Program Notes
Guest speaker: Daniel Pinchbeck
Today’s podcast features the 2014 Palenque Norte Lecture delivered by Daniel Pinchbeck. Beginning with a discussion of his experimentation with toad venom (primary active ingredient 5MEO-DMT), his interaction with the audience leads down many of the different roads that Daniel has traveled as he was gathering information for his books Breaking Open the Head, and 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Daniel is also the co-founder of RealitySandwich.com, The Evolver Network, and the Center for Planetary Culture.
Daniel Pinchbeck’s Website
Reality Sandwich
The Center for Planetary Culture
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism
By Daniel Pinchbeck
2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl
By Daniel Pinchbeck
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And I would like to begin today’s program by sending a big well done to the people of Ireland
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who voted in favor of same-sex marriage last week.
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As you no doubt already know, Ireland is the first nation on earth to submit this question directly to its citizens,
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a tactic that I am told is called democracy.
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Now here in the States, however, democracy is frowned upon,
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and so this nation has submitted that question to nine really old people
00:00:52 ►
who are sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court,
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and need I mention the fact that six of those nine are Roman Catholics.
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Yet there may even be hope here in the States,
00:01:02 ►
considering the fact that prominent members of the Catholic clergy in Ireland have called for their church to take a reality check.
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So it is with great pride that I salute the citizens of Ireland for shedding off their infestation of priests long enough to cast out that Christian homophobia.
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And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you also know that I hold dual citizenship with the U.S. and Ireland
00:01:27 ►
that’s right, my passport has that wonderful little harp on it
00:01:31 ►
and as for welcoming gay rights
00:01:34 ►
my family actually has a stake in that as well
00:01:37 ►
in June of 1993 I took my two youngest children to Ireland for a holiday
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and we postponed the beginning of our touring for one day
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while my youngest son marched in that year’s gay pride parade in Dublin.
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At the time, we never realized that it would take over 20 more years
00:01:54 ►
before the laws caught up with the minds of its citizens,
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but let’s hand it to the Irish for being the very first
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to actually ask their citizens how they felt about it.
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And, by the way, my youngest son is now married to a wonderful man,
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having been married in one of the U.S. jurisdictions that allow it,
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which is how it’s going to be now for everyone in the Republic of Ireland as well.
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Bravo, Ireland, bravo!
00:02:21 ►
So, now let’s get on with today’s program, which is the talk that my friend Daniel Pinchbeck gave at last year’s Palenque Norte lectures at Burning Man.
00:02:31 ►
Over the past few months, Daniel’s name has come up in these podcasts several times, and so I can’t remember how much about him I said recently.
00:02:39 ►
But for the newcomers to the salon today, I’ll give you a few of the headlines.
00:02:43 ►
For the newcomers to the salon today, I’ll give you a few of the headlines.
00:02:52 ►
First of all, as you’ll soon hear, Daniel is an author, lecturer, and one of the founders of Reality Sandwich, among many other pursuits.
00:03:00 ►
But my first contact with Daniel goes back to the 1999 Entheobotany conference that was held in Palenque, Mexico that January.
00:03:07 ►
After that, the next time we met was at the 2002 Burning Man Festival, when early one morning, after I’d just gotten up and was in center camp getting a cup of coffee, I bumped into Daniel,
00:03:12 ►
who, he was just coming home from a night on the then little town of Black Rock City. I think that
00:03:19 ►
there were only about 25,000 people there that year. The following year, though, is when I launched
00:03:24 ►
the Plankque Norte
00:03:25 ►
lectures, and Daniel was the second person who signed up to give a talk. Eric Davis was the first,
00:03:31 ►
by the way. And since then, Daniel has given a Planque Norte lecture at every one of our events,
00:03:37 ►
and Bruce Dahmer is the only other person to do us that honor so far. So I want to make a point
00:03:43 ►
here and give Daniel a great big thank you
00:03:45 ►
for his wonderful support over the years.
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He is most definitely an integral part of the Burning Man experience for me
00:03:52 ►
and for many others.
00:03:53 ►
So now let’s join Daniel Pinchbeck late on the Friday afternoon
00:03:57 ►
on the day before the 2014 burn.
00:04:02 ►
Next we have Daniel Pinchbeck.
00:04:04 ►
Daniel is the best-selling author of a couple of great books,
00:04:08 ►
Breaking Open the Head and also 2012 Return of Quetzalcoatl.
00:04:13 ►
He was also the co-founder of Evolver and Reality Sandwich, editor-in-chief.
00:04:19 ►
He’s the host of a show called Mindshift and his latest project.
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He is co-founded and is the director for the
00:04:26 ►
Center of Planetary Culture. So we’re super excited to have Daniel here with us. He’s
00:04:31 ►
been here at Palenque Norte every single year since 2003. So over a decade now.
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Please welcome Daniel.
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Please welcome Daniel.
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Hey, everybody.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
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Like many of you, I’m a little bit tired.
00:04:58 ►
So I’m going to do my best to be cogent and coherent.
00:05:02 ►
But I’ll also maybe invite some more audience participation at certain points, maybe to move some thoughts along.
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I was going to start, I mean, what I wanted to talk about today was more on the level of kind of mystical, metaphysical ideas and speculations.
00:05:18 ►
A lot of them spurred by some experiences with bufetonein, the 5-MeO dimethyltryptamine.
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How many people here have had an intense experience
00:05:30 ►
of 5-MeO DMT, just out of curiosity?
00:05:34 ►
Cool. How many of those people found it
00:05:36 ►
sort of overwhelming?
00:05:39 ►
Yeah, so I’ve done it a number of times.
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Most recently in New York, maybe a couple years ago, and then in Mexico City.
00:05:50 ►
And the experience in Mexico City was with a shaman who’s been working with the toads in the Sonoran Desert.
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Most of you probably know that 5-MAO-DMT is secreted by the glands of the bufo toad,
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5-MAO-DMT is secreted by the glands of the bufo toad,
00:06:10 ►
which is a pretty kind of gnarly-looking beast that you find in swamps and deserts.
00:06:14 ►
And apparently images of the toad can be found in sacred art
00:06:17 ►
in a lot of indigenous Mexican cultures and so on.
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And the experience of smoking it is,
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essentially if you go past a certain threshold,
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it’s kind of a total immersion or surrendering,
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a kind of total ego death experience
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where you find yourself in a kind of blissful,
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kind of absolute dimension
00:06:40 ►
that visually could be correlated maybe
00:06:44 ►
to kind of Islamic patterns going off
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in all directions forever, kind of white, crystalline, but even that doesn’t really
00:06:51 ►
do it justice. Yeah, so it’s essentially an experience that seems to be very similar to
00:07:00 ►
what Eastern philosophy like Buddhism talks about as nirvana or the void.
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My friend James Orock wrote a book called Tryptamine Palace.
00:07:10 ►
Have people checked that out at all?
00:07:13 ►
He’s actually speaking, I guess he spoke last night actually at Fomarosh.
00:07:16 ►
So he wrote a whole book about 5-MeO-DMT and his experiences with it.
00:07:20 ►
And his kind of perspective on it, which is something that I derived out kind of independently,
00:07:39 ►
And his kind of perspective on it, which is something that I derived independently, is that it’s almost as if an NDMT, which is sense of these hyper-dimensional other realities
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that when you go past a certain threshold seem
00:07:48 ►
in a sense more fully realized than this one
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to the point where it’s quite shocking
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to kind of come back into this reality
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5-MAO-DMT as I said is this kind of immersion
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in the white light of the void or of the absolute
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so James looking at these two experiences,
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suggested that maybe they represent kind of like
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the manifest and the unmanifest aspects of divinity or God.
