Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The most politically potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them, to give them the facts. The facts are now so horrifying, and the means of delivering the facts so effective that there is no excuse for everyone not beginning to act in an informed manner.”
“How can we go to the place where ideas come from?”
“We are to life what life is to the inorganic realm.”
“I think psychedelics are catalysts to thought, to imagination, to understanding.”
“Our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum. It has no viability. It’s completely self-limiting. It’s destructive. And it hands nothing on to its receivers.”
From Larry to Lorenzo from Lorenzo Hagerty on Vimeo.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And I want to thank you ever so much for sticking with us during this time of computer problems.
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In case you missed it, which I hope you did,
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our site was down for over 40 hours after the hosting company’s tech support
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made some kind of a mistake and seriously crashed the site.
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As you know, I’ve been working on a new version of the Slons Program Notes blog and the RSS feed with the
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intention of having a new site up by the end of the year. Well,
00:00:51 ►
I’ll put that on hold for a moment as I make plans to transition all of
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my websites to a new hosting company. Hopefully there won’t be another
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major crash, but just hold on with us for a bit more, and
00:01:03 ►
before you know it, all of
00:01:05 ►
these computer crashes will be a distant memory, as are most nightmares, I should add.
00:01:12 ►
Now, in about 20 minutes, you’re going to hear Terrence McKenna ask you several questions
00:01:17 ►
like, what do you think is going on?
00:01:20 ►
What do you think this is all about?
00:01:22 ►
And when you hear him say that, I suggest that you pause your MP3 player
00:01:27 ►
and take a little time to actually think about these questions that he’s asking.
00:01:33 ►
They seem to me to be among the most important questions that any of us can ever ask ourselves.
00:01:39 ►
And yet, most often, when they come up in a podcast like this,
00:01:43 ►
well, we listen to the rest of the talk and then promptly forget about them until the next time somebody brings them up.
00:01:49 ►
As Terrence says, it’s a matter of personal responsibility, personal responsibility, to find out what the world is really doing.
00:02:03 ►
When you get to that part, do me a favor and pause this recording and then spend some of your very valuable and very sadly short time on this planet
00:02:08 ►
to be a thinking human being and give some real thought to these important questions.
00:02:14 ►
They were important 25 years ago in May of 1990 when Terrence first voiced them
00:02:20 ►
and believe me, they’re ever so more important today.
00:02:24 ►
Remember that famous Mahatma Gandhi quote that I bring up every once in a while?
00:02:28 ►
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
00:02:34 ►
I suggest that maybe you repeat that quote to yourself each night as you’re drifting off to sleep.
00:02:41 ►
And now, with that very melodramatic introduction, here from May 1990, a weekend workshop is Terrence McKenna.
00:02:51 ►
Well, I’ll just say a little bit about myself and how I relate to this.
00:02:57 ►
I don’t really like to talk about it in those terms, but since this is the getting to know each other thing,
00:03:04 ►
since this is the getting to know each other thing,
00:03:11 ►
it’s very important to what I understand that everybody else understand
00:03:18 ►
that there’s nothing special about it or me.
00:03:24 ►
In other words, for what I’m trying to do to make sense, this access to this transcendental realm has to be democratically available. It can’t depend on your spiritual accomplishment or your mastery of a technique
00:03:45 ►
or something like that.
00:03:47 ►
It isn’t like that.
00:03:49 ►
It’s something that is as much a part of us
00:03:55 ►
as ordinary people,
00:03:57 ►
as our sexuality is.
00:03:59 ►
And sexuality is not something
00:04:01 ►
that is dispensed by gurus.
00:04:04 ►
It’s just something you figure out and do, you know.
00:04:07 ►
And this is much more along those lines.
00:04:13 ►
How I explain to myself what I’m doing in this position
00:04:17 ►
is that I was just simply incredibly lucky,
00:04:29 ►
simply incredibly lucky incredibly fortunate to be at certain places at certain times when they were handing out the good stuff and so it’s a and then I
00:04:41 ►
sort of I see you in the same way. Someone over here, Fred, said he was looking for the answer to the mystery of life.
00:04:50 ►
Well, the weird thing about taking that position
00:04:53 ►
is that you can fall into positions where you find it,
00:05:00 ►
where you find the answer.
00:05:01 ►
And I sort of feel like that’s the situation
00:05:05 ►
that the deep plant psychedelic community is in.
00:05:11 ►
It’s a sense of having found the answer,
00:05:14 ►
and now the task changes.
00:05:17 ►
It’s a completely different kind of spiritual universe
00:05:21 ►
that you live in after you’ve found the answer,
00:05:31 ►
universe that you live in after you’ve found the answer because the task becomes facing the answer facing it you now have it it’s no more about disciplining the passions and all the no no it’s
00:05:40 ►
now been handed over and so what are you going to do with it?
00:05:49 ►
And this is, to my mind in a way,
00:05:56 ►
the problem and the challenge that we face globally as a species. You know, if the holy grail of the Western mind
00:06:01 ►
was the ability to release energy and form matter and control nature, then this
00:06:10 ►
is now achieved. The goal, so now the whole context of the problem changes. And the problem
00:06:18 ►
becomes changing our own minds, controlling the hand that controls the energy.
00:06:27 ►
And this is an entirely different kind of problem.
00:06:31 ►
It is not to be solved with the analytical knife
00:06:35 ►
plunged again and again into the body of nature.
00:06:39 ►
That whole approach is seen to be,
00:06:43 ►
at best, passé, at worst, bankrupt.
00:06:48 ►
So instead, it’s about trying to edge up close to nature
00:06:53 ►
and feeling, as individuals and as a society,
00:06:57 ►
very peculiar about this.
00:07:00 ►
It’s like going back to your rape victim
00:07:03 ►
and pleading for their forgiveness
00:07:05 ►
and yet as i’ve tried to make sense of these psychedelic experiences first in a general way
00:07:17 ►
saying you know what are these molecules for or is that a proper question to ask? What are they doing for the plant?
00:07:25 ►
What are they doing for me?
00:07:28 ►
As I’ve tried to come to terms
00:07:31 ►
with what this might all be about,
00:07:34 ►
I’ve come more and more back to the notion
00:07:39 ►
that it all lies in the plants,
00:07:47 ►
that our peculiar restlessness,
00:07:52 ►
which in modern circumstances has evolved into a rapacious appetite
00:07:57 ►
for addictive substances of all sorts,
00:08:00 ►
our peculiar inappropriateness in all contexts.
00:08:06 ►
So we are not quite simply complex mammals.
00:08:09 ►
We are certainly not angels.
00:08:12 ►
And we just seem to occupy a very uncomfortable place in the hierarchy of creation.
00:08:19 ►
I think this has to do with the fact that we are the traumatized inheritors of a dysfunctional relationship, a-toned relationship with our environment and into, you know, this anticipation of the future, worry about the past, basically ego.
00:09:03 ►
about the past, basically ego.
00:09:07 ►
And I recently spoke in New York,
00:09:11 ►
and New York is a very nuts and bolts kind of town,
00:09:15 ►
and people there took issue with the notion that all of our problems
00:09:19 ►
can be boiled down to a single problem.
