Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I describe myself as a tall man with a cheap watch.”
“If reality is code, then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected before.”
“In a sense, the Italian Renaissance IS the medieval lead turned to the secular gold of reform and rebirth.”
“You aren’t an object. You’re a process of some sort.”
“What foods are, essentially, are idea-neutral drugs.”
Do You Have Social Anxiety or Social Phobia?
We are seeking men and women on the autism spectrum with social anxiety who are at least 21 years old.
You must be in good physical health, with blood pressure that is normal.
We are conducting a research study of an experimental drug used in combination with therapy.
The study takes place in the Los Angeles area and requires about 15 visits to the study location over several months.
For more information, please call (310) 222-1664.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
And first of all today I’d like to give a
00:00:26 ►
shout out to fellow salonner Jack Lukman. Jack, I’m really sorry that my wife and I weren’t able
00:00:31 ►
to take you up on your offer of a free pass to one of your performances at the San Diego Fringe
00:00:37 ►
Festival. As much as I hate to admit it, we’re just getting too old to want to go out at night
00:00:42 ►
anymore. And to tell the truth, that sounds really strange coming out of my mouth,
00:00:47 ►
because, well, it was just a few years ago that I thought that I’d be able to party until I dropped.
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Times sure change as these bodies of ours enter old age.
00:00:57 ►
Of course, that doesn’t seem to be the case for the Rolling Stones, does it?
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Anyway, Jack, that was quite nice of you to invite us, and I’m sorry
00:01:06 ►
to have missed you. Also, I have an announcement that fellow salonner and psychedelic researcher
00:01:12 ►
Alicia Danforth asked me to read for you, and I quote, we have had 200 screening inquiries, but
00:01:19 ►
the majority of them have been from out of the LA area. We think it’s great that there’s a nationwide and international interest in this research,
00:01:27 ►
but we need referrals for locals.
00:01:30 ►
We want to reach out to friends, families, and allies who know autistic adults with social anxiety
00:01:35 ►
who might want to screen for enrollment.
00:01:38 ►
And here’s the current status of our research.
00:01:41 ►
We have treated eight participants and enrolled nine,
00:01:44 ►
which means we still need to find
00:01:46 ►
three more participants.
00:01:48 ►
No serious adverse events have been
00:01:49 ►
reported, and it is a
00:01:51 ►
social anxiety study, not
00:01:54 ►
an autism study.
00:01:56 ►
We are working with autistic adults
00:01:58 ►
because they are more prone to
00:01:59 ►
social anxiety, and conventional
00:02:02 ►
treatments have not been shown to be
00:02:03 ►
very effective for them.
00:02:05 ►
Here is the text of the IRB-approved recruitment ad. Do you have social anxiety or social phobia?
00:02:12 ►
We are seeking men and women on the autism spectrum with social anxiety who are at least
00:02:18 ►
21 years old. You must be in good physical health with blood pressure that is normal.
00:02:24 ►
We are conducting a research study of an experimental drug used in combination with therapy.
00:02:29 ►
The study takes place in the Los Angeles area
00:02:31 ►
and requires about 15 visits to the study location over several months.
00:02:36 ►
For more information, please call 310-222-1664.
00:02:42 ►
And I’ll post this notice in today’s program notes, which as you know you can get to
00:02:46 ►
via psychedelicsalon.us. Now here’s a spoiler alert of sorts for our fellow salonners who,
00:02:54 ►
like me, dislike the little clicking sound in some of the Terrence McKenna recordings.
00:03:00 ►
Well, I’m sorry to report that such is the case again today. Now, it isn’t as bad as a few months ago, but I still thought that it might be interesting to add this series of workshop talks to our collection,
00:03:12 ►
since, well, as far as I know, it hasn’t been widely passed around before.
00:03:16 ►
So, what you and I are going to listen to in just a moment is the first workshop that Terence gave in 1996,
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just after he returned from that year’s Entheobotany Conference in Palenque, Mexico.
00:03:29 ►
Now, I wasn’t there that year, but my wife was, as were several of my good friends.
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And from what I understand, well, how can I say it?
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Let’s just say that a good time was had by all.
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But you have probably already heard enough of my stories about the Plan K conferences.
00:03:46 ►
However, in just a moment, you’re going to get a good idea of how difficult it was to recover from
00:03:51 ►
those amazing times. Right now, I’m going to play the beginning part of this tape just as it came
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to me. And as you listen to the very first words Terrence speaks in this workshop, try and picture
00:04:03 ►
yourself as sitting in that room and hearing him speak for the very first time that you’ve ever First Words And as you listen just now to how he begins, try and think about your initial reaction and how you would have thought about him at the very beginning of this workshop.
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Hmm.
00:04:34 ►
I guess you’ve had your introduction to Ascelin.
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You know that the baths are open 24 hours a day.
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The baths are very colorful. I was there today and someone sat down next to me and I noticed
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that they looked like a middle Picasso. They had one eye this way and one eye this way and
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their nose over here. And it was like a Fellini movie crossed with Disney.
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There were these very large-breasted women
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cavorting in the pool in the sunshine,
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and then they were like chipmunks and geese and donkeys.
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And so I realized that the recent two weeks I spent in Mexico
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were really sticking with me and had to retire
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to my room and think it over.
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Where was I?
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What was I saying?
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Oh, yeah.