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I’m actually going to speak pretty freely about spirituality and mysticism.
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I know Plank and Norte tends to sort of tilt a little bit
00:08:24 ►
towards the scientific and the rational. You know, you could of course look at all these experiences
00:08:29 ►
simply as, you know, neurological, cognitive experiences. My own, you know, kind of journey,
00:08:37 ►
which I described in the books, involves so many kind of psychic and transpersonal and
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paranormal, even occult experiences,
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that I ended up becoming more persuaded
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by kind of the occult or shamanic worldview,
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which suggests that, you know,
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kind of underlying the physical universe,
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there’s maybe, you know, consciousness,
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maybe a single consciousness, as Vedanta talks about.
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And maybe even underlying that single consciousness
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is this plane of the unmanifest,
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from where everything emerges
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and to which everything kind of falls back.
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So my experience of smoking the 5-MeO in Mexico City
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was, on the one hand, this total blissful immersion,
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surrendering into
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this state where there’s no subject or object. There’s just kind of this absolute serenity.
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And coming out of it, at first there was a sense of tremendous kind of power and opportunity.
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And then the ego mind kicked back in and I began to feel
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a lot of anxiety
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and fear around it.
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And I’ve heard that
00:09:49 ►
many people have had similar experiences
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and some people actually experience
00:09:54 ►
psychological breakdowns or mental breakdowns
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after 5-MeO-DMT.
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So it’s definitely a substance to be used with caution.
00:10:01 ►
It’s so radical
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and so quick
00:10:04 ►
and emergent into this other reality.
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And yeah, I think that in a way the ego mind finds it very difficult to kind of relinquish
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and become aware that there’s this other domain, this kind of domain of the absolute.
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Yeah.
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Oh, thank you.
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this kind of domain of the absolute.
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Yeah.
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Oh, thank you.
00:10:31 ►
So anyway, so that experience sort of led me to continue a lot of ideas and thoughts that I’ve been exploring in the book 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
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Just to give you maybe a little background about my work, he mentioned the books.
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The first book breaking open the head was on psychedelic shamanism,
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and I visited different tribal groups like the Mazatec Indians in Mexico and the Sequoia tribe in Ecuador to work with ayahuasca.
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And I went through a Bwiti initiation with the Boga in Africa, and I kind of approached the whole subject both from my personal story and then also from kind of cultural, anthropological, philosophical lenses,
00:11:06 ►
really trying to figure out why these types of experiences
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were so crucial for all these indigenous cultures around the world
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and so suppressed and repressed and denied by mainstream modern culture.
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And through the process of writing that book, as I kind of just mentioned,
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I shifted from a scientific materialist worldview to a more expanded worldview that encompassed the works of people like Carl Jung, a sense of there being kind of these domains of the supernatural or the occult or a collective psyche and so on.
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And the second book, so one of the, you know, kind of the shock of that first book was recognizing that, you know, this modern rational worldview had left so much out that it really seems like we were almost dealing with just like a very, you know, portion of reality that was much less than what should be available to us to think about and to know. And that a lot of these indigenous cultures
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had really been exploring this in such depth, and we’d rejected their knowledge or trivialized
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their ways of knowing and being. So I began to wonder if these indigenous cultures had
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some deeper information or deeper knowledge that came from the work they were doing with these shamanic practices and so on.
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And so that led me to explore the Hopi prophecies, the Mayan calendar, which was the basis of 2012.
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And in that book, I never suggested that anything in particular was going to happen on the date,
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December 21st, 2012, or even around that time, but more that we were in this process of a metamorphosis
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of human consciousness and society and civilization.
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And from my perspective, we can see that that process is ongoing and accelerating.
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We can’t necessarily see from where we are now exactly where it leads.
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There’s all sorts of crazy ideas or possibilities.
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There are people who are focused on the technological aspect
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who anticipate something
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they call the singularity.
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The sense that technology is
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accelerating, enhancing our capacities
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and eventually humans are going
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to kind of merge
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with machines and create
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kind of a silicon immortality
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or create a form of intelligence, an artificial
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intelligence that’s so much greater than ours, it kind of just silicon immortality or create a form of intelligence, an artificial intelligence that’s so
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much greater than ours, it kind of just
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supersedes us.
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I’m not,
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I question that
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perspective,
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which we can get into a little bit,
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but it’s an interesting one that’s out there.
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I mean, from where we are now,
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and what I charted in the 2012 book,
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you know, I think there are a few aspects of what’s happening on planet Earth that really suggest that we’re in some type of crucible of metamorphosis.
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You know, perhaps a process on the level of, you know, the planetary level, you know, similar to what happens when, you know, a caterpillar goes into a chrysalis and becomes a butterfly, a kind of real transmutation.
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goes into a chrysalis and becomes a butterfly,
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a kind of real transmutation.
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And the signs for that, from my perspective,
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include the acceleration of technology,
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particularly the creation of the infrastructure for global communications, the Internet and so on,
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which have now linked humanity into a global brain
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so that potentially signals new ideas,
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new techniques, new technologies
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can go across the entire field of the species mind instantaneously.
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And then also one thing that I take seriously is kind of the globalization of knowledge around esoteric and mystical traditions,
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as well as kind of the melding of science and mysticism that we see happening in terms of all sorts of studies
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on Tibetan monks and meditation
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or all the studies on psychedelics in the brain
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that are now being permitted after so many years
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through organizations like Hefter and MAPS and so on.
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But then the other aspect of it is, of course,
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the ecological crisis,
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which at the moment definitely looks like something
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that’s on
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the edge of being out of control. How many people know what the predictions are for temperature
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Celsius rise within this century? What do you think?
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Well, they’re saying four to six Celsius is what the IPCC report, the UN scientist says,
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which is, yeah, 10.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
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But the problem is that many people say that’s a conservative estimate
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because they’re discovering more and more feedback loops in the climate system.
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And they’ve also learned that from past epochs of climate change,
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that when climate change accelerates,
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also learned that from past epochs of climate change, that when climate change accelerates,
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you can have a quite large increase in temperature in a very short period of time, in 10 or 15 years. And so they’ve discovered, for instance, now we’re seeing droughts in California, wildfires
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in forests, the loss of the Arctic ice sheets leading to less of a reflection and more of
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an absorption of the sun’s rays.
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The Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the Earth.
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And they’re basically discovering that all the modelings that they did even
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15, 20 years ago are
00:16:15 ►
less intensive than the process that’s actually
00:16:18 ►
taking place, which also includes
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areas like ocean acidification.
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A few people will always leave the room
00:16:25 ►
when you start talking about this stuff
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because it’s just something that nobody really wants to concentrate on.
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However, I do think that we have to concentrate on,
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and actually the main work project that I’m doing right now
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with my wife, Jana, and Ashley, our director of communications,
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is a project on creating our own kind of wiki
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on a transition, what we’re calling the Regenerative Society wiki.
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What would be the kind of action plan for a rapid transition
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to kind of a regenerative social design
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that would shift in a very short period of time
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to renewable energies,
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to kind of maybe relocalized communities,
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decentralized systems of control,
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and everything else that we would need
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to sort of make a more holistic framework.
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Okay, so one, of course,
00:17:15 ►
one possibility or prospect
00:17:16 ►
is that this is simply
00:17:18 ►
a physical and material project,
00:17:21 ►
the process that’s happening.
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And obviously from some perspectives,
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it could be seen as maybe accidental,
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if everything that’s happening is accidental.
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Or the other idea is more from the Gaian hypothesis
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that maybe it’s actually part of the evolution
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of the Earth itself,
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and maybe also the evolution of consciousness
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as an aspect of Earth’s evolution.
