Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0806525797

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“In hyperspace nothing is hidden.”

“Culture is a narrowing.”

“We’re about to have the chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we’re going to save and what we’re going to keep.”

“It’s the monotheistic religions that have to take a knock for the present situation.”

“The thing that I go back to over and over again, and that makes psychedelics different, and that makes what I’m doing different, is you are not asked to believe anything.”

Download
MP3
PCs – Right click, select option
Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Psychedelic Salon Magazine
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries: The Classic Study of Leprechauns, Pixies, and Other Fairy Spirits
By W.Y. Evans Wentz

Previous Episode

460 - Our planetary birth process

Next Episode

462 - Psychedelic Advocacy

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24

And I hope that all is well with you today.

00:00:26

Of course, if you’re going to Burning Man this year, you are really busy right now,

00:00:30

because, well, there are only 40 days left until the man burns.

00:00:35

Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to make it again this year.

00:00:38

Although I’ve done Burning Man in a tent a couple of times,

00:00:41

I’ve now reached a point in my life where I’ll only be going

00:00:45

on a burn when I can afford to rent a motorhome for the event. I’ve gotten soft in my old age.

00:00:51

And the good news is that I’ve been putting a little money aside for that purpose each year.

00:00:55

So the next time that you’re going to see me at Burning Man is going to be in 2022 when I’ll be

00:01:02

celebrating my 80th birthday there.

00:01:08

So how’s that for old man’s long-range planning?

00:01:15

But getting back to the here and now, what do you say about the two of us listening to the next part of the Terrence McKenna workshop that I’ve been playing these past several

00:01:18

weeks?

00:01:19

So let’s join him and a few of his friends on a Saturday afternoon in May of 1990.

00:01:25

And that language may have existed a very long time before anybody got the idea

00:01:30

that you could use a certain sound like glass to mean a certain complex object.

00:01:39

Because on psilocybin, glossolalia is frequently triggered

00:01:46

glossolalia is normally

00:01:48

presented as speaking in tongues

00:01:50

a religious phenomenon of

00:01:52

fundamentalism and the

00:01:54

fundamentalist spin on it

00:01:56

is that these are ancient biblical

00:01:58

languages and that you’re being

00:02:00

possessed by an

00:02:02

angel or something but in fact

00:02:04

at the primitive level of religion worldwide

00:02:07

glossolalia is frequently met with

00:02:10

and all of us have an ability

00:02:14

to relax away from meaning

00:02:17

and still retain syntax

00:02:20

it’s just something you would never do

00:02:23

because we’re programmed to always

00:02:26

mean

00:02:28

something when we speak.

00:02:30

But in fact,

00:02:31

babies don’t do this at all.

00:02:33

They love to babble

00:02:35

and they only late

00:02:37

in the process learn to

00:02:39

attach meaning.

00:02:41

Well, so then,

00:02:43

under language in the humble service

00:02:47

of meaning there is

00:02:49

language

00:02:50

for itself

00:02:53

sort of the ding on seas of language

00:02:56

and

00:02:57

well I’ll give an example

00:03:00

of it and then discuss what’s going on. Nidrigevond vay haksikevichni mulgom vapakten didikini hipikektet,

00:03:11

e dejikevay vay hampikikitit ef mu luktive indidikt

00:03:18

kwa habagenket kifidut ulmikindital.

00:03:21

Okay, now what’s happening here?

00:03:23

First of all, ordinarily we associate

00:03:26

this speed of vocal noise with words.

00:03:30

Words are small mouth noises.

00:03:33

That’s all they are.

00:03:34

You see, if you’re going to have a creature

00:03:36

which communicates among members of its species,

00:03:39

you have to have a low energy form of communication.

00:03:44

Otherwise you’d be exhausted from the effort to communicate

00:03:47

well small mouth noises are great

00:03:50

a person can talk for about 12 hours

00:03:54

without stopping fairly effortlessly

00:03:58

I mean if you’ve got water and a little dope rolled

00:04:01

it’s not a problem

00:04:04

well do you know how much information a person could convey in 12 hours

00:04:08

if they were, say, reading the telephone book aloud?

00:04:12

It’s pretty amazing.

00:04:14

So this thing I just did,

00:04:17

it had syntax, but it had no meaning.

00:04:22

In other words, if you listen to it,

00:04:23

you hear that sounds repeat, rhythms repeat,

00:04:27

there appear to be prefixes, suffixes,

00:04:29

certain kinds of declensions.

00:04:31

It’s all there, folks.

00:04:33

It just doesn’t mean anything.

00:04:34

But it turns out that the activity of language

00:04:38

feels like language, whether it means anything or not.

00:04:42

Well, in the psychedelic state,

00:04:45

you discover this same set of tinker toys

00:04:49

that was used to create the little speech I just did

00:04:53

can be used to create sculptures that are free form,

00:04:59

that this hiwaiwaxikuvini mauhaktikipipit,

00:05:04

it looks a certain way

00:05:07

what’s important is not

00:05:08

how it sounds

00:05:09

what’s important is how it looks

00:05:12

in the Amazon

00:05:13

in these ayahuasca cults

00:05:15

they have what they call ikaros

00:05:17

magical songs

00:05:20

ikaros are

00:05:22

visual art

00:05:24

they are intended that way

00:05:27

and they’re criticized that way

00:05:30

and their success or failure is judged entirely

00:05:33

in the visual domain

00:05:35

and yet they are made out of sound

00:05:37

and what they convey

00:05:41

are very complex

00:05:44

feelings And what they convey are very complex feelings.

00:05:47

You could almost say three-dimensional feelings.

00:05:51

Feelings so complex that they won’t lay down

00:05:54

and be a sound like hate, fear, revulsion.

00:06:00

They won’t do that.

