
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I think that we are going to need a lot of energy.
01:07:23 ►
I think that we are going to need a lot of energy. I think that we are going to need to be able
01:07:26 ►
to undertake very dramatic engineering works. The other thing is, you know, you can look
01:07:36 ►
at it this way, that knowledge is power. And, you know, when you’re talking about nuclear chemistry,
01:07:47 ►
knowledge really is power.
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So it’s in a way a test.
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You uncover these hideous sources of power
01:07:58 ►
and it injects a new immediacy
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into the moral dimension of your existence.
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I find it extraordinary that atom bombs were used only in one case,
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the Hiroshima-Nagasaki case, against human beings, by human beings.
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I mean, you’ve got your Rwanda and Bosnia and even Auschwitz.
01:08:26 ►
But nevertheless, crazy as we may be,
01:08:32 ►
nobody ever got that pissed off.
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And we’ve had them now for 50 years, these devices.
01:08:40 ►
Able to be delivered within 30 minutes anywhere on the planet. And there have been
01:08:47 ►
some mighty dicey hassles come and go in about 50 years, but nobody ever went for broke,
01:08:55 ►
you know. And I think it means that there is a measure of sanity at some level. I mean,
01:09:02 ►
it’s too bad that you have to have the fate of the planet in the balance
01:09:06 ►
for people to exercise a little statesmanship,
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but that seemed to be the case.
01:09:15 ►
Anything else?
01:09:17 ►
My God, maybe we’ve got it wrapped up.
01:09:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:09:26 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:09:31 ►
If you could see me right now, you would see a big smile on my face
01:09:34 ►
as I think about the description of virtual reality that Terrence just gave.
01:09:39 ►
Because it’s actually, well, quite a primitive concept
01:09:42 ►
compared to what we already have today.
01:09:45 ►
And that should give you some pause as you may try to project what your world will be
01:09:50 ►
like 20 years from now.
01:09:52 ►
At the rate that tech is now moving, unless the politicians shut it down somehow, there
01:09:57 ►
is simply no way to predict the state of our tech just a few decades ahead.
01:10:03 ►
Perhaps then we should be focusing on increasing our consciousness
01:10:06 ►
so as to be better equipped to deal with these rapid changes
01:10:11 ►
as they continue pressing down on us.
01:10:14 ►
Actually, I’m really glad that we got to hear Terence’s thoughts about the 1994 Internet.
01:10:20 ►
And one of the things that struck me about that rap
01:10:22 ►
was that he was speaking about an Internet when the Web was only two years old,
01:10:27 ►
and it would yet be another 13 years before the iPhone was introduced.
01:10:31 ►
So the reason he went on at such length about how he signed on and searched for something is that, well,
01:10:38 ►
there may not have been more than one or two people in the room at the time who had even heard about the Internet.
01:10:43 ►
two people in the room at the time who had even heard about the Internet.
01:10:48 ►
And by the way, concerning what he said about the use of English on the net,
01:10:50 ►
that’s changed.
01:10:53 ►
According to Wikipedia, at the end of 2013,
01:11:00 ►
29% of the websites were in English, with Chinese close behind at 23%. However, I think that I recently read that Chinese was now the most used language on the Internet.
01:11:06 ►
How times have changed since 1994, huh?
01:11:10 ►
But my guess is that today, like most of us, Terrence would just be taking it all for granted.
01:11:16 ►
As I mentioned before, those of us who were fortunate enough to be working in Internet-related fields back in 1994
01:11:22 ►
had a dream that one day the only time anyone would even think of the fact
01:11:27 ►
that they wanted to use the net was when it was down and wasn’t working.
01:11:31 ►
But back in 1994, Terence wasn’t alone in his feelings about the magic of the internet.
01:11:37 ►
The late 80s and early 90s was a very interesting period for many of us
01:11:41 ►
as it brought into a single focus the personal computer, the internet, ecstasy, and the rave scene.
01:11:50 ►
In short, it made the 60s look like the 50s.
01:11:54 ►
Do you remember a few minutes ago when Terence said,
01:11:56 ►
The historical enterprise is an effort to turn the human body inside out
01:12:01 ►
so that the soul becomes visible and the body becomes a process
01:12:06 ►
that you can command in the imagination.
01:12:09 ►
Well, I suspect that you also thought about how through social media our souls are becoming
01:12:14 ►
more visible and with VR our virtual bodies can be commanded by our imaginations.
01:12:21 ►
Now, this is probably far from where I think Terence was going with his metaphor, but at the very least, it may be a stepping stone to, well, as James Joyce so famously said, becoming dirigible.
01:12:34 ►
Now, I’m going to close today by remembering a man who died a few days ago.
01:12:39 ►
In my opinion, this man was one of the two most important people to have lived during my lifetime.