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And so, for instance, one thing that I take seriously as I describe from my work in Breaking
00:17:53 ►
Open the Head in 2012 is the validity of psychic phenomena. How many people here believe that
00:18:00 ►
there’s validity to psychic phenomena, just out of curiosity? And how many people here
00:18:04 ►
don’t? Okay, so we’ve got more for’s than against, but I guess that’s what we would
00:18:08 ►
find here. So, yeah, so for instance, if psychic phenomena exists, it’s a potential form of
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energy that could be accessed for purposes of transformation or evolution. And if you
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look at the practices of tribal societies around the world,
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you know, that was, you know, or traditional civilizations,
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you know, that seems to have been a lot of their focus.
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You know, a good example, for instance, being the Hopi,
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who did, who live in a subsistence level, you know, area of high desert,
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where they have to have a certain level of crops grow every year.
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They can’t survive.
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And so for them, the kachina dances, the rain dances, are actually kind of necessary to
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bring enough rain to support the crops.
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You know, I’ve read the works of anthropologists, even like Cambridge trained kind of empiricists.
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I think one guy, the guy was Peter Whiteley, who spent years with them.
00:19:01 ►
And he admitted that over time he found that there were things about the Hopi
00:19:06 ►
that as an empiricist he couldn’t understand or accept.
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One is that they often seemed to be kind of telepathic
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and could figure out what he was going to talk to them about
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or ask them before he asked the question.
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Then the other is that sometimes these rain dances would work,
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that he would go to a kachina dance,
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it would be a clear blue sky, 120 degrees, blazing hot sun,
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and the Hopi would dance for 20 minutes or half an hour,
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and clouds would gather and rain would fall.
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And he said this didn’t happen all of the time, of course,
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but it happened often enough so that it seemed to him
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to be something more than coincidence.
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So I find this very, very interesting
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as we’re approaching this ecological tipping point,
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and we’re going to be maybe pushed to our limits to find outside-of-the-box ideas or solutions.
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Maybe harnessing psychic energy is something that humanity could learn to do
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to forestall or kind of avert various forms of catastrophe
00:20:04 ►
through using our global communications technologies,
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creating kind of global ceremonies, global workings, global focusing events to cool the
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planet, to preserve and protect threatened species, and so on.
00:20:19 ►
Now, I wouldn’t say that replaces everything that needs to happen on a material and physical
00:20:24 ►
and technical level. It would just be another aspect of this transition. And I think part of the transition
00:20:30 ►
is going from, you know, in many areas, kind of dualistic either or thinking to more like
00:20:35 ►
a non-dualistic framework, a both and kind of framework.
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And so one of the main thinkers, are you guys following this? Okay, cool.
00:20:45 ►
One of the main thinkers that I explored in the 2012 book
00:20:49 ►
who I discovered and was really in awe of this masterpiece he wrote
00:20:54 ►
was this Austrian philosopher, Gene Gebser,
00:20:56 ►
who wrote a book called The Ever-Present Origin.
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And as a typical kind of German-Austrian, Germanic kind of thinker,
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he’s very structural.
00:21:06 ►
And so he likes the word structure.
00:21:07 ►
And he looks at the evolution of consciousness
00:21:09 ►
in terms of these different levels or structures,
00:21:13 ►
each one being a different way of conceiving or realizing time and space.
00:21:18 ►
And in each one, there are actually being different capacities
00:21:22 ►
and potentialities that humans possess.
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So the book is called The Ever-Present Origin.
00:21:30 ►
So the aboriginal cultures, aboriginal means of the origin.
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For the first level of consciousness, in the book he calls archaic,
00:21:38 ►
but we can call it aboriginal, is a consciousness that is aware that every moment is the origin,
00:21:44 ►
that you’re not
00:21:46 ►
really going anywhere, that there’s no progress, there’s no cycle, there’s no return, there’s
00:21:53 ►
just origin.
00:21:55 ►
And so for the aboriginals, every ritual act that they do is just meant to help preserve
00:22:00 ►
creation in its perfection, its perfect state.
00:22:06 ►
Then there’s a number of these levels,
00:22:08 ►
but sort of the next big one is the mythical level,
00:22:11 ►
which is civilizations like the Hindu or ancient Greece
00:22:16 ►
or ancient Egypt or the ancient Maya,
00:22:18 ►
kind of all of the traditional civilizations
00:22:21 ►
which perceive time in terms of these huge cycles.
00:22:24 ►
So it could be the procession of the equinoxes for Egypt
00:22:27 ►
or the Mayan long-count calendar,
00:22:30 ►
these 5,125-year cycles for the Maya,
00:22:33 ►
or the Yuga cycle of the Hindus,
00:22:35 ►
this now being the Iron Age of the Yuga,
00:22:39 ►
which means at some point there’s a transition back to Golden Age.
00:22:45 ►
And so then there was, you know,
00:22:46 ►
after the sort of mythical, mythological structure of consciousness,
00:22:50 ►
which perceived everything in terms of cycles,
00:22:52 ►
there was the development of what Gebser talks about
00:22:55 ►
as the mental rational structure level of consciousness,
00:22:58 ►
which perceived space, which kind of opened up perspective
00:23:02 ►
and perceived space and time in a new way,
00:23:06 ►
in a spatialized way, in a linear way.
00:23:08 ►
So we conceive of progress.
00:23:10 ►
We conceive of history.
00:23:12 ►
We conceive of time as being something
00:23:14 ►
that’s similar to space or
00:23:16 ►
something similar to matter.
00:23:18 ►
So the way we think about time or talk about time
00:23:20 ►
is wasting time,
00:23:22 ►
spending time, running out of time.
00:23:24 ►
So we’re always envisioning time
00:23:26 ►
as a kind of quantity, which we can’t quite get our hands around, which is always kind
00:23:29 ►
of running away from us or running out from under us. So Gebser believes that mental rational
00:23:36 ►
consciousness is kind of marked by tremendous time anxiety and you know, and this pressure, you know, this clock time,
00:23:45 ►
you know, and so on. And that ultimately the mental rational structure will be superseded
00:23:50 ►
by another structure of consciousness, which he calls the integral or the aperspectival
00:23:55 ►
structure of consciousness, which is marked by space timelessness, kind of a return at
00:24:01 ►
a higher octave to that original awareness of
00:24:06 ►
the continuous
00:24:07 ►
presence of origin.
00:24:12 ►
So yeah,
00:24:13 ►
I found that very
00:24:15 ►
interesting and intriguing and
00:24:18 ►
helped me begin to make sense of
00:24:20 ►
the sort of prophetic thought
00:24:22 ►
structure of cultures like the Maya and the Hopi
00:24:24 ►
who talk about this being like the fourth world.
00:24:28 ►
The Hopi talk about this as the fourth world.
00:24:30 ►
The Aztecs and the Maya talk about the age of the fifth sun.
00:24:34 ►
This idea that there are these kind of psychical transformations of humanity,
00:24:39 ►
which I also then linked to the work of Rudolf Steiner,
00:24:49 ►
who was a visionary philosopher of the 19th and 20th century.
00:24:50 ►
Have people read Steiner at all or know anything about him?
00:24:56 ►
He created the Waldorf Schools, biodynamic agriculture.
00:24:59 ►
One of the interesting things about him is that he was an extraordinary visionary who was able to apply these kind of astral visions and ideas that he had
00:25:04 ►
in really practical
00:25:05 ►
ways. So, Waldorf was one of the world’s most successful independent educational movements,
00:25:11 ►
biodynamic agriculture is an important forerunner for organic agriculture and so on.
00:25:17 ►
And so Steiner was somebody who, according to him, just always had kind of visionary access to what he talked about as the astral plane or the Akashic record.
