Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
Today’s podcast features a talk given by Dr. Bruce Damer in May 2015 at the Lightening in a Bottle Festival. Building on a theme introduced by Lorenzo in a talk at Esalen, Bruce takes an in-depth look at the importance and essence of the Mysteries at Eleusis. In his concluding remarks, Lorenzo discusses the drawbacks of organized religion and suggests that minor children NOT be given religious instruction.
Next:Space | Dr. Bruce Damer | TEDxSantaCruz
In the Beginning: The Origin & Purpose of Life | Dr. Bruce Damer | TEDxSantaCruz
Lightning in a Bottle Festival
The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries
By R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A. P. Ruck
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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 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And for what it’s worth, progress is being made in moving our websites to a new hosting company.
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If all goes well, we’ll be coming to you through a new server in another week,
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but hopefully you won’t notice any difference.
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And then I’ll be able to continue working on a new website for the salon that hopefully is going to provide you with another way to find the others.
00:00:46 ►
So stay tuned for that.
00:00:48 ►
Also, thanks to some help that Bruce Dahmer is providing,
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we may even get the old feed back on iTunes, which will help some of our lost salonners find us once again.
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But for now, you and I are here, and I’m really happy about that.
00:01:04 ►
So speaking of Bruce Dahmer, yesterday we had a really long conversation,
00:01:09 ►
and one of the results was that I remembered a talk that he sent me two months ago.
00:01:14 ►
But it got buried under, well, buried under the mess of my not-too-well-organized filing system.
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So after he and I talked, I listened to it and realized that he had said some things that fit quite nicely with something that I’ve been wanting to say for myself for quite a while now.
00:01:32 ►
And I’ll do just that after we first listen to the talk that Bruce gave this past May at the Lightning in a Bottle Festival.
00:01:41 ►
In the cover letter that Bruce sent with this audio file, he said, and I quote,
00:01:45 ►
You should know that my fascination with Elusis and the greatest story you may ever hear
00:01:51 ►
was initiated by you at our Esalen workshop in 2012
00:01:55 ►
when you asked the question of what new myths should we give ourselves as a culture
00:02:00 ►
and you spoke about Elusis.
00:02:03 ►
My obsession with telling the Eleusis story
00:02:05 ►
comes from the belief that we need this story to return. End quote. Now, somewhere in one of my
00:02:12 ►
podcasts from that year, you can hear exactly what I said that caught Bruce’s attention.
00:02:17 ►
But for me, the person who most impressed the significance of the mysteries at Eleusis upon me was the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, who once said that if he was to sum up the first 200,000 years of human mythological history, including the Bible, it was Eleusis that was the pinnacle of what humans had accomplished up to that time.
00:02:42 ►
And I found that to be an incredibly important statement from a scholar whom I greatly admire.
00:02:49 ►
Now, after we listen to Bruce’s talk, I’ll be back to give you a few of my own ideas
00:02:53 ►
about why now, in our present day, creating new myths, both to live by and to teach our
00:03:00 ►
children with, is critically important.
00:03:03 ►
And please keep in mind that creating these myths
00:03:06 ►
isn’t only up to scholars like Joseph Campbell. You also have a role to play here.
00:03:13 ►
Now here is Pluma who will introduce my dear friend Bruce Dahmer.
00:03:18 ►
All right, it is my pleasure and honor to introduce Bruce Dahmer. Many refer to him as Dr. Bruce. You probably saw
00:03:28 ►
in your book, ancient temples, modern day shaman. He’s even more than that. He’s built spaceships
00:03:36 ►
for NASA. I mean, does this guy look like a NASA builder? He’s a storyteller. So you guys are in for quite a delicious, adventurous journey with
00:03:47 ►
Bruce. Let’s give Dr. Bruce our awesome love. Welcome him. Thank you for being here.
00:03:55 ►
This talk is about the light. It’s about the light of consciousness. The light of consciousness that comes through music like that.
00:04:07 ►
Do you know what that music was?
00:04:10 ►
That’s an Icaro from Peru by a friend of mine named William.
00:04:16 ►
And when he plays that music in the state that we are in ayahuasca ceremony, the light comes in.
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Can you feel that light when that music came?
00:04:27 ►
Just feel it coming into your body. Someone just told me that that’s 70 beats. That’s the beat of
00:04:34 ►
the rotation of the planet, that music. So like the peak music of light is related to the very
00:04:41 ►
rotation of the planet. and that’s a dance.
00:04:48 ►
That’s a kind of a dance, and we’ll come back to that later.
00:04:53 ►
But what I’m going to do today is to tell you a story which may be the most important story that you’ve ever heard.
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Now, that’s a strong claim, and that requires stronger evidence
00:05:04 ►
that this is the greatest story you will ever hear.
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But I think it is.
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So let’s take you back.
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The world of 300,000 years ago, we were coming out of Africa.
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Our ancestors survived a genetic neck where the surviving tribe was in South Africa.
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The surviving tribe was in South Africa living on seashells and living next to the ocean in a cave.
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And it was the last of the humans.
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This is about 180,000 years ago.
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Africa had dried out. and it was a peaceable
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community. It’s the Blombos Cave community. And then what happened was a really big shift.
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Mitochondrial Eve was born. Mitochondrial Eve, the common mother of us all. She was a mutant.
00:06:02 ►
She was a magnificent mutant. And her genes were so different that she
00:06:08 ►
was probably the oddest kid ever born to a community. And we don’t know where she was born.
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Was she born in South Africa? Was she born in Kenya? But we have one mother because our mitochondria,
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the little part of our cells that make energy, have one genetic code. We have a common mother.
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Does this tell us something?
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A common mother.
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What happens when you have a common mother?
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What does that mean?
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You’re all brothers and sisters, right?
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We’re all brothers and sisters.
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But something else.
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So she’s born.
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She’s this mutant.
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And the women are running the society at that time it’s a matriarchal society and they come around this odd child and they raise her and
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they protect her from the manic monkey males that are in the community and they think well she’s
00:07:00 ►
cool she’s special and we’re going to protect him from those idiots.
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Anyway, being one of those idiots, I know what idiocracy is. I’m a male. I know where we go.
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So they raise her. I think she invented language. She invented mathematics. She figured out the lunar cycle, and then she discovered something that was the greatest
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secret up until that time. She figured out the lunar menstrual cycle. So here she is, like 16
00:07:33 ►
years old. She’s the teacher now of the women in the community, and she says, listen girls,
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I just figured out how we can know whose child is whose. Whose child is whose? Because it’s like this amount of time.
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See those scratches in that ochre bone?
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That tells us that your child about to be born is the hairy kind of cute guy that’s a little bit smelly.
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That comes through him.
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And she says, oh, my God, you’re kidding.
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Oh, my God, you’re kidding. Oh my God. So what’s happening in that
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community is the hairy, cute guy, think of him like Bruce Brand, right? He’s behind the cave wall
00:08:15 ►
listening in, and he gets the information. Oh, that’s my child. And then patriarchy is born.
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That’s my child.
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And then patriarchy is born.
00:08:29 ►
Patrilineal process is born because he goes back.
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What does he do?
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He goes back to the guys and says, I know which child is going to be mine.
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I will have child.
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I will have child.
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And he’s bragging to the boys.
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And the boys are toys, right? They’re going out and they’re doing the hunting and they’re doing the fishing and whatnot. And they come back. And so the child is born. And it has his nose,
00:08:53 ►
you know, his cute ski jump nose that they like so much, right? And so he now has power, right?
00:08:59 ►
He has some kind of magic power, but it was the secret that was released. Now, what does this guy do? This is my
00:09:05 ►
story and my tale and my allegory. She gives birth. Mitochondrial Eve gives birth to twins.
00:09:14 ►
And those twin girls, they’re twin girls, right? Because we need females because her genes are
00:09:19 ►
going to go on and dominate the planet. But understand at 180,000 years, the planet is full of other peoples,
00:09:26 ►
Neanderthals, weird kind of off humans. It’s just replete with people, the planet. So how does
00:09:34 ►
her gene conquer the world, right? How does it happen? Well, cute guy, you know, has also a little deviousness to him. And he kidnaps, I call her the future
00:09:48 ►
child, he kidnaps one of the twins. He kidnaps her. Because the women are increasingly seeing
00:09:56 ►
that these guys are clueless. Because mitochondrial Eve is educating them. And they’re thinking,
00:10:02 ►
you know, what do we do with them? Because she helped
00:10:05 ►
them learn how to do something called gossip about the man, which taught them language. You know,
00:10:10 ►
now we have something to do all day. We can gossip about the man. And so one night he steals one of
00:10:17 ►
the future child, and he heads inland with the guys. They take up the spear. Now, because they have, why? Because they have to
00:10:26 ►
hunt the kudu. They can’t live on fish, which is a diet that creates mellowness and health.