00:09:24 ►
If you trace the thread of every screw-up back into the maze,
00:09:30 ►
it all comes back to a single issue,
00:09:33 ►
which is excess of ego.
00:09:37 ►
We all have excess of ego,
00:09:39 ►
and our entire situation,
00:09:43 ►
legalistic, psychological, religious, everything is about this.
00:09:49 ►
That it doesn’t work. It’s maladaptive.
00:09:54 ►
And yet we have it.
00:09:56 ►
And why do we have it if it’s maladaptive?
00:10:01 ►
If it doesn’t promote human values,
00:10:05 ►
then how in the hell did it get started
00:10:07 ►
and what is it that’s maintaining and sustaining it?
00:10:10 ►
Well, this is what I want to talk about over the course of the weekend.
00:10:19 ►
When I pushed the analysis of what the psychedelic experience meant to the limits, I was surprised
00:10:27 ►
to discover that it left the domain of my personal relationship to the mystery. You know, what is it?
00:10:35 ►
What does it want for me? What is it trying to say? All that had to also make room for another issue, which is there’s a political issue here.
00:10:50 ►
I think most people in this room, most people who have had the psychedelic experience,
00:10:56 ►
will agree that the most profound, the most open-hearted, the most moving moments of their lives,
00:11:04 ►
some of them have been tied in with those experiences. But we seem unable or unwilling or afraid to extrapolate that conclusion to the notion that this is a general panacea for society because we cannot conceive
00:11:25 ►
that the solution to a spiritual dilemma
00:11:32 ►
could lie in matter.
00:11:34 ►
In other words, we ourselves
00:11:36 ►
have been infected
00:11:38 ►
by the inside-outside matter-spirit dichotomies
00:11:43 ►
of the dominator culture. But the notion that man, notice the gender thrust here, the notion that man could somehow bootstrap himself to Godhead without reference to nature seems to me highly peculiar
00:12:05 ►
and simply nothing more than an expression of hubris,
00:12:10 ►
pride,
00:12:12 ►
a belief, you know,
00:12:13 ►
that we can do it our way and alone.
00:12:18 ►
So,
00:12:19 ►
all of this is very…
00:12:27 ►
The shelf life is short on all of these issues
00:12:32 ►
because the planet is in a state of terminal crisis.
00:12:38 ►
Does that have anything to do with the psychedelic experience?
00:12:43 ►
Or are these separate issues?
00:12:46 ►
How can they be separate issues
00:12:49 ►
if the psychedelic experience
00:12:51 ►
is a mirror of the state
00:12:53 ►
of the individual and collective psyche?
00:12:57 ►
And if the planet is on a collision course
00:13:03 ►
with some kind of terminal crisis.
00:13:05 ►
It seems to me then that what, you know,
00:13:10 ►
nature is struggling to right this disequilibrated planetary ecosystem.
00:13:22 ►
So in a sense, there is nothing to be done
00:13:27 ►
except to watch and wait
00:13:29 ►
but on the other hand
00:13:31 ►
we are not apart from nature
00:13:33 ►
we are in some sense
00:13:36 ►
a portion of nature
00:13:38 ►
which is the most reactive
00:13:41 ►
and energetic
00:13:42 ►
because we are reactive and energetic in the domain of epigenetic
00:13:47 ►
codes. We can foment rapid change. Until recently, it was a truism of thinking about society
00:13:56 ►
that all change had to be gradual. This myth has now been exploded. We know that, you know,
00:14:03 ►
you just take them all out and hang them
00:14:06 ►
and then that’s not gradual and then you’ve got a new world.
00:14:10 ►
And this has been done in several places with excellent success recently.
00:14:15 ►
So change need not be gradual.
00:14:19 ►
And in fact, I think we’re entering into a historical domain
00:14:23 ►
where very little change will be gradual.
00:14:27 ►
Gradual change was a luxury of the past.
00:14:30 ►
Well, how to come to terms with these processes, patterns,
00:14:38 ►
forming and reforming in our lives, in our relationships,
00:14:42 ►
in our families, in our businesses,
00:14:48 ►
in the extended relationships we have with people.
00:14:58 ►
What is needed, you see, is a kind of collective breakthrough in apperception.
00:15:06 ►
I was thinking in the hot tub today that the most politically potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them
00:15:08 ►
to give them the facts
00:15:11 ►
the facts are now so horrifying
00:15:15 ►
and the means of delivering the facts
00:15:20 ►
so effective
00:15:21 ►
that there is no excuse
00:15:24 ►
for everyone not beginning to act in an informed
00:15:30 ►
manner. And I think this is happening. For instance, a few months ago I was in Belize,
00:15:36 ►
which is an extremely poor country, a little chip of land in the armpit of the Yucatan
00:15:43 ►
that used to be British Honduras. I didn’t know there were countries of land in the armpit of the Yucatan that used to be British Honduras.
00:15:45 ►
I didn’t know there were countries this funky in the Western Hemisphere.
00:15:49 ►
I thought you had to go, you know.
00:15:53 ►
They have the fortune, good or ill,
00:15:58 ►
of speaking English as a national language.
00:16:01 ►
So when the British left, they just simply pointed dishes to the sky and they get
00:16:06 ►
270 channels of American television. It has completely educated the entire population of
00:16:14 ►
the country into an extremely sophisticated strategy for surviving in the real world of
00:16:21 ►
the present moment. They understand that their only resource is their nature,
00:16:27 ►
so they have made the entire country into a nature reserve.
00:16:31 ►
They understand that tourism is their only hope
00:16:38 ►
and that for tourism to work,
00:16:40 ►
they must halt the destruction of their environment.
00:16:47 ►
This informing people at distant points of the value systems operating at the centers where values are being created allows
00:16:55 ►
people to position themselves for success. I mean, a lot is being lost you cannot pretend that the situation we’re in
00:17:06 ►
is unambiguously
00:17:08 ►
rosy, it isn’t
00:17:10 ►
it’s extremely complicated
00:17:12 ►
Marxism
00:17:14 ►
dissolves
00:17:16 ►
what does this mean?
00:17:17 ►
it means that now
00:17:19 ►
21 language groups
00:17:21 ►
and 16 tribal
00:17:23 ►
groups are open to exploitation, homogenization, leveling of cultural values.
00:17:31 ►
Everybody will be turned into a kind of white bread consuming citizen in a beige fascist world.
00:17:39 ►
And this is the alternative to Armageddon.
00:17:43 ►
We hail this as a great step forward.
00:17:46 ►
What is happening is that all restrictions are being done away with
00:17:51 ►
against the expression of completely rapacious drives for immediate self-gratification.
00:17:59 ►
Until 18 months ago, only half the world had permission to behave like assholes.
00:18:05 ►
Now this permission is being extended to everyone as quickly as possible
00:18:09 ►
as a right, you know, your right to join in the looting of the planet.
00:18:15 ►
Well, certainly Stalinism is a bad thing,
00:18:19 ►
but is the only ideological counterpoise to that
00:18:23 ►
to be high-tech, mindless, consumer fascism?
00:18:29 ►
I don’t think so.
00:18:30 ►
In fact, I know not, because there isn’t enough metal in the planet
00:18:34 ►
to put a Volvo in every driveway of three and a half billion or four billion people.