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That it’s much better if it’s driven by the agenda of the people here. I will go through my various routines, but you should
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feel free to deflect me. This evening we’re not going to try to do a whole lot because
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a lot of people have driven either from LA or the Bay Area and fairly burnt out. As far out as far as what’s new or what’s on my mind that I find interesting right before I left for Mexico
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I noticed that they made 900 atoms of antimatter in a device at CERN in Switzerland. Not
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antiparticles, but anti-helium, actual anti- molecules of antimatter.
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This could be trivial, it could be an experimental effect in the laboratory, or it could
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fling humanity to the stars within decades. It’s hard to tell.
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fling humanity to the stars within decades. It’s hard to tell. When you bring anti-matter into contact with matter, you get a hundred percent conversion of energy. This is better
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than atomic energy. This is how you would do it if you were going to move through the
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Newtonian universe and overwhelm the vast distances that separate us from the stars.
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One of the things that I’m really interested in is the accelerating development of understanding nature that’s happening across all kinds of interfaces and very quickly fields
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that are very divergent and unconnected to each other are all reaching toward
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their own holy grail whether we’re talking about you know the anti-matter
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people there was also that little bit of information
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that the Hubble Space Telescope, they pointed it at one tiny part of the sky
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for ten successive nights.
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It was called Project Director’s Observational Privilege
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to use 10% of the observation time on his own personal projects.
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So he chose to observe this very small portion of the universe in extreme detail.
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And the conclusion is that there are not 10 billion galaxies.
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There are 50 billion galaxies.
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From one 10-day observation, the size of the universe has just expanded by
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five times. This kind of thing is very bizarre, because these are kind of revolutions that
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used to take centuries to assimilate, to just keep following each other, one after another after another. This thing I mentioned about computing with DNA,
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some of you may have been following this.
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There is a way to harness DNA
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so that it can perform the Boolean functions,
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the same functions computers perform.
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In a glass this size of DNA,
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you have more computational power than all the hardwired machinery in North America right now. The order of computational speed and compression
00:09:16 ►
is not one order of magnitude, but five orders of magnitude. It’s like impossible to imagine the kind of software that that kind of hardware
00:09:30 ►
can run. One of the things that we’ll talk about, because this is, after all, the briefing
00:09:36 ►
for a descent into novelty, is my own mathematical model of time and predictions it makes about the next few months and the basis of it.
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Some of you have heard this lecture over and over and over again.
00:09:57 ►
As far as what’s new, what’s new is, among many other peculiar things that happened in Mexico,
00:10:08 ►
before I went to Mexico I had been getting email from a person in England,
00:10:15 ►
a mathematician named Matthew Watkins,
00:10:19 ►
and he allowed us how he would be at Palenque when I was there,
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not part of this group, but just
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passing through, sort of, which is a little peculiar on the face of it, since Palenque
00:10:32 ►
is nowhere on the road to nothing. And so in the course of these two weeks that I was
00:10:41 ►
in Mexico, we had four meetings beside the swimming pool, and I will spare
00:10:48 ►
you the gory details, but among mathematicians there is the tradition of what is called the
00:10:58 ►
objection. When René Thom brought forth catastrophe theory,
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there was a Belgian mathematician who lodged an objection,
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which has stood to this day,
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and you sort of have to sort all this out.
00:11:18 ►
Anyway, as the time wave has grown, one of my wishes for it has been critique.
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It’s now 25 years old and nobody has ever done anything about it except
00:11:31 ►
allow us how it was astonishing and I was a genius. Well, now comes Watkins objection which holds
00:11:46 ►
that this is
00:11:48 ►
flimsy at best
00:11:50 ►
delusional at worst
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and
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we went over
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it from a number of angles
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and I found
00:12:00 ►
him most interesting
00:12:03 ►
not entirely comprehensible to me
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because we speak fairly different languages,
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he being a formal mathematician and an algebrist
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and me being a drug-crazed messianic visionary.
00:12:23 ►
But over the next little while at the website,
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we will conduct an email discussion
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with input from Peter Meyer and Peter Broadwell,
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who were the primary programmers of the original thing,
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and Klaus Schraff at Tübingen in Germany,
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who duplicated the algorithm, and Ralph Abraham.
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And now we are fully engaged. I’m alarmed. Watkins sends blood. The whole thing is much more
00:12:59 ►
interesting than it was before. And coming, as it does, on the brink of this plunge into novelty,
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I was led at one point to contemplate the possibility
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that the plunge into novelty would wipe out the theory
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that predicted the plunge into novelty in the first place.
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So life is much more interesting than it was before.
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Let’s see, what else?
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Well, one of the things that I’m keen to discuss with you is thinking about language structures and culture and ideas
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as using a model based on computer organization.
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Talking, and I’ll get more into this tomorrow,
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but talking about how the realization that I think is coming
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to a lot of people in a hurry is that large portions of reality, if not all of reality,
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is code, is code of some sort. That the primary reality is language, mathematical languages, spoken languages, that syntax is the only level you
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can reach without some set of philosophical presuppositions. And the interesting thing
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about that, to be explored in more detail, is that if reality is code then it can be hacked in some way that we had not suspected
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before. A way of thinking of this is like science by exteriorizing the world and taking it very seriously as an ontos of its own.
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Magic, on the other hand, is, when you strip away the folkloric presuppositions,
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is basically a theory of ontology that says the world is made of linguistic intent.
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It is held together by the power of projective will and linguistic structures are primary.
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Science is a victimizing position, in a sense, because it makes man, it accepts in its own weird, the notion of man’s fall.
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It marginalizes man to an accidental process, a peripheral process, an ancillary, coincidental, chancy thing.