00:06:01

They can only be laid out as grammatical objects

00:06:06

of a higher order

00:06:07

and I think that

00:06:09

this process is happening

00:06:13

in human beings

00:06:15

the push toward visible language

00:06:17

but it’s being accelerated

00:06:19

by the psychedelics

00:06:21

and that we are trying to become

00:06:23

for each other visual objects that we are trying to become, for each other, visual objects,

00:06:26

and we are trying to become capable of generating these things.

00:06:31

Now, why I hold these conclusions is because in the DMT flash,

00:06:40

which is the most intense quintessence, most quintessential distillation of this kind of stuff,

00:06:47

you encounter the shamanic entities,

00:06:53

the spirits, the ancestors.

00:06:57

And this is really confounding.

00:06:59

I mean, we can put up with shifting cobwebs of color

00:07:01

and weird insights about our nostrils and our little fingers,

00:07:05

but not entities.

00:07:08

And yet in that space,

00:07:10

these things exist.

00:07:12

And they’re preaching

00:07:13

this ontological transformation of language.

00:07:17

This is how entities in hyperspace communicate.

00:07:23

It’s as though everything has had one dimension

00:07:26

added on to it

00:07:28

it’s as though we are existing in some kind of squashed version

00:07:32

of a larger super space

00:07:34

that can simply be mentally unfolded

00:07:37

through the act of encountering

00:07:41

a psychedelic substance

00:07:42

I think it’s big news that these entities exist.

00:07:49

Now, if you were to go to a shaman in a classical culture

00:07:54

and say, what’s it about?

00:07:58

What’s going on here?

00:07:59

They would unhesitatingly tell you that these are the ancestors.

00:08:03

Oh, yes, these are the ancestors oh yes these are the ancestors

00:08:05

we cure using the

00:08:08

ancestors and

00:08:10

this is I think very unsettling

00:08:12

for us

00:08:14

as westerners

00:08:15

we’d much rather accept the notion

00:08:18

of friendly extraterrestrials

00:08:20

communicating through the

00:08:22

mushroom than that this is the

00:08:24

dearly departed.

00:08:25

I mean, that really, you can feel your boundaries

00:08:28

beginning to quake against that possibility.

00:08:33

It’s very interesting.

00:08:34

Recently, there was a new edition of Evans-Vence’s

00:08:41

The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries,

00:08:44

which if you’ve never read it, it’s quite an interesting book.

00:08:47

Y.E. Evans Vance was an American

00:08:50

who became a great scholar of Mahayana Buddhism

00:08:52

and wrote the Tibetan Book of the Dead,

00:08:55

the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,

00:08:57

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines and so forth.

00:09:00

But his doctoral thesis,

00:09:02

when he was a young folklore student at Cambridge in 1911 was he wanted to study the fairy faith.

00:09:09

And he went to Brittany and Wales and Ireland and interviewed the oldest people in the districts, the crones and the old, old people.

00:09:20

And it’s a wonderful book to read because these people just tell these stories

00:09:26

and it’s absolutely convincing.

00:09:29

I mean, the fairies are real.

00:09:30

The fairy faith is real.

00:09:32

And when you asked,

00:09:33

when Evans Vance asked these people,

00:09:36

you know, what’s going on?

00:09:38

They said, well, these are the dead.

00:09:42

When you die, you stay around,

00:09:44

but you’re in an invisible realm and it’s an ecology of souls. These are the dead. When you die, you stay around,

00:09:46

but you’re in an invisible realm,

00:09:49

and it’s an ecology of souls.

00:09:51

My phrase, not his.

00:09:52

An ecology of souls. But this is what is revealed on DMT,

00:09:57

is entities that are so strange

00:10:04

that they could easily pass for extraterrestrials.

00:10:10

What’s puzzling about them is their tremendous humor

00:10:15

and affection and intense involvement in us as human beings.

00:10:23

Why are they there?

00:10:26

What do they want?

00:10:30

And they’re not, if they are ancestors,

00:10:33

they are not my ancestors.

00:10:35

In other words, when I broke in there,

00:10:38

I didn’t find my mother and my grandparents.

00:10:39

It wasn’t like that.

00:10:40

There was no personal.

00:10:41

It isn’t like that. but there is this sense of

00:10:45

affection

00:10:47

interest, caring

00:10:50

well

00:10:51

we have the doctrine of purgatory

00:10:54

in western theology

00:10:56

in the catholic church

00:10:57

I had always assumed

00:10:59

thinking about it that purgatory

00:11:01

must have been a doctrine that

00:11:03

the church fathers Irenaeus and Eusebius and that crowd,

00:11:09

had written into the gospel message for their own purposes.

00:11:15

I discovered, to my amazement, that that isn’t what happened at all,

00:11:20

that St. Patrick is the person responsible for purgatory

00:11:26

because he wrote purgatory into Christian doctrine

00:11:31

in order to convert the Celtic peasantry of Ireland

00:11:36

to the idea that fairyland and the Christian afterlife were the same place.

00:11:43

And it was thought such a good idea in Rome

00:11:47

that the doctrine became canon law generally for the church.

00:11:52

So purgatory is a spruced up, cleaned up version of Irish fairyland

00:11:57

to make it a little more palatable.

00:12:02

Well, you see we this is where our

00:12:05

anxieties come in and where

00:12:07

it’s hard to push it much further

00:12:10

than this an extraterrestrial

00:12:12

contact I think we could probably

00:12:14

ride

00:12:16

that through and it would be amazing

00:12:18

but it would be tolerable

00:12:19

but if what’s happening is

00:12:22

that at the end of history are waiting

00:12:24

the dead

00:12:25

and that our notion of reality is so skewed that we don’t even know the most basic facts

00:12:32

about the cycles of life and death and rebirth,

00:12:35

then it’s going to be quite astonishing for us, I think, to come to terms with this.