00:18:41 ►
So the search for a serious revolution in values is on.
00:18:46 ►
It cannot, it must come from the spiritual realm.
00:18:52 ►
And the spiritual realm in practical terms
00:18:55 ►
means the imagination.
00:18:58 ►
The frontier of our species is the imagination.
00:19:04 ►
Now we have to take that slogan and somehow turn it into
00:19:09 ►
a technology. How can we go to the place where ideas come from? How can we somehow separate
00:19:17 ►
our architectonic fantasies from the ongoing momentum of the planet. Both are valid, you see, but we have to recognize
00:19:30 ►
that what we are is almost an ontological transformation of life. We are to life what life
00:19:40 ►
is to the inorganic realm and we need to separate ourselves
00:19:45 ►
from the planet.
00:19:47 ►
The planet, the entire planet
00:19:49 ►
should be a bio-reserve.
00:19:52 ►
How many of these oxygen-rich,
00:19:54 ►
water-heavy worlds are there?
00:19:56 ►
Now, of course, it’s pie in the sky
00:19:58 ►
to talk about moving all heavy industry
00:20:01 ►
into space or to the asteroid belt
00:20:03 ►
or something like that.
00:20:06 ►
But on the other hand,
00:20:16 ►
when you extrapolate a visionless future, even as much as three or four decades into the future, you see the accumulation of problems on such a scale that then there will be no pulling out of the power dive because once a society passes a certain point
00:20:28 ►
in the process of dissolution,
00:20:31 ►
you just don’t make a decision to change.
00:20:34 ►
I mean, it’s too late.
00:20:35 ►
You don’t have the engineering skills.
00:20:37 ►
You don’t have the technical community.
00:20:39 ►
You don’t have the resource extraction ability.
00:20:41 ►
It’s all slipped through your fingers.
00:20:49 ►
extraction ability it’s all slipped through your fingers well i think uh psychedelics are catalysts to thought to imagination to understanding and we are like somebody who
00:20:59 ►
has been dead drunk while the house was burning down around us. And now we have awakened to the sound of falling timbers
00:21:07 ►
and the smell of smoke.
00:21:09 ►
And we have a certain limited amount of time
00:21:11 ►
to figure this situation out.
00:21:13 ►
We don’t have 500 years or 100 years.
00:21:18 ►
Anybody who speaks in terms of solutions
00:21:21 ►
that require 100 years or even 50 years to implement
00:21:24 ►
doesn’t understand the dynamics of the situation. in terms of solutions that require 100 years or even 50 years to implement,
00:21:29 ►
doesn’t understand the dynamics of the situation.
00:21:34 ►
History has some kind of will for its own transcendence, and I think we are now so close to the dropping of the mask
00:21:39 ►
and the realization of what the game was all along,
00:21:45 ►
that the sense of this nearby revelation informs all of our lives.
00:21:53 ►
I mean, drives our dreams, our thoughts, the choices we make,
00:21:57 ►
why we’re here in this room this evening.
00:22:01 ►
It’s very big news, I think.
00:22:04 ►
The world is not at all as we suppose it to be.
00:22:09 ►
I find that very amazing. I mean, that’s the bottom line for me. I always think of these things
00:22:16 ►
in reference to that scene in 2001 when the anthropoid apes are leaping up and down
00:22:25 ►
and screaming and pointing at the monolith.
00:22:28 ►
That’s what we’re doing here in this room.
00:22:31 ►
I mean, the subject of this weekend is unspeakable.
00:22:34 ►
It can only be obliquely indicated.
00:22:38 ►
Whatever you say about it is not true.
00:22:41 ►
And yet it is somehow the informing mystery of being and it is not remote that’s
00:22:50 ►
the big news that the previous human model which is that we are all poor groveling sinners and that
00:22:59 ►
gnosis will trickle down to us from the wonderful folks up on top of the steep building nearby
00:23:06 ►
where they’re conducting mysterious business
00:23:08 ►
with liver readings and stargazing.
00:23:11 ►
That model is insufficient and insulting
00:23:17 ►
considering the situation we have been brought to
00:23:21 ►
by those very stargazing men wearing dresses.
00:23:25 ►
So I think what we have been brought to by those very stargazing men wearing dresses. So I think what we have to do now is just take the machinery into our own hands.
00:23:32 ►
It’s a matter of personal responsibility to find out what the world is really doing,
00:23:38 ►
what it is.
00:23:39 ►
What do you think’s going on?
00:23:41 ►
What do you think this is all about?
00:23:44 ►
Who do you think you are? What do you think this is all about? Who do you think you are? What do you think English is?
00:23:48 ►
How do you really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I’ve been, what I want? I mean,
00:23:58 ►
you know, it’s in Moby Dick, Melville says, if you would strike, strike through the mask. Everything is a mask. And just behind that mask lurks, and people have always lived in the shadow of that mystery.
00:24:25 ►
But it is our weird privilege to live in an age
00:24:30 ►
where there is also to be a collective dropping of the mask,
00:24:34 ►
a moment of melting and recasting of what reality itself is to be.
00:24:43 ►
So, you know, discussing discussing this convincing ourselves of it and then working
00:24:49 ►
out the minute details of how it all is inevitable and couldn’t be any other way
00:24:55 ►
is how we will occupy ourselves this weekend i’m really conflicted always in these situations because I feel, for some reason, I suppose it’s an ego trip, that I want to be correctly perceived.
00:25:12 ►
I, as a person, want to be correctly perceived.
00:25:15 ►
And I think of myself as a reasonable person, a person sensitive to concepts like evidence, causality, so forth and so on.
00:25:28 ►
And yet what I have to say is like completely unreasonable.
00:25:33 ►
I mean, a messenger bearing news of complete madness approaching from all directions and I got into that position by staying pretty close to the principle
00:25:47 ►
of skepticism
00:25:51 ►
I’m not a believer
00:25:53 ►
in fact when the aliens
00:25:57 ►
draped the mantle over my shoulders
00:25:59 ►
they said it’s because you don’t believe in anything
00:26:03 ►
this is why you get that’s why you got this far,
00:26:08 ►
because you didn’t believe in anything.
00:26:12 ►
And it’s a good method.
00:26:15 ►
Normally it’s a method spawned out of futility.
00:26:19 ►
You say, well, fuck it, I don’t believe in anything.
00:26:22 ►
But it’s also very good for getting rid of a lot of crap
00:26:26 ►
because the real stuff can take the test of skepticism.
00:26:33 ►
The real stuff doesn’t have to be bowed down before
00:26:36 ►
and it works, it’s on its own.
00:26:41 ►
The news is, and it’s very hard news
00:26:46 ►
to get out because it’s
00:26:48 ►
news about the structure of reality
00:26:51 ►
the news is
00:26:53 ►
coming back from
00:26:55 ►
you know
00:26:57 ►
50, 60, 100 years
00:26:59 ►
of anthropologists
00:27:00 ►
ethnographers, geographers
00:27:03 ►
botanists
00:27:03 ►
dealing with the most quote-unquote primitive people in the most remote parts of the world,
00:27:12 ►
the news is that reality is not at all as we imagined it to be, and that our prowess in the technical sciences is simply a cultural artifact, an accomplishment of ours.