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Magic takes an entirely different position
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basically the idea is
00:16:09 ►
that
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existence is unfinished
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that nature
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provides a platform
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from which
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magical
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humanity
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can build forward
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it’s a co-partnership
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deal, it’s not a
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it’s not a wrathful
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god and a pathetic
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humanity
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this is the position of renaissance
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magic
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basically, Marcello Ficino
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and Pico de Marandolo
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and that crowd, Bruno, D.
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D.
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Yes, maybe because…
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So we’re separate from nature?
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Well, not exactly separate, but we inherit it.
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Actually, what we are is we’re the concrescence of nature.
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You know, it’s very hard for us when looking at something like alchemy
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to realize that it was not only a process in the lives of individual people
00:17:18 ►
related to their concepts of material transformation or psychic transformation, but it was actually
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the psychology of an age. That’s what alchemy was. And we say, well, alchemy failed because
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it never turned lead to gold. But in a sense, the Italian Renaissance is the medieval lead turned to the secular gold of reform and rebirth.
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I’ve been thinking about all this lately because one of the things that was happening for me in Mexico was a horrific series of headaches.
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And they keep me up in the darkest part of the night. And it made me think, do
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you know Albrecht Durer’s drawing of Melancholia, which shows a very opulent female angel in
00:18:21 ►
robes with money bags on her belt, and strewn about her are navigational instruments,
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compasses, measuring devices. There’s a ladder behind her, a rainbow in the background,
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a strange polygon in the foreground, a weeping cherub, and her face is blackened, and she holds her face like this.
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She is Saturnine melancholy.
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Saturnine melancholy is a place in Renaissance psychology
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related to understanding the functioning of complex technical devices,
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vision and prophecy.
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And this figure of this black-faced female angel
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locked in musical, mathematical mathematical Pythagorean
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contemplation and migranous headache
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came to me in these in these I call the migraines actually
00:19:37 ►
reverse psychedelic
00:19:40 ►
experiences, you know, they’re like the anti-psychedelic experience.
00:19:45 ►
And I saw then that this night humor, this style of melancholia, is inimical to the psychedelic enterprise and that in a sense the the how shall I put it naive
00:20:10 ►
optimism or depthless cheerfulness of the New Age formulation of the visionary quest doesn’t really come to terms with this Gethsemane aspect of it,
00:20:32 ►
that knowledge is hard won.
00:20:35 ►
And it’s hard won in the individual’s struggle for self-knowledge,
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in the individual’s struggle for self-knowledge,
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and it’s hard won in the societal struggle to come to terms with itself, to discipline itself,
00:20:54 ►
to instill values in itself.
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What’s Gethsemane?
00:21:00 ►
The place where Christ meditated the night
00:21:04 ►
before he gave himself up to the Roman soldiery.
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So it’s a metaphor for,
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it’s called the agony in the garden.
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And it’s, you can still go there.
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I’ve been there.
00:21:19 ►
Lots of olive trees in the garden of Gethsemane.
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I’ve gotten loaded there.
00:21:28 ►
Gethsemane. Are we all agreed on this, those of us who’ve heard it before? I’m not mangling anything. Good. Gethsemane.
00:21:37 ►
Yeah. So this moment we’re passing through is very interesting.
00:21:46 ►
And by this moment, I actually mean between here and the end of the month.
00:21:51 ►
I mean February 1996.
00:21:55 ►
This is a period of enormous resistance to the future compared to all that is to come. It’s the highest speed bump we have to surmount
00:22:10 ►
between here and my own peculiarly local form of the millennium, which is basically sometime in late 2012. Well, first of all, it’s the dead of winter. It’s
00:22:28 ►
not resistance. I should explain. My notion is that the world as we experience it is a
00:22:37 ►
struggle between two different kinds of forces. On the one side, habit, rather than resistance or all these things. Habit.
00:22:47 ►
And what is habit? It’s what has come before. It’s repetitious. It’s predictable. It’s recursive. It’s iterative.
00:23:06 ►
And the other thing is novelty.
00:23:10 ►
And novelty is complexity, symmetry breaks,
00:23:15 ►
the improbable, the unusual, the unexpected,
00:23:21 ►
the unstable, the unusual. And so, you see, there is this ebb and flow,
00:23:29 ►
this tension between these two things in every moment. In the last five minutes, in the last
00:23:36 ►
five millennia, in the last five billion years, there has been a struggle between these two forces and they can be mathematically portrayed
00:23:47 ►
just like the rise and fall of temperature or the rise and fall of a stock or or any other
00:23:54 ►
numerical quantity they can theoretically be portrayed in this way, then where we are now, if we think of habit as a rising of this imaginary
00:24:10 ►
Cartesian graph, and habit as a falling toward novelty, deeper into novelty we say, a plunge into novelty, then where we are now is creeping along the highest edge
00:24:29 ►
of a plateau of habit, recidivism, constipation, conservatism, habitual thinking, so forth
00:24:39 ►
and so on, inevitably approaching a dramatic collapse in that style of behavior,
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caused by many different vectors coming together.
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Climate, economy, politics, invention, technology, hormones, moon phases,
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ocean tides, cometary impacts, the spinning of the planet around the Sun, so forth
00:25:08 ►
and so on. Time as experienced is very complex and rich and fractal and filled with anticipation,
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and whatever the opposite of anticipation is,
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reconsideration, memory, regret, satisfaction.
00:25:39 ►
But the time that you get out of science is completely emotionless.
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It’s like a skeletal map of time.
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It’s featureless.
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Measurements are carried out without concern
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for where in the universal matrix they are made.