00:12:41

And yet this is what shamans live with

00:12:45

this is what they tell you

00:12:47

a shaman is a person

00:12:49

who can pass daily

00:12:52

through the gates

00:12:53

of death and return

00:12:55

we see into the other realm

00:12:58

we see into

00:12:59

hyperspace

00:13:00

as inheritors of the

00:13:03

rational tradition this is pretty hard for us to swallow

00:13:08

because I think, I mean, maybe it’s not true anymore, but in my personal process of rejecting

00:13:15

Catholicism, I did manage to convince myself that when you’re dead, it’s over with. And it’s been

00:13:22

very hard for me to fight my way back to the notion that that might

00:13:26

be just 100% malarkey

00:13:28

and nothing more than a conservative

00:13:30

first try

00:13:31

and now I think

00:13:33

much more in terms of

00:13:35

dimensionality and

00:13:38

that I don’t know what

00:13:40

a form is

00:13:41

but the process of

00:13:43

the fertilization

00:13:46

of an egg, of any organism

00:13:48

it doesn’t have to be a human being

00:13:49

the life of that organism

00:13:51

and then its death and dissolution

00:13:54

is the process of

00:13:56

a form descending

00:13:58

from hyperspace

00:13:59

clothing itself in matter

00:14:02

and then withdrawing

00:14:04

from matter, returning then withdrawing from matter,

00:14:07

returning to hyperspace.

00:14:09

And this concept of hyperspace is very, very necessary

00:14:13

to understanding this stuff.

00:14:16

Because if you look at what shamans do that is so confounding,

00:14:22

they find lost objects they cure disease

00:14:25

they rescue lost

00:14:28

souls, they discern

00:14:30

secret

00:14:32

acts, infidelities

00:14:34

thefts

00:14:36

poisonings

00:14:37

stuff like that, all of these

00:14:39

magical things that they do

00:14:42

are completely

00:14:43

non-mysterious

00:14:46

if we grant the idea

00:14:48

of a higher spatial dimension

00:14:50

I mean if

00:14:51

there’s a higher spatial dimension

00:14:54

then you know this

00:14:55

section is not zipped

00:14:57

there’s a part of it which is completely

00:15:00

open to the world, this room

00:15:02

is not closed, there’s one

00:15:04

direction in which it’s absolutely open to the world. This room is not closed. There’s one direction

00:15:05

in which it’s absolutely

00:15:06

open to the air.

00:15:07

In other words,

00:15:08

in hyperspace,

00:15:10

nothing is hidden.

00:15:12

Yeah.

00:15:14

Give yourself a chance

00:15:15

to breathe for a moment.

00:15:17

Why do you think it is,

00:15:18

I mean, we as human beings

00:15:20

have evolved with

00:15:21

pretty much all the equipment

00:15:22

we need to get along

00:15:23

and do things.

00:15:24

Why do you think it is that we have evolved with pretty much all the equipment we need to get along and do things. Why do you think it is that we have evolved

00:15:26

with such a poor understanding,

00:15:28

or no understanding,

00:15:30

of these matters of which you speak?

00:15:33

The afterlife, the rebirth.

00:15:38

I mean, we hear it.

00:15:39

Many people, they hear it and they have a curiosity

00:15:42

and they go towards it.

00:15:43

But few people understand it.

00:15:45

Well, I think this is a very recent phenomenon.

00:15:52

Culture is a narrowing, obviously.

00:15:56

I mean, if a man can have ten wives, two wives, no wives, one wife,

00:16:01

well, then you go into a culture, you’re going to make a choice.

00:16:05

And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.

00:16:11

We don’t know how we could be.

00:16:14

We don’t know what we could be if we were free to evolve ourselves.

00:16:19

I think that’s the starting line that we’re edging up on.

00:16:24

We’re about to have a chance to create a global culture,

00:16:27

to decide, to essentially clean our basement

00:16:30

and decide what we’re going to save and what we’re going to keep.

00:16:36

This sense of not being connected is, to my mind,

00:16:40

entirely rooted to what I’ve said here several times,

00:16:43

the problem of the ego,

00:16:47

but then to get a little more specific and maybe slightly more offensive,

00:16:50

it’s the monotheistic religions

00:16:53

that have to take a real knock

00:16:56

for the present situation.

00:17:00

Monotheism as a philosophical reflex

00:17:04

is understandable but simple-minded.

00:17:10

I mean, it’s what an eight-year-old would get to.

00:17:13

I mean, one God, reasonable, economical,

00:17:17

seems to fit the situation pretty well.

00:17:20

So what’s wrong with that?

00:17:22

Well, what’s wrong with it is

00:17:23

you’ve got to be a little more sensitive.

00:17:28

Philosophy is not practiced in a void.

00:17:30

And as Jungians know well, we mirror ourselves in our gods.

00:17:40

Our religions are a set of permissions for how we as individuals can be

00:17:48

and monotheism presents us with the notion

00:17:52

that God should be omnipresent

00:17:55

omnipotent

00:17:57

omniscient

00:17:58

and unforgiving

00:18:01

and male

00:18:04

well this is nobody you would invite to a garden party and unforgiving, and male.

00:18:08

Well, this is nobody you would invite to a garden party.

00:18:10

This is what we call an asshole.

00:18:14

Somebody who corners you,

00:18:15

who’s never wrong,

00:18:17

who’s totally full of their opinion,

00:18:20

who just wants to tell you how the boar ate the cabbage and never doubts them.

00:18:22

A boar.

00:18:23

So we have enshrined at the center of our

00:18:25

cultural machinery the archetype

00:18:27

of the unbearable boar

00:18:29

and then we’ve gone out

00:18:31

to realize it

00:18:33

and we try to

00:18:35

fine tune it

00:18:37

we say okay well this old testament religion

00:18:39

with all this ritual and

00:18:41

dietary this isn’t it so then along

00:18:43

comes Christ and tries to fine-tune it.

00:18:47

But, you know, he’s working in the most

00:18:49

women-repressing, male-dominator,

00:18:55

hierarchical structure on the planet,

00:18:59

and whatever good he does is quickly wiped out

00:19:03

150 years later by these clowns I mentioned, Eusebius, Irenaeus, and the rest of those guys.

