Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Language is the software without which we wouldn’t be people.”
“Culture is a strategy for intensifying the dimensionality of an animal species.”
“Somehow, the psychedelic experience is related to this bootstrapping process of climbing, organizationally, from one dimension to another, deeper and deeper into complexity. It’s almost as though the psychedelic experience is a viewing of the process from the highest dimension in the plane.”
“What you experience in the psychedelic experience is eternity, all of time.”
“A shaman is someone who has seen the end.”
“Ideas are the signposts of our destiny.”
“It’s an absurd question to ask the question, ‘What will the world be like in 500 years?’ What the world will be like in 500 years is unimaginable.”
“Language is an informational creature of some sort.”
“[Quantum physics] is our truth [about reality]. How crazy are you if your truth is something you can’t even understand? And that’s the situation that we are in.”
Trip
by Kelly Matten & Walker Farrell
The Museum Dose: 12 Experiments in Pharmacologically Mediated Aesthetics
by Daniel Tumbleweed
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And now that we’re about halfway through the summer months, or I guess the winter months, depending on where you’re living right now,
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at least here in the States, it’s been a summer of rather unusual weather.
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And I believe that’s true in other parts of the world as well.
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Even here in drought-stricken Southern California, we’ve had the most rain during the month of July since records have been kept.
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And yes, I know that the rest of the country has been having some extremely difficult times in regards to rough weather this summer.
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I just want you to know that if you’re looking for a place to relocate and weather is one of your factors,
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well then you may want to take a look at Southern California,
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because I don’t think that you can find better weather all year long anywhere else on the planet.
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And the preceding message was brought to you by the California Association of Studious Hippies, or CASH, which is something that you’re going to need a lot of to pay for your rent out here.
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Of course, we save on not needing heating and air conditioning. Thank you for watching. and natural disasters, well, here in Southern California, we seldom have the chance to even mention our weather.
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Of course, all this great July rain that we’ve been experiencing
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the past several days hasn’t yet amounted to as much as Texas and Florida
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often get in just a single hour.
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Everything is relative, as you know.
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Now, getting on with today’s program, we are going to get to listen to the next part
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of a weekend workshop given by Terrence McKenna in May of 1990, which picks up right where we
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left off last week. And so now, here’s Terrence. Well, let’s talk a little bit more as we were
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this morning. I talked more than I intended to this morning.
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What is anybody’s take on this?
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Did anybody not get their licks in this morning?
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Yeah?
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You mentioned the odd and strange and the weird.
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Other than hallucinogens,
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how can we fool this brain away from the ego?
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It’s pretty difficult.
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I think that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in.
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We’re talking about things we could do every day, not once a month.
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Well, there’s no substitute for
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awareness in any situation.
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I mean, part of
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the work, I mean part of the work I think is the
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spectacular
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episodes of intoxication
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that break down the boundaries
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of our personality and reorient
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us and recast it
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but then the other thing is just living that out
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from day to day
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and there’s no substitute
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for hard work I mean people say
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how can psychedelics be real
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you’re saying it’s some kind of shortcut
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to spiritual wisdom
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well it may be a shortcut
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but nobody said it’s easy
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it isn’t easy
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no
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it just is that it’s ultimately effective
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I don’t know.
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I find myself preaching a doctrine
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that is hardly welcome in the touchy-feely circles
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that I’m usually teaching in,
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which is stifle it.
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Now, there’s a doctrine to take home from the New Age.
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Stifle it, you know.
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The ego is much too large. I mean, we need
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an ego, yes. That’s so that if you take somebody to dinner, you know whose mouth to put food
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in. That’s having an ego. But above and beyond that, it becomes sort of superfluous. It’s a habit.
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It’s a bad habit.
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It’s an infantile response that has been culturally supported
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to the point where it’s become institutionalized.
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Do you believe a person needs a strong enough ego
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before they can transcend or transform it, though.
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The reason I’m saying that is because
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I’ve seen a lot of teenagers in the city
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and then they experiment a lot with drugs,
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and especially with psychedelics.
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And sometimes I wonder
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if they’re really getting anything out of that early experimentation.
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I didn’t get into psychedelics until my late 20s.
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Well, see, it’s a real complicated question.
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Civilizations
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evolve folkways to deal with the drugs that they’re
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interested in, and this takes hundreds, thousands of years.
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Part of the question I hear you asking is, you
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say that these drugs dissolve the ego, but aren’t some of the question I hear you asking is you say that these drugs dissolve the ego
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but aren’t some of the people in a weakened ego condition
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when they come upon them
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and I think probably you’re right
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it’s not clear that the onset of puberty
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when there’s a good deal of psychosexual
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and endocrine confusion going on anyway
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is the precise right moment that you want to drop these psychedelics on somebody.
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Although this is done in many traditional societies.
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But the problem is that in societies where there is shamanism,
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there’s an understood way to do it.
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There’s an understood way to do it. There’s an understood way to initiate somebody.
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Kids growing up on the streets taking drugs of all sorts
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and doses of all sorts, it’s very hard to sort it out.
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People don’t have intent.
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They don’t have focus.
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They don’t have information.
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they don’t have focus they don’t have information
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they’re just
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everything is so fragmented
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in modern life
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part of what all this
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yammering about shamanism
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might eventually lead to
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is the reformation
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of psychotherapy
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along the lines
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of a shamanic
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style so that then along the lines of a shamanic style
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so that then people could have these voyages,
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could have the insight into their problems
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that you get from psychedelics.
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Also in those cultures and societies
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where they do use the psychotropic drug at puberty,
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I think those societies support the individual, the child growing up,
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in very positive ways and feed their ego in a very constructive, positive way
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so that they are not filled with a lot of self-consciousness and self-hatred
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and lack of self-worth and so forth,
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a lot of the critical nature that I think,
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and the lack of nurturing and attention
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that a lot of the adolescents grow up in our society with
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that then get weak egos from adolescence on into adulthood.
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And I think the developmental quality of life
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in different cultures has a lot to do with
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one’s ability to utilize the drug, the plants, effectively.
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Cooperation is just an automatic response
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among many of these rainforest- gathering people i mean when you finish a job
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it isn’t your job when you finish a job you go on and you do another job until all the jobs are done
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and and this is clearly a learned response because these are human beings just like us
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but under the extreme pressure of being you know 20
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people trying to hold it together in the
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rainforest through gathering
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they have accepted
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that the tribal unit
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is the lowest common
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denominator and that everything
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has to operate
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in the light of that
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back here
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I felt that part of what was being discussed here
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was the difference between discursive
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and one-pointed meditation.
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And discursive meditation is like meditating
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on the stations of the cross,
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if you’re Catholic,
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or the seven sheaths of the self,
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if you’re a Hindu.
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And it sort of serves years of doing that
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as establishing a ladder
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that can take you to the transcendent.
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And that one point of meditation,
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and even more profoundly,
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the use of psychedelics,
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can suddenly put you into a transcendent state.
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And whether you’ll have the capacity to get back
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is the question.
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And so that there might be a role
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for a period of discursive meditation
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or an education along that way
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before something instantly propels you
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into an experience of the transcendent.
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Yes, although this difficulty getting back
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is an interesting thing to talk about
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because I certainly know what you mean
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I think everybody who takes psychedelics a lot
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eventually has a trip that stands their hair on end
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and the reasonable fear
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I’ve always felt about psychedelics
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was not that it would kill you.
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That’s not reasonable.