01:12:45 ►
As you may guess, I think that one of those men was Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD.
01:12:52 ►
And the other man who I consider to hold such a lofty spot in human history is the man who,
01:12:58 ►
at the age of 89, died on the 14th of this month, the great B.B. King. And why do I consider these two men to be so significant?
01:13:08 ►
Well, without the change in consciousness brought about by what we loosely call the 60s,
01:13:14 ►
well, we might still be living in the mindset of the 50s.
01:13:17 ►
And trust me, that wasn’t a great time for young people
01:13:22 ►
who were trying to break the thought patterns that were then prevalent. But the 60s brought two very important ingredients to our world, psychedelics
01:13:31 ►
and rock and roll. I’m sure that there will be many status quo loving historians who will
01:13:37 ►
challenge me on this, but they’re never going to change my opinion. Without rock and roll,
01:13:42 ►
the youth movement that began in the late 50s would never have made it into the 60s, 70s and Thank you. Well, in my opinion, while we may have had a small change in consciousness with the arrival of Elvis Presley and his imitators, it was the so-called British invasion of rock bands that really set the tone for the age.
01:14:24 ►
Not to mention all of the U.S. bands that were also coming alive at the time.
01:14:35 ►
You will find, I am quite sure, that with very few exceptions, the great musicians who led those bands will tell you that their initial inspiration came from the music of B.B. King.
01:14:46 ►
His music was the music that led us all out of that fluffy area of doo-wop bands. I only saw B.B. King perform live one time, and by then I’d already heard live performances by musicians like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington.
01:14:52 ►
And I’d been to rock concerts that spanned the genre from Buddy Holly to Bruce Springsteen and
01:14:57 ►
on to the great English rock bands. Yet that night that I experienced a live performance by B.B. King
01:15:03 ►
remains at the very top of my all-time list of favorite concerts.
01:15:08 ►
That night, by the way, also happened to be B.B. King’s 70th birthday.
01:15:13 ►
The opening act was the Righteous Brothers, and they didn’t leave the stage until well after 10 p.m.
01:15:18 ►
Eventually, B.B. King took the stage and played for over two hours.
01:15:25 ►
took the stage and played for over two hours. Afterwards, which was well after midnight,
01:15:30 ►
there was B.B. King sitting on the edge of the stage and talking to those of us who hung around to meet him. At the time, I wondered how much longer he could go on. After all,
01:15:35 ►
he was now 70 years old, I thought. But go on he did. In fact, 16 years later, when he
01:15:41 ►
was 86 years old, he was still touring, playing concerts in places like London’s Royal Albert Hall.
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There’s simply no way I can fully express my gratitude for the life and work of the great B.B. King.
01:15:55 ►
His body may have given up, but his music will be with us forever.
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And so, as I close today, I want to leave you with one of my favorite songs of his.
01:16:04 ►
It was recorded at the Montreux Festival in Canada when he was 68 years old. So, as I close today, I want to leave you with one of my favorite songs of his.
01:16:09 ►
It was recorded at the Montreux Festival in Canada when he was 68 years old.
01:16:12 ►
What an incredible man he was.
01:16:18 ►
We owe him a lot, including the consciousness that evolves when psychedelics and music come together.
01:16:23 ►
But let me be clear, to my knowledge, B.B. King never used psychedelics himself.
01:16:26 ►
Listening to him play, you can see why.
01:16:31 ►
His consciousness had already expanded well beyond the default world us average people live in.
01:16:35 ►
The thrill of his live performances may now be gone,
01:16:40 ►
but the thrill of B.B. King’s music will always be an important part of my life.
01:16:44 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be careful out there my friends
01:16:47 ►
applause ¶¶
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¶¶ Thriller’s gone Thriller’s gone away
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Thriller’s gone, baby
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Thriller’s gone away
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You got me wrong, baby Thank you. Thrill is gone away from me Thrill is gone away from me
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Thrill is gone away from me
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Oh, I’m still alone
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But so lonely
01:18:22 ►
I am But so lonely I’m
01:18:25 ►
lonely Drill is gone
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Drill is gone.
01:19:07 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone. The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:17 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:18 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
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The thrill is gone.
01:19:19 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:20 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:20 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:20 ►
The thrill is gone.
01:19:20 ►
The thrill is gone.
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is gone.
01:19:20 ►
The thrill is gone.
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is gone.
01:19:21 ►
I know I know I’ll give it all the thrill is gone. I know I know I’ll give it all one day, baby Like I know a good man should
01:19:28 ►
Oh, free now, baby
01:19:33 ►
And free from your spell
01:19:39 ►
Free, free, free now be
01:19:45 ►
and free from your spell
01:19:49 ►
now that it’s all over
01:19:54 ►
all I can do
01:19:57 ►
is wish you well Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.