00:25:57 ►
So there’s a schism between the scientific model of time
00:26:01 ►
and time as experienced, yeah.
00:26:04 ►
Well, I would partially agree with you and suggest that, yes,
00:26:09 ►
history is a series of forward movements and backward lurches,
00:26:15 ►
but over long periods of time, there is actually visible advance,
00:26:23 ►
if we carefully enough define advance.
00:26:27 ►
I mean, it’s not advance into cheerfulness or advance into universal progress and so forth and so on,
00:26:37 ►
but there is some kind of advance.
00:26:43 ►
history is on one level you know like in 1984
00:26:46 ►
I can’t remember
00:26:49 ►
the interrogator’s name says to Winston Smith
00:26:52 ►
he says if you want, what’s his name?
00:26:54 ►
O’Brien says to Smith
00:26:56 ►
if you want an image of human history
00:26:59 ►
think of a boot kicking a human face forever
00:27:03 ►
well that’s that is that static image of history of a boot kicking a human face forever.
00:27:09 ►
Well, that is that static image of history.
00:27:12 ►
I’m not that pessimistic. If you pull back to a scale of 25,000 years,
00:27:16 ►
history is an enormously creative rush
00:27:19 ►
out of the darkness toward the light.
00:27:22 ►
The fact that so much blood and gore is spilled along
00:27:27 ►
the way is pause for thought. But if what is being birthed is novelty, then we
00:27:34 ►
seem to have hit the main vein of novelty. You know, there was animal life
00:27:42 ►
for a very long time on this planet and there was animal life for a very long time on this planet,
00:27:45 ►
and there was human intelligence for a very long time.
00:27:49 ►
I mean, people physically like you and I have been in existence for at least 150,000 years.
00:27:57 ►
That’s, you know, many, many times the duration of history. Those people had humor, drama, innuendo, rumor, gossip, hope, fear, loathing, so forth and so on.
00:28:13 ►
What they didn’t have was technological expressions of their manas.
00:28:20 ►
They didn’t download their minds into matter the way we do and have been doing for quite a while.
00:28:27 ►
And that’s changed things.
00:28:30 ►
And to my mind, I guess I’m operating on the a priori assumption
00:28:38 ►
that novelty is to be cherished
00:28:41 ►
because I observe that nature cherishes novelty.
00:28:48 ►
You know, whenever you create a homogenate, whether chemical, social, religious, gaseous, whatever,
00:29:00 ►
it devolves into some kind of aggregate of mixed types.
00:29:09 ►
Purity dissolves into complexity.
00:29:13 ►
The simple becomes the compound in all processes, in all times and places.
00:29:20 ►
So you said, isn’t it always thus? And it is, but it hasn’t always been described
00:29:30 ►
this way, especially in the West. I think probably this line comes closest in terms
00:29:38 ►
of a tradition to Taoism. I mean, after all, Taoism is about
00:29:45 ►
some all-pervading but invisible something,
00:29:51 ►
which is the first thing they tell you about it
00:29:53 ►
is it’s hard to understand,
00:29:56 ►
and yet somehow it builds things up
00:29:59 ►
and it pulls things down
00:30:02 ►
according to its own mysterious inner dynamic.
00:30:08 ►
Well, surely what we’re talking about here is time,
00:30:11 ►
but a different kind of time than the time of science,
00:30:15 ►
which doesn’t build things up.
00:30:17 ►
It may pull things down.
00:30:19 ►
You know, there is in science great genuflection
00:30:23 ►
to what is called the second law of thermodynamics, which
00:30:26 ►
is simply a law which says everything falls to pieces. The exception, which is never mentioned,
00:30:35 ►
is life itself. And the reason it’s never mentioned is because to physicists, life is so uninteresting and peripheral
00:30:46 ►
that it can actually just be rounded out.
00:30:53 ►
You say, well, since only 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 percent
00:30:58 ►
of the universe is alive,
00:31:00 ►
let’s just pretend none of it’s alive.
00:31:03 ►
Now what kind of a system do we have? Yes, but notice that
00:31:07 ►
the life of the average star is about 500 million years. This star that we happen to be in orbit
00:31:16 ►
around happens to be an unusually stable star, hence a lifetime of maybe four, 5, 6, 7, 8 billion years
00:31:27 ►
but most stars gutter out in a fraction of that time
00:31:33 ►
and since very early on in the establishment of this cosmic environment
00:31:39 ►
life has been present
00:31:41 ►
it survives through death
00:31:44 ►
which is an interesting trick Life has been present. It survives through death,
00:31:47 ►
which is an interesting trick.
00:31:50 ►
Death is somehow for life this opportunity to throw the dice again
00:31:54 ►
and improve the odds in its own favor.
00:31:58 ►
It has slowly, over hundreds of millions of years,
00:32:02 ►
stacked the deck,
00:32:04 ►
worked the game in its favor,
00:32:07 ►
where there was a toxic planet bathed in hard radiation.
00:32:11 ►
It created an atmosphere which softened all of that.
00:32:16 ►
And then within that atmosphere,
00:32:18 ►
it established niches of temperature and moisture and so forth,
00:32:23 ►
and always sustaining itself. And tremendous setbacks,
00:32:28 ►
I mean planet-shattering setbacks, asteroid infalls, enormous volcanic eruptions, and who
00:32:38 ►
knows what else. And though the clock has been reset many times,
00:32:45 ►
never reset to zero.
00:32:47 ►
It always picks itself up and proceeds forward
00:32:50 ►
in this relentless search to acquire and maintain novelty.