00:25:28 ►
And essentially, one might think similar to the types of visionary experiences
00:25:33 ►
one has on ayahuasca or high doses of LSD or mushrooms,
00:25:38 ►
where you’re able to see into all of these different dimensions or realities.
00:25:42 ►
So for Steiner, this was just a kind of dispensation
00:25:45 ►
that he had for whatever reason since early childhood. But he began to realize that the
00:25:50 ►
people around him didn’t have this ability. And when he tried to talk about his visions,
00:25:55 ►
they would ridicule him or be kind of afraid of him. So he basically shut up about it.
00:26:00 ►
And he waited until he’d had a doctorate in philosophy and had been doing a whole bunch of work on Goethe’s science papers
00:26:06 ►
to begin to express his own worldview, his own vision.
00:26:11 ►
And he ended up writing so many books,
00:26:14 ►
so many thousands of lectures on so many topics.
00:26:17 ►
And much of it will seem quite eccentric
00:26:19 ►
or even kind of maybe ludicrous aspects of it might seem ludicrous.
00:26:24 ►
It was definitely at the time also of the theosophists,
00:26:27 ►
Madame Blavatsky and so on,
00:26:28 ►
and there was a kind of integration with theosophy and anthroposophy
00:26:32 ►
and some of the other movements of that time
00:26:34 ►
in an effort to integrate kind of Eastern metaphysics
00:26:37 ►
and the Western occult tradition,
00:26:40 ►
which was basically part of what Steiner was doing.
00:26:42 ►
But among the very, I think, very interesting things that Steiner talked about
00:26:46 ►
even at the dawn of the 20th century
00:26:48 ►
he said that his mission
00:26:50 ►
the reason that he had reincarnated on the earth at that point in time
00:26:54 ►
was actually to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the west
00:26:57 ►
and he said that not only did
00:26:59 ►
humans incarnate again and again
00:27:03 ►
but the earth itself incarnated in different forms.
00:27:07 ►
And he said that this was currently
00:27:08 ►
the fourth incarnation of the Earth,
00:27:11 ►
and we were on the cusp or the transition
00:27:13 ►
to what he talked about as the fifth incarnation of the Earth.
00:27:16 ►
I mean, one thing that I really tried to do in my work
00:27:19 ►
was to look at all these different kind of articulations,
00:27:23 ►
you know, or expressions of what seems to be happening, recognizing
00:27:27 ►
that the map is not the territory and none of them are perfect, but all of them are tools
00:27:32 ►
for us to think and imagine and then hopefully maybe co-create what emerges and what develops.
00:27:43 ►
So in terms of Steiner’s concept of these incarnations of the earth,
00:27:47 ►
they really represent different states
00:27:49 ►
or different levels of consciousness,
00:27:51 ►
very much like Gebser was talking about.
00:27:54 ►
And so, for instance, he talked about how
00:27:57 ►
in the first earth,
00:28:00 ►
humans only possessed the physical body
00:28:02 ►
or some rudiment of it.
00:28:04 ►
Then we gained the etheric body in the second world
00:28:07 ►
then the astral body
00:28:08 ►
then finally in the fourth world which we’re in presently
00:28:11 ►
we gain the ego or the I
00:28:13 ►
we gain our sense of
00:28:15 ►
separate individual identity
00:28:17 ►
our sense of
00:28:18 ►
our unique self, our sense of free will
00:28:21 ►
and Steiner believed
00:28:23 ►
that the
00:28:23 ►
next incarnation of the earth
00:28:26 ►
that we were moving towards
00:28:27 ►
involved the creation of a new subtle body, in a sense,
00:28:32 ►
or some kind of body or form.
00:28:35 ►
So, yeah, you could look at, as I said,
00:28:39 ►
the physical body, which is the material body,
00:28:43 ►
the etheric body, which is kind of the life body, the astral body, which is the dream body. For Steiner, you know, when we go to
00:28:49 ►
sleep at night, the eye or the ego and the astral body unite and they take off on journeys
00:28:56 ►
into the astral realms and then bring back information to the sleeping person. And yes, so you had the astral body
00:29:07 ►
and then finally the eye or the ego.
00:29:10 ►
But the problem from Siner’s perspective
00:29:12 ►
was that in our time,
00:29:15 ►
through the astral body,
00:29:16 ►
through all these other dimensions and other worlds,
00:29:18 ►
these tremendous cravings and yearnings and desires
00:29:21 ►
pour into us.
00:29:23 ►
And when the eye is weakly developed,
00:29:25 ►
it’s more than we can handle.
00:29:27 ►
So it leads people to addictions,
00:29:29 ►
to patterns of self-destruction,
00:29:31 ►
to a lot of the negative, to greed,
00:29:34 ►
to all of this stuff.
00:29:35 ►
So Steiner said that the next incarnation of the Earth,
00:29:38 ►
the fifth one, would mark the development
00:29:41 ►
of what he called the spirit self,
00:29:43 ►
which would be as the I or the ego grew stronger,
00:29:46 ►
it was able to transmute or transform the astral body
00:29:49 ►
and take mastery over it.
00:29:51 ►
And as the astral body was transmuted or transformed,
00:29:54 ►
it created something that Steiner talked about
00:29:56 ►
as the spirit self.
00:29:58 ►
So once again, this idea that we were on the cusp
00:30:00 ►
of this transition from this mental rational worldview, this egoic individualistic world, to something that maybe is more subtle, more psychic.
00:30:18 ►
And then for me, I correlate this with a lot of what we see happening in technology.
00:30:23 ►
this with a lot of what we see happening in technology.
00:30:27 ►
One thing that’s super interesting to me is the trajectory that seems to suggest that the human imagination is
00:30:31 ►
being liberated in more and more
00:30:36 ►
rapid phases. So a thousand or two thousand
00:30:40 ►
years ago, if you wanted to carve a sculpture out of stone, you’d have had to spend
00:30:44 ►
decades as an apprentice. You’d have had to find a block of marble. You know, you’d have had
00:30:49 ►
to really, really do all this incredible work. You know, today, theoretically, you can do
00:30:55 ►
a sketch, find somebody to render it, find a 3D printer, and in an hour, you could have,
00:31:00 ►
you know, a sculpture made. You know, similarly, we see that with all the media, with the ability to create a magazine on the web
00:31:07 ►
or a film or whatever it is.
00:31:10 ►
So it’s like our imaginative capacities
00:31:13 ►
are being sped up.
00:31:15 ►
At the same time, science and technology
00:31:17 ►
are exploring kind of deeper and deeper levels
00:31:19 ►
or layers of the physical world.
00:31:21 ►
I have friends who are MIT chemical engineers
00:31:24 ►
who do work with nanotechnologies and so on,
00:31:27 ►
and they talk about how when they think about the trend
00:31:29 ►
of what’s happening in science and technology,
00:31:33 ►
they see it leading to what they call ITM,
00:31:36 ►
which would be instantaneous thought manifestation,
00:31:40 ►
where as soon as you had a thought,
00:31:43 ►
you’d be able to materialize or project it in physical form.
00:31:47 ►
And in that sense, I think we could look at the evolution of technology as simply an aspect or projection of the evolution of consciousness itself.
00:31:57 ►
In that if we think about what technology is, it’s like we have an idea, we create a tool, the tool then reflects us back at ourselves.
00:32:05 ►
We then iterate and we can create another tool.
00:32:08 ►
That tool teaches us something new about ourselves, you know, and we can see this, you know, very clearly in how, you know, computers, you know, everything we’ve discovered and learned through computers has also become like operative metaphors for, you know, for cognitive processes, for memory, for thought, and so on.