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But the somewhat murkier question,
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could it drive you mad,
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is a little harder to just, of course not,
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because, hell, why not?
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I mean, it’s definitely rubbing up against those areas.
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But I have real faith that it’s like flipping a coin
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and getting it to land on its edge.
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The psychedelic experience represents such a state of disequilibrium
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that in almost all cases
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the entire system is striving to return to normal
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and will do so very quickly.
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My life is built around one spectacular exception
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where my brother took a bunch of things
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and had a theory and proceeded to sail off
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for the better part of three weeks
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and
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this sort of brings up
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another issue
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we sit here relatively down
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and calm
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and we can talk about
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the LD50 of psilocybin
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that’s how much you would have to
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give to a hundred mice
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for fifty of them to die.
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This is what pharmacologists are all about.
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But when you’re actually stoned in these places,
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you realize or you have the apparent realization
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that of course the mind is in control.
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And talking about safety, you’re only as safe as you think you are
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literally
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and if for a moment you decide you’re not safe
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the state is very fragile
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it’s skittery
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get it going too fast in one direction
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it will be very hard to run around and get in front of it
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and get it halted and moving off in some other direction.
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Is that what you meant by self-toxicity?
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Did I use that phrase this morning?
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No, in a past tape you did mention about self-toxicity
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and negative effects, possible negative effects.
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Well, yeah, I think this is what people fear,
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that they are self-toxic.
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And we have all been disempowered. fear, that they are self-toxic. And we have all been disempowered.
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To some degree, we are self-toxic.
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That’s a real tragedy.
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It means we have been made our own enemies.
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And then, whether we are or not,
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we all fear self-toxicity.
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This is why, in the 60s,
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when LSD first began to appear,
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people had such violent
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reactions to it
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you know Tim Leary said
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LSD is a psychedelic
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drug which causes psychotic
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behavior in people who haven’t
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taken it
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this is absolutely true
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well why would
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a drug that you don’t take
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cause you to become psychotic?
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It’s because the mere fact of its existence
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is so threatening to you
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because you know that you’re self-toxic.
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That’s what I always felt in the 60s.
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These people all know they’re crazy
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and they don’t want to get near anything
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which would perturb their psychic dynamics.
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They know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re certifiably insane
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and they don’t want to hear about it.
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So they’re not going to be delving into something
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which shines a Klieg light on the mechanics of the psyche.
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It’s the last thing that they are interested in.
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that they are interested in.
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If the definition of ego is the sort of reality testing mode of the psyche,
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the psyche’s ability to perceive reality,
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then it almost seems that the psychedelic experience
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augments the ego to a new level
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rather than extinguishes the ego,
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that it gives a truer picture of
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reality.
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Well, you know, Freud had this concept that he called the superego, and this term has
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somewhat fallen out of use, and because we all tend to be a little more Jungian than
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that, and we talk about the collective unconscious
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but in a way I though I’m more sympathetic to Jung I like the phrase super ego because the phrase
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collective unconscious is a kind of blah concept it’s like a data bank a repository where super ego seems to imply organization
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intelligence, focus
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awareness
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and
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what seems to emerge from these
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psychedelic experiences is
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that where we expected
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disorder or the absence
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of organization
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we find order
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we find mindedness the the superego seems to be
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everywhere. So in a way, it is like that. It is that you’re becoming more informed,
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but it diminishes your personal importance, the physical atom of your body.
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You know?
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I mean, we believe,
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and it may be true,
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but the question is,
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how important is it,
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that we are each unique
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and that somehow in this uniqueness
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is our worth
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and that if something were to happen to you,
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we can’t replace you with me,
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and you can’t stand in for me.
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But, you know, back off
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to where you’re looking at a scale of a thousand years of this stuff,
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and you see that each one of us actually is expendable,
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and that the general processes in which we are embedded are so large
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that it probably
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doesn’t matter who you are
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and I could have been you
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and you could have been me
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well then once you’ve got that
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nailed down
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being becomes a whole
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different project
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being is something out there
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that you do you garden, you bear and raise
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children, you feed people, you build objects, you know, it becomes something outside of yourself
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rather than something interiorized. And I think, you know, thousands and thousands of generations
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of people were born and lived and went into the ground
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with this kind of a psychology.
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And we are all imprisoned by our cultural expectations
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to such a degree that the real problem
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is to make ourselves realize how blind we are,
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how much what we’ve been taught,
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the words we use, much what we’ve been taught the words we use
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the expectations we have
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hem us in
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and the psychedelics
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show that cultural relativism
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not as an exercise
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not as something that you’re convinced of
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by rational argument
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but that you just
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you just see it
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immediately
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see I think we are very malleable creatures but that you just see it immediately.
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See, I think we are very malleable creatures and have held many positions in the last 10,000 years
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vis-à-vis these structures which we call the ego,
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the superego, the self, the unconscious.
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It’s more fluid than we imagine.
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Language may have emerged only 40,000 years ago.
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Well, imagine that.
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Language is the software without which we wouldn’t be people.
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You know? wouldn’t be people you know language allows us
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to explore realms of
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subtlety and
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inclusive understanding
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that so exceed the
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animal grasp that
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they can barely be compared
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I think
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probably in the beginning
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that language was something that
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women
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held almost as a magical power.
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The reason for this is that there was greater selective pressure on women than on men to develop language.
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Because the physically larger male, when there began to be role specialization
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the physically larger male
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was made a hunter
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and hunting places a premium
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on such values
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as stoicism
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patience and an ability
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to keep your mouth shut
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the women
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were involved in
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gathering
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and because the children were physically with the women
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this area in which the gathering went on
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was more tightly related to the living space
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well if you know anything about the science of botany
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you know that it is a science of the coordination of detail everything is about the science of botany you know that it is a science of the coordination
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of detail
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everything is about the detail
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here you have 50 species of grasses
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to Joe Blow they all look
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exactly the same
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to a specialist in the Grimini
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here is a whole rich universe
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of taxonomic diversity
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to be combed over and milked
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for years as you advance through the academic machinery.
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So women had to learn all these differentiations.
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Women had to be able to make statements like
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it’s the small bush at the bottom of the draw
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with the wrinkled leaves and the sticky white berries
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with the silver hairs on them.
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See, it’s all color, shape, form, and relationship words.
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Well, this kind of language is the kind of language
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that gave us a leg up on animal organization.
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After a passage of time, I think this linguistic thing
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generally established itself
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but it was
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originally a thing
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that women were into
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even to this day
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when you go into villages
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in third world parts
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of the planet
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there’s this phrase in all
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travel books which is
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the chattering of the village women.
00:20:46 ►
And it’s true, they really do chatter.
00:20:48 ►
And it’s because they are more collective creatures.
00:20:50 ►
The male is this proud, lonely, hunting figure,
00:20:55 ►
and the females represent the village values.
00:21:00 ►
And they held the knowledge of the plants.
00:21:03 ►
They discovered all this stuff.
00:21:05 ►
You even get that in the Eden story.
00:21:08 ►
It’s a woman who’s blamed.
00:21:09 ►
Somehow these women have a deeper insight
00:21:12 ►
and the poor guy is just led to slaughter
00:21:15 ►
because he’s trying to get some chow.
00:21:20 ►
Perhaps an appropriate image would be one of climbing a temple.
00:21:27 ►
I was thinking Bor-o-dur,
00:21:28 ►
which is probably the most impressive temple
00:21:30 ►
that I’ve ever visited.