00:10:32 ►
They have to now take up the spear and they have to kill again. But he carries her. There had to be
00:10:37 ►
some force that carried that gene around the planet. But they change. Their diet changes to meat, and their whole personality changes.
00:10:46 ►
And then what happens? That spear is carried for 180,000 years, up to 1989,
00:10:56 ►
when the ultimate spear that those dudes made, called a thermonuclear warhead, is poised to be, you know, sent off, and the Cold War ends, and 35,000 of
00:11:09 ►
those suckers are put in a shed somewhere. Why? Because it was too mad. It was too fucking crazy
00:11:16 ►
to have a spear like that and throw it, because you lose everything. Of course, there’s some guy
00:11:21 ►
in a command bunker that if ordered, his sergeant would say,
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all right, all right, you know, end of the world.
00:11:29 ►
He’d say, end of the world, coming right up, coming up, sir, guaranteed.
00:11:33 ►
You know, there was some guy that was going to do that.
00:11:36 ►
Guarantee, end of the world, that’s my, on my little mission chart, push that button, boom.
00:11:40 ►
It almost happened, right?
00:11:42 ►
Could have been a Russian end of the world, but I think those guys were a little cooler than us. They would have kind of held off. We would have pushed
00:11:50 ►
the button. We’re just that crazy. So that’s not the greatest story you will hear, but it’s the
00:11:56 ►
prelude to it. Because on the way up, on the way of the spear carrier, the spear carrying power,
00:12:03 ►
the male manic power, is so powerful that
00:12:05 ►
through war and competition, they carried mitochondrial yeast genes, and everyone else fell.
00:12:12 ►
Everyone fell. They leveled humanity. Anyone who did not have her genes and her genius didn’t
00:12:20 ►
survive. From the New Guinea highlands to Madagascar to here, you’re all the offspring of
00:12:27 ►
her. So that did a job, right? That did a job. But we are now in a new phase. But along the way,
00:12:35 ►
as the manic monkeys poured out of Africa, they poured into the Mediterranean. Like the
00:12:41 ►
Mediterranean was dry and then it was wet and it was hard to get across and all this shit was happening. But suddenly it was just right. It was the garden of the world.
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The Mediterranean was peopled, but it was still a bit of a matrilineal culture. It wasn’t totally
00:12:55 ►
male. In Sumeria, they were hitching plows, iron plows, and they were cutting the earth and they
00:13:03 ►
had a bull culture. That was their culture,
00:13:06 ►
and they described this. I mean, ancient people are cool because they don’t beat around the bush,
00:13:11 ►
right? They described it as the penis that is cutting the vulva of the earth, yeah? So women
00:13:18 ►
were displaced from that world. The women had been the gardeners. Now men industrialized agriculture and they domesticated plants. And then they domesticated animals, the bull. And then they were in the
00:13:31 ►
process of domesticating women. So there’s the full cycle. It was the full, full cycle. So in
00:13:36 ►
Samaria, this was going on. But in Greece, it was different. In Greece, it was different.
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So for example, why we know this is Greece had a real
00:13:46 ►
feminine culture. It had real feminine power. Women were priestesses. Women were priestesses.
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The Delphic Oracle, you know about that, right? The Oracle of Delphi, which might have been
00:13:58 ►
nitrous oxide coming out of the ground. And these women would basically tell truths. So the king of Persia would come to
00:14:06 ►
Delphi and say, who’s going to win the war? You know, who’s going to win this war? You know,
00:14:11 ►
they would come to their enemy to ask. The Delphic oracles were so powerful that
00:14:16 ►
competing male kings would come to them for advice before fighting anybody. And of course,
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their answer is always ambiguous. It was like,
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a great king will win this war, you know, straight out of a nitrous burst. And he goes off all proud
00:14:33 ►
and happy. And of course, who wins it? The Greek, you know, greater king than you. Because they
00:14:38 ►
were playing the manic male. They were playing us. But there was one other place that the women were doing
00:14:46 ►
something even more powerful, even more powerful, which is in the matrilineal lineage of mitochondrial
00:14:53 ►
Eve, where their teachers, they set up something called a mystery school. Now, there’s a camp here
00:15:00 ►
called Mystery School. I think, Dennis, you’re talking in it tomorrow, which is cool.
00:15:06 ►
And this is called the temple. This is called the temple stage, right? Thanks, Becca. You know,
00:15:13 ►
this is, and Pluma, the temple. Now, there’s a pattern here. So, what was going on in Greece
00:15:19 ►
were mystery schools all over the Mediterranean. What they were was, here you have 150,000 years of
00:15:27 ►
history in Europe. It was called the Upper Paleolithic. And what did people do? Well,
00:15:32 ►
we know what they did because of Otzi, the Iceman. There was a guy found frozen in the ice.
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Was it 25,000 years he was frozen? How old he was? Remember the news as this guy found frozen
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in the top of a mountain and they defrosted him.
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And he’s in a museum now.
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I think it’s in Italy.
00:15:54 ►
But this guy was a medicine man walking across the Alps
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and he had a poke and he had all his magical stuff in it,
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including what seems like it was mushrooms.
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He was walking across the Alps, servicing small communities.
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And this is in what’s called the Upper Paleolithic, sort of the Stone Age, Iron Age.
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This is what was going on.
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It was hundreds of thousands of years of this culture of little villages served by shamans, medicine men,
00:16:21 ►
nobody particularly going to war.
00:16:23 ►
There was no organization.
00:16:25 ►
There was no giant temple complexes. You know, the city started to sort of form at the end of this,
00:16:31 ►
but it was a whole chill period. Think of it like Middle Earth, you know. This is like,
00:16:36 ►
you know, a bit like the Shire and a bit like Rivendell and whatnot. You know,
00:16:40 ►
this is kind of our paradise time. These peaceable communities, mostly, I’m sure that there were war parties that would go,
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that were just sort of in the space.
00:16:50 ►
Ice ages would come and scrape the land, and then they would have to kind of relocate.
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But it was over a long enough time period.
00:16:56 ►
So this is what was going on.
00:16:58 ►
But then suddenly, when you go to your high school, what do you read about?
00:17:02 ►
The Roman Empire, right?
00:17:03 ►
Where the fuck did that come from?
00:17:06 ►
My God, you know, they’re building shit.
00:17:09 ►
They’re building aqueducts, and they’re building,
00:17:12 ►
they have mathematics and theater,
00:17:13 ►
and then you find out, oh, they stole it all from the Greeks, you know.
00:17:17 ►
They took all the intellectual property from the Greeks,
00:17:19 ►
and you go, wait a minute, look at the Greek peninsula.
00:17:23 ►
There’s this little Peloponnesian thing here and a little Sparta here.
00:17:26 ►
And how did these people crack this thing?
00:17:29 ►
If they’re the source of all this, what were they doing?
00:17:33 ►
And then we hear about Eleusis.
00:17:35 ►
And Eleusis is this elusive, magical place.
00:17:41 ►
It’s still there.
00:17:42 ►
If you take a bus, a certain bus line out of Athens, and you go up to
00:17:46 ►
this area, which is now surrounded by oil refineries, there’s this plane, and it has this
00:17:53 ►
wreckage of a temple complex on it. And there it is, and there’s a little museum and whatnot. And
00:17:59 ►
for four or five hundred years, this has been the obsession of classicists to understand what was going on here, because this is referred to by many people, by Pliny, by Plato, by many, you know, well-known,
00:18:12 ►
famous people. They talk about going to Eleusis for initiation, to be initiated. And so there’s
00:18:20 ►
this whole mystery around this thing for hundreds of years. Now what I’m going to do next is instead of blabbing on and on,
00:18:30 ►
I am going to put on the screen.
00:18:35 ►
So this is something very special for you guys.
00:18:40 ►
Can you see that dude’s head?
00:18:42 ►
Can you see it?
00:18:44 ►
That is you 2,500 years ago.