00:32:28 ►
Yeah, so I think that’s just a very interesting prospect.
00:32:32 ►
So to go back to the larger kind of theme,
00:32:36 ►
I started talking about 5-MeO-DMT and the sense of this kind of…
00:32:41 ►
Yeah? Yeah.
00:32:42 ►
Well, I mean, now you’re looking…
00:32:43 ►
I mean, I don’t even know how I think about this or feel about it,
00:32:46 ►
but eventually we may be able to
00:32:48 ►
3D print new life forms.
00:32:51 ►
I mean,
00:32:51 ►
or re-engineer
00:32:54 ►
extinct species,
00:32:55 ►
make them de-extinct.
00:32:57 ►
Or then
00:32:58 ►
combine species. I mean, they’re already doing that.
00:33:01 ►
The backyard
00:33:03 ►
geneticists are
00:33:05 ►
making, genetic engineers are making
00:33:07 ►
glow-in-the-dark trees
00:33:09 ►
and plants right now. I mean,
00:33:11 ►
I don’t necessarily think any of that is
00:33:13 ►
good or bad. I don’t even know what good or bad
00:33:15 ►
is in a sense. It’s part of what’s happening
00:33:17 ►
or emerging right now, I guess.
00:33:19 ►
And we have to, you know, look at it
00:33:21 ►
straight in the eye. I mean, I very
00:33:23 ►
much agree with William Blake’s idea
00:33:25 ►
that the imagination is not just a state,
00:33:29 ►
it’s the human existence in itself.
00:33:32 ►
What we’re experiencing in terms of, once again,
00:33:35 ►
Carl Jung’s idea of the mythological unconscious,
00:33:39 ►
it’s like there’s an archetypal process
00:33:42 ►
that in a way it’s like a myth that’s woven into
00:33:46 ►
reality
00:33:47 ►
and in that sense
00:33:51 ►
yeah I feel that we’re on the cusp of
00:33:52 ►
liberating the imagination
00:33:54 ►
to a tremendous degree and that’s
00:33:56 ►
very much what we see at Burning Man
00:33:58 ►
that’s I think what draws people here
00:34:00 ►
is we see this capacity that we now
00:34:02 ►
have to go from
00:34:04 ►
just being trapped in the inertia
00:34:06 ►
of this industrial capitalist
00:34:08 ►
mega machine that’s all about money
00:34:10 ►
and materialism to somehow
00:34:11 ►
at the edge of that
00:34:13 ►
structure transmuting it
00:34:16 ►
making a metamorphosis so it’s about
00:34:18 ►
joy,
00:34:20 ►
individual expression,
00:34:22 ►
community expression,
00:34:24 ►
creativity and the liberation of the imagination.
00:34:29 ►
So for me, that’s what is suggested as kind of a potential teleology or destiny for us.
00:34:37 ►
And then beyond that, who knows?
00:34:40 ►
I mean, there may be different levels.
00:34:45 ►
Once again, this idea that there are these levels or structures of consciousness,
00:34:48 ►
something that Gebser talks about, that Steiner talks about in his own way.
00:34:52 ►
Another thinker who talks about it is Orobindo, who talks about,
00:34:57 ►
he wrote a book called The Life Divine, which I haven’t read all of it.
00:35:00 ►
It’s like a zillion pages, like 1,300 pages or something.
00:35:03 ►
But essentially he looks at this idea that we’re in this mental level of consciousness, and then there’s this
00:35:10 ►
Brahma or the Atman or the divinity or the absolute. And he develops a very compelling
00:35:18 ►
kind of metaphysical philosophical argument that there are other stages in this process,
00:35:23 ►
like intermediary stages. He talks about something that he calls
00:35:26 ►
the descent of the supermind
00:35:27 ►
as the potential next stage
00:35:30 ►
of human evolution.
00:35:33 ►
I’m sorry if this is super heady.
00:35:34 ►
I hope you guys are enjoying it.
00:35:36 ►
Alright, cool.
00:35:38 ►
I just decided to go for it. This is actually
00:35:40 ►
more or less what I think about all the time,
00:35:42 ►
or a lot of the time, so I might as well just get it
00:35:44 ►
out of my head and share it and then you can
00:35:46 ►
bounce it around in your head for a while.
00:35:48 ►
And then you can get a headache and tell me what you think.
00:35:51 ►
Can you repeat that writer’s name?
00:35:53 ►
Which one?
00:35:55 ►
Aurobindo?
00:35:56 ►
He was an Indian mystic
00:35:57 ►
who created a
00:36:00 ►
utopian community
00:36:02 ►
in India called Auroville
00:36:03 ►
with his partner who’s called the Mother.
00:36:06 ►
And he was one of the major…
00:36:08 ►
He very much liked… I would say Steiner
00:36:09 ►
and Aurobindo are the
00:36:11 ►
Western and Indian greatest
00:36:14 ►
metaphysical thinkers
00:36:15 ►
of the 20th century.
00:36:18 ►
Yeah, so this idea that
00:36:19 ►
on the way back to
00:36:22 ►
unity or the absolute
00:36:23 ►
or nirvana, there are these different stages or dimensions.
00:36:28 ►
And as chaotic and turbulent and kind of in some ways disastrous as our system, our civilization may seem at this moment, we’re that, I think, most intensely at a place like Burning Man, where we can see how much work so many people have done on themselves
00:36:47 ►
to reach new levels of awareness, new levels of illumination, and so on.
00:36:54 ►
You know?
00:36:57 ►
I mean, in terms of the Vedantic thought, there are different levels of consciousness.
00:37:04 ►
There’s a waking consciousness, there’s dream sleep consciousness,
00:37:08 ►
and then there’s dreamless sleep.
00:37:09 ►
And for them, they believe that the dreamless sleep
00:37:11 ►
is actually the deepest level of consciousness.
00:37:14 ►
And once again, we’re usually not aware in dreamless sleep,
00:37:18 ►
but actually you apparently can become aware,
00:37:22 ►
you can become conscious in dreamless sleep consciousness.
00:37:27 ►
Tibetan lamas talk about it. If you read kind of the Tibetan yoga of sleep and dream is one
00:37:33 ►
excellent book, which has a whole set of practices for lucid dreaming. And ultimately, if you follow
00:37:37 ►
the practices, if you develop your lucid dreaming practice, you’re then ultimately able to then
00:37:42 ►
kind of be conscious or aware in this kind of space-timeless state of dreamless sleep.
00:37:51 ►
So, yeah, I guess also my other level of thinking and work right now is, as I said,
00:37:57 ►
looking at through the new organization we started, Center for Planetary Culture,
00:38:02 ►
considering the ecological crisis, the amount of social and wealth injustice on the planet,
00:38:07 ►
and, you know, what would be a rapid transition strategy.
00:38:11 ►
But from my perspective, for that transition to be effective,
00:38:15 ►
to actually happen,
00:38:17 ►
there also needs to be kind of a new vision or a new myth
00:38:21 ►
or a new construct of where humanity is going.
00:38:24 ►
Because over the last several hundred years,
00:38:26 ►
I mean, we transitioned from, you know, kind of imperialism,
00:38:30 ►
you know, kind of missionary Christianity
00:38:31 ►
to kind of just materialism,
00:38:36 ►
kind of get for yourself what you can,
00:38:39 ►
you know, money as kind of the god of the system in a way,
00:38:43 ►
a naive faith that technology can solve all the problems created by technologies.
00:38:49 ►
So, you know, potentially, from my perspective,
00:38:51 ►
a future orientation for human society could be in two directions.
00:38:57 ►
It would be both simultaneously up and out and down and in.