00:19:09

And then Islam comes along to twist the screws yet tighter

00:19:16

on this monotheistic ideal.

00:19:19

And it doesn’t serve.

00:19:23

And it was put in place

00:19:25

because people tried to figure it out on their own.

00:19:29

Monotheism is what you come to

00:19:30

if full of sincerity

00:19:32

you try to figure it out on your own.

00:19:35

But if you will just forget being full of sincerity

00:19:38

and take mushrooms,

00:19:40

you will never come to this monotheistic conclusion.

00:19:44

It just appears preposterous

00:19:47

because the multiplicity

00:19:49

the shifting, unpredictable, boundaryless

00:19:53

maternal nature of things

00:19:56

is what forces its presence

00:19:58

into your consciousness

00:20:00

we are born in the mystery

00:20:03

it’s all around us

00:20:05

everything is provisional

00:20:07

and this is something worth talking about

00:20:11

I suppose because it’s a psychedelic point of view

00:20:13

every society has always believed

00:20:17

that it possessed 95% of the truth

00:20:20

and that the next 5% would fall into place

00:20:23

in the next 15 years

00:20:25

and yet these societies have just been

00:20:28

all over the map

00:20:29

you know and we don’t

00:20:31

understand anything

00:20:33

in fact we have taken

00:20:35

a more perverse turn

00:20:37

than most we have

00:20:39

substituted the incomprehensible

00:20:42

that’s why we get

00:20:43

these quarks and mu mesons

00:20:46

and tensor equations of the third degree.

00:20:48

We actually worship incomprehensibility

00:20:51

as the highest form of explanation of what’s going on.

00:20:55

Say, well, I don’t know what’s going on.

00:20:58

Somebody must understand it.

00:21:00

Well, I’ve got news for you.

00:21:02

If you don’t understand it,

00:21:03

what good is it that somebody understands it somewhere?

00:21:06

I mean, you’re responsible for yourself.

00:21:09

And yet I think that all this technology,

00:21:14

$2.5 billion worth of atom smashers,

00:21:18

at some level is being inspired by something transcendental.

00:21:29

They’re trying to achieve love and Godhead and all that stuff.

00:21:33

We want to know. We do want to know.

00:21:37

And to science’s credit, and this is what I love about science, is that it’s not kidding itself.

00:21:43

I mean, the thing that I go back to

00:21:47

over and over again

00:21:48

and that makes psychedelics different

00:21:50

and that makes what I’m doing different

00:21:51

is you’re not asked

00:21:54

to believe anything

00:21:55

you just have to do something

00:21:59

in other words

00:22:00

you’re invited to perform an experiment

00:22:02

not accept a belief

00:22:04

and taking a psychedelic

00:22:08

is an experiment it’s not an act of religious devotion I mean you may do it in a devoted and

00:22:16

religiously sensitized way but it’s an experiment to see what happens and And if it works, it can be repeated.

00:22:26

Delusion is a terrible thing.

00:22:30

And there’s a lot of it in the world,

00:22:34

and probably psychedelics have to take the blame for some of this.

00:22:38

I mean, all these rishis, roshis, geishis, and gurus

00:22:42

that are running around with their hands out,

00:22:44

this largely can be put at the feet of psychedelics. Zeroshis, Geshes and Gurus that are running around with their hands out this is largely

00:22:45

can be put at the feet

00:22:48

of psychedelics

00:22:49

but

00:22:50

you mean why should we blame psychedelics

00:22:54

for this?

00:22:56

I don’t think anybody would have given any of this

00:22:58

a thought if they hadn’t

00:23:00

had psychedelic experiences

00:23:02

to show them that the mind is not what they assume it to be.

00:23:07

I mean, the great impetus to Eastern religion came in the 60s

00:23:11

when all of this stuff was happening.

00:23:16

I wanted to ask a little further about the animal experience of time

00:23:20

and that they are stuck in the point present.

00:23:24

They don’t have a sense of future or past.

00:23:28

And my own experience with marijuana is I lose my short-term memory.

00:23:34

And my foolish days when I used to try to drive after getting really stoned,

00:23:38

I remember looking to the right and it’s clear,

00:23:40

and I look to the left and it’s clear, but I forgot what it is on the right.

00:23:45

I look to the right and it’s clear, but I forgot what it is on the right so I look to the right and it’s clear but I forgot what it is

00:23:48

and I’m going like this

00:23:50

and I can’t hold anything

00:23:52

in my mind for even that long

00:23:53

and it’s terrible

00:23:55

when you’re driving it’s awful

00:23:57

but I don’t find it pleasant

00:24:00

in any sense

00:24:01

when you read you forget a paragraph

00:24:03

you move on to the next paragraph.

00:24:06

And I wondered if that’s somewhat like the animal experiences life.

00:24:12

And also I wondered if that was an attribute of mushrooms and ayahuasca,

00:24:17

that loss of short-term memory.

00:24:19

I don’t particularly like that experience.

00:24:22

I don’t like that either.

00:24:23

I really don’t like it when it’s acute.

00:24:28

But I don’t think that’s necessarily a part of it.

00:24:31

I mean, you don’t want to try and pigeonhole the psychedelic experience

00:24:37

because what it is is it’s everything.

00:24:39

I mean, you think you’ve got it figured out

00:24:42

and that it’s always going to be this,

00:24:43

and then the next time it’s completely something else.

00:24:49

So much can be done.

00:24:51

So much can be structured and learned.

00:24:55

I mean, I think basically the kind of psychedelic experiences

00:24:58

most of us have been having have been just reconnoitering.

00:25:02

You know, we sail over the territory and photograph the landscape

00:25:06

and take it back and study it.

00:25:08

But what you could do if you landed down there,

00:25:11

what you could do if you actually learned the way of it,

00:25:15

is I think, you know, it’s very inviting.