00:21:32 ►
But there, as you walk up the temple,
00:21:35 ►
if you pay attention,
00:21:36 ►
you’re having a whole experience of Buddhism
00:21:38 ►
and different symbologies,
00:21:39 ►
but also just basically your vision
00:21:42 ►
of the surrounding jungle expands
00:21:45 ►
and your sense of self diminishes.
00:21:49 ►
Because you see the larger world.
00:21:51 ►
You see the larger world from up on top.
00:21:53 ►
Yeah, from the center of the mandala.
00:21:56 ►
The same psychology is operating on the Mayan buildings.
00:22:01 ►
I mean, the Mayan buildings are barely buildings at all.
00:22:04 ►
They’re more like pedestals.
00:22:06 ►
I mean, this thing is, you know, 230 feet high, but when you climb to the top of it, there’s room
00:22:12 ►
for 12 guys to stand shoulder to shoulder, and that’s the building. And it’s clearly entirely
00:22:19 ►
to elevate them above the social space. It was literally a machine for lifting the priesthood
00:22:27 ►
into another dimension.
00:22:29 ►
And the dimension into which it lifted them
00:22:31 ►
was an aerial dimension.
00:22:33 ►
They could see the whole world.
00:22:35 ►
They could see the sock base stretching out to the next pyramid.
00:22:39 ►
They could see the next pyramid five or ten miles away on the horizon
00:22:43 ►
and could see the life of the
00:22:46 ►
city and all this.
00:22:47 ►
You know there’s a funny thing.
00:22:52 ►
It’s almost as though biology and then its ancillary tack on phenomenon culture is a
00:23:02 ►
kind of conquest of dimensions that has been going on for a very
00:23:08 ►
long time and this aids me anyway in understanding the transformation that I think lies ahead for
00:23:15 ►
this planet the earliest forms of life had only a tactile sense That means all they knew was what they were bumping up against,
00:23:28 ►
and they would move around,
00:23:30 ►
and what was edible was eaten,
00:23:32 ►
and what wasn’t, wasn’t.
00:23:33 ►
And then a long time passed,
00:23:36 ►
you know, 100 million, 200 million years,
00:23:38 ►
and certain specialized cells aggregated
00:23:46 ►
and these cells were light sensitive
00:23:49 ►
cells, they could send an on
00:23:51 ►
off signal
00:23:52 ►
based on whether or not photons
00:23:55 ►
were falling on them
00:23:57 ►
so eye spots developed
00:23:59 ►
and eye spots are just these sensors
00:24:02 ►
which tell you if it’s light or dark
00:24:03 ►
and suddenly these creatures could move off after a light source
00:24:09 ►
or could retreat from danger into a dark spot.
00:24:13 ►
Well, then eventually these eye spots evolved into the kinds of
00:24:18 ►
very finely coordinated optical systems that we have and octopi have and so forth.
00:24:25 ►
At the same time, motility was developing, the ability to move through space.
00:24:33 ►
Well, have you ever noticed that when you look at something
00:24:38 ►
and at a place a few feet from where you’re sitting
00:24:42 ►
and then go there, physically move there,
00:24:46 ►
that what you have really done is you have coordinated a short trip into the future.
00:24:55 ►
Because you have looked at a spot and you have said, this is how the brain computer works,
00:25:00 ►
it has said, I am not in that that place I want to be in that place
00:25:06 ►
I am in this place
00:25:08 ►
now to get from this
00:25:10 ►
place now to that place
00:25:11 ►
then I have to move through
00:25:14 ►
the following points
00:25:15 ►
and when animals
00:25:17 ►
began to move
00:25:19 ►
another dimension
00:25:22 ►
was added to their
00:25:24 ►
repertoire of control.
00:25:26 ►
And when they began to coordinate vision,
00:25:28 ►
another dimension was added to their repertoire of control.
00:25:32 ►
Well, we made then a great and fundamental break
00:25:37 ►
in our neurological organization.
00:25:40 ►
All animal life, as far as we can tell,
00:25:43 ►
is imprisoned between very steep temporal canyons
00:25:49 ►
having to do with the present moment.
00:25:53 ►
Animals are in the present moment
00:25:56 ►
in a way that would be very frightening to us, I think.
00:26:00 ►
If you could suddenly enter the mind of an animal,
00:26:04 ►
the immediate thing
00:26:06 ►
that you would notice that would really
00:26:08 ►
unnerve you was the absence
00:26:10 ►
of a past and a future
00:26:11 ►
that just you know you talk about
00:26:14 ►
be there now
00:26:15 ►
an animal has that down pat
00:26:18 ►
well when we
00:26:19 ►
through language
00:26:22 ►
that was the great
00:26:24 ►
language is a strategy
00:26:25 ►
for binding time
00:26:27 ►
language is a
00:26:30 ►
strategy for taking the animal
00:26:32 ►
mind locked
00:26:33 ►
in the present moment and pushing
00:26:36 ►
it back
00:26:37 ►
conceivably to the
00:26:39 ►
creation of the universe as we do
00:26:42 ►
and forward conceivably
00:26:44 ►
to the end of the universe as we do, and forward conceivably to the end of the universe.
00:26:46 ►
So culture is a strategy for intensifying the dimensionality of an animal species.
00:26:54 ►
And when you then get into what’s called epigenetic coding,
00:27:02 ►
not simply being able to recall the past neurologically
00:27:08 ►
and project the future neurologically,
00:27:10 ►
but to actually write down the past and calculate the future,
00:27:16 ►
well then what is happening is mind is spreading out
00:27:19 ►
through the dimensions available to it.
00:27:22 ►
And this whole cultural intensification
00:27:28 ►
that we call the 20th century,
00:27:30 ►
the spinning down and interconnecting
00:27:34 ►
of technologies and animal ecosystems
00:27:40 ►
and philosophical systems,
00:27:42 ►
all this knitting together
00:27:44 ►
is a going hyperdimensional of our species
00:27:49 ►
that yet more of the future and more of the past is apparently to be realized.
00:27:56 ►
And if you know anything about virtual reality thinking,
00:28:02 ►
there time is to be homogenized completely
00:28:05 ►
you will not be able to tell
00:28:08 ►
whether it’s next week or last week
00:28:10 ►
because they will be
00:28:12 ►
approximately equally
00:28:14 ►
accessible
00:28:15 ►
and
00:28:16 ►
somehow
00:28:19 ►
the psychedelic experience
00:28:22 ►
is related to this
00:28:24 ►
bootstrapping process of climbing organizationally from highest dimension in the plane.
00:28:47 ►
One way of putting this that isn’t so mathematical
00:28:49 ►
is to say what you experience in the psychedelic experience is eternity.
00:28:56 ►
All of time.
00:28:57 ►
You leave the slowly revolving torus of time
00:29:03 ►
just as one would leave the galaxy in a spaceship,
00:29:07 ►
and you go outside, and then you look back,
00:29:11 ►
and you see all of time.
00:29:14 ►
You see the beginning of life, the end of life,
00:29:17 ►
the fiery death of this planet,
00:29:19 ►
millennia hence, whatever it is.
00:29:24 ►
And I think that this is a true vision,
00:29:30 ►
that this is what shamans have achieved,
00:29:33 ►
this is what we, with all our sophistication,
00:29:37 ►
are confounded by.
00:29:39 ►
A shaman is someone who has seen the end.
00:29:44 ►
A shaman is somebody who has seen the end.
00:29:48 ►
A shaman is somebody who has seen it all.
00:29:53 ►
They’ve run the movie and run the movie and run the movie and they’ve satisfied themselves that they understand the movie.