00:18:48 ►
That’s a festival goer in ancient Greece from Eleusis.
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Doesn’t he look cool? He’s got nice long hair. He’s got a hair tie.
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He’s like super chill. Super chill.
00:19:01 ►
That’s what’s depicted on here.
00:19:01 ►
All right, super chill.
00:19:04 ►
That’s what’s depicted on here.
00:19:14 ►
Now, most importantly, what’s inside, and we put it on the screen so that you could see, is this.
00:19:17 ►
This is a piece of the temple at Eleusis.
00:19:19 ►
I shouldn’t have it.
00:19:23 ►
It shouldn’t be in my possession, but it found its way to me.
00:19:24 ►
It’s a shell, and on the back of the shell is stone
00:19:27 ►
because it’s a piece of the Mediterranean in the rock at Eleusis.
00:19:31 ►
This was taken and plucked from the lowest foundation at the temple at Eleusis.
00:19:38 ►
And I’ll tell you more about this later,
00:19:40 ►
but my wet dream is that this was peed on by Aristotle during his initiation,
00:19:49 ►
or Cleopatra’s beautiful bottom was sitting nudged against this. You know, that’s my dream.
00:19:56 ►
But this is a piece of the actual temple that changed the world. And let me tell you the story
00:20:02 ►
of what this did. These women set up this mystery school,
00:20:07 ►
and there were lots of mystery schools, but the mystery schools were an outgrowth of the upper
00:20:11 ►
Paleolithic’s tradition of initiating people when they were young. Because any tribal or indigenous
00:20:18 ►
culture realizes if you don’t provide initiation for youth, especially males. They go off, right? You’ve got to level
00:20:26 ►
them down. You’ve got to mature them. You have to smooth them out. You have to have them face fears.
00:20:32 ►
You have to have them face limits, for God’s sakes. And so the upper Paleolithic communities
00:20:37 ►
always had initiation for their males. And this grew into the mystery schools. And the mystery schools grew into a big thing.
00:20:46 ►
Eleusis was a major operation.
00:20:49 ►
Eleusis had a, they built a temple
00:20:50 ►
that could house a thousand people.
00:20:52 ►
It was sunk into the ground.
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It’s called the Telestereon.
00:20:55 ►
What happened there was you could apply to be initiated.
00:21:00 ►
You then took a boat, you know,
00:21:02 ►
or a conveyance of some kind to get to Athens.
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You had to speak a bit of the Greek language.
00:21:08 ►
That was the one thing that they required.
00:21:10 ►
But you could be a slave.
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You could be, you know, highbrow, highborn.
00:21:15 ►
Didn’t matter.
00:21:15 ►
You had a right in your lifetime to go through initiation and contact with this thing, this mystery.
00:21:21 ►
So you arrived in Athens, and for months, you went through the lesser
00:21:25 ►
mysteries. And the lesser mysteries were preparation, special diets, immersion in the sea.
00:21:33 ►
And you were celebrated by the people of Athens. They had a festival that celebrated these thousand
00:21:39 ►
people that were going to go to the ultimate thing to be feared and the ultimate thing to be done as a human being.
00:21:46 ►
And then around July and August,
00:21:49 ►
if you’d kind of got through the lesser mysteries part,
00:21:52 ►
you were then lined up and you walked up to the Eleusinian plain.
00:21:56 ►
You didn’t take the local bus service.
00:21:59 ►
You walked and you reached a point,
00:22:01 ►
you were wearing very simple clothes,
00:22:04 ►
so everybody looked the same.
00:22:05 ►
So the high-born Roman and the slave were pretty much identical at that point, level, level it down.
00:22:14 ►
And they reached a bridge so narrow that vehicle conveyance could not go across it.
00:22:19 ►
But on either side were the townsfolk of Eleusis, whose job it was to hurl epithets at these people and say,
00:22:28 ►
hey, you young punk with your chest out like this, you’re going to be a hooked old man like me in no
00:22:36 ►
time soon, so come down a bit from your perch. So this is the kinds of things they would hurl
00:22:43 ►
to level these people down, to completely
00:22:46 ►
level them. So before they entered Eleusis, they were not holding themselves separate from others
00:22:51 ►
because they couldn’t. I mean, eventually they were not going to be in unity with others.
00:22:56 ►
So then they would go to the Telstarion complex and they would do things that we don’t know about
00:23:02 ►
because this was a mystery under penalty of death, if you described this phase,
00:23:09 ►
or somebody, some nobles managed to get the stuff that they used for the ceremony,
00:23:14 ►
and they were holding parties, parties in Athens for their rich friends,
00:23:19 ►
and they got severely punished.
00:23:21 ►
That was in the 4th century B.C.
00:23:24 ►
So roll forward. They’re coming
00:23:26 ►
forward to day six, day seven, day eight, day nine. They reach day nine, and day nine is the day.
00:23:31 ►
They are prepared. They probably have been on a dieta of some kind, like we do for ceremony.
00:23:37 ►
They have undergone a transformation as much as they can as a human being. They’re to that point.
00:23:43 ►
They’ve been working with priestesses, with priests.
00:23:45 ►
The Hierophants have been working with them.
00:23:48 ►
And they enter the temple.
00:23:49 ►
They enter the Telestrion at night.
00:23:52 ►
And then what happens, we have indirect descriptions
00:23:56 ►
of what goes on in the Telestrion.
00:23:58 ►
This whole thing is based on the mythology of Demeter and Persephone.
00:24:03 ►
Demeter was the mother, basically Mother Earth,
00:24:07 ►
and Persephone was her beautiful daughter. And one day, Persephone is out picking a hundred-bulb
00:24:14 ►
narcissist plant, and she gets kidnapped and taken to Hades, which is hell, the underworld.
00:24:21 ►
And Demeter, this is the greatest, most powerful story of the Mediterranean tradition.
00:24:25 ►
And Demeter is in a state of frenzy for her daughter, trying to recover. And she beseeches
00:24:32 ►
the gods. And she becomes a hag. And she goes into Mufti. And she goes around trying to find
00:24:41 ►
what happened to Persephone. But then the gods relent and Persephone returns,
00:24:46 ►
but she’s carrying the seed of the underworld,
00:24:49 ►
the seed of the underworld in her belly.
00:24:52 ►
And what she does then is she must return every season to the underworld
00:24:57 ►
and come back, and then her seed is spread.
00:25:01 ►
And she is life, life itself, agriculture, the wheat.
00:25:05 ►
So Persephone becomes the cycle of life.
00:25:09 ►
So Eleusis, the temple at Eleusis,
00:25:13 ►
is the experience of the rise of Demeter from the underworld
00:25:17 ►
in this incredible, glorious tradition.
00:25:20 ►
So that’s the background.
00:25:21 ►
So everyone knew that story.
00:25:24 ►
And in fact, Demeter sat under
00:25:26 ►
a tree and commanded that they build the temple there so that everyone could experience this
00:25:31 ►
rebirth of the earth. And that’s how the legend is collected. And we’re experiencing the
00:25:37 ►
rebirth of a septic operation here, but no problem. So does this make sense? Are you following? Are you
00:25:46 ►
following this amazing story? It gets more amazing. It gets more amazing. So
00:25:53 ►
on the ninth night, the ninth evening, they, women come out and they’ve got smoke. They’ve got
00:26:02 ►
drums beating. They have instruments. The whole temple is built as a sonic complex.
00:26:07 ►
Like there’s alcoves that reflect sound.
00:26:09 ►
So the people are in this astonishing state of reverberation.
00:26:14 ►
Like these stages here.
00:26:16 ►
Like what the DJs can do to your body, right?
00:26:18 ►
What they do to your body.
00:26:20 ►
And then the lasers come out and the lights come out.
00:26:23 ►
These people had mastered that.
00:26:24 ►
They were doing that to the thousand initiants at Eleusis.
00:26:29 ►
They were in that space of smoke and everything coming up.
00:26:33 ►
And then the women came out and they had these pots on their head
00:26:36 ►
and they would dance in a circle.
00:26:38 ►
They would dance in a circle.
00:26:39 ►
And that was the beginning of the ceremony.
00:26:41 ►
And they had this special wallet that they opened up with something in it.
00:26:45 ►
We don’t know what it was.
00:26:46 ►
And then they would start handing out the cups.
00:26:49 ►
And in the cups was the kai kion, the drink, the beverage, as Terrence would call it.