00:32:58 ►
And it does it through what is called dissipative structure
00:33:04 ►
or open system.
00:33:07 ►
Or structuralism?
00:33:09 ►
Well, structuralism is…
00:33:12 ►
The study of the same thing
00:33:14 ►
you’re talking about?
00:33:15 ►
To some degree.
00:33:16 ►
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics
00:33:18 ►
is really the study
00:33:19 ►
of what I’m talking about.
00:33:21 ►
What I’m talking about is
00:33:22 ►
how a system,
00:33:26 ►
remember how most systems run down toward equilibrium,
00:33:29 ►
but some systems establish themselves
00:33:32 ►
at what is called
00:33:32 ►
far from equilibrium,
00:33:35 ►
and they maintain themselves there,
00:33:37 ►
not for decades,
00:33:38 ►
but for millions of years.
00:33:40 ►
Biology is such a system,
00:33:42 ►
and the way it pulls this trick off
00:33:44 ►
is by being what’s called an open system or a dissipative structure.
00:33:49 ►
What that means is how the trick is done is you are open.
00:33:54 ►
And so you bring in highly organized material, food, ideas, money.
00:34:02 ►
It depends on what kind of system you are, a corporation, an organism, a university,
00:34:08 ►
but in any case you bring in highly organized material, you extract energy from it, you trap
00:34:14 ►
this energy within a membrane of some sort, and you excrete then the lower grade used up stuff. And by trapping energy within these membranes,
00:34:26 ►
you ride far from equilibrium.
00:34:30 ►
Sooner or later you die if you’re a biological system.
00:34:35 ►
But sometime before you die,
00:34:37 ►
if you’re a successful biological system,
00:34:40 ►
you condense and download your software
00:34:43 ►
and pass it on to some other part of the system.
00:34:49 ►
Now this sounds incredibly chancy, and you wouldn’t think this would be a strategy for overcoming a fairly hostile and tropic universe. But it turns out it not only works, meaning it not only sustains itself, it actually
00:35:07 ►
has enough flexibility and creativity left over to advance, to incrementally advance through the
00:35:18 ►
process of morphogenesis. Morphogenesis is the trapping of form in matter. I mean, think about your body,
00:35:28 ►
for example. Every five years, six years, every molecule in your body is replaced. You are not
00:35:38 ►
who you were seven years ago. Maybe the gold in your teeth is the same, but your teeth aren’t the same.
00:35:46 ►
There is some small percentage of neural tissue, which is believed to remain constant through life,
00:35:53 ►
but 95% of you is being cycled through.
00:35:58 ►
So you aren’t an object.
00:36:01 ►
You’re a process of some sort and you can discover the difference between yourself and an object by
00:36:09 ►
considering a chair and what happens when you slice into a chair not very much when you slice
00:36:18 ►
into yourself it creates a crisis because it interrupts metabolism. Metabolism is time trapped in a biological matrix.
00:36:32 ►
We are essentially membranes of some sort
00:36:36 ►
that have trapped time in some kind of a matrix.
00:36:40 ►
And through this, we are undergoing the formality of being alive. This is sort of
00:36:49 ►
like a description of what it’s like to be alive from inside. Well, so then this raises the issue
00:36:58 ►
that brings in the drug. The drugs, the plants, the substances are metabolized as well, like food.
00:37:11 ►
What foods are essentially are idea-neutral drugs on one level.
00:37:19 ►
They undergo the formality of keeping you alive.
00:37:22 ►
They don’t give you a lot of ideas.
00:37:24 ►
Of course, if you’re a gastronome, perhaps they do. You know, if you have the sensitivity of a Proust,
00:37:30 ►
then a good Saturn can send your mind reeling back to the smell of your grandmother’s lap
00:37:38 ►
45 years before and so forth and so on. But generally speaking, food stabilizes us in this dimension
00:37:48 ►
of trapped time that is our metabolism, our being alive. What drugs do is affect this stability,
00:38:00 ►
perturb this stability. And this word perturb is interesting
00:38:07 ►
because it’s the very word that Ilya Prigozhin,
00:38:12 ►
the French thermodynamicist,
00:38:16 ►
used when he was defining dissipative structures.
00:38:20 ►
What Prigozhin showed was that chemical systems,
00:38:36 ►
and he wasn’t even talking about biology, he was talking about complex physical chemical systems, spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. that this is basically the ground zero of the physical world
00:38:48 ►
and that you have spontaneous mutation to higher states of order,
00:38:53 ►
then you see that there is embedded in matter itself
00:38:59 ►
this curious appetite for creativity
00:39:03 ►
that runs counter to the ordinary wisdom
00:39:07 ►
about how everything falls to pieces.
00:39:10 ►
And again, life is some kind of strategy
00:39:15 ►
for taking this minuscule percentage of creativity
00:39:20 ►
and trapping it in loops
00:39:23 ►
that loop and iterate and iterate and iterate and build and build.
00:39:29 ►
And through this, after at some extraordinary level of complexity, or like around nine billion
00:39:38 ►
neurons, you have what’s called an emergent property and there’s nothing mysterious about this
00:39:47 ►
I mean imagine if you have one atom of water
00:39:50 ►
it does not have the property wet
00:39:54 ►
how could it?
00:39:56 ►
it’s an atom of water
00:39:58 ►
but now if you have a hundred billion atoms of water
00:40:01 ►
wetness is an emergent property
00:40:04 ►
that is only visible when there is an enormous
00:40:08 ►
population of water molecules. Similarly, when you have a large enough population of neurons,
00:40:16 ►
there is an iridescence that is coaxed out of all that neural machinery that is self-reflection.