00:29:56 ►
Then they go back to their place in the movie
00:29:59 ►
and they live it with a small smile
00:30:02 ►
because they know the end.
00:30:06 ►
They know how things work.
00:30:08 ►
They know what life is.
00:30:10 ►
And when you have even a piece of that action,
00:30:14 ►
you can get a real handle on peace of mind, on true authenticity
00:30:21 ►
because it’s in the tumbling forward rushing chaos
00:30:27 ►
of the lower dimensional slices of time
00:30:31 ►
that we lose it
00:30:32 ►
that we become confused
00:30:34 ►
who am I?
00:30:36 ►
what do I want?
00:30:37 ►
where am I?
00:30:38 ►
who should I be with?
00:30:39 ►
what should I give myself to?
00:30:41 ►
this is a voice
00:30:44 ►
speaking from chaos.
00:30:47 ►
I remember once at a period of turmoil in my life,
00:30:51 ►
I took mushrooms to try and resolve my personal difficulties.
00:30:57 ►
And I said, I’ll think of a question.
00:31:00 ►
You know, they say you should think of a question.
00:31:02 ►
So I said, I’ll think of a question.
00:31:04 ►
The question was, am I doing the right thing thing and it’s in the point in the trip i posed this question
00:31:11 ►
to it and the answer was what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask an extraterrestrial
00:31:20 ►
intellect well so then i got it you, that that was a chicken shit question
00:31:25 ►
and that I had been completely
00:31:26 ►
misunderstanding the nature
00:31:28 ►
of the relationship.
00:31:30 ►
This wasn’t some kind of little glass ball
00:31:32 ►
that gives yes or no
00:31:33 ►
when you turn it upside down.
00:31:35 ►
This is, I don’t know, words fail,
00:31:39 ►
but nobody to expect psychotherapy
00:31:41 ►
for free from anyway.
00:31:43 ►
You said something about, you know, the beginning and ending of time and stuff, and it sounded like
00:31:50 ►
a deterministic model, and I’m very skeptical about that.
00:31:53 ►
It does sound like a deterministic model. If the computer’s working tonight, I’ll show
00:31:59 ►
you my model, and you can decide whether it’s deterministic or not no deterministic model
00:32:06 ►
has any chance
00:32:08 ►
of success
00:32:09 ►
there’s a built in flaw
00:32:11 ►
so you don’t need to waste time with forms
00:32:14 ►
of determinism
00:32:15 ►
this is the kind of stuff they teach you if you study
00:32:17 ►
formal philosophy
00:32:18 ►
the problem with determinism is
00:32:20 ►
it says everything can’t
00:32:24 ►
happen anyway
00:32:25 ►
except the way that it’s happening.
00:32:28 ►
Now the problem with that is
00:32:29 ►
that it makes the concept of thinking irrelevant
00:32:35 ►
because you’re thinking what you’re thinking
00:32:38 ►
because you couldn’t think anything else.
00:32:41 ►
Therefore the notion of truth or judgment or all of that is completely shot
00:32:48 ►
down. So a totally determined universe is the most ultimately uninteresting that there
00:32:56 ►
can be. Nevertheless, the universe clearly is to some degree highly determined I mean we know to within nanoseconds the time
00:33:06 ►
of the sunrise tomorrow
00:33:07 ►
and unless there’s a serious
00:33:10 ►
instability it will be on
00:33:12 ►
time so there is a degree
00:33:13 ►
of predictability
00:33:15 ►
my rap is sort of divided
00:33:20 ►
into two parts
00:33:21 ►
and I’m very shy about the
00:33:24 ►
second half the second half.
00:33:25 ►
The first half is easy for me.
00:33:27 ►
It’s that psychedelics are wonderful, you should take them,
00:33:30 ►
this is the way to save the world, so forth and so on.
00:33:33 ►
The second part of the rap is, here’s what I’ve learned from psychedelics,
00:33:40 ►
and then not some general kind of feel-good thing,
00:33:43 ►
but something that requires a blackboard
00:33:46 ►
and tensor equations of the third degree and so forth and so on.
00:33:50 ►
And I’m very shy about putting that out.
00:33:53 ►
My personal approach to psychedelics,
00:33:57 ►
before I realized that you could save the world with them,
00:34:00 ►
when I just thought that this was some kind of thing, self-exploration.
00:34:06 ►
My notion was what it’s good for is ideas.
00:34:12 ►
It’s for generating ideas.
00:34:15 ►
And I don’t really like the word generating because you don’t generate them, you hunt
00:34:20 ►
them.
00:34:20 ►
You get in your little boat and you paddle out onto the dark water and then you know you put
00:34:28 ►
your feet up and you wait and you set your nets and you wait and uh you know sometimes you pull
00:34:36 ►
up your nets and something the size of a freight train has gone through them and you just row for sure shit and flight and sometimes
00:34:45 ►
minnows, trivia
00:34:47 ►
why does
00:34:49 ►
our little finger just fit our
00:34:51 ►
nostril
00:34:52 ►
the mysteries of the animal
00:34:55 ►
body or all kinds of stuff
00:34:57 ►
but occasionally
00:34:59 ►
and it’s worth fishing a lifetime
00:35:02 ►
occasionally
00:35:03 ►
something will come into the nets
00:35:05 ►
that is not so small as to be trivial
00:35:08 ►
and not so large as to be incomprehensible,
00:35:12 ►
and this thing can be wrestled with for hours
00:35:15 ►
and eventually brought home
00:35:17 ►
to show the startled folks back on shore.
00:35:21 ►
And this showing the startled folks back on shore
00:35:24 ►
makes history
00:35:27 ►
all these ideas
00:35:29 ►
come out of interaction
00:35:32 ►
with these plants
00:35:33 ►
the number of ideas
00:35:36 ►
which when you pick up
00:35:38 ►
a straight encyclopedia
00:35:39 ►
should be traced back to
00:35:42 ►
herders
00:35:44 ►
and people who kept animals.
00:35:47 ►
People say, you know, astrology, astronomy,
00:35:50 ►
it was invented by people watching their flocks.
00:35:54 ►
The calendar, time,
00:35:56 ►
was invented by people watching their flocks.
00:36:00 ►
All of a sudden, well, they weren’t only watching their flocks,
00:36:02 ►
they were also watching the cow pies of their flocks for mushrooms. And, you know, music, all of these Pythagorean insights into order, I think, come out of this herding, domesticated animal husbandry, we call it, husbandry, because it’s a model of caring for nature. And these ideas are the inspiration and the purpose to my mind. you know, get rid of my stuff and feel better about
00:36:45 ►
how I was abused in childhood
00:36:47 ►
and this and that and the other thing
00:36:49 ►
with psychedelics.
00:36:51 ►
But that’s all personal growth stuff.
00:36:54 ►
But an idea, you know, can be shared.
00:36:58 ►
You can take it and you can lay it at somebody’s feet.
00:37:02 ►
And where do they come from?
00:37:05 ►
You know, when you ask the, where do the ideas come from,
00:37:09 ►
this is Platonic philosophy 101, ladies and gentlemen.
00:37:13 ►
This is why the Greeks gave up fishing,
00:37:15 ►
to discuss this problem, where do the ideas come from?
00:37:20 ►
And we are no closer to understanding that,
00:37:23 ►
and yet the ideas are the signposts of our destiny. They guide us forward and yet we know not from whence nor whither. He said, well, there must be a perfect world somewhere where all these things exist
00:37:46 ►
and the numbers and everything.