00:27:31 ►
Some people do great tattoos.
00:27:34 ►
We send spacecraft to the stars.
00:27:37 ►
But it doesn’t mean we understand anymore.
00:27:41 ►
And in fact, the evidence is building that
00:27:45 ►
our style
00:27:47 ►
of society is
00:27:49 ►
the historical equivalent
00:27:51 ►
of a temper tantrum
00:27:53 ►
you know that it has no
00:27:55 ►
viability it’s completely
00:27:57 ►
self limiting
00:27:58 ►
it’s destructive
00:28:00 ►
and it hands nothing on
00:28:03 ►
to its receivers. So I sort of talk to this group
00:28:12 ►
and all the groups that I talk to from two points of view. I’m trying to convince you
00:28:19 ►
of something and yet reason dictates that I assume that you’re already convinced pretty much
00:28:27 ►
so then it’s also an effort to figure out
00:28:29 ►
what it is we’re so convinced of
00:28:32 ►
and then what is so great about it
00:28:34 ►
because I think some kind of
00:28:37 ►
this is a real mystery
00:28:40 ►
the only one I know
00:28:43 ►
this is the thing that you hope exists and assume doesn’t if you’re a reasonable person because it’s that you know all the dreams of childhood all the sense of magic and the and the dissolvability and transcendability
00:29:05 ►
of boundaries
00:29:06 ►
is returned
00:29:10 ►
is affirmed
00:29:12 ►
in this experience
00:29:14 ►
well
00:29:15 ►
yet here we are having this
00:29:18 ►
on the brink
00:29:20 ►
of a planetary
00:29:21 ►
meltdown of culture
00:29:23 ►
and ecosystem
00:29:24 ►
so is this just some kind of dancing on the brink? Is it a kind of ultimate self-indulgence? Does it feed back into the central moral problem of the age, which is what is to be done? What are we to do? How can we be effective, whatever that means? Is there a discernible role for each of us to play in the metamorphosis and near death of the planet that we are now experiencing?
00:30:06 ►
Or are we simply to witness it?
00:30:09 ►
Well, I don’t think there’s any point in thinking about these kinds of questions
00:30:14 ►
unless you draw back to the big picture, to first premises.
00:30:21 ►
You know, a good example of what I mean is suppose we save the rainforests
00:30:29 ►
and stabilize the population and so forth and so on and then 50 years down
00:30:33 ►
the line the Sun explodes means we didn’t get it we were not reading
00:30:41 ►
correctly the message nature was trying to hand to us.
00:30:45 ►
And so we did the wrong thing and are going to be blown out of the water for such churlishness.
00:30:53 ►
So what’s important is to figure out what is going on before you start pushing in the process.
00:31:03 ►
And I don’t think you can do it
00:31:06 ►
from within a culture.
00:31:09 ►
In other words,
00:31:09 ►
if you’re a person of decent intent
00:31:12 ►
and moderate intelligence
00:31:14 ►
and you read the great minds
00:31:17 ►
of your culture
00:31:18 ►
and study their thought,
00:31:21 ►
it’s insufficient
00:31:22 ►
because everybody is bound
00:31:24 ►
within an illusion of language. The entire
00:31:27 ►
enterprise of culture is this illusion of language. Homer was as sick with it as Heidegger.
00:31:33 ►
So there’s no going back or getting, you know, no classic recension. What we have to do is reach past to some kind of experience.
00:31:45 ►
It must be anchored in an experience.
00:31:49 ►
But there is this thing about being human
00:31:53 ►
which we as a culture have ignored, repressed,
00:31:58 ►
don’t want to talk about, face, or think about,
00:32:00 ►
which is you can get loaded.
00:32:02 ►
And nobody knows quite what to make of this
00:32:06 ►
we dance around it with the same kind of furious
00:32:10 ►
ambiguous intensity
00:32:12 ►
that we also reserve for sex
00:32:16 ►
which is also a boundary dissolving
00:32:21 ►
momentary loss of self
00:32:26 ►
into some kind of greater whole
00:32:28 ►
and it also just drives us into a frenzy
00:32:31 ►
we establish boundaries, we have hierarchies
00:32:34 ►
we push it this way and it just drives us up the wall
00:32:38 ►
whoever she was
00:32:41 ►
who designed this system
00:32:43 ►
had the good sense to connect this
00:32:46 ►
whole sexual impulse very
00:32:47 ►
tightly into the generative
00:32:49 ►
process
00:32:50 ►
so that there’s no way
00:32:53 ►
you can get sex
00:32:55 ►
out of the human experience
00:32:57 ►
I mean people have tried in all times and places
00:32:59 ►
in many strange ways
00:33:01 ►
150 years ago they were putting
00:33:03 ►
pants on pianos
00:33:05 ►
because it was thought that young men
00:33:07 ►
should not see pianos unclothed
00:33:10 ►
because it might excite them to impure thoughts.
00:33:14 ►
This is real in England, in our culture,
00:33:17 ►
not New Guinea or the moon,
00:33:19 ►
but in England, pianos wore pants.
00:33:24 ►
But the psychedelic option is sort of like an appendix.
00:33:32 ►
You can have it, but you don’t need it, apparently.
00:33:37 ►
Apparently, that’s the key thing.
00:33:40 ►
In other words, whether or not you have the psychedelic experience does not stand between
00:33:45 ►
you and the ability to pass on your genes into time it does not stand between you and continued
00:33:52 ►
existence like the reflect the autonomic reflex of breathing it’s a kind of of uh potential loop in development
00:34:05 ►
which we can
00:34:08 ►
as culturally coordinated creatures
00:34:11 ►
choose to follow
00:34:14 ►
or choose not to follow
00:34:17 ►
but this development
00:34:19 ►
is very recent
00:34:21 ►
until, pick a number
00:34:25 ►
10,000 years ago
00:34:27 ►
the onset of puberty
00:34:30 ►
which was
00:34:31 ►
a wave of hormonal
00:34:34 ►
release basically
00:34:36 ►
the onset of puberty was the
00:34:38 ►
signal to the social mechanisms
00:34:39 ►
of the people to
00:34:41 ►
begin the administration
00:34:44 ►
of psychedelic plants,
00:34:46 ►
to carry people into adulthood,
00:34:50 ►
to carry them into a feeling-toned relationship
00:34:55 ►
with the mythological material that they had learned as children,
00:34:59 ►
but that they now would be expected to exemplify as realized adults within the Lung or Shhe culture
00:35:09 ►
or whatever it is that they are.
00:35:12 ►
We, in our anxiety about all this,
00:35:15 ►
and I’ll talk about why I’m sure it will come out,
00:35:18 ►
but for the present just to say,
00:35:21 ►
we have interfered with this
00:35:22 ►
and we have enforced upon ourselves
00:35:25 ►
a kind of infantilism.
00:35:29 ►
Now this is a phenomenon that’s well known.
00:35:32 ►
It’s called neoteny.
00:35:34 ►
Neoteny is the preservation
00:35:37 ►
of adult characteristics
00:35:40 ►
into adulthood.