00:25:18

In spite of the fact that psychedelics have been around

00:25:21

for, you know, 50,000, 100,000 years,

00:25:24

I still can’t shake the impression

00:25:27

that it’s going to have a historical impact,

00:25:31

that they’re going to eventually get around

00:25:35

to noticing how odd it is

00:25:38

and noticing that it’s right in the center of ourselves.

00:25:44

The real problem is getting the word out about what it is.

00:25:48

So many people have taken a little bit of LSD

00:25:52

or a little bit of psilocybin or something,

00:25:54

and then they think they know what the psychedelic experience is.

00:25:59

But you have to spend time poking around,

00:26:02

and you have to take chances,

00:26:04

and eventually the ice will break underneath you

00:26:07

into your absolute horror.

00:26:09

The thing you have been trying to cause to happen

00:26:12

will then happen,

00:26:14

but you almost always have to trick yourself,

00:26:17

trap yourself into it.

00:26:18

I don’t know what the limit of this stuff is.

00:26:21

I certainly have been as stoned as I ever want to get

00:26:25

I mean I said at the time

00:26:26

let it be noted

00:26:28

I don’t ever want to be more loaded

00:26:31

than this

00:26:32

the film that I’m

00:26:41

trying to get produced

00:26:43

in its message side,

00:26:47

it deals with the issue of what do we let go of

00:26:50

and what do we hold on to in this shrinking world of our own ethnic heritage.

00:26:56

And as the world shrinks, there’s a move towards homogeneity.

00:27:00

And what’s really happening right now is people are really pulling back into their in-group. I mean, the Muslims have done this most profoundly because it’s very frightening.

00:27:09

They have to all become one. And the idea of all being a consumer white bread homogeneity

00:27:15

is a horrible image. But the thing that people are willing to share, I find, is their cuisine.

00:27:23

Everybody’s willing to eat and explore

00:27:25

and relish in each other’s food.

00:27:28

But the thing that nobody’s willing

00:27:30

to give up, or few are willing to give up,

00:27:31

are their languages.

00:27:33

You can see they’re talking about

00:27:35

Quebec seceding again

00:27:37

from Canada.

00:27:39

There’s something about

00:27:41

our attachment to language that’s

00:27:43

really potent.

00:27:45

And you’re giving up not just…

00:27:48

I mean, it’s a world view.

00:27:51

It is really ourself.

00:27:53

I mean, we also are made of language.

00:27:56

I said the world is made of language.

00:27:58

Note that you are part of that world

00:28:00

and are made of language.

00:28:03

I don’t know whether the appetite for stuff will drive people

00:28:08

to abandon their fear of merging. I think, you know, a lot is going to be lost. A lot has been

00:28:15

lost. I mean, the extinction of the mammals that began 50,000 years ago. It was 50,000 years ago that was the greatest number of mammal species on Earth.

00:28:28

There’s been steadily falling species since about that time,

00:28:32

mostly due to human predation.

00:28:35

And, you know, we’re not going to bring back the giant ground sloth

00:28:39

and the woolly mammoth and the glyptodont.

00:28:42

They’re gone for good.

00:28:42

mammoth and the glyptodont they’re gone for good

00:28:44

and

00:28:45

there’s no

00:28:48

getting away from the poignancy

00:28:50

of this process

00:28:52

the cruise is over

00:28:57

we’re in the lifeboats

00:28:59

the ship is going to sink

00:29:02

the question is

00:29:03

how does this adventure end

00:29:05

but there’s no question that there’s going to be a lot of

00:29:08

loss and redefinition

00:29:09

I mean usually in these weekends we get to a

00:29:12

place where it comes down to being

00:29:14

you know this thing about

00:29:15

the space issue

00:29:17

because people love it

00:29:20

and they hate it and it has a lot

00:29:22

to do with how you relate to the male ego

00:29:24

because it’s the engineering dream come true

00:29:27

and nature disappears

00:29:31

you replace it with black vacuum

00:29:33

and you say here we will erect

00:29:36

the palaces and whorehouses

00:29:40

of the human imagination

00:29:42

we can make them the size of moons

00:29:44

we can do

00:29:46

this and that.

00:29:48

And the beauty that is within us

00:29:52

gives me a lot of hope

00:29:54

for that. My God,

00:29:56

the expression of the design

00:29:58

process in this world is

00:30:00

certainly awful.

00:30:02

Our world is visually

00:30:04

hideous,

00:30:07

the part of it touched by human beings.

00:30:09

And that’s very puzzling to me,

00:30:11

because when you take psychedelics,

00:30:16

you discover within the human body-mind the same kind of transcendent beauty

00:30:19

that you see in the rainforest

00:30:21

and the Arctic tundra and all that.

00:30:24

I mean, immense beauty,

00:30:27

and yet we seem to have a very hard time

00:30:30

translating it into the design process.

00:30:33

Art is, you know, we haven’t really talked that much

00:30:36

about art in relationship to all this,

00:30:39

but the politics of the situation

00:30:42

here in this millennial crisis, I think the reasonable response is to push the art pedal right through the floor.

00:30:53

The way to escape the present cul-de-sac is an enormous outbreak of creativity of all sorts.

00:31:03

We just need to overwhelm ourselves

00:31:05

with creative expression.

00:31:08

This could be very easily done.

00:31:10

We’ve been in the habit of binding

00:31:12

about 60% of our social energy

00:31:15

into a standing crop of weapons.

00:31:18

And, you know, whatever creativity is expressed

00:31:21

in the production and design of these weapons,

00:31:24

it goes on behind closed doors

00:31:26

in the most excessively testosterone-festered environment

00:31:30

you can possibly imagine,

00:31:32

which is a military weapons research laboratory.