00:26:56 ►
Like it’s Coca-Cola or something, beverage.
00:27:00 ►
As an archaeologist would call it.
00:27:02 ►
And they hand out these cups to everybody.
00:27:06 ►
And at one moment, everyone takes the kikion.
00:27:09 ►
What was in the kikion?
00:27:11 ►
We don’t know.
00:27:13 ►
But Albert Hoffman, Carl Ruck, and Gordon Wasson wrote a fantastic book about this.
00:27:18 ►
They did the research that the archaeologists were too fearful to tread in that space.
00:27:23 ►
And they did the research and wrote a beautiful book about 35 years ago,
00:27:28 ►
which is a great source.
00:27:29 ►
And they believe it could have been a combination of ergot smuts on the barley
00:27:35 ►
that generated an LSD analog, combined perhaps with datura.
00:27:41 ►
Potentially it was mushrooms.
00:27:43 ►
On the frieze, which is the stone face of Eleusis,
00:27:48 ►
there’s a guy holding, handing a mushroom to another guy, and there’s a guy with a platter
00:27:53 ►
with three mushrooms on it saying, have a mushroom, you know, it’s completely there,
00:28:00 ►
you know, why archaeology is sort of blind to this, you know, is a discussion you could have with Dennis at some point.
00:28:08 ►
But the, so this drink, this beverage was handed out and people drank it.
00:28:13 ►
And then they were instructed to sit on the bench seats around the base of the temple.
00:28:18 ►
Hence, why I have a piece from the seat.
00:28:22 ►
It’s the seat of knowledge in a sense.
00:28:25 ►
And then something happened.
00:28:27 ►
What they describe it to be,
00:28:29 ►
they describe it as an incredible light came up from somewhere into the space
00:28:36 ►
and everyone went into union with the infinite.
00:28:42 ►
Union with the infinite.
00:28:44 ►
Plato describes this as indescribable.
00:28:47 ►
I mean, it’s described as something that cannot be wordable,
00:28:51 ►
can’t be Englishable or even Irishable, you know.
00:28:55 ►
So this is what happened.
00:28:58 ►
And then they came out of that experience,
00:29:00 ►
and they were considered to be human beings.
00:29:03 ►
Human beings.
00:29:09 ►
Amazing. So these women and men who ran Eleusis were running a comb across the Paleolithic world, and they were stroking
00:29:15 ►
through it, and they were pulling people from the upper Paleolithic bloodlust culture, you know,
00:29:21 ►
kind of a cool beer-drinking culture, it’s still around, and they were pulling
00:29:26 ►
them into civilization. Because out of the Eleusinian experience, the initiation came,
00:29:32 ►
the theater, mathematics, engineering, you know, the concepts of abstract holistic thinking,
00:29:48 ►
abstract holistic thinking, beautiful art came out of Eleusis. It was the transforming mechanism.
00:29:55 ►
That light birthed the classical world. You know, I think it’s the clearest explanation.
00:30:01 ►
Because what happens when you go into an experience of contact with this? You’re delivered things that your monkey mind cannot come up with on its own, right?
00:30:11 ►
You’re delivered a vision from somewhere else. Well, can you imagine? This ceremony was done for 1,700 years. I think LIB is what, in its 10th year, right? 10 years? 1,700 years. Year in,
00:30:23 ►
year out, perfecting it, perfecting it, perfecting it.
00:30:26 ►
And what grew up around that period?
00:30:29 ►
The great civilizations.
00:30:30 ►
Rome grew.
00:30:32 ►
Trade spread.
00:30:34 ►
The invention of everything came.
00:30:36 ►
It was just amazing.
00:30:38 ►
So I think we are on the basis on the platform of an initiated,
00:30:45 ►
would we call it psychedelic experience.
00:30:49 ►
So then you might ask, what happened to Eleusis?
00:30:53 ►
Why are we in the world that we’re in today?
00:30:55 ►
And I’m not saying the Romans had it all right.
00:30:58 ►
Like in Monty Python, they ask, what have the Romans done for us?
00:31:03 ►
And Brian says, oh, let’s see,
00:31:06 ►
aqueducts and law enforcement and clean water. And they go, okay, shut up, you know, shut up.
00:31:13 ►
So what have the Romans done for us? What snuffed out the light at Eleusis? Can anyone take a guess?
00:31:28 ►
anyone take a guess? Religion? Okay. What did I hear? Anybody else? Christianity. Christianity.
00:31:36 ►
So Christianity was founded by a tradition of light and heart, but by the fourth century, it was becoming a corporate religion. They had these things called the Councils of Nicaea.
00:31:41 ►
You’ve heard of this stuff. Sponsored by Constantine as a money-saving measure
00:31:47 ►
to centralize all the collection of taxation
00:31:52 ►
and to try to hold the Eastern and Western empires together
00:31:55 ►
because they were under attack.
00:31:56 ►
They had had their 9-1-1.
00:31:58 ►
They had their 9-1-1 attack every year
00:32:00 ►
because cities were being sacked.
00:32:04 ►
So they created this committee that dumbed down
00:32:07 ►
all these surviving teachers and created the four gospels and created this monstrosity
00:32:12 ►
called the Bible, which had some good in it, but it was mostly just an unreadable blurb made by a
00:32:18 ►
bureaucratic committee. In fact, at one point, I think at the second or third council, the Greek bishops who had been arguing
00:32:26 ►
over the one term, you know, these are guys that are word people, and the Western bishops started
00:32:34 ►
screaming at the Greek bishops and said, you people will, for a thousand years, debate the
00:32:39 ►
meaning of a single word, a single word, and we’re leaving. And they had created something
00:32:47 ►
called the Holy Trinity. You know, anyone raised Catholic? I wasn’t raised Catholic. The Holy
00:32:52 ►
Trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, right? The Greek bishops in the fourth
00:32:57 ►
century said, that is such an abomination that we cannot figure out. It is a fucking committee-derived stupidity that we Greek minds,
00:33:08 ►
it doesn’t make any sense.
00:33:09 ►
And they split, and they created the Greek Orthodox Church.
00:33:13 ►
And then the surviving bishops in the West were in much worse shape, actually,
00:33:17 ►
in terms of being attacked, created the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church.
00:33:23 ►
So rolling forward,
00:33:26 ►
they finally finished all these bureaucratic meetings.
00:33:28 ►
They published the new rules and regulations,
00:33:32 ►
the new thing.
00:33:33 ►
It’s corporatized.
00:33:35 ►
Crosses are painted on shields of the army, right?
00:33:39 ►
The whole thing.
00:33:40 ►
And they’re in the process of killing all the festivals.
00:33:43 ►
They killed all the festivals. They killed all the festivals.
00:33:45 ►
They killed the pantheon of gods.
00:33:47 ►
They were converting them to saints under one like bureaucratic structure.
00:33:52 ►
And they’re in the process of killing the festivals.
00:33:54 ►
And the Pauline Christians left Constantinople in their robes,
00:33:59 ►
in their black robes, not like this.
00:34:02 ►
And they met Alaric on the road.
00:34:08 ►
Alaric was this Germanic king who was coming for the annual sacking of some city, which they did, and they were survivors of the upper
00:34:13 ►
Paleolithic, the tradition before Eleusis, and they were coming down just to do their annual,
00:34:19 ►
look for a city or town to sack and take all the things and whatever. That’s what they did,
00:34:23 ►
it’s their business, and they met the Pauline Christians. And the Christians said, hey, guys, we’re glad
00:34:30 ►
that we met you because we’re going somewhere and we need to do a job. Follow us. You know,
00:34:36 ►
we’ll pay you handsomely for this. And they followed them to Eleusis and Alaric and his muscle smashed the temple. About 396 AD, just wrecked it,
00:34:48 ►
absolutely wrecked it. You know, solid, a solid demo job, solid demolition job. And so that
00:34:55 ►
happened. What did they replace it with? The culture that we’re in now. The culture we’re in
00:35:01 ►
now, which is, what is it? Tax paying to central authorities, levels of authority, the bishops,
00:35:10 ►
armies, a state religion and state armies, control at all levels.
00:35:17 ►
And then especially in the spiritual path,
00:35:20 ►
you had to follow all the rules and regulations laid forth in this document and by church doctrine to go to heaven.
00:35:30 ►
When you died, when you died, you might go to heaven if you follow our rules.