00:35:44 ►
Into adulthood. Childhood characteristics or infantile characteristics
00:35:49 ►
or even fetal characteristics. So for instance, all primate fetuses are hairless, but only
00:35:58 ►
the human being retains this fetal characteristic throughout life. The very large head of the human infant,
00:36:09 ►
the percentage relationship to body mass
00:36:13 ►
remains very much in the fetal end of the statistics
00:36:19 ►
throughout life for human beings.
00:36:22 ►
We have large heads.
00:36:23 ►
The very prolonged period in which skills,
00:36:28 ►
cultural skills are acquired, up to 16 years.
00:36:31 ►
Well, this tendency toward biological neoteny,
00:36:36 ►
which was reinforced by mutagenic influences in the diet,
00:36:43 ►
is carried over into culture as a cultural characteristic.
00:36:47 ►
And it’s, have you noticed that every generation views the generation it spawns as more childish
00:36:55 ►
than itself? And we look back to our rugged grandparents who slogged across the plains,
00:37:01 ►
and I suppose they look back to people in chain mail who were only four feet high
00:37:06 ►
who could go without eating for six months or something.
00:37:10 ►
And it just gets…
00:37:12 ►
We become more and more soft,
00:37:15 ►
more and more infantile.
00:37:17 ►
And the final phase of this was just the decision
00:37:20 ►
that we never needed to grow up at all.
00:37:23 ►
We never needed to grow up at all. We never needed to find out about the nature of our relationship to being at all.
00:37:30 ►
And so the psychedelics were suppressed.
00:37:33 ►
And what you have in the pre-adolescent child is an extreme expression of ego.
00:37:44 ►
This is the 11-year-old child, let’s take as the example. is an extreme expression of ego.
00:37:49 ►
This is, you know, the 11-year-old child, let’s take as the example,
00:37:52 ►
is the supreme egoist.
00:37:57 ►
And in a sense, we got hung up at that place because we didn’t get hung up in it, we fell into it.
00:38:03 ►
We were in balance, But the suppression of psychedelics created the precondition that allowed the generation of ego. And it’s very complicated. A lot of factors were at work, you see.
00:38:25 ►
the shamanic style of the nomadic hunter-gatherer is a style of goddess worship
00:38:28 ►
and psychedelic shamanism
00:38:34 ►
and orgiastic religion.
00:38:38 ►
And the shamanism and the religion
00:38:39 ►
overlap each other considerably.
00:38:43 ►
The style that replaced that
00:38:46 ►
was a style of domination,
00:38:52 ►
hierarchy,
00:38:54 ►
with alpha males,
00:38:56 ►
with powerful males controlling females
00:38:58 ►
at the center of these hierarchies.
00:39:00 ►
And to my mind,
00:39:02 ►
the concern that caused the shift was the accumulation in the psyche of these hominids of enough ego that there became concern for the line of male paternity.
00:39:20 ►
In other words, men wanted to know who their children were. And that made the orgiastic style of religion in conflict
00:39:29 ►
because that was all about…
00:39:32 ►
The children were the children of the group
00:39:34 ►
and sex was a shared activity,
00:39:37 ►
even though there might be bonding.
00:39:40 ►
But once people got men,
00:39:42 ►
once men got it into their heads
00:39:44 ►
that they wanted to know who their offspring were, then females had to be controlled very rigidly and there had to Well, you see, what had been going on before was a true incipient symbiosis.
00:40:12 ►
And this is, I think, the new idea that I want to communicate
00:40:16 ►
and that I’m absolutely, one, serious about and two, literal about that the, our
00:40:25 ►
glory
00:40:28 ►
and our uniqueness
00:40:29 ►
and why we are as we are
00:40:31 ►
is because we are
00:40:34 ►
a plant
00:40:36 ►
animal symbiotic
00:40:38 ►
species
00:40:40 ►
our ordinary
00:40:42 ►
state, our state
00:40:44 ►
of nature, the way in which we existed until 10,000 years ago,
00:40:48 ►
was in a very tightly bound symbiotic relationship with plants.
00:40:53 ►
We domesticated them and we spread them and we created environments for them through the use of burning.
00:41:06 ►
And in return for this, this mysterious connection opened up
00:41:11 ►
where real information couched in humanly cognizable terms,
00:41:17 ►
information about where the reindeer went, who you should marry,
00:41:23 ►
what the weather’s going to do, stuff like that.
00:41:26 ►
Real information began to be traded back and forth.
00:41:31 ►
Now, biologists are familiar with the notion of pheromones,
00:41:36 ►
message-bearing chemicals that regulate behavior within a species.
00:41:41 ►
But we’re just getting ready to go to the next level and recognize the
00:41:46 ►
possibility of what have been called exo-pheromones, pheromones that regulate behavior between
00:41:52 ►
species.
00:41:54 ►
And it’s very clear that, you know, in climaxed ecosystems of great age, such as the equatorial tropics of this planet, exo-pheromonal interactions become the major mediating force
00:42:10 ►
in all the evolutionary exchanges going on.
00:42:14 ►
The old notion of competition and survival of the fittest
00:42:19 ►
is now seen to be bankrupt.
00:42:21 ►
The way nature works is it’s the species that can make itself most necessary to
00:42:28 ►
other species, the one that can cut energy deals with the most of its neighbors that is the
00:42:35 ►
successful one. So you maximize cooperation, you maximize dependency, you maximize integration.
00:42:43 ►
maximize dependency, you maximize integration.
00:42:47 ►
This is the successful evolutionary strategy.
00:42:51 ►
I mean, of course you can be a jaguar and crash around in the forest and eat things immediately smaller than you,
00:42:55 ►
but jaguars will be a memory in the fossil record of this planet
00:42:59 ►
when the plants will still exist,
00:43:02 ►
given that man were not part of the picture.
00:43:07 ►
So the dynamic of life dictates that these energy levels be held very close.
00:43:20 ►
How do you explain the ego and the identity and the I and all that stuff?
00:43:26 ►
Is that outside of the natural?
00:43:29 ►
Well, no, I think nothing is outside of the natural,
00:43:33 ►
but all of this can be explained in terms of climatological flux on the African continent.
00:43:42 ►
Very briefly, the primates evolved in Africa.
00:43:48 ►
Out of the primates came the hominids,
00:43:51 ►
which were these gracile, upright,
00:43:55 ►
opposable-thumb binocular vision.
00:43:57 ►
And there were a number of these,
00:43:59 ►
and they existed for, you know,
00:44:01 ►
over the past six million years.
00:44:04 ►
But Africa and the planet, because of repeated glaciation,
00:44:08 ►
is subject to cycles of drying.
00:44:11 ►
And every time the ice moved south,
00:44:15 ►
primate populations were bottled up in Africa.
00:44:19 ►
And we know there have been four glaciations.
00:44:21 ►
Immediately the last one, the ice melted 20,000 years ago and out of
00:44:26 ►
Africa that last time
00:44:28 ►
came pastoralists
00:44:30 ►
people who
00:44:31 ►
had domesticated cattle
00:44:34 ►
and had a style of
00:44:35 ►
following cattle around rather than
00:44:37 ►
being just strictly hunter
00:44:39 ►
gathers well I maintain
00:44:42 ►
what happened was
00:44:43 ►
these arboreal tree canopy living apes came under pressure as the continent dried up to expand their diet because the forests were disappearing and being replaced by grassland.