00:31:36

But if we weren’t caught up in that,

00:31:39

if we could really direct the resources the way we want,

00:31:43

we have no idea how rich

00:31:46

we are and

00:31:47

how perverse our

00:31:49

distribution of resources

00:31:52

is. I mean

00:31:53

a single

00:31:57

F-16 fighter plane

00:32:00

standard

00:32:02

equipage costs

00:32:03

120 million dollars

00:32:06

one

00:32:07

of these fighter planes

00:32:08

they order them in lots of 500

00:32:11

if somebody were to give

00:32:14

120 million dollars

00:32:16

to the new age

00:32:18

define that any way you like

00:32:21

or to me

00:32:21

or to you

00:32:22

but that’s a lot of money but if you spend it on a

00:32:26

fighter plane it’s not a lot of money you can park a fighter plane in an area twice the size of this

00:32:32

room and there it sits useless unless armageddon should come along it’s about the most useless

00:32:39

thing you could do with 120 million dollars and yet if you gave that to the

00:32:46

sincere, the insincere

00:32:48

the half

00:32:50

sincere and let them

00:32:52

all go off and do with it what they want

00:32:53

society would be a much richer

00:32:55

place and many more

00:32:58

interesting possibilities would be

00:32:59

developed so

00:33:01

part of saving

00:33:03

the world I think is to make people angry, to make people absolutely furious with the way we are being managed.

00:33:14

The human enterprise is being managed by idiots.

00:33:18

And I don’t say they’re vindictive idiots, but the case could certainly be made.

00:33:24

But give or take that, they’re idiots.

00:33:28

And we don’t have forever, you know.

00:33:32

In fact, we have, I think, a very short amount of time to take hold

00:33:36

and to insist that human values, which none of us have much trouble accessing.

00:33:43

I mean, I’m not saying we’re all Albert Schweitzer,

00:33:45

but we know what it means to be Albert Schweitzer.

00:33:49

Why are our institutions unable to project the human values

00:33:53

that we personally are able to feel?

00:33:56

And then why do we tolerate that?

00:33:59

Why are boys in charge of everything?

00:34:02

It just doesn’t make any kind of sense.

00:34:08

Working our way out of this

00:34:10

is just going to require shock treatment.

00:34:15

And that’s what this shamanic option represents.

00:34:18

I mean, I wouldn’t preach this

00:34:20

if I didn’t think the situation were fairly desperate.

00:34:24

It’s a radical option

00:34:26

it’s not a reasonable option

00:34:28

it’s a quick fix

00:34:30

because quick is the only

00:34:32

fix that counts now

00:34:34

this is not a debating society

00:34:36

the crisis confronting

00:34:38

this planet, it’s a life or death

00:34:40

situation

00:34:41

I don’t see any other option.

00:34:47

Yeah.

00:34:47

Charles, is there any value

00:34:49

in looking at the dichotomy

00:34:50

of the natural evolutionary

00:34:53

self-destruction of the planet,

00:34:55

the toxicity of volcanic eruptions,

00:34:58

the ice ages,

00:34:59

the shifting of the axis,

00:35:02

of the polar axis,

00:35:04

and plate tectonics.

00:35:05

All that is going on

00:35:06

and we seem to be a minor player

00:35:08

in the rearrangement of matter on the planet

00:35:11

compared to what it naturally does itself.

00:35:14

And what about that?

00:35:16

What about that?

00:35:17

Well, you’re right.

00:35:18

The Earth is now understood

00:35:20

to be an extremely dynamic environment

00:35:23

locally and globally

00:35:28

as a local example

00:35:29

that some of you can relate to

00:35:31

in the last 100,000 years

00:35:33

tidal waves up to 2,000 feet

00:35:36

high have occurred locally

00:35:37

in the Hawaiian islands because of

00:35:39

sloughing off the face of those islands

00:35:42

into deep sea trenches

00:35:43

the International Geophysical Congress has held meetings about this.

00:35:48

I’ve seen the physical evidence of it myself.

00:35:51

A 2,000-foot tidal wave, you would shit white if you saw that coming.

00:35:57

It’s just inconceivable.

00:35:59

A 50-foot tidal wave is appalling.

00:36:02

A 50-foot tidal wave is appalling.

00:36:06

On a global scale, 65 million years ago,

00:36:10

something crashed down on this planet,

00:36:15

and nothing on this planet larger than a chicken walked away from it.

00:36:18

You know, dramatic? You bet. This happened between breakfast and lunch one day.

00:36:24

So, yes, I think the Earth is a very dynamic place,

00:36:28

and part of this psychedelic message is, you know,

00:36:34

shake the mud off your shoes, monkeys.

00:36:38

You can’t always count on it to be like it is.

00:36:43

I mean, the mushroom has a kind of a hortatory personality and

00:36:48

it sometimes says things which I don’t necessarily agree with that are slightly alarming. I mean,

00:36:53

one of its favorite themes is if you don’t have a plan, you’re going to end up part of

00:36:59

somebody else’s plan. And it’s speaking to me as a person, it’s speaking to human beings as a species.

00:37:07

If you don’t have a plan,

00:37:08

you’re going to end up being part of somebody else’s plan.

00:37:12

The sun has a limited lifespan.

00:37:16

There are serious problems with the sun

00:37:19

that are not discussed at all, much,

00:37:22

except in the scientific literature.

00:37:24

It would take

00:37:25

major revisions of nuclear

00:37:28

theory, which has been

00:37:29

in place without revision

00:37:31

for nearly 50 years.

00:37:33

It would take major revisions of

00:37:35

nuclear theory to explain why

00:37:37

there isn’t something wrong with the sun.

00:37:40

The sun is

00:37:41

not emitting

00:37:43

neutrinos at nearly the rate it should be if it’s a healthy atomic furnace.

00:37:51

Is it possible that sometime in the last 100,000 years the nuclear fires of the sun have actually slipped off the main sequence?