00:35:36 ►
Follow all these rules, and there’s some force in the sky that’s doing an accounting,
00:35:42 ►
and it will decide whether you can go to heaven or not.
00:35:45 ►
But you’ve got to show up every week, and you’ve got to bow and do your thing, right? That was it.
00:35:53 ►
It’s represented today as the corporate job and the pension plan, right? You know, the pension
00:36:00 ►
plan, you’re old and you’ll have this wonderful time, but work for us all the way through. So the stamp of that is still on society. It runs everything. And so you do not have the
00:36:11 ►
right. What they’re saying is you do not have the right to be initiated to meet the energy of the
00:36:16 ►
cosmos, to meet your God. You don’t have that right. We control the gate to that. And you come in and you follow our rules and on death,
00:36:26 ►
you might be allowed it. So what an incredible, what a package, right? What a deal, such a deal
00:36:34 ►
that got replaced. So what happened? What happened to that civilization? And we’re talking about
00:36:40 ►
our civilization bubbling to the top because of lack of initiation,
00:36:45 ►
were the psychopathic males and some psychopathic females
00:36:49 ►
that managed to control, learn how to gain control,
00:36:55 ►
to gain control of the whole system.
00:36:58 ►
And they did.
00:37:00 ►
And so we had things like the Crusades,
00:37:02 ►
an insanity of a thing like the Crusades, where this is so stupid.
00:37:10 ►
The Crusades were so incredibly stupid.
00:37:12 ►
Somebody, Prester John, invented this, well, it was a myth created that there was a Christian community in Mesopotamia,
00:37:20 ►
and it was under attack by infidels.
00:37:28 ►
in Mesopotamia, and it was under attack by infidels. And then the, so all of these stupid leadership, mostly male, figured, oh, this is a way to get our rocks off and take our armies,
00:37:37 ►
and we’ll go and smash those infidels. And what did they do? They went to the Holy Land, and they
00:37:41 ►
massacred Christian communities, you know, one after the other.
00:37:47 ►
They never found Prester John, all this sort of stuff. All this stupidity was happening.
00:37:49 ►
And what it was was it was juvenility into adulthood.
00:37:54 ►
Because what do you have when you have a civilization with no initiation?
00:37:59 ►
You have the juvenile going further and further into adulthood.
00:38:03 ►
You know, people never grow up because that’s what
00:38:05 ►
the Paleolithic communities knew. We roll forward, you know, and Terrence said at one point,
00:38:14 ►
why are we led by the least among us? You know, why are we led by the least among us, right? I think
00:38:22 ►
it goes back to this because people didn’t go through an incredible
00:38:27 ►
experience where they faced their fears, they faced who they were, they dug deep, they barely
00:38:33 ►
survived, because these initiations there were not a walk in the park. It was described, you know,
00:38:38 ►
and they came out as softened, beautiful human beings. It saw all human beings as equal. Why? Because Augustus,
00:38:46 ►
who went to be initiated, was initiated alongside a slave. Now, that slave was still a slave,
00:38:53 ►
but it softened the whole picture. Now, it didn’t help Nero much, you know, but it created this
00:39:01 ►
whole beautiful patina as a civilization as one thing.
00:39:06 ►
And so we roll forward.
00:39:08 ►
We’re in this day.
00:39:09 ►
Now what’s happening today?
00:39:11 ►
What’s happening at LIB?
00:39:13 ►
People are craving initiation.
00:39:15 ►
They’re craving contact with a powerful entity,
00:39:19 ►
with a powerful force that’s bigger than the default world, you call it, right?
00:39:24 ►
The world that is being fed to us.
00:39:28 ►
Commercialism.
00:39:30 ►
You know, when you look at TV commercials, and I don’t watch much TV,
00:39:33 ►
look at TV commercials.
00:39:35 ►
It’s like they’ve programmed robots to do this stuff.
00:39:38 ►
They’re our age.
00:39:39 ►
I mean, they’re just cool young people.
00:39:41 ►
Some of them probably come to festivals, but they work for the machine,
00:39:44 ►
so they do commercials for T-Mobile and whatever, and they become very good programmable robots,
00:39:50 ►
and there’s a machine that’s running that system. But beneath that machine is this amazing power
00:39:57 ►
that is coming up underneath it, and it’s a secret power. It’s like a mystery school again.
00:40:01 ►
And it’s a secret power.
00:40:02 ►
It’s like a mystery school again.
00:40:10 ►
So, for example, you know, how many of you have sat in ceremony of some kind in circle, right?
00:40:11 ►
That’s a big number here.
00:40:14 ►
How many people have done a Vipassana retreat?
00:40:15 ►
I haven’t done one yet.
00:40:19 ►
So it’s like 80% of the people here have sought their own initiation.
00:40:24 ►
And LIB is a consensual seeking of such initiation.
00:40:25 ►
Of course, we’re having a good time too and we’re partying and we don’t have the skill that they had in ancient greece we don’t have the
00:40:31 ►
preparation that they had where they were they were prepared uh for months and then they they
00:40:38 ►
were integrated for months they knew how to do it because this is a once-in-a-lifetime shot that they had to get their initiation once in a lifetime.
00:40:47 ►
So people took it really seriously, and they went home transformed.
00:40:52 ►
And then it was a better world, and the women knew that,
00:40:56 ►
and we kept doing that until it was lost.
00:40:59 ►
So we’re scrabbling up the slope to bring this back.
00:41:03 ►
We need our initiation.
00:41:07 ►
Our kids need it. Yeah?
00:41:15 ►
We need it. God damn it. And we’re doing it. We’re doing it. Because why? You know, as Terrence or Dennis or everyone will say, once you’ve looked into that light, when you look into the light
00:41:21 ►
that’s glowing to you from the social network or the TV or whatnot, it’s a different quality of light.
00:41:27 ►
You looked into the light of pure power, of pure elevation,
00:41:31 ►
a light bigger than human beings, a light from the cosmos.
00:41:35 ►
We looked into that light.
00:41:36 ►
No other light is going to impress us.
00:41:39 ►
It’s going to control us.
00:41:41 ►
There’s no other light that will control us.
00:41:43 ►
Now, the funny thing about this Christian bashing thing I’m doing, we go to Pucallpa, right? In the Amazon, where they have
00:41:52 ►
access to this light through their spirit medicines, in the 19th century and 18th century,
00:41:59 ►
they gave it up to go towards Jesus, to go toward Jesus Christ. Why? Because those people that had
00:42:08 ►
shamanic light initiation, even though the bishops were nasty fellows, even though there was this
00:42:16 ►
whole bill of goods, when they connected with the light of Jesus, and it wasn’t even, I think,
00:42:20 ►
through the Bible. I think it was through some direct powerful thing.
00:42:32 ►
They felt the power that Jesus had that was also destroyed by the church.
00:42:39 ►
So the shamans and the Amerindians of that went into Christianity because they felt a dude that was carrying the light was really powerful,
00:42:44 ►
despite the fact that bishops were slaughtering their communities.
00:42:48 ►
So even in Christianity, there is a powerful light,
00:42:52 ►
but it’s been obfuscated and corporatized and packaged for 2,000 years.
00:42:57 ►
So I don’t want to come across as Christian bashing either,
00:43:01 ►
because there was a powerful light there, and it’s still there.
00:43:04 ►
It survived. In fact, during ceremony once, I looked up, and I saw Jesus coming into the maloca,
00:43:11 ►
and I saw him, and he was wearing colorful wings, like a whole dream coat thing, but with feathers,
00:43:18 ►
with jungle bird feathers, and I said, oh my God, you survived. You made it through all the bullshit and everything.
00:43:27 ►
And I said, of course, you know, I’m here.
00:43:30 ►
And I said, you know, and he started walking over toward me.
00:43:33 ►
So you’ve got to close your eyes, you know.
00:43:36 ►
And I said, close my eyes.
00:43:37 ►
And he says, you know, I’m not a religious character, but I’ll be your son.
00:43:41 ►
You know, why not?
00:43:42 ►
You know, cool.
00:43:44 ►
He patted me on the head.