00:45:02 ►
eat only one or two kinds of food.
00:45:04 ►
This is a general rule in nature,
00:45:09 ►
and it’s in order to hold down exposure to mutagenic influence.
00:45:15 ►
But when an animal population is in a situation of food scarcity,
00:45:18 ►
the logical thing to do is to begin to test food sources and to expand your repertoire of food.
00:45:21 ►
Well, that’s what these primates coming out of the trees did. Number one, they began eating meat, which gave them a real interest that they had never had before in these ungulate mammals that were evolving in the grasslands. And they began to test all kinds of other foods in the environment. Well, when you do that, you are exposing your population to mutation and mutation rates soar
00:45:47 ►
and it was during this period
00:45:51 ►
that the human brain size doubled
00:45:55 ►
in like a million and a half years
00:45:58 ►
someone said it was the
00:46:01 ►
the most rapid evolutionary expansion of a major organ ever seen in the fossil record.
00:46:10 ►
Nothing like it ever happened. Why? What was making this happen? Well, it looks like probably
00:46:20 ►
huge numbers of mutations were taking place in this population because people were literally eating anything they could get their hands on.
00:46:28 ►
And in this environment of the grasslands,
00:46:31 ►
the mushrooms were growing on the dung of these ungulate animals.
00:46:35 ►
Well, now a weird thing about psilocybin is that in very low doses,
00:46:40 ►
doses so low that you don’t feel anything,
00:46:45 ►
your vision improves.
00:46:49 ►
They’ve done tests with this.
00:46:52 ►
And there is an improvement in visual acuity on psilocybin at low doses.
00:46:58 ►
Well, you can imagine the evolutionary impact of something like this
00:47:02 ►
on a hunting, gathering population where visual acuity
00:47:06 ►
is all that stands between
00:47:08 ►
you and grim starvation.
00:47:10 ►
It means a population of
00:47:12 ►
animals, a population of these
00:47:13 ►
evolving hominids that accept the
00:47:16 ►
mushroom into their diet
00:47:17 ►
have just been given a
00:47:20 ►
tremendous leg up on nearby
00:47:22 ►
competing troops
00:47:26 ►
that don’t have it. It’s like chemical binoculars.
00:47:29 ►
So immediately then there is a reason, an evolutionary reason,
00:47:34 ►
for mushrooms to be eaten and for the spread,
00:47:37 ►
for mushrooms to be accepted into the diet as an item and so forth and so on.
00:47:42 ►
Well, so then you take slightly more mushrooms and like all
00:47:48 ►
alkaloids and cn it’s a cns arousal means you feel alert you feel interested you want a boogie
00:47:56 ►
and also uh if you’re if you’re male you can sustain an erection so it arousal means arousal so then this stuff is an enzyme
00:48:08 ►
promoting sexual activity at that level well sexual activity then you know the number of
00:48:15 ►
copulations that occur within a population is directly related to the number of successful
00:48:21 ►
impregnations so suddenly you have these horny primates be a lot of more
00:48:27 ►
interest in sexual contact and partners and all that. This means that these psilocybin-using
00:48:33 ►
creatures that are now more successful at hunting and more interested in sex have all kinds of
00:48:40 ►
pressures on them that will force them to outbreed the dull, uninteresting folks who don’t use mushrooms at this point.
00:48:49 ►
Well, so then, yet higher doses, it changes,
00:48:57 ►
and it’s no longer about sexual activity or clarity of vision.
00:49:00 ►
It becomes about the psychedelic trip this tremendum
00:49:05 ►
which is as awesome to you and me
00:49:08 ►
as it was to these so-called primitive
00:49:10 ►
folks 20,000 years ago
00:49:11 ►
we don’t know what to make of it
00:49:13 ►
they didn’t know what to make of it
00:49:15 ►
they founded a religion about it
00:49:17 ►
we’re trying to start
00:49:19 ►
the engine of the same religion all over
00:49:22 ►
again and
00:49:23 ►
the way in which this religious ecstasis manifests itself
00:49:29 ►
is in language activity, in cognition, but in glossolalia,
00:49:35 ►
in spontaneous outbursts of syntactically organized vocal activity.
00:49:40 ►
Well, the great mystery of human emergence, of course, is language.
00:49:46 ►
What is it? Where did it come from how did it ever get going on such a scale
00:49:49 ►
so forth and so on
00:49:50 ►
but it looks to me like
00:49:52 ►
what we’re seeing in psilocybin
00:49:54 ►
is a kind of neurological enzyme
00:49:58 ►
a catalyst in the environment
00:50:01 ►
that could take an evolving primate population
00:50:04 ►
and put it through a series of forced changes
00:50:08 ►
that produce ultimately a self-reflected, minded creature
00:50:15 ►
practicing a shamanic mother goddess religion in this nomadic context.
00:50:20 ►
And that was paradise.
00:50:23 ►
And that was the ideal for the archaic revival. In other words, that Eden actually existed, that we are made for better things than what we’ve got. Cain was the red light district of Dublin here in Moy Cain we flop on the seamy side
00:50:46 ►
but up Nyent
00:50:48 ►
prospector you sprout
00:50:49 ►
all your worth and woof your
00:50:52 ►
wings that’s a promise
00:50:54 ►
for the future up Nyent
00:50:56 ►
you sprout all your worth and woof
00:50:58 ►
your wings but also
00:50:59 ►
Antes
00:51:01 ►
we sprouted our worth and
00:51:03 ►
woofed our wings and this whole nostalgia for a perfected shamanism
00:51:09 ►
in pre-history is reasonable i think i mean i think we had something an unimaginably precious
00:51:17 ►
gift we had consciousness and dynamicciousness as we experience it now
00:51:26 ►
within the confines of history
00:51:28 ►
is most analogous to cancer.
00:51:32 ►
I mean, it’s just, you know, replicating, spreading.
00:51:35 ►
But it once was a dynamic, ordered thing.
00:51:40 ►
People lived, they died, they made love,
00:51:43 ►
they had children, they herded their flocks, they
00:51:45 ►
had ecstatic flights into dimensions which we cannot even conceive of, and they felt
00:51:51 ►
no need, you know, to break into the earth, to divert the rivers, to do all of this stuff.
00:51:59 ►
And, you know, even if we’re not aesthetically attracted to that,
00:52:06 ►
we have to make a value judgment on it
00:52:08 ►
because it was not a runaway process.
00:52:10 ►
It did not push everything toward crisis.
00:52:15 ►
Okay, well then, so what happened?
00:52:17 ►
What the hell happened if that’s how it was?
00:52:20 ►
Well, you know, nature is just an ongoing story. The very drying processes that created
00:52:28 ►
those grasslands, that created those pressures on diet, that created that mother goddess religion,
00:52:34 ►
that evolved those ungulate animals, that process continued. And the grasslands dried up.
00:52:41 ►
And the winds began to blow. And the water holes got further and further apart from each
00:52:46 ►
other and the mushroom festivals went from every saturday night to the first saturday of every
00:52:54 ►
month and then to four times a year and then to once a year and then to once every five years and
00:52:59 ►
then to never and in the absence of the psychedelic experience, this ego thing gets going.
