Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Boundary-dissolving internal hierophany does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these [psychedelic] plants and compounds.”
“We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just fact the answer, how you come to terms with the options that are actually available.”
“It is not only possible, but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience. To my mind this is just an instance of an appalling infantilism that is culturally sanctioned.”
“[Psychedelics are] part of the birthright. This is what religion WAS for the first million years before it fell into the hands of men who insist on wearing dresses. It was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship with nature. And it’s still there. The portals are still there.”
“I’m not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I’m an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage. And to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality, why it’s ludicrous.”
“The government has never been a major factor in the decisions I made about my program of ingestion.”
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478 - Breaking The Spell On You
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480 - Coming Down from a Psychedelic Power Trip
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we’re going to continue with a series of Terrence McKenna talks that I left off with a while back.
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Quite a while back, actually.
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It was in September of 2013 that I played the first three parts of this month-long scholar-in-residence gig that Terrence McKenna did at Esalen.
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And you can go find those talks in podcasts 367, 368, and 369, which are over 100 podcasts ago.
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And why, you may ask, have I waited so long to continue with this series?
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Well, to be honest, I don’t remember.
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But in any event, we’re going to pick up on that series today with an afternoon talk that Terrence gave outside, as you’ll be able to tell.
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And after we listen to what Terrence has to say here,
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I’ll be back with a, well, somewhat embarrassing story about myself.
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But for all of you Terrence McKenna fans who tell me that they have now heard it all,
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well, before you skip over this talk, you may want to listen to what he calls his performance
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that begins in just about a minute from now.
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And I think that you’ll be happy that you did.
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Now, here’s Terrence.
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Now, here’s Terrence.
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Well, we have such a beautiful day today that I thought we would leave the computer inside.
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There’s only so much of that kind of thing that you can put up with
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and sort of examine our tools, if not our premise, today, rather than go forward with looking at the time wave in the way we have been.
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So since this is a fairly small group and I’m feeling fairly confident,
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I’d like to talk about language today,
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and I will attempt to open this with a performance,
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which is something I rarely, like never, do.
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“‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
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Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
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All mimsy were the borogoves,
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And the mawny wraths outgrabe.
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Beware the jabberwock, my son, The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.
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Beware the jub-jub bird,
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And shun the fermious Bandersnatch
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He took his Vorpal Sword in hand
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Long time the Maxim foe he sought
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So rested he by the Tum-Tum Tree
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And stood a while in thought
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And as in oofish thought he stood,
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The jabberwock with eyes of flame came woofing through the tulgy wood
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And burbled as it came.
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One, two, one, two, and through and through,
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His vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
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He left it dead, and with its head he went galumphing back.
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And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
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Come to my arms, my beamish boy.
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Oh, frabjous day Caloo, calay
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He chortled in his joy
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T’was brillig
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And the slithy toes
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Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
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All mimsy were the borogos
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And the mawny wraths out grave applause
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applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause I hope, I assume most of you recognize that as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky,
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which was an example of verbal intentionality and syntax overcoming absence of ascribed meaning.
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This is what’s happening here.
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meaning. This is what’s happening here, that the intentionality of meaning is so great that it overcomes the origin of language.
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And we’ve also been using language in a fairly free
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and in some cases unusual and in some cases outrageous manner.
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So that’s what I meant when I said it made sense to examine the tools
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we are particularly neurologically outfitted for the production of small mouth noises we can do this
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I’ve proved it myself
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for hours at a time
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without exhaustion
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and what is going on there
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is that rather than
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the rippling of plumage
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or the rubbing of hard body parts against each other, since we don’t have any
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hard body parts to rub against each other most of the time, communication in our species
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has taken the form of neuromodulation of small mouth noises. Now these small mouth noises
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are transduced into acoustical waves,
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a physical phenomenon
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which moves from point to point
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in ordinary Newtonian space.
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The acoustical pressure wave strikes the ear.
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The ear conveys the particular unique signature of that arriving acoustical wave into, for lack of a better term, we have to call the mind.
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And the mind takes this acoustical signal and compares it with an imprinted dictionary built up out of experience.
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It does this very, very quickly. The speed with which the dictionary is consulted and each
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arriving word is identified, its syntactical class understood, and its intentionality in the domain of meaning recognized is very, very rapid.
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It represents the most rapid sort of intellectual activity that we undertake as human beings.
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Thought is a similar phenomenon, but it is an interior dialogue.