00:43:48 ►
but I’ll be your son. Why not? Cool. He patted me on the head. So all that said,
00:43:56 ►
I’ve been seeking the light too, as all of you have. So seeking the light, you can find it in many places. You can find it in morning meditation if you’ll only let it in. If you let your mind go,
00:44:03 ►
you can find that light. That light can come in. It’s
00:44:05 ►
actually just below the surface. You don’t need to go to Eleusis. It’s always there. It’s just
00:44:11 ►
above the surface. And sometimes it sneaks in the side and hits you. Sometimes you’re like Eckhart
00:44:15 ►
Tolle and the verge of taking his own life and committing suicide. And Eckhart had his opening
00:44:23 ►
to the light when he asked the question, why am I doing this to
00:44:26 ►
myself? And then he was free. He was liberated because he realized there’s two of me. Why am I
00:44:34 ►
doing this to myself? Then there’s two of me. And then the thing that was basically driving him to
00:44:39 ►
distraction went away and he was in a total state of liberation. This is how Eckhart Tolle came to the light.
00:44:47 ►
So there’s many ways to come to this light.
00:44:50 ►
My personal path started with Terrence and before Terrence.
00:44:55 ►
Because as a kid, I had a trippy brain.
00:44:56 ►
I still do.
00:44:58 ►
When I would go to sleep at 11 years old and I had a stimulating day,
00:45:02 ►
there would be flashes of color and shit going on behind my closed eyes. And it happens, right? You have a stimulating day here, you’ll notice those
00:45:10 ►
patterns, right? I’ve worked out that’s probably endogenous DMT. It’s just been jacked up.
00:45:17 ►
Because I started working with that when I was about 10 or 11. And then whole worlds would open
00:45:22 ►
up. And I learned that if I turned my mind off,
00:45:26 ►
and I shut everything down and became the little bead, and like, I’m not there, I’m not even
00:45:30 ►
thinking, I have no language, nothing, then this field opened up, and this color patterns, and then
00:45:35 ►
worlds, boom. I was in worlds. So, you know, bored in school? Take a trip, because I could like, look,
00:45:44 ►
go into those worlds. and I started drawing the worlds
00:45:46 ►
when I was about 12 and I filled notebooks I didn’t have to take notes in class because I
00:45:51 ►
could just look at the drawings and like I remember everything that was said just in this
00:45:55 ►
little patch of drawing it was easier like notes were sucky you know notes were part of you know
00:46:01 ►
the post-Iliocenian thing where you had to, I could draw a vision.
00:46:05 ►
So I learned how to draw visions.
00:46:07 ►
I learned how to draw visions out.
00:46:09 ►
And that’s how I do my work.
00:46:11 ►
I mean, I’m working on spacecraft designs for NASA.
00:46:14 ►
Now, since NASA is not funding me, I’m going to be doing it for Elon Musk.
00:46:19 ►
I did two TEDx talks three weeks ago in Santa Cruz, and they’re online now.
00:46:23 ►
And one of them is a ballsy way to
00:46:25 ►
open the entire solar system. And this is all from this light. It’s a new type of spacecraft
00:46:30 ►
that can capture asteroids and comets and do all kinds of fantastical sailing ship.
00:46:36 ►
And then I work on the origin of life because I think the light started when the first cells
00:46:41 ►
organized and they wrote the code. there was a light on that moment.
00:46:46 ►
So those are the two places I’ve been going with this endosystem.
00:46:51 ►
And recently, I’ve learned how to combine the endogenous light with the lights of the medicine.
00:46:57 ►
Take less medicine.
00:46:59 ►
That is the advice.
00:47:00 ►
And you can have agency and work the whole field.
00:47:03 ►
Kundalini energy, rainforest energy, musical energy.
00:47:06 ►
You can wind the vine and create a very powerful experience.
00:47:11 ►
And in a sense, it may have been how they did it at Eleusis,
00:47:14 ►
because they had the music, they had the fasting, they had the purification.
00:47:17 ►
They were winding the vine as well.
00:47:20 ►
And so that’s my practice.
00:47:23 ►
But last October, I can tell you one more story of my personal encounter with the light,
00:47:28 ►
which was I basically got fed up with the madre.
00:47:32 ►
You know how you get fed up with your mother, your mother-in-law?
00:47:37 ►
Us males get fed up with females telling us what to do, right?
00:47:41 ►
It just happens.
00:47:42 ►
And we kind of get female on them and say, just, I don’t want to
00:47:46 ►
deal with you. Finally, we learn how to deal with our females by not dealing with them.
00:47:51 ►
Because they’re so much smarter, you know, that’s the problem always. So I had said to Madre, I said,
00:47:57 ►
I’ve had 25 encounters. We’ve had encounters together 25 times. We have danced. We have
00:48:04 ►
merged. We have gone places.
00:48:06 ►
We went to the origin of life, and we survived it, and we were born. You took me through my
00:48:11 ►
conception and birth, and I became a sperm, my sperm, and all this shit has happened 25 times,
00:48:18 ►
but you’re now an obstruction to my progress, to my evolution, because you’re always there in the
00:48:24 ►
field. Whether you’re super strong and paying no attention, you have me my evolution, because you’re always there in the field,
00:48:28 ►
whether you’re super strong and paying no attention, you have me pinned down,
00:48:34 ►
or we’re doing this whole thing. And so I’ve said, please, let’s set up a permanent link,
00:48:41 ►
a data link, a modem connection for all types like me, and then the call it quits. I need to go on.
00:48:46 ►
I don’t know where I’m going. And so the next night at ceremony, she wasn’t there.
00:48:52 ►
And I sat, and as the field opened, it was like being in the telestrion at Eleusis. I’d be, oh, my God.
00:48:55 ►
It’s the whole fucking energy.
00:48:57 ►
I’m facing it alone.
00:48:59 ►
Oh, my, what do I do?
00:49:01 ►
It’s like, oh, my God.
00:49:03 ►
And then I felt a bump on my leg, bump. And I stood up.
00:49:09 ►
Oh, oh, and I started moving. She was instructing me from behind, you, you now, now you move, move,
00:49:15 ►
move, move. Because she was like, the little chickadee was just being pushed out of the nest
00:49:20 ►
at this point. What do I do? What do I do in this energy? Move. And then I sat down,
00:49:26 ►
and then there was this arching presence over me. I didn’t turn to it, and it was Madre saying,
00:49:33 ►
I’m teaching you something. Okay. Like Dennis’s cool baseball cap. She said, okay, watch this.
00:49:40 ►
I’m lifting it. I’m lifting it. I’m lifting it it was the cap of self all me
00:49:46 ►
my filters, my mind were being
00:49:48 ►
taken off and I watched it
00:49:50 ►
and I crumpled my body, oh my god
00:49:52 ►
it’s being taken away
00:49:53 ►
and it landed on the floor of the maloca
00:49:56 ►
oh
00:49:57 ►
and I said, I’m in two places
00:50:00 ►
and I
00:50:02 ►
did a blocking action, don’t come back
00:50:04 ►
don’t come back, don’t come back. Don’t come back. And
00:50:05 ►
then I went up like this and my heart came up like this. And oh my God, this is why you interface
00:50:12 ►
with this thing. The cathedral flowing energy, the big Alex Gray cathedral, it goes into the heart
00:50:19 ►
and the mind is like, I checked it out. I was like, it was so chill and happy to be disconnected from me.
00:50:27 ►
It was taking a freaking holiday.
00:50:29 ►
But you can’t think about it.
00:50:32 ►
You can’t use a word about it because it comes right back.
00:50:32 ►
Boom.
00:50:33 ►
It’s like shit.
00:50:34 ►
It came back.
00:50:35 ►
So the Madre trained me again.
00:50:36 ►
Take off the hat.
00:50:37 ►
Take off the hat.
00:50:38 ►
Follow it down.
00:50:38 ►
Follow it down.
00:50:40 ►
Get rid of that thing.
00:50:42 ►
That thing is taking your life energy.
00:50:44 ►
It’s not needed here. And so I learned how to do that.
00:50:47 ►
I took this off when I was sitting on the potty out in the rainforest, away from the shaman’s
00:50:52 ►
protection. I got approached by a demon to feed on me. It’s like, holy shit. Opening, is there some
00:50:59 ►
risks to this? I had to block the demon because the demon simulated the madre and took a step and
00:51:06 ►
made a sound coming toward me. So there’s risks with this practice, but it’s a practice I was
00:51:12 ►
taught. And then on the fourth night, I had had the intention to see the cosmogenesis. You know,
00:51:23 ►
I’m a nerd. I went through the biogenesis.
00:51:26 ►
I want to see the origin of the cosmos.
00:51:28 ►
You know, please.