00:53:09 ►
I mean, it is literally like a calcareous growth in the bloodstream of the psyche.
00:53:15 ►
If you don’t inoculate yourself against it, it will begin to take root and grow. And the boundaries of the world begin to move inward.
00:53:29 ►
And you no longer see things on a planetary scale or a millennial scale.
00:53:34 ►
It’s just about, you know, my women, my money, my land, my children, all of this stuff.
00:53:42 ►
my children, all of this stuff. And at that point, you get the appearance of historical civilizations.
00:53:51 ►
You have kingship, kingship, the age of Gilgamesh.
00:53:57 ►
I mean, my God, when you read the story of Gilgamesh,
00:53:59 ►
you just wonder what’s going on.
00:54:03 ►
Gilgamesh spurned the goddess, and the goddess sent a bull,
00:54:10 ►
which to me is, you know, symbolic of the mystery of the mushroom, the ungulate herding
00:54:16 ►
horned animal, the crypto symbol for the goddess. The goddess sends a bull, and he rejects the
00:54:23 ►
bull. He rejects the goddess. He rejects the bull.
00:54:26 ►
Then he takes Enkidu, the shaman figure,
00:54:29 ►
and forces him to go with him into the wilderness.
00:54:34 ►
And what do they do in the wilderness?
00:54:36 ►
This oldest of all myths, this story of the first men,
00:54:41 ►
what do they do?
00:54:42 ►
They cut down the tree of life.
00:54:45 ►
That’s what they do. They cut down the tree of life. That’s what they do.
00:54:47 ►
They cut down the tree of life,
00:54:48 ►
and then it goes forward.
00:54:51 ►
The earliest stratum of mythology
00:54:53 ►
that comes out of these Middle Eastern civilizations
00:54:56 ►
is full of this male-female nature artificial tension.
00:55:03 ►
The story of Genesis is a similar thing.
00:55:07 ►
I mean, what’s happening in Genesis
00:55:09 ►
is history’s first drug bust.
00:55:12 ►
A woman is involved with a plant
00:55:17 ►
and the plant opens their eyes
00:55:21 ►
and they see that they are naked,
00:55:27 ►
which happens to be the case they are naked
00:55:28 ►
so in other words
00:55:29 ►
they see
00:55:30 ►
they grok their true existential condition
00:55:34 ►
and Yahweh
00:55:36 ►
wandering around
00:55:37 ►
mumbling to himself in the garden
00:55:39 ►
says
00:55:40 ►
this thing that these people have done
00:55:43 ►
what if they eat
00:55:44 ►
of the fruit of the tree of life
00:55:47 ►
then they will be as we are
00:55:49 ►
so it’s very clear
00:55:51 ►
that
00:55:52 ►
there is concern
00:55:54 ►
to withhold knowledge
00:55:56 ►
that human beings
00:55:59 ►
are to be held in an inferior
00:56:00 ►
position otherwise
00:56:02 ►
if they were to eat of the fruit of the tree of life, of knowledge,
00:56:06 ►
they would be as we are.
00:56:08 ►
So there’s this whole tension.
00:56:10 ►
And in the story in Genesis,
00:56:12 ►
you’ll recall Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden
00:56:14 ►
and an angel is set at the east of Eden
00:56:18 ►
with a burning sword.
00:56:20 ►
Well, what I take this to be about
00:56:22 ►
is it’s a story from a strata where already the shift to the dominator culture has taken place.
00:56:33 ►
But they’re looking backward at the partnership society in, on the grasslands of Africa.
00:56:41 ►
And the, and the angel with the burning sword is nothing more than the sun. They literally
00:56:47 ►
were cast out of Eden. Eden disappeared around them. It dried up and blew away. And there was
00:56:53 ►
nowhere to go but the Nile Valley and Palestine. And these people who appear in the Nile Valley
00:56:59 ►
and Palestine at about 9,800 BC, called Natufayanayan come out of nowhere with a very high culture
00:57:08 ►
and a tremendous ability to exploit plant resources.
00:57:13 ►
And I think they are the remnants of this partnership culture.
00:57:18 ►
And you see, the way in which all this ties into the present and attempts to be whether you’re a Marxist or any of that anymore
00:57:45 ►
because we’ve all seen through that,
00:57:48 ►
the new issue is human nature.
00:57:51 ►
And it evolves around this drug thing.
00:57:55 ►
You know, is it the true and purest expression of human nature
00:58:02 ►
that you should drink nothing but cold water
00:58:05 ►
and eat nothing but raw vegetables
00:58:08 ►
and any departure from this is an abomination.
00:58:12 ►
And then when you get to drugs,
00:58:13 ►
you know, this is really an abomination.
00:58:16 ►
What should be our relationship to substances?
00:58:20 ►
And why are we the addictive creatures that we are?
00:58:23 ►
I mean, I know that elephants intoxicate on papayas
00:58:28 ►
and bumblebees get loaded on sugar, water, and this and that.
00:58:32 ►
But human beings addict to dozens of substances, to behaviors.
00:58:39 ►
I mean, all kinds of things.
00:58:41 ►
A guy goes out in the morning to pick up his paper off his porch,
00:58:46 ►
and it’s not there. and he has a heart attack you know he has to sit down my god you know what am i going to and he
00:58:54 ►
has to have instant relief from the the traumatic crisis of the non-presence of the morning
00:59:00 ►
information fix and and the phenomenon of falling in love
00:59:05 ►
which doesn’t really happen with other animals
00:59:08 ►
I mean other animals bond
00:59:10 ►
but they don’t go bananas in the way that we do
00:59:15 ►
on this issue
00:59:17 ►
we’re chemically highly cued
00:59:21 ►
in a way that a lot of animals around us aren’t.
00:59:26 ►
So then history, because of this,
00:59:28 ►
because of this addictive drive within us
00:59:30 ►
that we have because of this disrupted symbiotic relationship in prehistory.
00:59:37 ►
See, we’re looking for the score, but we can’t quite find it.
00:59:41 ►
Imperialism doesn’t do it.
00:59:43 ►
Heroin doesn’t do it. Sadomasochism doesn’t do it. Nothing quite find it. Imperialism doesn’t do it. Heroin doesn’t do it. Sadomasochism doesn’t do it.
00:59:47 ►
Nothing quite does it. But we keep trying stuff. Cocaine, money, fascism, mercantilism, ideology,
00:59:56 ►
all of this stuff. We are very, very restless. And the path of our restless, frantic peregrinations across the intellectual landscape is what we call history.
01:00:09 ►
It’s our effort to try and get straight, get back to something which we feel we deserve and that we lost,
01:00:20 ►
and that we don’t know quite what it was.
01:00:22 ►
and that we don’t know quite what it was.
01:00:28 ►
Well, meanwhile, in the rainforests, in the Arctic tundra,
01:00:34 ►
these little brown people have been keeping the gnosis going,
01:00:39 ►
never questioning, never doubting, millennia after millennia,
01:00:44 ►
going into these hyperdimensional mind spaces and operating there.