00:40:26 ►
And it is, you know that Grateful Dead song,
00:40:30 ►
you are the eyes of the world?
00:40:32 ►
I mean, this is nature looking at itself.
00:40:35 ►
When you ask, who am I?
00:40:37 ►
The answer is, I am this process.
00:40:44 ►
And when you ask, what am I seeing?
00:40:48 ►
You’re seeing this process.
00:40:51 ►
You are retroflexively embedded in a process of becoming.
00:40:58 ►
This is why, though he didn’t get everything right,
00:41:01 ►
Heidegger was on the right track when he said,
00:41:04 ►
a human
00:41:05 ►
being is not an object or a process, but a window of opportunity into eternity. In other
00:41:15 ►
words, beyond process thinking, there is an implicit metaphysic. This has to do with the cutting edge and the cutting edge is
00:41:29 ►
where it’s at, always has been. It’s an extension of ourselves, first the blade
00:41:39 ►
and then the word. This is why words are inevitably conceived of as swords,
00:41:47 ►
because they divide reality.
00:41:52 ►
They make distinction, and they give definition.
00:41:58 ►
So we’re caught up in some kind of autocatalytic hypercycle of reflexivity,
00:42:10 ►
and that would be a good way to put it.
00:42:12 ►
And the psychedelics, by sort of speeding up and slowing down
00:42:19 ►
and disrupting and perturbing this metabolic flow of energy
00:42:25 ►
become primary data for understanding how self and world works.
00:42:34 ►
And then, of course, far from all of this,
00:42:37 ►
far from the dark night of the soul
00:42:41 ►
and its contemplation of the linguistic cutting edge is the receptacle of
00:42:46 ►
culture that we all move in and down to which we eventually must download our perceptions and make
00:42:56 ►
sense of them make sense of them in a in a historical context in a sexual context, in a relational context to the rest of the past
00:43:06 ►
and the future. The faith here is sort of that you can think your way to at least the illusion
00:43:15 ►
of an understanding. You know, it’s in the Arthurian legends or it’s in Parsifal where Lancelot,
00:43:26 ►
or maybe it’s not Lancelot anyway,
00:43:28 ►
somebody rides a horse
00:43:31 ►
across a burning bridge.
00:43:35 ►
And I think all logical constructs
00:43:37 ►
are these burning bridges.
00:43:40 ►
It need only last long enough
00:43:43 ►
for you to get your thundering speed across.
00:43:46 ►
It doesn’t have to be for the ages.
00:43:51 ►
Because the beginning of intellectual maturity is to understand that what these models illuminate is greater darkness.
00:44:10 ►
Inevitably greater darkness, inevitably greater darkness. You can make a geometric model out of it and just say as the sphere of understanding expands so necessarily the surface area of
00:44:18 ►
ignorance grows ever larger. And how could it be otherwise?
00:44:28 ►
Only if you live in some tiny universe,
00:44:32 ►
the equivalent of a trailer of some sort,
00:44:35 ►
could the light of your illumination be expected to shed itself
00:44:37 ►
into the far corners of the cosmos.
00:44:41 ►
No, it’s a discovery of
00:44:43 ►
the provisional nature of knowledge. And if you look at the
00:44:47 ►
history of philosophy, this is really what has been understood over 2,000 years. Less and less
00:44:56 ►
has been understood as the nature of the problem has come into clearer and clearer focus.
00:45:05 ►
I mean, it’s one thing when you’re trying to figure out
00:45:07 ►
if the world is made of earth, air, fire, or water.
00:45:11 ►
It’s quite another if you’re trying to answer questions like,
00:45:14 ►
what is the nature of the self in the context of language?
00:45:19 ►
You know, you take the simple questions early
00:45:21 ►
and the more complex questions late,
00:45:24 ►
but inevitably you come to the complex questions, and the more complex questions late. But inevitably, you come to the complex questions.
00:45:27 ►
And this is where we are.
00:45:29 ►
And to me, what all of this, the conclusion,
00:45:33 ►
and I’ll close for this evening,
00:45:36 ►
the conclusion of all of this intellectual circumlocution
00:45:41 ►
and so forth,
00:45:42 ►
is the importance of the felt experience of the moment.
00:45:48 ►
That the felt experience of the moment
00:45:52 ►
is the only secure datum for reality.
00:45:57 ►
And everything else is memory, anticipation, and conjecture.
00:46:04 ►
And so, you know, we have developed
00:46:06 ►
these very abstract analytical tools
00:46:09 ►
like epistemology and so forth and so on
00:46:13 ►
in the Western tradition.
00:46:15 ►
The only purpose of these things
00:46:17 ►
is to lead you back to the felt presence of experience.
00:46:22 ►
So in a sense, philosophy and tripping and self-discovery
00:46:29 ►
is the journey of a prodigal son.
00:46:33 ►
You know, it doesn’t make any sense,
00:46:35 ►
it doesn’t complete itself
00:46:38 ►
unless you return to where you started from, enriched.
00:46:43 ►
And the place you start from
00:46:46 ►
is the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:46:51 ►
So we will explore all of this in greater detail.
00:46:56 ►
This was fairly high-flung and humorless this evening,
00:47:01 ►
but it doesn’t have to be.
00:47:04 ►
Thank you very much.
00:47:06 ►
Get some sleep.
00:47:07 ►
The baths are open 24 hours a day.