00:39:01 ►
Up and out would be reviving the idea that was very popular in the 60s
00:39:05 ►
that humanity actually could
00:39:07 ►
take the living biosphere to other worlds
00:39:11 ►
and settle them.
00:39:15 ►
But I very much like Lynn Margolis,
00:39:17 ►
who was Carl Sagan’s wife.
00:39:20 ►
She wrote a book called Microcosmos.
00:39:22 ►
And she realized in that book,
00:39:24 ►
she discussed how almost everything that humans are doing with technologies
00:39:27 ►
we find present on the microcosmic level.
00:39:31 ►
So viruses are able to transfer genes around the whole surface of the planet
00:39:34 ►
super fast, almost as if they had their own kind of global communication system.
00:39:40 ►
In the same way microorganisms are able to make an eye,
00:39:45 ►
we now make satellite dishes to look out into space, you know.
00:39:48 ►
So in a way, we think we’re doing technology,
00:39:51 ►
but it may be more than technology is just happening or emerging through us.
00:39:54 ►
We’re kind of incubating technology on behalf of this Gaian mind or Gaian intelligence.
00:40:01 ►
And if, according to the Gaian hypothesis,
00:40:03 ►
if the Earth is something like
00:40:05 ►
a giant living organism uh what is it that uh you know organisms seek to do they seek to uh
00:40:12 ►
reproduce themselves right so in a sense it could be that humans are being the human species is
00:40:18 ►
being auditioned or apprenticed to be the kind of um disseminators of the biosphere to take it from the earth and bring it to other worlds.
00:40:27 ►
So that would be the kind of up and out aspect
00:40:29 ►
of where we might consider ourselves going as a species,
00:40:33 ►
whether in 50 years or 100 years or 50,000 years, God knows.
00:40:38 ►
And the other direction would be down and in,
00:40:41 ►
into the qualitative exploration of body-mind states and the development and
00:40:51 ►
enhancement of our various potentially psychic capacities.
00:40:57 ►
This is an idea that was developed very much by Jose Arguelles, who’s one of my favorite
00:41:03 ►
kind of thinkers.
00:41:05 ►
He talked about how we’re on the cusp of shifting
00:41:07 ►
from material civilization to psychotechnic civilization,
00:41:11 ►
where we would use all the tools of technology
00:41:13 ►
to kind of develop all of our cognitive capacities,
00:41:19 ►
all of our psychic capacities.
00:41:21 ►
This type of idea is also developed very recently
00:41:23 ►
in a book by Tom Roberts
00:41:25 ►
called The Psychedelic Future of the Mind. And yeah, in that book, you know, Roberts suggests
00:41:31 ►
that the singularity may not be so much a technological singularity as a kind of
00:41:37 ►
awakening of all of these, you know, dormant capacities of the human mind.
00:41:46 ►
awakening of all of these dormant capacities of the human mind. And he notes that we could really use our technical genius to accelerate and enhance our cognitive functioning.
00:41:53 ►
So for instance, in that book he talks about how there’s all these documented cases of
00:41:57 ►
people getting struck by lightning and suddenly developing a new skill, like being able to
00:42:02 ►
sight-read music or access a language or something. And so if that’s a dormant
00:42:07 ►
faculty in the human brain that somehow is responded,
00:42:13 ►
is a construct
00:42:16 ►
that happens due to some electromagnetic stimulation of a certain structure of the brain,
00:42:20 ►
you could theoretically artificially induce it. At the same time
00:42:24 ►
you see kind of, yeah, like the scientist Persinger in Canada
00:42:30 ►
developed what’s called the God Helmet that was able to stimulate a part of the brain
00:42:34 ►
that reliably produced a feeling of divine awe or divine terror, the sense of an enormous
00:42:41 ►
presence from outside.
00:42:43 ►
You know, so in this sense, we may be very much just at the beginning
00:42:46 ►
of exploring qualitative states,
00:42:51 ►
qualitative capacities of existence.
00:42:54 ►
And once again, I feel that Burning Man is a template for that
00:42:57 ►
in that we accept, on some levels,
00:43:00 ►
tremendous uncomfortableness
00:43:02 ►
in order to have a deeper intensity
00:43:06 ►
of qualitative experience.
00:43:09 ►
So I guess I could yap on and on.
00:43:12 ►
I’m sort of maybe running out of time,
00:43:13 ►
but I could take a couple questions if you’ve got one.
00:43:15 ►
Yeah.
00:43:16 ►
Yeah.
00:43:17 ►
Well, Buckminster Fuller has definitely been
00:43:19 ►
a huge inspiration for me.
00:43:20 ►
I mean, I made a documentary film,
00:43:22 ►
which I think is free to watch now on Vimeo,
00:43:24 ►
called 2012 Time for Change
00:43:25 ►
and Buckminster Fuller was
00:43:28 ►
the linchpin of the film
00:43:29 ►
and essentially thinking about his
00:43:31 ►
design science principles
00:43:33 ►
as really the template for how we would
00:43:35 ►
rethink the
00:43:37 ►
designs we’re now using
00:43:39 ►
socially and technically and so on.
00:43:41 ►
I mean, Bucky realized that
00:43:43 ►
humans were designing.
00:43:45 ►
Have people read his books?
00:43:46 ►
Has people read Utopia or Oblivion?
00:43:49 ►
Definitely recommend that short book
00:43:51 ►
or Operation Spaceship Earth,
00:43:54 ►
that essentially humans were designing
00:43:56 ►
in ways that sought to dominate or control natural processes
00:44:00 ►
rather than learning from nature
00:44:02 ►
and imitating how it functions.
00:44:06 ►
So in the film, we looked at permaculture as a design science applied to agriculture.
00:44:10 ►
I mean, in terms of the excess CO2 production, just a worldwide global shift from industrialized
00:44:16 ►
monoculture agriculture to permaculture and ecological agriculture would reduce CO2 by
00:44:23 ►
30%, according to a lot of studies.
00:44:27 ►
So, yeah, so, and we looked at it even in terms of monetary systems, you know, and there
00:44:32 ►
again, like, the implementation of Buckminster Fuller’s ideas often involves kind of looking
00:44:39 ►
back at traditional cultures and tribal societies and how they created systems that were highly
00:44:46 ►
resilient and
00:44:47 ►
functional and non-destructive to
00:44:49 ►
their local ecosystems.
00:44:51 ►
For instance, the guy who just won the Buckminster Fuller Prize
00:44:54 ►
two years ago developed a whole
00:44:56 ►
system for
00:44:57 ►
reversing desertification
00:45:01 ►
on grasslands that had been turning to deserts
00:45:04 ►
through rotating cattle,
00:45:07 ►
because he discovered that the nomads who were herding on the steps,
00:45:13 ►
the way that the cattle was rotated and their saliva and feces and all that stuff
00:45:18 ►
actually kept the soil moist and allowed for the grasslands to stay grassy.
00:45:26 ►
So he now has applied almost like a military precision
00:45:30 ►
to what these nomadic herders were doing kind of just naturally through trial and error.
00:45:36 ►
So a lot of the, in design science,
00:45:38 ►
a lot of the cutting edge of the thought is the kind of bringing together of indigenous wisdom
00:45:43 ►
and postmodern technologies and techniques?
00:45:47 ►
That’s a great question. I don’t even know if I have a total answer.
00:45:50 ►
I mean, there’s something like when you go to visit, you know, Palenque or what’s the big one outside of Mexico City, Teotihuacan?
00:45:57 ►
I mean, they seem like, you know, hyper-advanced kind of artifacts.
00:46:06 ►
You sense that there was something very, very profound
00:46:08 ►
and kind of numinous going on there
00:46:10 ►
that’s kind of beyond our current level
00:46:13 ►
or capacity to understand.