00:38:02

This is an appalling possibility. You see, if that

00:38:06

were to happen, the neutrino

00:38:08

flux from the

00:38:10

nuclear furnace at the center

00:38:11

of the sun would instantly

00:38:13

drop.

00:38:16

It would be measured

00:38:17

within eight minutes on the earth,

00:38:20

the drop in the neutrino

00:38:22

flux. But all

00:38:23

physical manifestations

00:38:25

of this process

00:38:27

would not appear for about 70,000 years

00:38:31

the period of time it takes

00:38:33

for core solar material

00:38:35

to percolate to the surface

00:38:38

so the neutrino drop would be registered

00:38:40

virtually instantly

00:38:42

but it would take 70,000 years

00:38:43

for any other thing

00:38:44

well you know

00:38:46

if that’s what’s happening

00:38:47

if the sun is going into some

00:38:50

state of instability well then we look back

00:38:52

in the geological record and what do you

00:38:54

see

00:38:54

nine times in the past

00:38:58

five million years ice

00:39:00

five miles deep has moved

00:39:02

south from the poles

00:39:03

what the hell is that about?

00:39:06

And you go further back in the record

00:39:08

and you don’t find this.

00:39:11

People don’t realize this.

00:39:13

This planet existed for close to five billion years

00:39:17

before there was glaciation.

00:39:20

Glaciation is a brand new phenomenon on this planet

00:39:25

why is it happening?

00:39:27

well the obvious place to look is the energy dynamics of the home star

00:39:32

is it possible then that we’re riding an edge

00:39:36

more precarious than we know

00:39:38

is it possible that bios, life on this planet

00:39:42

actually senses limitations and constraints

00:39:46

and that we are

00:39:48

we have been summoned

00:39:49

we are a

00:39:52

we, I mentioned

00:39:53

stopgap solutions

00:39:55

we are a stopgap solution

00:39:57

about 2 million years ago

00:40:00

the biospheric

00:40:02

mind of the planet said

00:40:03

my god, the sun has just gone of the planet said my god the sun has

00:40:05

just gone off the main

00:40:07

sequence we have approximately

00:40:09

a million years to organize

00:40:11

some kind of

00:40:13

arc out of here

00:40:15

a species must be

00:40:17

deputized to release

00:40:19

energy and to manipulate matter

00:40:21

this species must be brought

00:40:23

forward and made dominant species over the earth.

00:40:27

And out of that technology,

00:40:29

we can perhaps fashion an escape.

00:40:32

In other words,

00:40:34

we are something that has been called forth out of nature

00:40:38

because of unusual dynamics on a very large scale.

00:40:43

Well, this is a possibility.

00:40:46

Can I ask you a question?

00:40:47

Sure.

00:40:48

I had a fantasy for your tape about the evolution of the brain, the next evolution.

00:40:57

I mean, it doesn’t make any rational sense, but you don’t always have a rational sense

00:41:02

of it.

00:41:04

What about the mushroom growing within the brain?

00:41:08

I mean, actually not taking it in, but…

00:41:10

You mean becoming physically symbiotic.

00:41:13

Being in there.

00:41:14

Well, yeah.

00:41:17

I mean, Brian Aldiss wrote a book called The Long Afternoon of Earth

00:41:22

in which he envisioned a human-fungal symbiosis

00:41:27

that was so close that people actually had a lump on their shoulder

00:41:31

and it went directly into the head.

00:41:35

I find this kind of thing a little too creature-feature-ish, but… But it is…

00:41:47

I mean, I have had the notion…

00:41:51

Not a notion,

00:41:52

it was more like a delusion at certain times

00:41:54

that…

00:41:55

And I can’t explain it to you,

00:41:57

I will just tell it to you,

00:41:59

that there are…

00:42:01

Really, the big secret about human beings is that there are three sexes,

00:42:07

male, female, and mushroom.

00:42:10

And this third sex is some, I mean, I haven’t worked out the genetics of it

00:42:17

or how in the world we could have gotten so far without understanding this.

00:42:21

But it’s that notion that it’s wedded into us at that level.

00:42:26

And of course the mushroom,

00:42:28

I don’t know if it’s this way for women too,

00:42:31

and it’s subtle, it’s smart,

00:42:34

it’s tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky.

00:42:36

And it uses you against yourself,

00:42:39

not viciously.

00:42:40

It’s just very matter-of-factly

00:42:42

knows a hundred times more about you

00:42:44

than you do yourself

00:42:46

and it presents itself

00:42:48

as this 4D girlfriend

00:42:50

you know

00:42:51

it’s the sorer mystiker

00:42:54

of alchemy

00:42:55

it’s the invisible female companion

00:42:58

yeah

00:43:00

I had a dream a few months ago

00:43:02

that

00:43:03

I don’t know if I gave birth or someone gave birth to these children who were like part mushroom, you know, and they were part fungus.

00:43:13

And I felt very loving towards them, but they were actually like, you know, beings, you know, but they were like part mushroom and part human.

00:43:23

It was all very sweet, you know sweet it wasn’t ghoulish or anything

00:43:26

well yeah I mean

00:43:28

the symbiosis is coming together

00:43:30

one of the funny

00:43:32

insights that I had

00:43:34

that I don’t try to make

00:43:36

sense of that I in fact don’t believe

00:43:39

but I thought it

00:43:40

and it was an emotionally opening

00:43:42

thought though it’s absurd

00:43:44

on the face of it,

00:43:45

was when I was in the Amazon in these pastures,

00:43:48

looking at these pastures full of these mushrooms,

00:43:50

I kept thinking, you know,

00:43:52

it’s the lost part of the human brain.