00:51:30 ►
I want to look back to the thing that made us.
00:51:33 ►
This is one of my life’s missions.
00:51:36 ►
And I saw it.
00:51:38 ►
I was lying down.
00:51:40 ►
My friend was playing the charango.
00:51:41 ►
My heart opened, and I saw it over the rainforest canopy,
00:51:44 ►
this glowing fuzzball. Oh, my God. Because mind was gone. I could see it. I could feel it.
00:51:51 ►
And it was coming in. But the next day, the next day was more, even more fantastic,
00:51:58 ►
because it was our day session. It was our daytime session. In the daytime session,
00:52:02 ►
you can see the energy in the maloca.
00:52:05 ►
You can shape it.
00:52:06 ►
Crystal informs it.
00:52:07 ►
I go and dance through it, and I spray it on people.
00:52:10 ►
It’s a great thing to do.
00:52:11 ►
Try it sometime.
00:52:13 ►
And our group is a bunch of dialed-in regulars.
00:52:17 ►
We all know each other’s moves.
00:52:19 ►
We’ve been going for years.
00:52:21 ►
There’s no surprises.
00:52:21 ►
And we do dance, and we do what we call the cabaret, which makes me
00:52:27 ►
difficult to manage in other circle. But so what happened was I had asked, I had asked for to see
00:52:37 ►
this light. This is my own asking for the light, you know, just as people asked for that light back in the times of the Greeks.
00:52:46 ►
And I suddenly saw it. And I saw not only it, but the mathematics of it as geometry. I’d asked to
00:52:55 ►
the question, what made the cosmos? It was asking the question of the Big Bang. And then this thing,
00:53:02 ►
this glowing ball appeared in front of me. And it had these other balls rotating around it.
00:53:08 ►
And the other balls were avoiding each other.
00:53:10 ►
They were doing this dance.
00:53:12 ►
And out of those dances were patterns that were rippling out.
00:53:15 ►
And I saw this table appear, and it was the table to generate the subatomic particles.
00:53:21 ►
And I went, oh, my God.
00:53:22 ►
And my friend Scott Olson, who’s done the math around the Fibonacci and the Lucas numbers, showed me equations. He had showed me equations that say,
00:53:31 ►
all you need is phi, and all you need is love. All you need is phi and ones, and you can generate
00:53:37 ►
everything definite from the indefinite. And these equations were running in my head,
00:53:42 ►
and I saw them manifest in this orb.
00:53:46 ►
It was making the thing.
00:53:49 ►
So then what I did,
00:53:52 ►
this is the orb.
00:53:54 ►
I’ll put a bit of a light in it.
00:53:58 ►
So I said to the orb, as it was turning,
00:54:02 ►
I said to it, you know, what is it?
00:54:02 ►
Show me more.
00:54:05 ►
And it showed me a million unities going around,
00:54:12 ►
a million unities, skating patterns, folds were coming off this thing. And I was just sitting there looking at this, and it was generating star clusters. It was generating atoms. Each fold was
00:54:19 ►
making a bit of the cosmos, but it wasn’t the singularity. It wasn’t the Big Bang. It was the thing that was
00:54:27 ►
always running, always running. And I went, oh, you know, and my little head is going around,
00:54:34 ►
and then suddenly I got a bump on the leg, a bump on the leg, and it said, okay, you now get up,
00:54:46 ►
You now get up, stop thinking, and start moving.
00:54:48 ►
Start moving.
00:54:52 ►
Because you cannot understand, and Grok, this is your monkey mind.
00:54:53 ►
I’m sorry.
00:54:55 ►
This is as far as I can take you.
00:54:58 ►
This is a cartoon for the reality.
00:55:01 ►
What your monkey brain is trying to understand as a scientist,
00:55:03 ►
this is as far as you can go, kid.
00:55:07 ►
Get up, stop thinking, and start moving.
00:55:12 ►
So I did, and I danced, and I moved and moved and moved,
00:55:15 ►
and my body was taken over by the energy and the ecstasy, and I just came, I unfolded in the cosmos.
00:55:19 ►
It was unwordable.
00:55:21 ►
I’m giving you words about it.
00:55:23 ►
And the message was, this can only be experienced.
00:55:26 ►
You must become it. You must become it. So that’s what happened. And what I want to close with
00:55:36 ►
is the following. And let me do something here. So we’re bringing the music up. And I want to invite you, just as we close, to…
00:55:50 ►
So what I want to invite you to do is to stop thinking, get up, and start moving.
00:56:04 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:56:08 ►
thought at a time.
00:56:11 ►
I have to apologize to Bruce for not playing the complete musical introduction and the
00:56:17 ►
closing piece that he used to bookend this talk, particularly since it was created by
00:56:22 ►
his friend, the Peruvian musician, William Lorena Mirari. Thank you. included Dennis McKenna, I should add, well, that’s when they all began to join in the dance.
00:56:50 ►
Now, before today, have you ever wondered what scientists see when they take psychedelics?
00:56:57 ►
One of the first people who envisioned the DNA molecule as a double helix, Francis Crick,
00:57:01 ►
admitted that he first did so while under the influence of LSD.
00:57:07 ►
Another scientist, Kerry Mullis, won a Nobel Prize for creating the PCR process, which is the foundation for genome sequencing, and he too came up with the idea
00:57:13 ►
while on an acid trip. But seldom do we get to listen to a scientist, particularly one of Bruce
00:57:19 ►
Dahmer’s stature, give a very detailed account of how a psychedelic experience can unfold for them.
00:57:27 ►
And as you have heard in previous talks by him that I’ve podcast, Bruce has the rare
00:57:32 ►
ability to sometimes experience the psychedelic state on the natch, as Terrence McKenna would
00:57:38 ►
say.
00:57:39 ►
Now, many of us have had the experience of achieving something or creating something
00:57:44 ►
that others find quite wonderful,
00:57:46 ►
but that our closest friends and family barely acknowledge.
00:57:49 ►
For example, with the exception of my wife, nobody else in my family has ever taken the time to listen to any of my podcasts or to read my books.
00:57:59 ►
Now, at first this really bothered me until I realized that, well, this is actually the normal situation.
00:58:04 ►
really bothered me until I realized that, well, this is actually the normal situation.
00:58:10 ►
Because among our family members, we aren’t judged by what we have actually done or become.
00:58:15 ►
We’re still being held to account in their minds for, oh, say, being a bothersome child or an overly busy parent or something like that.
00:58:19 ►
It’s difficult for family and close friends to be able to separate their earlier knowledge
00:58:24 ►
of a person
00:58:25 ►
from the accomplished person that strangers see. So keeping that in mind and considering the fact
00:58:32 ►
that Bruce Dahmer is an integral part of our salon family, I think that maybe I should say
00:58:37 ►
just a few more words about some of the things that Bruce is involved in. Because in my opinion,
00:58:43 ►
200 years from now, when you and I are going to be
00:58:45 ►
long forgotten, people will still be talking about the work of Bruce Dahmer. First of all,
00:58:51 ►
as you’ve heard, among other things, Bruce is actually a real rocket scientist. He designs
00:58:57 ►
space vehicles and projects to further our understanding of how this universe is, well,
00:59:03 ►
actually put together. But this is only one part of his professional life.
00:59:08 ►
The part of his professional work that I believe will have the most lasting impact
00:59:12 ►
on human understanding of our place in the cosmos
00:59:15 ►
is his work in discovering the true origin of organic life as we know it.
00:59:21 ►
Now this is no small matter because at this very moment,
00:59:34 ►
Now, this is no small matter, because at this very moment, human beings are being tortured and killed over disagreements about how we got here, which they, of course, answer through of the world are free to continue polluting the minds of our children, and some of them grow up to become intolerant religious fanatics, each
00:59:50 ►
with their own favorite story about what they call creation.
00:59:55 ►
Interestingly, to me at least, is the fact that even as Bruce and his colleagues advance
01:00:00 ►
ever more closely to an understanding of the physics and chemistry that took place when life first began,
01:00:06 ►
they are also coming face to face with the fact that
01:00:09 ►
the chances of life springing into existence,
01:00:12 ►
even on one of the hundreds of millions of Earth-like planets
01:00:15 ►
that we suspect are out there,
01:00:17 ►
even on a billion Earth-like planets,
01:00:19 ►
the spontaneous appearance of organic life
01:00:22 ►
comes with a very low probability of occurring.