00:37:49 ►
There’s a perfect form for everything
00:37:51 ►
in a higher dimensional world called the archetypes.
00:37:56 ►
Well, 2,000 years of philosophical sophistication
00:38:01 ►
have shown certain problems with that point of view,
00:38:06 ►
but fewer than you might think.
00:38:08 ►
I mean, the mystery of form, the problem of form, what is it?
00:38:12 ►
Where does it come from? What sustains it?
00:38:15 ►
We are nothing more than form.
00:38:17 ►
If it weren’t for form,
00:38:19 ►
we would be no different than the dirt under our feet.
00:38:23 ►
And form intrudes into matter matter and then it withdraws
00:38:28 ►
and when it withdraws they put you in a hole and put dirt on top of you so it’s very important to
00:38:35 ►
understand what is this coming and going of form if we take this pillow and saw it in two, it’s a pretty undramatic event.
00:38:48 ►
If we take one of us and saw us in two,
00:38:51 ►
it’s an extremely dramatic event.
00:38:53 ►
Now what is the difference there?
00:38:55 ►
It’s that this object is three-dimensional
00:38:59 ►
and this object is four-dimensional.
00:39:04 ►
This object has a quality about it called being alive.
00:39:10 ►
Being alive, also technically known as metabolism,
00:39:14 ►
means that material is moving along temporal gradients
00:39:19 ►
within the confines of this organism.
00:39:22 ►
Material is not moving along any gradients within this thing.
00:39:26 ►
It’s just where it is.
00:39:28 ►
There it sits.
00:39:29 ►
But in here, a form is being maintained from within.
00:39:36 ►
And if I were to die, the form would collapse.
00:39:39 ►
Here, no form is being maintained except the form imposed.
00:39:43 ►
This is an imposed form.
00:39:46 ►
It has no sense of itself and it doesn’t sustain itself from any kind of internal integrity.
00:39:51 ►
But higher dimensional objects like animals and plants and human beings have this quality.
00:40:00 ►
Well, so then what we’ve been talking about here albeit sloppily is
00:40:06 ►
the fact that we seem to
00:40:08 ►
occupy a higher dimension
00:40:10 ►
in the natural order
00:40:12 ►
than other things
00:40:14 ►
and this higher dimension has to do
00:40:16 ►
with the fact that we have a little piece
00:40:18 ►
of mind, a little chunk
00:40:21 ►
of this higher order
00:40:22 ►
organization
00:40:24 ►
well then going toward that,
00:40:27 ►
as visionaries, as users of psychedelics,
00:40:31 ►
society keeps adjusting its trim tabs, as it were,
00:40:36 ►
to mirror this transcendental goal.
00:40:41 ►
And this is what we want to become.
00:40:43 ►
We want to become like the sensed object in our
00:40:45 ►
imagination and shamanism is a pipeline
00:40:49 ►
about this it’s almost
00:40:51 ►
as though the end state
00:40:54 ►
well here’s a model for it it’s almost as though
00:40:58 ►
the ordinary causal flow of
00:41:00 ►
information from the past to the future
00:41:04 ►
must make a place for like a three to five percent
00:41:08 ►
backward flow and this is what we call intuition it’s that vague unformed knowing that comes
00:41:17 ►
without any baggage of causal mechanism but it’s true knowledge you know how it’s going to be
00:41:25 ►
well it may be that
00:41:27 ►
time is somehow information
00:41:29 ►
permeable that future
00:41:32 ►
potential states of
00:41:33 ►
existence are
00:41:35 ►
actually somehow in
00:41:37 ►
resonance with states of
00:41:40 ►
existence in the present
00:41:42 ►
and in the past
00:41:43 ►
our models of how the world works are very,
00:41:47 ►
very simple. I mean, basically, we operate with mechanical push-pull models that are
00:41:54 ►
appropriate to very simple mechanical systems. And yet, we know that we are far more complex
00:42:01 ►
even than the most complex physical systems.
00:42:05 ►
This last 15,000 years has been something.
00:42:09 ►
And the last 500 years has really been something.
00:42:14 ►
It’s so close now, the transcendental object, that it informs everything.
00:42:34 ►
Everything, the metaphor, the model to hold in your mind as you gaze at the earth and its travail is the metaphor of birth, not death.
00:42:46 ►
That a gestation process of 20,000 years is coming to an end. Culture using, language using,
00:42:49 ►
minded creatures are coming to some kind of
00:42:53 ►
fermentative climax.
00:42:57 ►
And we cannot extrapolate
00:42:59 ►
the human career on this planet
00:43:02 ►
centuries into the future.
00:43:04 ►
It ain’t going to be like that
00:43:05 ►
it’s an absurd question
00:43:08 ►
to ask the question what will the
00:43:09 ►
what will the world be like
00:43:11 ►
in 500 years
00:43:13 ►
what the world will be like in 500 years
00:43:15 ►
is unimaginable
00:43:17 ►
because in the next 40
00:43:19 ►
years we are going to
00:43:21 ►
pass through this
00:43:23 ►
quantized transition where we actually become insiders
00:43:27 ►
and players in the game history is a state of becoming it’s a state of moving from the
00:43:34 ►
inarticulate unreflecting animal style of organization to the self-reflecting, minded, conscious,
00:43:46 ►
energy-controlling style.
00:43:48 ►
But to get from one to the other
00:43:50 ►
takes about 20,000 years,
00:43:52 ►
and it’s a bitch.
00:43:53 ►
You don’t know where you are.
00:43:54 ►
You don’t know up from down.
00:43:56 ►
You cannot tell what is happening.
00:43:58 ►
There’s just migrations and warfare
00:44:00 ►
and pogroms and gene mixing
00:44:03 ►
and hysteria of every sort
00:44:05 ►
and messiah this and religion that
00:44:07 ►
and they’re slaughtering these people
00:44:09 ►
and these people are doing that.
00:44:11 ►
And it’s like a bad dream.
00:44:14 ►
It’s like a psychedelic trip
00:44:17 ►
is what it’s like.
00:44:18 ►
It’s a 15 to 25,000 year dash
00:44:22 ►
to authentic being from the animal body.
00:44:26 ►
And it would have been a lot easier to understand
00:44:29 ►
if 10,000 years ago we hadn’t cut the telephone wire to nature.
00:44:36 ►
Because from then on we haven’t been able to figure out what’s going on.
00:44:39 ►
And it’s been left to men with large egos to figure out what was going on.
00:44:45 ►
And what they figured out was going on was that there was a lot of free women, land, animals and money that needed to be organized for their pleasure.
00:44:54 ►
Because they lost the connection to this planetary birth process.
00:45:01 ►
Now, and like a birth process
00:45:05 ►
I mean the metaphor is worth pursuing
00:45:07 ►
because a birth
00:45:10 ►
is violent
00:45:11 ►
blood is shed
00:45:13 ►
there’s moaning and groaning
00:45:15 ►
and thrashing around
00:45:17 ►
and yet this is not
00:45:18 ►
an automobile accident
00:45:21 ►
this is not a human tragedy
00:45:23 ►
this is how life works. This
00:45:26 ►
is centrally scripted
00:45:28 ►
in to how human
00:45:30 ►
beings operate. If this didn’t happen
00:45:32 ►
we wouldn’t be here.
00:45:34 ►
Well, that’s the, and yet
00:45:36 ►
you know, if you’ve ever been
00:45:38 ►
pregnant or been around a
00:45:40 ►
pregnant person
00:45:41 ►
this is a wonderful state of
00:45:44 ►
equilibrium,
00:45:48 ►
of self-satisfaction, of completion.