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And God help us, let’s hope we understand our
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thoughts better than what people say to us, because in the case of our thoughts, we are both
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the one communicating and the one communicated to. Language is this double-edged adaptation of the human animal.
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It is obviously a multifaceted, multipurpose, adaptive advantage in all environmental situations
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because if you can image and linguistically process evolving situations,
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you have a leg up over an organism which is hardwired for reaction along the line of instincts.
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Yet, in the domain of cognition, it’s almost as though language has exceeded its usefulness,
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because someone said language was invented
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to lie. Well, perhaps that is too cynical, but certainly language obfuscates reality.
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It cannot help but do this. It does it in the following manner. A child born into what the psychologist William James
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called a blooming, buzzing confusion, a child born into the blooming, buzzing confusion
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attempts to isolate complexes of activity, complexes of color, sound, and tactility. And the nurturing parent provides names. This is a kitty. This is a bird. This is a blanket. What is happening here is that the blooming, buzzing confusion
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is slowly being tiled over by an interlocking and seamless set of names and syntactical structures
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which literally then stand for reality.
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They stand for reality. They stand for reality.
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So unless you’re the kind of
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very fortunate person
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who speaks many, many languages fluently
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and has a sense of this relativity
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of the intent to communicate,
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you are barred from realizing
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the context dependency of your own language.
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And we all are like this.
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This impressed me very much in the Amazon
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because the first time I went to the Amazon,
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I knew nothing about botany.
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And it appeared to me largely to be green.
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And when I returned some years later, having made a fairly thorough study of the taxonomic
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families of tropical plants, it was a vast, intricate, fascinating domain because I had terms for all these exotic floral forms, leaf forms, seed expressions, morphology, you see.
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Nature’s expression in the world of form is called its morphology.
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Morphology is the science of form.
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Well, form, we tend to think of it as a platonic concern.
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After all, aren’t the forms somewhere in a platonic hyperspace?
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Aren’t they somehow above and beyond the machinations of language
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and perception? Well, they are if you’re a Platonist. But when we look at natural form,
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the enterprise of science has been to attempt to describe natural form. This is essentially a program to be carried out within the domain
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of language. And this has been entirely overlooked by the philosophy of science so far as I can
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tell. I mean, the world is not made of anti-mumasons and quarks and photons and electromagnetic fields.
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Reality is made of words.
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Reality is made of symbolic interlocking linguisto-mathematical constructs.
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Everything beyond that is pure conjecture.
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I mean, this is what you learn in philosophy one, the relativity
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of knowing, the impossibility of actually nailing down the ontos of what is presented in the theater
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of perception through an exercise of epistemic knowing. It cannot be done. Brain cannot fully elucidate brain.
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There’s a tautology there.
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So language is something that springs
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from the biological matrix
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and the neurological matrix within us and its major um the major theme of its siren song to us is that it allows us to
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know the world and to communicate it well the truth is it does allow us to uh know the world to some degree, and it does allow us to communicate about it.
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But a price is paid at every step of the way.
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First of all, because we are
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concrescent entities of feeling.
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This is Alfred North Whitehead.
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We are concrescent entities of feeling,
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yet our language prepares us to describe a world of three-dimensional spatial relationships between solid objects.
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So it is not true to the perceiver, you see.
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There is a kind of break of faith with the world.
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Language betrays.
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Language betrays in order to mean.
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You know, Archibald MacLeish said,
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A poem should not mean but be.
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And this is a reasonable statement of a poetic, but it is not a basis for a theory of communication.
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A theory of communication depends on correct mirroring of the meme that is being transmitted,
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no matter how far down the line it has come? suggesting that the catalysis of neurological development that has gone on over the last million years in the human species
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was catalyzed by what was at first a random exposure to these things,
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then a deepening exposure brought on by the consequent synergy of increased visual acuity.
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In other words, some of these biogenic amines were conferring increased visual acuity,
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and this was shifting the reproductive mathematics in the direction of those individuals
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that were allowing this psychoactive substance,
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I mean, let’s be frank about it, into the diet. Then later we saw that sexual arousal was also a concomitant
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to admitting this item into the diet,
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and at higher doses and deeper exposures,
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a deepening sense of what we can call without defining the other, the other.
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I read recently an interesting paper called The Felt Presence of the Other in Unusual Environments.
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And it was an article about the kind of hysteria which overtakes people lost in
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the wilderness, the sense that they are being stalked or followed or observed. And in its
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mildest form, I’m sure we all have experienced this, it’s the sense of being observed when you know you’re alone in the wilderness. We seem to be,
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you know, we have very strong fight or flight hard wiring in the organism. And we also,
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when we admit, when we admitted these biogenically active amines into the diet,
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these biogenically active amines into the diet, we set ourselves up for a kind of undefined frontier
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between ourselves and the other.