00:46:17 ►
And once again, maybe you see Burning Man,
00:46:19 ►
the structures here and the orientation of people here
00:46:21 ►
kind of pointing towards the re-accessing of that knowledge.
00:46:27 ►
Maybe it involved all sorts of psychotechnical practices,
00:46:32 ►
occult practices.
00:46:36 ►
It definitely seems that when people go into psychedelic states,
00:46:41 ►
there’s like an automatic re-accessing of a lot of information, almost an overwhelming
00:46:46 ►
amount of information. And these cultures
00:46:48 ►
maybe had the time over thousands
00:46:50 ►
of years to
00:46:51 ►
study it, mediate it,
00:46:54 ►
make use of it.
00:46:56 ►
And maybe it’s part of our
00:46:58 ►
destiny then to redevelop
00:47:00 ►
in that direction while at the
00:47:02 ►
same time
00:47:03 ►
having gone on our evolution
00:47:05 ►
of science and rational knowledge and technology would be an aspect of what we would now apply,
00:47:12 ►
you know, to that knowledge, you know, to make it maybe more full or more complete,
00:47:16 ►
you know.
00:47:17 ►
I mean, it’s amazing what the Maya knew and also what they didn’t know.
00:47:20 ►
You know, they could observe these, you know, tremendous long, these tremendous long movements of the stars and
00:47:25 ►
the heavenly bodies and so on. But as far as we know, they didn’t know that the earth
00:47:30 ►
was circling the sun. Well, I mean, listen, it’s all theoretical.
00:47:37 ►
I mean, and any construct is just a construct. And we tend to get trapped in constructs.
00:47:43 ►
Like I really like Joseph Chilton Pierce’s idea
00:47:46 ►
that in a way culture is our enemy
00:47:48 ►
because culture always kind of,
00:47:51 ►
it’s like a crystallization or rigidification of something
00:47:56 ►
that was once just a vision or an experience
00:47:59 ►
and then people begin to believe in the rigidification.
00:48:03 ►
So I don’t want to do that.
00:48:03 ►
I like all these different ways of articulating,
00:48:06 ►
and I’m not saying that any of them is the way or the right way,
00:48:09 ►
but by having a range of them and seeing how they correlate,
00:48:12 ►
then in the spaces kind of in between them,
00:48:14 ►
we get a more full sense or more comprehensive sense,
00:48:17 ►
potentially, of what’s happening.
00:48:18 ►
Yeah, he’s wondering about the experience of ego death,
00:48:23 ►
and what was the rest of it?
00:48:24 ►
And psychedelics, how that affects different states of consciousness.
00:48:30 ►
What is the ego death experience?
00:48:32 ►
Yeah, I mean, I guess it was this 5-MeO-DMT experience
00:48:38 ►
was the most powerful one that I’d had.
00:48:41 ►
It’s essentially, yeah, it’s like
00:48:42 ►
disappearance of a subject-object
00:48:46 ►
distinction. You know, on the one hand, it’s kind of like a merging with everything, which
00:48:51 ►
is very much what they talk about enlightenment. But at the other hand, it’s like the disappearance
00:48:55 ►
of everything at the same time. So it’s like a paradoxical, you know, non-dual state, you
00:49:03 ►
know. And it’s too much for our ego minds to hold onto at this point because
00:49:10 ►
we’re connected to this. This is what we know.
00:49:13 ►
I was getting various flavors of DMT. They pop the bubble of the ego and hence
00:49:22 ►
they unhinge you from the constraint of linear time.
00:49:27 ►
And where you even experience the, you know, in the nuclear physics aspect of multiple paths,
00:49:34 ►
which you could, potentials which you could have traveled on or did travel on or may travel on.
00:49:38 ►
So I think that seems to me to be the key to those substances.
00:49:44 ►
Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
00:49:46 ►
I mean, you know, according to quantum physicists,
00:49:51 ►
you know, what we experience as space-time, in a sense,
00:49:54 ►
already exists on a higher dimension as a block, you know.
00:49:58 ►
We’re seeing it through our little periscope, you know,
00:50:01 ►
much as we might look down at a three-dimensional sculpture
00:50:04 ►
and see ants, you know, moving around in it, they would only see their little limited trajectory. We’re
00:50:09 ►
kind of having that same experience of the space-time continuum, but there is another
00:50:14 ►
point from a higher dimension where the whole thing is comprehensible as one.
00:50:19 ►
And it may be that when we talk about galactic level civilizations, aliens and so on, it may be that they are beings who’ve passed through that threshold.
00:50:35 ►
So to some extent or other, we’re able to access that higher dimensional reality.
00:50:44 ►
Yeah.
00:50:46 ►
We got more questions over here.
00:50:49 ►
Any women?
00:50:52 ►
Any women have a question?
00:50:53 ►
Or is it all men?
00:50:55 ►
All right.
00:50:56 ►
Go ahead.
00:50:59 ►
I just want to ask you this question about technology
00:51:02 ►
because essentially I believe that we’re going to move
00:51:04 ►
beyond the need to take an actual plant or chemical substance.
00:51:07 ►
So there’s two ways I think personally that this is going,
00:51:10 ►
and one is that eventually with brain technology,
00:51:12 ►
we’ll figure out how to determine what those psychedelic programs are,
00:51:17 ►
pushing the buttons inside of our brains and our neurotransmitters
00:51:20 ►
so that we can put on headphones and eventually just turn the dial
00:51:23 ►
and be able to experience it or turn it off.
00:51:26 ►
But what are your thoughts on that?
00:51:28 ►
And then ultimate virtual reality, not just goggles you put on,
00:51:31 ►
but actually like lucid dream when we really start getting real with virtual reality.
00:51:35 ►
What are your thoughts on where that’s going?
00:51:38 ►
Well, once again, I mean, I don’t know, but it’s certainly interesting.
00:51:43 ►
You know, there’s also this idea that, you know,
00:51:45 ►
serious Cambridge philosophers
00:51:47 ►
like this guy Nick Bostrom are now
00:51:49 ►
exploring this idea that the physical
00:51:52 ►
universe itself could very well
00:51:54 ►
be a simulation. And they’re trying
00:51:56 ►
to figure out kind of
00:51:58 ►
ways to look at the boundary
00:51:59 ►
constraints, like, you know,
00:52:02 ►
at the edges, if it pixelates
00:52:04 ►
out, you know, that would be a good sign
00:52:06 ►
that it’s actually some form of simulation. So what would that mean? Is it a simulation within
00:52:10 ►
a simulation within a simulation? Is it like the Escher hand drawing the hand drawing the hand
00:52:15 ►
drawing the hand? I don’t know. You know, maybe, maybe, once again, these things are so inherently
00:52:21 ►
paradoxical, that, you know, it’s going to be beyond our current form of language, perhaps,
00:52:28 ►
to even express them.
00:52:30 ►
But this idea of the universe being a kind of simulation
00:52:33 ►
resonates very much with Hindu ideas of Maya or Leela and so on.
00:52:41 ►
Yeah, well, I mean, there’s the potential.
00:52:47 ►
I mean, from my perspective at this point point having looked at this stuff so deeply it’s you know the the i
00:52:51 ►
can’t totally understand the the ability of the you know the human mind individually and collectively
00:52:57 ►
to block out what’s happening ecologically you know so you have people for instance who
00:53:02 ►
you know have these massive companies now like Facebook and Google who are still very young.
00:53:07 ►
They’re in their 30s.
00:53:08 ►
So if they look just at the science of what’s happening on the planet, within 50 years, it’s essentially an uninhabitable planet.