01:00:25 ►
In other words, even scientists who hold a deep-seated belief that there may be life
01:00:31 ►
elsewhere in this universe, even they will tell you that we are rare beings, very, very
01:00:37 ►
rare beings, which, of course, feeds directly into the priests who claim to be in direct
01:00:43 ►
contact with the one and only supreme being,
01:00:47 ►
the guy that’s in charge of this lash-up.
01:00:50 ►
And just to bring this right on down to American politics today,
01:00:54 ►
a few weeks ago we heard a straight-faced questioner ask the leading Republican candidates
01:00:59 ►
for President of the United States of America whether God had spoken directly to them
01:01:05 ►
regarding their involvement in politics.
01:01:08 ►
Now stop for just a moment and think about this.
01:01:11 ►
Most people in the States actually believe
01:01:13 ►
that their president should have a direct line
01:01:16 ►
to some invisible, magical, and powerful being
01:01:19 ►
who guides them along their way.
01:01:21 ►
How is this any different from the moronic people
01:01:24 ►
in the Middle East who
01:01:25 ►
are cutting the heads off of humans who don’t buy into their particular twisted ideas of a
01:01:30 ►
supreme being? Now maybe today’s American politicians aren’t cutting off heads anymore,
01:01:35 ►
but their predecessors a few centuries back conducted a genocide on the native inhabitants
01:01:41 ►
of this land that was orders of magnitude greater than whatever the ISIS fanatics are now dishing out.
01:01:47 ►
Now, pause for a moment and reconsider what I just said.
01:01:51 ►
We humans are incredibly unique.
01:01:54 ►
As far as we know, for a fact right now,
01:01:57 ►
we are alone in this universe.
01:02:00 ►
And while I do personally hold the thought
01:02:02 ►
that there must be other self-reflecting life
01:02:04 ►
somewhere in this cosmos,
01:02:06 ►
what we know as fact at this moment in time is that thus far we have only found conditions
01:02:11 ►
that in the past may have been conducive for organic life somewhere.
01:02:15 ►
But thus far we have never found any other form of life other than what is here on earth.
01:02:21 ►
We are rare, very rare, and possibly unique.
01:02:27 ►
what is here on earth. We are rare, very rare, and possibly unique. Yet, we create gods and religions that allow us to act in groups as if we had no minds at all. Now, the only religion that
01:02:33 ►
I’ve had any significant personal interaction with is Christianity. And if you’ve been with
01:02:39 ►
me here in the salon for a while, you already know that I was raised as a Catholic, and I went to a Catholic grammar school and a Catholic university. During that time, I was subjected to a significant amount
01:02:51 ►
of what they called religious instruction. But what it is, actually, is a cruel form of
01:02:57 ►
brainwashing and child abuse. It took me over 20 years of reading and studying to break the
01:03:03 ►
shackles that were forged in my mind about
01:03:05 ►
the Bible and Christianity. Eventually I’ve come to the conclusion that the Jesus story is simply
01:03:11 ►
the rework of a much earlier myth, and it’s been used for two millennia simply to control the
01:03:17 ►
masses, you know, us common people. For one thing, I have yet to find any significant evidence that this Jesus character was actually, at any time, a real, live human being.
01:03:29 ►
Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that, well, Jesus was simply a mythological creation, a fictional character no more real than Sleeping Beauty.
01:03:38 ►
Now, I don’t want you to think that just because I graduated from the University of Notre Dame that I still buy into the Christian myth.
01:03:42 ►
just because I graduated from the University of Notre Dame,
01:03:44 ►
that I still buy into the Christian myth.
01:03:49 ►
The most bare-bones description of the Christian story that I have ever found,
01:03:50 ►
by the way,
01:03:52 ►
you ready for this?
01:03:54 ►
It comes from the movie Reality Bites,
01:03:56 ►
where one of the characters said,
01:04:02 ►
Christianity is a belief that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever.
01:04:06 ►
If you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul
01:04:11 ►
that is present in humanity because a rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a
01:04:18 ►
magical tree. The speaker then concludes by saying, makes perfect sense. And, in fact, if this story does happen to make perfect sense to you,
01:04:29 ►
then you most certainly have the right to call yourself a Christian,
01:04:32 ►
just as I did for the first 42 years of my life.
01:04:35 ►
However, as you have guessed, it no longer makes any sense to me.
01:04:40 ►
So, what’s the point of me spending so much time on this right now,
01:04:44 ►
and most likely sending quite a few of our fellow salonners away forever?
01:04:49 ►
Well, as our old-timers know, one of my main reasons for doing these podcasts is to be able to pass along a few of my thoughts to my grandchildren once they are in the middle of their lives.
01:05:11 ►
Obviously, I won’t be around then, and so I’m hoping that one day, at least one or more of my grandchildren will hear this podcast and begin to think for themselves and question authority just as I have done.
01:05:16 ►
And by questioning authority, I mean all authority, not just political, but religious as well.
01:05:22 ►
And even if they don’t do that, at least they’ll have a clear idea of how I see things. So let me circle back to what prompted Bruce’s
01:05:25 ►
talk in the first place, which was a talk that I gave in support of the idea that we need to
01:05:31 ►
create new rituals, particularly new rituals to help our children as they begin to encounter
01:05:36 ►
ideas about life, death, and eternity. The problem before us is simple. Just how do we talk to
01:05:43 ►
children about death if we don’t fall back on the old religious ideas about heaven and hell?
01:05:49 ►
It really isn’t an easy thing to do, and what’s more, I’ve observed that children who are not a part of a particular religious tradition very often gravitate to the religion of their friends.
01:06:02 ►
After all, what preteen wants to be an outsider,
01:06:05 ►
the only one in the crowd who hasn’t been baptized?
01:06:08 ►
Now, I have no issue with making religious instruction
01:06:11 ►
available to well-balanced and mature people
01:06:14 ►
who have already had a chance to experience life on their own for a while.
01:06:18 ►
But I take great issue with teaching children these horrible stories
01:06:21 ►
out of the collection of Bronze Age folktales that is called the Old Testament. No doubt you’ve read parts of it. Thank you. This is a book that should have an adults-only label on it. In my opinion, children should most definitely not be subjected to these stories,
01:06:48 ►
because, well, I fear that, like me, these stories are going to cause them to have nightmares and worse.
01:06:54 ►
Yet, what kind of ritual dealing with life, death, and eternity
01:06:58 ►
do we have to replace the baptism that lets our children appear to be superior in some mystical way.
01:07:05 ►
I’ve been baptized, I’ve been confirmed, and I’ve even had what the Catholic Church calls
01:07:10 ►
the last rites.
01:07:12 ►
And that’s a story for another day.
01:07:14 ►
But I’m here to tell you that not one of those rituals gave me any kind of a spiritual feeling
01:07:20 ►
at all.
01:07:21 ►
If you want a true spiritual experience, well, a good place to begin is by ingesting
01:07:25 ►
five grams of psychedelic mushrooms. So, where are we now? Well, it may just be you and me
01:07:33 ►
left here in the salon, because I know that there are many, many fellow salonners who
01:07:37 ►
automatically call themselves Christian, and I’ve no doubt pissed them off greatly. And
01:07:42 ►
I’m sorry if what I said has distressed them,
01:07:45 ►
but maybe we should think of it as tough love.
01:07:48 ►
However, the one thing that I do know for sure is that all of us,
01:07:52 ►
and our children in particular,
01:07:54 ►
have a deep-seated human need for rituals, for rites of passage.
01:07:59 ►
I have nothing to put forward in the way of suggestions here myself,
01:08:02 ►
but I’ve been to quite a few festivals during
01:08:06 ►
which various rituals were introduced.
01:08:08 ►
Some never to be
01:08:10 ►
repeated, and others that seem to grow
01:08:12 ►
each year with new modifications.
01:08:14 ►
So, maybe the best thing
01:08:16 ►
that we can do for our children right now,
01:08:18 ►
as they grow into adults,
01:08:20 ►
is to bring them with us to
01:08:21 ►
whatever festival we can find nearby.
01:08:24 ►
Don’t forget that Eleusis began as a festival,
01:08:27 ►
and according to Joseph Campbell,
01:08:29 ►
it was the crowning glory of the first 200,000 years of human history.
01:08:35 ►
My guess is that the new Eleusis is already here.
01:08:39 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:08:44 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.