00:45:52 ►
And yet, the very fact that it exists ensures that it’s going to be rent.
00:45:55 ►
It’s going to be torn.
00:45:56 ►
It’s going to end violently in separation
00:45:59 ►
of these two beings.
00:46:01 ►
But then there are all kinds of births.
00:46:04 ►
There’s stillbirth,
00:46:06 ►
the most disturbing and unsettling of all.
00:46:09 ►
There’s, you know, breach.
00:46:11 ►
There’s cesarean.
00:46:12 ►
There’s bad presentation.
00:46:14 ►
There’s all, there’s easy labors,
00:46:17 ►
hard labors.
00:46:19 ►
And I think this is the choice that we are,
00:46:21 ►
we still have some choices left.
00:46:24 ►
And a choice still to be made is, is it going to be a hard labor or an easy labor?
00:46:30 ►
It’s how fast we educate ourselves.
00:46:33 ►
That’s the lubrication in the birth canal of this pup.
00:46:36 ►
How fast we educate ourselves.
00:46:39 ►
Are we going to fight it or are we going to go with it?
00:46:42 ►
And it’s really frightening
00:46:47 ►
because what we want is, first of all,
00:46:52 ►
forgiveness for what we’ve done,
00:46:55 ►
which ain’t likely to come.
00:46:57 ►
And then we want to go back and paint ourselves blue
00:47:00 ►
and be tribal and turn our back on all of this
00:47:05 ►
but I don’t think it’s going to be like that
00:47:07 ►
it’s propelling us to some kind of higher
00:47:09 ►
order
00:47:10 ►
the faith is that history must
00:47:13 ►
have been for something
00:47:15 ►
and that
00:47:17 ►
everything
00:47:19 ►
is to be knitted together
00:47:21 ►
and everything is to
00:47:23 ►
be reborn anew
00:47:25 ►
and I don’t think this
00:47:27 ►
is not a religious
00:47:29 ►
doctrine exactly
00:47:31 ►
it’s more like the biological
00:47:34 ►
faith
00:47:35 ►
I mean we see it everywhere
00:47:37 ►
we see it in the birth that I was
00:47:39 ►
just describing, we see it
00:47:41 ►
in the metamorphosis
00:47:43 ►
of insects
00:47:44 ►
you know Heraclitus said Pantit Rea just describing. We see it in the metamorphosis of insects.
00:47:48 ►
You know, Heraclitus said,
00:47:51 ►
Pantit rea, all flows.
00:47:56 ►
And I think that this is the hardest thing to learn. It certainly has been the hardest thing for me to learn in my life.
00:48:01 ►
And I assume then by extrapolation,
00:48:04 ►
maybe this is one of the hard
00:48:06 ►
things to come to terms with
00:48:08 ►
everything
00:48:09 ►
flows, nothing
00:48:12 ►
lasts, I mean
00:48:14 ►
not the travail, not the horror
00:48:16 ►
you know, not the women you love
00:48:18 ►
not the women who drive you crazy
00:48:19 ►
not the children you love, not the children that drive
00:48:22 ►
you crazy, everything
00:48:23 ►
is in the process of changing into something else,
00:48:27 ►
even at the very moment that you recognize its coherence as an entity.
00:48:37 ►
And this is the bad news that the ego doesn’t want to hear.
00:48:41 ►
This is what the ego is created to deny
00:48:45 ►
because the ego
00:48:47 ►
is
00:48:48 ►
you know
00:48:51 ►
it’s the effort of flesh
00:48:54 ►
to make diamond
00:48:55 ►
and it can’t be done
00:48:58 ►
you cannot make an indestructible
00:49:00 ►
adamantine
00:49:02 ►
clear substance
00:49:04 ►
it can’t be done but indestructible, adamantine, clear substance.
00:49:07 ►
It can’t be done.
00:49:13 ►
But it’s all tied up with our fear of death.
00:49:18 ►
We assume that if we release ourselves into this flow, we will be swept away,
00:49:20 ►
that our identity will cease to exist,
00:49:23 ►
that we will somehow not be there.
00:49:27 ►
This is an artifact of language.
00:49:30 ►
It’s a horrible misunderstanding about who we are and how the whole system is working.
00:49:38 ►
Are you using language as a better word, more than just the syntactic you know, songbook
00:49:45 ►
Well, no.
00:49:47 ►
That’s all I mean.
00:49:49 ►
But I’m really aware of what a funny
00:49:51 ►
thing it is.
00:49:53 ►
You know, you talk about other dimensions.
00:49:56 ►
Language is like an informational
00:49:58 ►
creature
00:49:58 ►
of some sort.
00:50:01 ►
I mean, languages live.
00:50:04 ►
They reproduce themselves. It’s a virus. Yes, languages live, they reproduce themselves.
00:50:06 ►
It’s a virus.
00:50:07 ►
Yes, it’s a kind of virus.
00:50:08 ►
William Burroughs said this.
00:50:09 ►
He said English is a virus from outer space.
00:50:12 ►
I have no quarrel with this.
00:50:14 ►
This seems entirely reasonable.
00:50:18 ►
It’s a very strange thing.
00:50:20 ►
Reality is made out of language.
00:50:23 ►
And for most of the people in this room, it’s made out of English.
00:50:28 ►
And yet we spend a great deal of time worrying about quarks
00:50:32 ►
and mu mesons and electromagnetic radiation.
00:50:38 ►
All this is entirely a fiction.
00:50:41 ►
None of this stuff exists.
00:50:43 ►
All that exists are words. And we play a game, a really
00:50:50 ►
fairly insidious game with ourselves. We all, I suppose here, give great credence to what is
00:50:57 ►
called quantum physics. Is there anyone here who would care to explain to the group
00:51:05 ►
several of the core doctrines of quantum physics?
00:51:08 ►
Or any core doctrine?
00:51:10 ►
And by explain, I don’t mean a verbal gloss.
00:51:13 ►
I mean give us the hardcore equations.
00:51:17 ►
Well, no one seems to be coming forth.
00:51:20 ►
And yet, this is our truth.
00:51:23 ►
How crazy are you if your truth is something
00:51:26 ►
you can’t even understand
00:51:27 ►
and that’s the situation
00:51:30 ►
that we’re in
00:51:31 ►
we believe that somewhere
00:51:33 ►
among us
00:51:34 ►
somebody understands these tensor equations
00:51:38 ►
of the third degree
00:51:39 ►
and that if it got real tight
00:51:41 ►
we could go to them
00:51:43 ►
and they would then explain what reality
00:51:46 ►
is well this is a
00:51:48 ►
head full of shit this kind of thinking
00:51:50 ►
what you are actually dealing with
00:51:52 ►
is what Wittgenstein called
00:51:53 ►
the present at hand
00:51:55 ►
the present at hand
00:51:58 ►
good phrase because
00:51:59 ►
it implies that only
00:52:02 ►
that which can be grasped
00:52:04 ►
matters and the quark cannot be It implies that only that which can be grasped matters.
00:52:06 ►
And the quark cannot be grasped,
00:52:08 ►
the new meson, the electromagnetic field, none of this.
00:52:11 ►
These things need to be understood for what they are,
00:52:14 ►
which is little shingles,
00:52:17 ►
little shingles which we epoxy onto the face of the universal mystery.