00:47:12 ►
There is in Zoroastrian religion,
00:47:16 ►
which is an older religious strata than the Vedic strata,
00:47:21 ►
a sacrament called Haoma.
00:47:26 ►
And Haoma,
00:47:29 ►
which you can tell that the word is related to the Vedic concept Soma,
00:47:32 ►
but Haoma is unambiguously
00:47:35 ►
Pagamon Harmala.
00:47:37 ►
And was
00:47:42 ►
apparently the basis of some kind of
00:47:44 ►
psychedelic sacrament on its own.
00:47:48 ►
Pagamon harmala contains a lot of harmoline,
00:47:52 ►
very little harmine.
00:47:55 ►
It also, strangely enough, and this is new data to everybody,
00:48:01 ►
30% of the alkaloid content of Pagamon Harmala
00:48:05 ►
is vasocene,
00:48:07 ►
about which virtually nothing
00:48:09 ►
is known other than
00:48:11 ►
melting point and activity
00:48:13 ►
in dogs.
00:48:15 ►
Sasha Shogan,
00:48:17 ►
in this Mexican meeting
00:48:19 ►
I just came from,
00:48:20 ►
lectured on the alkaloid content
00:48:24 ►
of Pagamon harmala.
00:48:25 ►
So vasocene is in there.
00:48:27 ►
We really should regard Pegamon harmala
00:48:30 ►
as a fairly mysterious and untested compound.
00:48:35 ►
If you’re interested in all of this,
00:48:38 ►
Jonathan Ott wrote a book called Ayahuasca Analogues.
00:48:42 ►
It’s apparently available here at the bookstore.
00:48:46 ►
It’s a small, thin book.
00:48:48 ►
It details his personal self-experimentation
00:48:52 ►
with various MAO inhibitors and sources of DMT.
00:48:58 ►
This is all new stuff.
00:49:00 ►
It’s amazing that, you know,
00:49:02 ►
we’ve talked about Pagamonarmala for 25 years.
00:49:06 ►
He did a GCMS on it.
00:49:08 ►
Out pops vasocene, 30% of the alkali compound content.
00:49:15 ►
He’s wondering if anybody’s ever noticed it.
00:49:20 ►
And then, you know, you go back to the literature
00:49:22 ►
and you discover that Hochstein and Paradis in 1931
00:49:26 ►
described vasocene as a major component of pergamon harmless.
00:49:31 ►
It never hurts to do your homework.
00:49:34 ►
Even the biggies can profit from that.
00:49:38 ►
Pardon me?
00:49:38 ►
Two grams of seed.
00:49:39 ►
Two grams of seed.
00:49:41 ►
And then the question, how much of the DMT?
00:49:47 ►
That’s more something where you get… The ayahuasca, the banisteriopsis.
00:49:49 ►
Well, if you’re making a pseudo or neo-ayahuasca,
00:49:54 ►
you don’t use banisteriopsis.
00:49:56 ►
See, the classic ayahuasca is made out of banisteriopsis capi,
00:50:00 ►
which is this huge woody jungle vine in the Malfugaceae native to the Amazon.
00:50:07 ►
And it’s made with the leaves of Socotria viridis,
00:50:12 ►
which is a little bush related to coffee, also an Amazon endemic. The reason sucotria is preferred is because it has a very clean signature for DMT.
00:50:30 ►
In other words, there’s very little in it except DMT. You don’t want to take something that has
00:50:36 ►
monomethyltryptamine, alpha-methyltryptamine, 5-MeO, bufetine, DMT so forth and so on this will put you all over the map
00:50:46 ►
so the search is always
00:50:48 ►
for the clean
00:50:50 ►
source
00:50:52 ►
the acacia simplex on this list
00:50:57 ►
has the highest
00:50:58 ►
DMT ever measured
00:51:00 ►
you grind them together squeeze a lemon into it, and that’s to acidify the water
00:51:12 ►
in order to cause the alkaloid to pull out a little more efficiently.
00:51:19 ►
Of the acacia simplex, every part of that plant seems to have a lot of DMT in it,
00:51:27 ►
but the root bark is most intense.
00:51:29 ►
Usually root bark is most intense.
00:51:35 ►
You know, there’s this mysterious hallucinogen
00:51:38 ►
in eastern Brazil called Jarima,
00:51:43 ►
or Jarima, Vino de Jarima, Mimosa Hostiles.
00:51:48 ►
That’s an interesting one because there’s no known monoamine oxidase inhibitor present,
00:52:00 ►
and yet this stuff is orally active.
00:52:02 ►
So it’s very interesting to pharmacologists.
00:52:06 ►
On this trip to Mexico,
00:52:08 ►
I became aware of the fact
00:52:11 ►
that there is a thing sold in Mexican drugstores
00:52:14 ►
called tipescoite.
00:52:17 ►
And it’s actually made from the root bark of mimosa hostiles.
00:52:24 ►
It’s sold as a burn powder,
00:52:29 ►
but in fact it’s about 5% DMT.
00:52:34 ►
Some friends of mine were thinking of forming a company
00:52:37 ►
called Distribuidoros Mexicanos de Tepescavite,
00:52:42 ►
which would give you the initials DMT.
00:52:48 ►
I don’t know.
00:52:49 ►
Okay, so enough about that.
00:52:51 ►
Those of you who are…
00:52:53 ►
Yeah.
00:52:55 ►
Acacia simplex?
00:52:58 ►
Well, I have access to Banisteriopsis capi and Socotria viridis,
00:53:04 ►
so I’m a classicist and fairly conservative,
00:53:08 ►
and I just make classic ayahuasca.