00:43:57

It’s that part of us is in these fields,

00:44:03

that this mushroom, this is human flesh

00:44:07

this flesh

00:44:08

it’s a strange kind of human

00:44:10

but hell we’re about to give legal rights

00:44:13

to fetuses we might as well extend

00:44:15

legal rights to mushrooms

00:44:16

and make them voting citizens

00:44:18

because you see it’s intelligent

00:44:23

it’s intelligent it’s intelligent

00:44:25

it loves you

00:44:27

it can blow your mind

00:44:29

it can make you laugh

00:44:30

it can make you cry

00:44:31

there’s no other way to relate

00:44:35

to something like that

00:44:36

except to love it

00:44:38

in spite of yourself

00:44:40

this is how you seduce someone

00:44:43

you make them laugh you You make them cry. You move them. You get them to drop their barriers. You get them to not with an immense sense of relief it’s just like

00:45:06

ah

00:45:07

you know

00:45:09

when I was in Guatemala

00:45:10

I did not take a deep breath

00:45:14

for

00:45:14

three weeks because

00:45:17

I could feel

00:45:19

the oppression

00:45:20

the artificiality of it

00:45:23

it’s in the air the evil and you don’t even get used to it, but when you cross back into Mexico, you just say, my God, you know, what was that?

00:45:42

under siege conditions here.

00:45:45

No wonder it’s a little hard to connect up with your higher self.

00:45:47

We’re living in a foxhole, for God’s sake.

00:45:51

But, you know,

00:45:52

if we could realize our situation,

00:45:55

then there would be a possibility of change.

00:45:59

I wanted to mention another thing

00:46:01

which I recently read about

00:46:03

that’s imperiling the biosphere

00:46:05

that is bovine

00:46:07

flatulence. Methane.

00:46:10

Apparently it was

00:46:11

just really

00:46:12

struck me as

00:46:14

something like 160 million

00:46:17

tons of methane is produced

00:46:19

from bovine flatulence

00:46:22

and as the appetites

00:46:23

as the citizens appetite

00:46:25

for meat

00:46:26

goes up

00:46:26

the number

00:46:27

of cattle

00:46:27

is increased

00:46:29

and this

00:46:29

problem

00:46:30

continues to

00:46:31

contribute to

00:46:32

the greenhouse

00:46:33

effect and

00:46:33

we’re all

00:46:34

going to be

00:46:34

cooked

00:46:35

killed by

00:46:36

cow farts

00:46:40

well

00:46:44

nobody said life wasn’t fraught with peril right

00:46:48

or humor yes

00:46:52

well on that flatulent note uh why don’t we break off here

00:47:00

you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a

00:47:08

time so thanks a lot terrence with all the problems in this world that we have to deal with right now

00:47:16

you go and tell us that the sun may be entering extremis and uh may have begun the process of burning out. Well, as Pa Kettle would say, isn’t that a fine kettle of fish?

00:47:30

So let me get this right.

00:47:32

The sun seems to be losing its energy and is sending less heat energy our way.

00:47:38

And so us careless humans, without even planning it, have caused global warming as a stopgap measure with which

00:47:46

to offset this problem.

00:47:48

Now, I don’t for a minute believe that argument, but if you are into late-night dorm room talks,

00:47:54

well, this could be an interesting one to discuss with your astrophysics, nuclear engineering,

00:47:59

and ecology classmates, for I certainly don’t have enough knowledge to be able to intelligently discuss

00:48:05

it myself. Keep in mind, I’m just a carnival barker, remember? All of the action is in the

00:48:11

tent, which is your own mind, and you happen to be in the center ring of the main tent.

00:48:18

Now, I can’t remember which podcast it was in, but on at least one other occasion,

00:48:23

Terrence spoke about the W.Y. Evans Wentz’s book,

00:48:27

The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

00:48:29

In fact, after he mentioned it one time,

00:48:32

one of our fellow Slauners sent me a copy of it, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

00:48:37

And the reason I’m mentioning it again right now

00:48:39

is because I realized that even though the Disney Corporation

00:48:43

seems to have made it almost impossible for

00:48:46

anyone else to build a

00:48:48

story from one of the Brothers Grimm’s

00:48:50

fairy tales, I don’t

00:48:52

think that the Disney people have gotten

00:48:54

their dirty hands on Wentz’s book yet.

00:48:56

So, if you’re a writer who is

00:48:58

looking for some old myths to bring alive,

00:49:00

well, and particularly

00:49:02

as a children’s story, well,

00:49:04

I think that you can find a lot

00:49:05

of inspiration in this book, which I’ll link to in today’s program notes in case you’re

00:49:10

interested.

00:49:11

And as you know, you can get to them via psychedelicsalon.us.

00:49:15

Also, Terrence spoke of what he called the entities in DMT space.

00:49:20

In fact, he even said, and I quote, I think it’s big news about these entities, end quote.

00:49:26

Now, that was said by Terence McKenna over 25 years ago,

00:49:30

but the world apparently wasn’t ready for his idea yet.

00:49:34

However, just one week ago,

00:49:36

Philip Smith wrote an article for Alternet that is titled,

00:49:39

Do Entities from Another Universe Inhabit the Brains brains of psychedelic DMT users?

00:49:46

And the subtitle read,

00:49:48

There is something strange, very strange, going on inside the heads of people using the fast-acting psychedelic.

00:49:56

Machine elves, anyone?

00:49:58

End quote.

00:49:59

So, perhaps the rest of the world is now beginning to catch up with the mind of McKenna.

00:50:13

So, perhaps the rest of the world is now beginning to catch up with the mind of McKenna, and if you are interested in reading that article, you can go to the Psychedelic Salon magazine on Flipboard, which I’ll also link to in today’s program notes.

00:50:23

One of the other stories that I’ve posted there is titled, Ten Reasons Why Federal Medical Marijuana Prohibition Is About to go up in smoke. There probably isn’t anything in that article that you don’t already know,

00:50:27

but it is fascinating to see all of these facts in a single essay.

00:50:32

Did you realize that as of today,

00:50:33

there are now 40 states in which cannabis is legal for medical uses?

00:50:39

The times, they are a-changing.

00:50:41

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:50:46

Be careful out there, my friends.