00:52:24 ►
And once you have a bunch of these little shingles epoxied onto the face of the universal mystery. And once you have a bunch of these little shingles
00:52:27 ►
epoxied onto the face of the mystery,
00:52:30 ►
then you can’t see the mystery at all anymore,
00:52:32 ►
and you call that an explanation.
00:52:35 ►
Say, well, that’s taken care of.
00:52:37 ►
We’ve explained it.
00:52:38 ►
By the time a child is eight or nine or five or six,
00:52:42 ►
they have covered the entirety of reality
00:52:46 ►
with these interlocking little
00:52:48 ►
linguistic tiles
00:52:49 ►
and nowhere now is reality
00:52:52 ►
to be found
00:52:53 ►
between ourselves and reality
00:52:56 ►
as quickly as we possibly can
00:52:58 ►
we erect a
00:53:00 ►
a lie
00:53:01 ►
we erect a false set of
00:53:04 ►
assumptions that are culture bound. And this has always impressed
00:53:08 ►
me, the culture bound nature of language, that in a way you can never leave the place you’re
00:53:17 ►
raised in because you acquire a local language and the local language is all you ever really have
00:53:26 ►
I had an experience of this
00:53:28 ►
that brought it home to me very strongly
00:53:30 ►
because when I first went to the
00:53:32 ►
tropics
00:53:33 ►
I was there as a professional butterfly
00:53:36 ►
collector and it was pretty important
00:53:38 ►
to make a living
00:53:39 ►
and my impression
00:53:42 ►
of the jungle was that it was
00:53:44 ►
green
00:53:44 ►
that was my impression well the jungle was that it was green.
00:53:47 ►
That was my impression.
00:53:52 ►
Well, then three years later, I went back with botanists.
00:53:55 ►
Well, if you know anything about botany and taxonomy, what it is is it’s an orgy of language.
00:54:00 ►
I mean, you know, leaves are lanceolate, cremelate.
00:54:06 ►
They have bracts, which are sessile, umbilate, and indentified, and so forth.
00:54:12 ►
These are specialized words to describe structure.
00:54:15 ►
You go with a botanist into the jungle, and the jungle becomes unbelievably rich. Here are melanostomes,
00:54:26 ►
malfigs, varolas,
00:54:28 ►
all kinds of things.
00:54:31 ►
And as soon as you put words to it,
00:54:34 ►
reality emerges.
00:54:36 ►
So you see, here is language as a double-edged sword.
00:54:40 ►
Out of the undifferentiated,
00:54:42 ►
it creates miraculous new realities
00:54:46 ►
to which we immediately
00:54:49 ►
habituate
00:54:50 ►
undervalue
00:54:52 ►
and profane
00:54:53 ►
in other words
00:54:55 ►
familiarity breeds contempt
00:54:57 ►
but somewhere between silence
00:55:00 ►
and the familiarity
00:55:02 ►
that breeds contempt
00:55:03 ►
is the living essence of the word and its meaning.
00:55:09 ►
This problem of language is central, I think,
00:55:15 ►
to understanding the psychedelic experience.
00:55:20 ►
What I see happening on these tryptamines
00:55:24 ►
is the project of language
00:55:27 ►
goes from being something which you hear
00:55:32 ►
to something which you see
00:55:35 ►
without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition.
00:55:41 ►
Well, this is to my mind absolutely astonishing,
00:55:44 ►
and I think I’m a pretty tough nut to crack
00:55:47 ►
when you see language
00:55:49 ►
it’s amazing
00:55:53 ►
because it’s a paranormal thing
00:55:56 ►
or it’s like it cheats
00:55:58 ►
it achieves paranormal intensity
00:56:01 ►
without violating any of the laws of physics
00:56:05 ►
that I’m familiar with
00:56:07 ►
what I’m talking about is that
00:56:09 ►
in these shamanic performances
00:56:11 ►
in the Amazon and on
00:56:13 ►
psilocybin
00:56:14 ►
language goes from something
00:56:17 ►
beheld to something
00:56:19 ►
seen
00:56:20 ►
there’s precedent for this
00:56:24 ►
in the Hellenistic
00:56:26 ►
world of Greco-Romanism
00:56:28 ►
the be all
00:56:30 ►
and the end all of spiritual
00:56:31 ►
accomplishment was what’s called the Logos
00:56:34 ►
and the
00:56:36 ►
Logos was an informing
00:56:38 ►
voice, a voice in the
00:56:40 ►
head that told you
00:56:42 ►
the right way to live
00:56:43 ►
and Plato and all of these heavies cultivated
00:56:48 ►
and achieved connection with the Logos. Well, there was an Alexandrian Jew named Philo
00:56:55 ►
Judeus who was a great commentator on the religions of his period. And he wrote about
00:57:02 ►
what he called the more perfect Logos, the more perfect Logos. And he said about what he called the more perfect logos.
00:57:07 ►
The more perfect logos. And he said, what is the more perfect logos?
00:57:11 ►
And then he answered his own question.
00:57:13 ►
The more perfect logos goes from being heard to being seen
00:57:17 ►
without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition.
00:57:23 ►
Language is something unfinished in us.
00:57:27 ►
It’s something that was catalyzed out of animal organization
00:57:31 ►
by hallucinogenic activation of brain states,
00:57:36 ►
and it is something that is in the act of perfecting itself.
00:57:41 ►
And when it is completed,
00:57:43 ►
my faith is that words will be seen,
00:57:48 ►
not heard.
00:57:50 ►
The whole way in which we organize our language
00:57:54 ►
around visual metaphors
00:57:57 ►
when we talk about clarity.
00:58:01 ►
So if someone is able to communicate,
00:58:03 ►
we say,
00:58:27 ►
she spoke clearly. That’s a visual metaphor. We say, I see what you mean. I see what you mean. That means I understand you. I see what you mean. he painted a picture it means unconsciously at the unconscious level we connect visual metaphors and the visual sense
00:58:28 ►
with clarity of understanding
00:58:31 ►
and what’s happening
00:58:32 ►
in the ayahuasca cults
00:58:35 ►
in the mushroom intoxications
00:58:37 ►
and so forth
00:58:38 ►
is an invocation of the visible logos
00:58:41 ►
it comes into being
00:58:44 ►
in the shared space
00:58:46 ►
you control it
00:58:48 ►
with sound
00:58:49 ►
you discover
00:58:51 ►
that sound is something
00:58:53 ►
that you can see
00:58:55 ►
I referred to this this morning
00:58:57 ►
when I talked about how we may be a one gene
00:58:59 ►
mutation away from a transformation
00:59:02 ►
of language
00:59:03 ►
you can sit, feel perfectly normal, not feel
00:59:07 ►
wired or depressed, not have visual activity in the visual field, and then you generate
00:59:14 ►
a tone like…
00:59:17 ►
And you see that it’s a certain shade of lemon yellow with a chartreuse edge running on it.
00:59:26 ►
And then you…
00:59:28 ►
And it shifts to pink blue.
00:59:31 ►
Well, you begin to experiment with this and you discover very quickly that you can do more than just generate colors.
00:59:40 ►
You can generate modalities.
00:59:42 ►
You can generate modalities. You can generate shapes. As you begin to relax into an unconscious expression of syntax,
00:59:50 ►
form begins to behave itself in the space in front of you.
00:59:56 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:59 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:00:03 ►
As you can probably tell after listening to this talk with me, it wasn’t easy to come
01:00:09 ►
up with a title for today’s podcast.