00:53:15 ►
These other things, people are reporting different things.
00:53:20 ►
It’s an art, and eventually I think they’ll get it down,
00:53:29 ►
but it’s an inexact art at the moment.
00:53:34 ►
Arundodonax, that’s an interesting one.
00:53:46 ►
That’s the giant Mediterranean river reed, and it has DMT in the roots. What makes it interesting, aside from its botany,
00:53:50 ►
is that plant, Arundodonax, to this day is the source for reeds,
00:53:54 ►
for reeded musical instruments,
00:53:57 ►
clarinets and that sort of thing.
00:53:59 ►
Well, so here we have a river reed
00:54:03 ►
native to the ancient Middle East
00:54:07 ►
associated with flutes, associated with music,
00:54:13 ►
and having its psychoactive principle under the ground in its roots.
00:54:19 ►
It is arguably some kind of orphic trope of some sort.
00:54:27 ►
I mean, Orpheus, you recall, made a journey into the underworld,
00:54:31 ►
was a player of a magical flute, so forth and so on.
00:54:35 ►
There’s a lot of this kind of suggestive mythology that you can play with,
00:54:41 ►
and if anybody’s interested in those subjects, you can steer me that way with a question.
00:54:46 ►
Otherwise, I won’t get too much into it.
00:54:50 ►
Uh-huh.
00:54:51 ►
Yeah.
00:54:52 ►
I mean, people think of it different ways.
00:54:55 ►
Sort of the way I think of it is, imagine a bullseye.
00:55:00 ►
And at the center of the bullseye is something like
00:55:04 ►
a high-dose smoked DMT experience.
00:55:09 ►
And then out some distance from that is high-dose psilocybin.
00:55:17 ►
And some distance from that, high-dose ayahuasca.
00:55:21 ►
And then, you know, the upper left corner is LSD
00:55:25 ►
the lower right corner is Salvinorine Alpha
00:55:29 ►
mescaline is up here
00:55:32 ►
in other words they’re very different things
00:55:35 ►
but all roads lead to Rome
00:55:37 ►
if you raise the dose high enough
00:55:41 ►
and so here’s the spectrum
00:55:44 ►
that you pass through.
00:55:46 ►
If you take a low
00:55:48 ►
dose of
00:55:49 ►
mescaline, psilocybin,
00:55:52 ►
LSD,
00:55:56 ►
orally activated tryptamine,
00:55:58 ►
a low dose of any of
00:56:00 ►
those, they basically all
00:56:02 ►
make you feel the same,
00:56:04 ►
which is aroused, slightly discomforted,
00:56:09 ►
hypnagogia with closed eyes, slightly accelerated heartbeat, so forth and so on.
00:56:15 ►
Then if you increase the dose, you come into a zone where each one has its own characteristics.
00:56:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:26 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:30 ►
For what it’s worth, I went out to Wikipedia just now
00:56:34 ►
to see if Terrence’s prediction about the February 1996 events was correct.
00:56:40 ►
Well, in my opinion, it was.
00:56:42 ►
That was a really horrific month in many respects.
00:56:45 ►
But hopefully the good always helps balance the bad,
00:56:49 ►
and so the only thing that I’m going to pass along right now about that month
00:56:52 ►
is the fact that this was also the month that the Pokémon series was first released in Japan.
00:56:58 ►
Now, if you’re not a gamer, this probably won’t mean much,
00:57:01 ►
but Pokémon is part of the genesis of the gaming world.
00:57:05 ►
At least that’s the way I see it.
00:57:07 ►
Hardcore gamers among us may have some different opinions, I guess.
00:57:11 ►
Now before I go, I should probably give you another update
00:57:14 ►
about the status of our website’s migration to a new hosting company.
00:57:18 ►
And first of all, I want to extend a great big thank you
00:57:21 ►
to all of our fellow Saloners who have offered to help me with this project.
00:57:26 ►
There are, of course, things that I could pass along to others that would be of some help to me,
00:57:31 ►
but like a few other people that I know, I don’t seem to work very well with others, as my teachers would have said.
00:57:39 ►
It’s a definite failing on my part, and I recognize that, so I apologize for not taking you up on your
00:57:45 ►
offers. But the truth is that I’m also having a lot of fun doing this work. You know, after a
00:57:51 ►
little while, us retired people still have to do something that seems like work if we’re going to
00:57:56 ►
keep from going batty, just staying home and not going to a job that we hate every day.
00:58:02 ►
As the dead fans would say, what a long, strange trip this has been.
00:58:07 ►
Anyway, in a few weeks, all of my websites should be transferred to the new hosting company, and
00:58:12 ►
within a couple of months, the new psychedelic salon site will be open. Basically, it’s going
00:58:18 ►
to be in many ways similar to what I’ve got for you right now, but it’ll also look a lot better and be reflexive so that you can
00:58:25 ►
use it better on a handheld or tablet device. But there is one more thing that I’ll be adding,
00:58:32 ►
and that is a social network app that’s going to allow us to better get in touch with one another,
00:58:38 ►
to find the others. For you geeks out there, what I’m talking about is BuddyPress, the plug-in for
00:58:44 ►
WordPress. So if you want to, you can check it out and get a little idea, what I’m talking about is BuddyPress, the plug-in for WordPress.
00:58:48 ►
So if you want to, you can check it out and get a little idea of what I’m up to.
00:58:54 ►
And as I get closer to rolling all of this out, I’ll mention it here in the podcast for you.
00:58:59 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:17 ►
Be careful out there my friends.