01:00:46 ►
While this has been going on,
01:00:49 ►
we have been elaborating positivism,
01:00:51 ►
scientific philosophy,
01:00:53 ►
building atom smashers,
01:00:54 ►
so forth and so on. We have created then,
01:00:56 ►
out of our infantile cultural style,
01:01:00 ►
what Eric Fromm would call
01:01:03 ►
a fecal cultural style
01:01:06 ►
because we just excrete stuff, you know, all kinds of stuff.
01:01:12 ►
They have held this mystery.
01:01:15 ►
But they, to my mind, the mistake that has been made
01:01:18 ►
is that it’s been thought that they understood it.
01:01:21 ►
That we now go to the shamans and they will explain to us what the inner skinny is on all this. That isn’t it. That we now go to the shamans and they will explain to us
01:01:26 ►
what the inner skinny is on all this.
01:01:28 ►
That isn’t it.
01:01:29 ►
There’s no explaining this.
01:01:31 ►
Once you’ve been there,
01:01:32 ►
you know the futility of a notion
01:01:35 ►
like understanding the psychedelic experience.
01:01:38 ►
It’s like understanding the ocean
01:01:41 ►
or understanding planetary ecology.
01:01:44 ►
We think that things are to be understood,
01:01:48 ►
but some things are simply to be, you know, what’s the word,
01:01:52 ►
appreciated, imbibed, to be in the darshan of them.
01:01:57 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:00 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:03 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:10 ►
When just now Terrence was saying that we humans are very, very restless,
01:02:14 ►
well, I thought about how that might have related to my own life.
01:02:19 ►
Until now, well, I actually hadn’t thought very much about my life’s trajectory as being driven by restlessness.
01:02:22 ►
I just figured that, well, I never actually found out what it was that
01:02:25 ►
I wanted to do in this world. I grew up, you see, in a family that was lower middle class in regards
01:02:31 ►
to money and upper middle class in regards to manners. That’s a long story that I don’t have
01:02:37 ►
time for right now, but basically I grew up in a somewhat poor Irish Catholic family in the Midwest,
01:02:43 ►
but from there I got an electrical engineering degree from Notre Dame,
01:02:47 ►
where I was also captain of the sailing team.
01:02:51 ►
The first time that I crossed the Pacific, it was in a wooden square-rigged ship,
01:02:54 ►
and I worked as a stuntman in the movies, served as a naval officer in Vietnam,
01:02:59 ►
practiced law in Texas, organized a personal computer company before IBM was in the business,
01:03:04 ►
became the internet evangelist for the nation company before IBM was in the business, became
01:03:05 ►
the internet evangelist for the nation’s largest phone company at the time, launched the Palenque
01:03:11 ►
Norte Lecture Series at Burning Man, and now, well, I’m your friend and host here in the
01:03:16 ►
Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:17 ►
Maybe that was a bit restless now that I think about it.
01:03:21 ►
However, I’ve also discovered something here in my 73rd year
01:03:25 ►
that has really surprised me. I find myself to be perfectly content without any sign of
01:03:31 ►
restlessness. In fact, if I have my way, I hope to never have to even leave this county
01:03:36 ►
again. At first, I couldn’t figure out what it was that changed me. Maybe I just got old.
01:03:42 ►
Then, while I was reading a John Fowles novel, I came across the following, and I quote,
01:03:48 ►
There comes a time in each life like a point of a fulcrum.
01:03:52 ►
At that time you must accept yourself.
01:03:55 ►
It is not anymore what you will become.
01:03:57 ►
It is what you are and always will be.
01:04:00 ►
End quote.
01:04:02 ►
And so at last I’ve come to grips with the fact that right now, at this very moment, End quote. life right now, that may not be what you should be saying to yourself. My only reason for telling
01:04:25 ►
you this is that, well, I want you to know that if you live long enough, there’s a very good chance
01:04:31 ►
that you will eventually be able to relax and to realize that it has never been about what you did
01:04:37 ►
or continue to do. It’s only about who you are at your core. And you know the answer to that better than anyone else.
01:04:45 ►
So if you want to relax a bit, try and figure out just who and what you are.
01:04:51 ►
Sure, it may be great to be a big rock star during the few hours that you’re on a stage,
01:04:56 ►
but from what I’ve seen and read, the rest of their lives aren’t something that I’d want to share.
01:05:01 ►
In particular, the thousands of hours that they have to practice.
01:05:05 ►
I was never very good at practicing music when I was taking piano lessons.
01:05:09 ►
But once you figure out what it is that you would like people to say about you at your funeral,
01:05:14 ►
and then you figure out that you are comfortable about what those closest to you at the end of your life will say,
01:05:20 ►
well, then you have reached the point of that fulcrum where you accept the fact that
01:05:24 ►
those who know you best know you for all of the reasons that you want to be known for.
01:05:30 ►
Well, I could go on, but I don’t even know how I got on that track.
01:05:35 ►
Let’s see, getting back to what Terence was saying,
01:05:38 ►
did you notice that when he mentioned the human population of this planet,
01:05:43 ►
that it was only three and a half or four billion people?
01:05:46 ►
At even that level, Terence found our situation to be quite precarious.
01:05:51 ►
Now, here we are today with almost twice that number of people that were here just 25 years ago.
01:05:57 ►
I’ll let you think about that for a moment.
01:06:00 ►
And by the way, when he said, and I quote,
01:06:03 ►
When you extrapolate a visionless future, even as much as three or four decades ahead,
01:06:10 ►
you see the accumulation of problems on such a scale that then there will be no pulling out of the power dive,
01:06:16 ►
because once a society passes a certain point in the process of dissolution,
01:06:21 ►
you just don’t make a decision to change.
01:06:23 ►
It’s too late. It’s all slipped through
01:06:26 ►
your fingers, end quote. Well, here we are almost three decades into this visionless future where
01:06:33 ►
we humans are not even capable, after many attempts, to come to any kind of a global strategy
01:06:39 ►
to preserve an environment in which human life can not only survive, but to once again actually
01:06:45 ►
thrive.
01:06:46 ►
And it really shouldn’t be all that difficult when you think about it.
01:06:50 ►
For example, we need to transition to renewable energy.
01:06:54 ►
Technically, that’s certainly possible.
01:06:57 ►
I think we should cancel all student debt and provide a free higher education to everyone
01:07:01 ►
who wants one.
01:07:03 ►
We should obviously end the war on drugs and the war on terror.
01:07:07 ►
Let’s recall that war actually causes terror.
01:07:10 ►
There is no way a war can ever end what it’s causing.
01:07:15 ►
Another interesting thing we could do here in the States
01:07:17 ►
is to provide free Medicare-like health care for everyone,
01:07:21 ►
including people that are living here without the proper paperwork.
01:07:45 ►
We should actually do something about the fact of climate change Thank you. human being can agree with. Yet, I sure don’t see many of the so-called political leaders doing much about these issues, other than just talking about them. Maybe it’s time to get rid of the concept
01:07:51 ►
of having local, state, and national leaders, and get back to something more basic. Representatives.
01:07:58 ►
Representatives of the wishes of we the people, and not representatives of the wishes of our corporate masters. Well, that’s my little insignificant rant. Now it’s your turn.
01:08:09 ►
Maybe together we can stir some things up.
01:08:13 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:08:17 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.