01:00:11 ►
I thought about calling it Ego Lessons, or Our World is Like a Bad Dream, or The Culture-Bound
01:00:18 ►
Nature of Language, all of which fit parts of today’s program.
01:00:23 ►
Now if I was a booking agent, however, trying to get Terence McKenna some speaking gigs,
01:00:28 ►
I probably would have asked him to narrow it down a bit.
01:00:31 ►
As you’re now aware, in the past hour, we’ve listened to Terence talk about ego, psychedelics, shamanism, language, virtual reality, time, death, and quantum physics.
01:00:48 ►
That’s quite a few topics to touch on in only an hour,
01:00:54 ►
and I can hardly wait to hear what comes next. I have to admit, however, that even though I’ve heard that one bit before, I do enjoy Terence’s story about what the mushroom told him when he
01:00:59 ►
asked, am I doing the right thing? And as funny as it was, I think you might do yourself a favor to think about that question
01:01:07 ►
and similar ones that you may come up with while doing psychedelics.
01:01:12 ►
It’s a big lesson in what can actually be worked on during a trip.
01:01:16 ►
Another little tidbit that you may want to focus on is what Terrence said about language
01:01:21 ►
being the software without which we wouldn’t be people.
01:01:26 ►
Terrence said about language being the software without which we wouldn’t be people. I’d never thought about that before, and I’m still not sure where I come down on the statement. But the more
01:01:31 ►
I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve realized that I’m thinking about it and everything else in
01:01:37 ►
language. Can we even think without the aid of language? And if we don’t think about the past, the present, the future,
01:01:45 ►
are we still human?
01:01:47 ►
It seems to me that there’s a paper here
01:01:50 ►
for some of our fellow slaughters who still may be students.
01:01:54 ►
And speaking of being a student,
01:01:56 ►
today is the funeral mass for one of my most fearsome professors,
01:02:00 ►
Dr. Emil T. Hoffman,
01:02:02 ►
who was a professor emeritus of chemistry and former dean at the University of Notre Dame. As a little bit of trivia, Thank you. well. Hopefully the university has moved the chemistry department into somewhat more modern
01:02:26 ►
quarters by now. And you should know that this Dr. Hoffman wasn’t related at all to the famous
01:02:33 ►
and important Dr. Hoffman that we all know and love so well. On a happier note, I see that today
01:02:40 ►
marks the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. Now, for our fellow slaughters who don’t live in the States
01:02:46 ►
or who aren’t as old as I am,
01:02:48 ►
this may not seem like a very big deal.
01:02:51 ►
But for those of us who remember the days
01:02:53 ►
when former relations between the U.S. and Cuba were broken,
01:02:57 ►
well, it certainly is a day to be remembered.
01:03:00 ►
Soon after the rupture with Castro,
01:03:03 ►
people began to flee Cuba by boat, and I got to know some of those people.
01:03:08 ►
At the time, my mentor hired a man and his wife who had recently fled Cuba.
01:03:13 ►
They became the caretaker and housekeeper for my mentor’s family.
01:03:17 ►
Now, before leaving Cuba, this man, who I only knew as a gardener and caretaker, was one of Havana’s leading attorneys and quite rich.
01:03:26 ►
They lost everything except their lives when they fled Cuba.
01:03:29 ►
I learned a lot from those two wonderful people,
01:03:32 ►
and I wonder today how they would feel about reconnecting the U.S. and Cuba,
01:03:36 ►
if they were still alive, that is.
01:03:39 ►
Now, I knew others also who had fled Cuba in the early Castro days,
01:03:43 ►
and they remained very bitter for most
01:03:46 ►
of their lives about having to leave the country of their birth.
01:03:50 ►
As you know, today there are literally millions of refugees all over the planet who are also
01:03:56 ►
being forced out of their countries due to unfavorable conditions of one kind or another.
01:04:01 ►
As a child, my mother and I moved into my grandparents’ house when my
01:04:06 ►
father was shipped off to the South Pacific during World War II. And so my grandfather was my only
01:04:12 ►
male influence during the first three years of my life. He too had been forced from his native land,
01:04:19 ►
Ireland. And even after World War II, we continued to live with my grandparents until they died,
01:04:25 ►
and I was the recipient of many, many triads against the British.
01:04:30 ►
A family story tells of me around five years old getting really mad at one of my friends
01:04:35 ►
and calling him what my grandfather had led me to believe was the worst thing a person could be called.
01:04:42 ►
I got red in the face and screamed at him and called him an
01:04:45 ►
Englishman. Now my mother laughed, but my grandfather didn’t. He was really proud of me.
01:04:52 ►
So why am I telling you this story? Well, with the many millions of people now on the move and
01:04:58 ►
being forced out of their native lands, whether over politics or economics, I suspect that there
01:05:03 ►
are a lot of little kids like I was back then
01:05:06 ►
and they’re being brought up to hate whomever or whatever their parents believed
01:05:11 ►
to be the culprits that brought about their diaspora.
01:05:14 ►
It wasn’t until I graduated from college and became close friends with a Brit
01:05:18 ►
and then spent some time with him in Devonshire, getting to know his friends and family,
01:05:24 ►
that I realized that they
01:05:25 ►
weren’t to blame for my grandfather’s problems, just as most Americans aren’t to blame for the
01:05:31 ►
horrors that the United States is perpetrating all over the world. We are only to blame if we
01:05:36 ►
constantly look the other way and don’t speak up, and let those horrible people in Congress and the
01:05:41 ►
White House continue to sully our names. I have no recommendations as to what you should do,
01:05:47 ►
but I’m confident that you’re going to figure out what the very important
01:05:51 ►
and probably insignificant thing is that you can do to make this world a little better.
01:05:57 ►
But I’m sure you’re going to figure that out for yourself.
01:06:01 ►
However, some of our fellow slaughters have already begun to figure out what it is that
01:06:06 ►
they are to be doing right now, at least in the way of writing books. These fellow slauners are
01:06:13 ►
Kelly Matten, Walker Farrell, Daniel Tumbleweed, and J.P. Harpignies. Kelly and Walker now are
01:06:21 ►
not only writers, but artists as well, and they have created a truly interesting
01:06:25 ►
graphic novel that is simply titled Trip. Although the characters of this novel are both young women,
01:06:32 ►
I was actually quite surprised to see how much of their story was something that I could directly
01:06:37 ►
relate to. I won’t spoil it for you, but their approach was for each of them to both write and
01:06:43 ►
draw in their own voices. This is
01:06:45 ►
a very clever approach to their story, and I enjoyed their book immensely. The other book is
01:06:51 ►
one that just simply the title alone would have made me pick it up in a bookstore. It’s called
01:06:57 ►
The Museum Dose. It was written by Daniel Tumbleweed and curated by J.P. Harpingnese.
01:07:04 ►
Now, to be honest, I now wish that I’d thought
01:07:06 ►
of writing something with that title myself, because anyone who has first-hand experience
01:07:12 ►
with low-dose psychedelics in public spaces will, well, probably not be able to resist
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picking up that book should they come across it in a bookstore. And not only does it have
01:07:22 ►
a clever premise, it’s also quite well written. so my hat is off to these fellow Saloner writers and artists
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and I’ll put links to their books in the program notes
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for today’s podcast which you know you can get to via
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psychedelicsalon.us
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however if you want to go directly to the Salon’s bookstore
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you’re going to find them at the top of our listings
01:07:42 ►
well I guess that’s about it for today.
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So, for now, this is Lorenzo,
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signing off from cyberdelic space.
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Be careful out there, my friends.