00:53:15 ►
They can reach 1.2 billion people or more with an email or a social technology tomorrow.
00:53:21 ►
or a social technology tomorrow.
00:53:25 ►
You know, so, you know, imagine if they, you know,
00:53:28 ►
had a realization that the trip that they’re on,
00:53:32 ►
the inertia of this post-capitalist industrial mega machine,
00:53:35 ►
you know, was just hitting the skids.
00:53:39 ►
You know, they could actually disseminate to, you know,
00:53:41 ►
a huge percentage of the world’s population, including almost everybody who’s educated,
00:53:44 ►
has wealth
00:53:45 ►
and resources and so on, a whole set of ideas around how do you build a rooftop garden?
00:53:52 ►
How do you form local communities with a decentralized power system? What’s the most efficient ways
00:54:00 ►
to go completely renewable in terms of your energy supply and feed back that energy to the grid.
00:54:06 ►
They could be doing that next month.
00:54:09 ►
They could be rolling out the Google Facebook
00:54:11 ►
climate crisis prevention network.
00:54:16 ►
And if they don’t do it, I mean, those aren’t going to be,
00:54:18 ►
just because they’re the first billion-person platforms,
00:54:21 ►
the likelihood that others will emerge,
00:54:23 ►
and especially as we’re hitting
00:54:26 ►
this critical time of transition.
00:54:29 ►
Does that answer your question?
00:54:31 ►
Okay, cool.
00:54:33 ►
A wise proposition to start formatting or quantizing the creative expression so that
00:54:40 ►
this artificial intelligence doesn’t treat it as a threat?
00:54:43 ►
Because I could easily see how it could be threatening
00:54:45 ►
to something, a new emerging consciousness like that.
00:54:50 ►
Yeah, I mean, once again, it’s not an area of expertise.
00:54:55 ►
I mean, there are scientists who are, you know,
00:54:57 ►
significantly concerned about artificial intelligence.
00:55:02 ►
You know, it’s something that I would like to know more about, I guess.
00:55:06 ►
I think one of the problems we have right now is that our structures of governance were
00:55:15 ►
created in the 19th century, 18th century.
00:55:18 ►
The nation state government, the liberal democracy was created in the 18th century for a time
00:55:22 ►
when technology and science were pretty slow and things moved at horse and buggy speeds. We don’t really have ways to
00:55:32 ►
collectively respond intelligently to the level of change and technological evolution
00:55:42 ►
that’s happening so rapidly now. So know, so in a way, like,
00:55:46 ►
I think it would only be through,
00:55:48 ►
you know, social networks, social technologies
00:55:50 ►
that, you know, the human population
00:55:53 ►
on a much larger scale
00:55:54 ►
could be given a voice
00:55:56 ►
in the future of these technologies,
00:55:58 ►
you know, how they should be implemented,
00:56:00 ►
you know, what they should be allowed to do,
00:56:02 ►
and so on, you know.
00:56:05 ►
What is the void? What’s that? The void. What so on. What is the void?
00:56:07 ►
What’s that?
00:56:07 ►
The void. What is that?
00:56:08 ►
What is the void?
00:56:09 ►
Yeah.
00:56:10 ►
Yeah, it’s like the unmanifest, I guess.
00:56:13 ►
It’s like the emptiness that underlies the manifestation.
00:56:18 ►
What do you think it is?
00:56:20 ►
I don’t know what it is.
00:56:22 ►
Yeah, I mean, it’s also suchness or tathagata, I guess,
00:56:25 ►
another way of looking at it.
00:56:27 ►
It’s, I guess, it’s this paradoxical non-dual state, you know,
00:56:33 ►
of, you know, the full, you know, I mean, I guess, you know,
00:56:37 ►
Buddhist philosophy talks about, you know, that samsara is actually nirvana,
00:56:41 ►
you know, and nirvana is this um the perfected experience that uh you have through
00:56:47 ►
uh you know i think a substance like 5meo dmt uh at least a glimpse into you know maybe we should
00:56:54 ►
stop there is that good all right guys thank you so much for listening i hope this was was interesting
00:56:59 ►
you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:06 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:11 ►
And while I haven’t seen the schedule that Chris Pezza is organizing
00:57:15 ►
for this year’s Planque Norte lectures,
00:57:17 ►
my guess is that Daniel Pinchbeck is going to be on it once again.
00:57:22 ►
And by the way, if you want to listen to Daniel’s very first Planque Norte lecture
00:57:26 ►
at the inaugural sessions that we held back in 2003,
00:57:30 ►
you’ll find it as my podcast number four.
00:57:33 ►
Also, you may want to go to our program notes blog,
00:57:37 ►
which you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,
00:57:40 ►
and there you’ll find links to all things Daniel,
00:57:43 ►
including Reality Sandwich, Evolver, the Movie Database
00:57:47 ►
and now the Center for Planetary Culture.
00:57:51 ►
And speaking of planetary culture
00:57:53 ►
I would like to refer you to my podcast number 143
00:57:58 ►
Rethinking Society.
00:58:00 ►
This is a trialogue between Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake that I published in June of 2008.
00:58:08 ►
And I think you’ll find some very interesting conversation there about the state of the world back in 1992 when that trialogue took place.
00:58:17 ►
Not surprisingly, things haven’t gotten significantly better since then.
00:58:21 ►
And actually, it’s too bad that we didn’t follow Ralph Abraham’s advice at the
00:58:25 ►
time, which was to turn over our churches to the rave community and hold all night dances in them.
00:58:31 ►
And in that podcast for our fellow salonners who are sampling McKenna’s soundbites for their music,
00:58:38 ►
you’ll be rewarded to hear him say that there will be no peace in this world until the last
00:58:43 ►
politician is strangled with the guts of the last priest.
00:58:48 ►
It’s a little gory, but a nice thought anyway, don’t you think?
00:58:52 ►
Now, in closing, I’d like to circle back to a question that has been floating around here in the salon for quite a while.
00:58:59 ►
And that is the origin of the phrase, find the others.
00:59:03 ►
Now, if you’ve been with us for a while, then you’ve heard Terrence McKenna claim that it was Timothy Leary who first came up with that phrase.
00:59:10 ►
But then we heard Dr. Leary deny it, claiming that he never said it.
00:59:15 ►
Well, there is this bit of Timothy Leary’s writing that’s floating around the net these days.
00:59:22 ►
and while I can’t attest to its accuracy,
00:59:25 ►
if we assume that it was actually written by Leary,
00:59:30 ►
then this may explain why the good doctor didn’t remember coming up with that phrase because, well, it was part of a much longer essay of his.
00:59:33 ►
And here’s the pertinent part, and I quote Dr. Timothy Leary here.
00:59:38 ►
Admit it, you aren’t like them.
00:59:41 ►
You’re not even close.
00:59:42 ►
You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them,
00:59:46 ►
watch the same mindless television shows as they do,
00:59:49 ►
maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes.
00:59:52 ►
But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider,
00:59:57 ►
watching the, quote, normal people as they go about their automatic existences.
01:00:02 ►
For every time you say club passwords like,
01:00:05 ►
have a nice day and weather’s awful today, eh?
01:00:09 ►
You yearn inside to say forbidden things like,
01:00:12 ►
tell me something that makes you cry,
01:00:15 ►
or what do you think deja vu is for?
01:00:18 ►
Face it, you even want to talk to the girl in the elevator.
01:00:21 ►
But what if that girl in the elevator,
01:00:23 ►
and the balding man who walks
01:00:25 ►
past your cubicle at work, are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking
01:00:31 ►
a chance on a conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody
01:00:37 ►
comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.
01:00:46 ►
End quote.
01:00:48 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:52 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.