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Language took its place in that fissure
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and began to create the earliest images of the other.
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But antecedent to the image is the feeling.
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And that was the point that I wanted to make,
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that in all cases, antecedent to the image is the feeling,
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the felt presence of immediate reality,
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which is the unique province of the individual.
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It is not, we choose to attempt to communicate it,
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but it is always and forever, by the nature of the situation, ours and ours alone.
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Ours and ours alone.
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Well, the idea then that language is a double-edged adaptation that has both served us and betrayed us on different levels, needs now to be looked at in the light of the fact that culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language. By, for instance, propagandists, both governmental and commercial.
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Reality is more and more in the image. And when we talked about virtual realities
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and the tendency of technology to create the dream utopias of the unconscious prehistory
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and shamanism, you see that what is happening is we are, as a global culture,
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What is happening is we are, as a global culture,
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abandoning ourselves in a way to the image because nothing else can be done.
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There aren’t enough resources, there aren’t enough metals in the planet
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to give everyone the kind of standard of living
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that is enjoyed by the technocratic elites in the West.
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So instead, there has to be this trade-off in image.
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Now, this is not something new.
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We see it reflected in American life over the whole post-war era.
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Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in order to make good on the grand promise that was to accrue to the American middle class consequent upon the defeat of fascism, this utopia that was to come to be, for it to happen, it was done tackily.
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That was the price that was paid you know
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Eric Jansch said
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the question regarding space colonies
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is not is it possible
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but how will we keep it in good taste
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and this was a question that was not answered
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by American culture in the 50s
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it was essentially a suburban
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modular housing, modular products, modular values,
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modular lifestyle paradise that was sold as the consequences of the completion of the American dream. Part of what we have been living through this period
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is a hallucination of improper language.
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I mean, now, because of the changes going on in the Soviet Union, the fiction of our, this implacable enemy bent on putting a tank on every street
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corner in the world is now exposed as a cultural illusion, a fiction. And I’m not entirely
00:22:00 ►
persuaded that it is, was simply all a horrible misunderstanding. It seems to me these
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illusions played very strongly into the hands of different factions on both sides. Political
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realism is also a coming to grips with language. You know, the French sociologist Jacques Ellul
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said, there are no political solutions. There are only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.
00:22:39 ►
Well, this, you know, people howl to the high heavens. But in fact, ideology, which is a kind of street corner form of metaphysics, ideology has been just a pervasive cancer on the Western mind ever since the burning of Eleusis. I mean, we just can’t get enough of it. And, you know, we may look with
00:23:06 ►
horror on the funeral of the imam, but believe me, in the history of Western civilization,
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there have been scenes go down that make that look like child’s play. Recall to you, just
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as an example, the Albigensian Crusade, when in order to stamp out a heresy, the Inquisition was turned loose in southern France.
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And the professional killer who was put in charge of this operation was a career man named Simon de Montfort. And his lieutenants came to him at one point in this campaign and said,
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we have the city surrounded, we are laying siege to, I believe it was Carcassonne.
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And they said, but there are 7,000 Catholics within the walls.
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He said, kill everybody, God will recognize his own.
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He said, kill everybody, God will recognize his own.
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So, you know, the 20th century has not cornered the market on the ways in which language can distort
00:24:17 ►
and is used for political purposes to distort reality.
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A very poignant example of that that I’ve personally had to deal with is a lot of my work in
00:24:30 ►
the Amazon has been in an area of the Colombian Amazon called the Lower Putumayo. And I venture
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very few people here this afternoon have any association to the lower Putumayo, but in fact, British
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banks, with the collusion of Peruvian ruling families in the early years of this century,
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created a mini-Holocaust in the Peruvian, it was then Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon,
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in the Peruvian, it was then Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon,
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in the pursuit of rubber.
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And what this was about was going into these tribal areas and showing these people how to collect wild rubber
00:25:16 ►
and then telling them, you know, you bring in this much,
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the first time you don’t bring in this much,
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we remove the soles of your feet with a machete. The second time you don’t bring in this much we remove the soles of your feet with a machete
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the second time you don’t bring in this much
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we kill you
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and 45,000 Indians were exterminated
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in the Colombian Putumayo
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going there years after
00:25:39 ►
this atrocity
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I was amazed to see the lingering effects of the misuse of language.
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The Colombians, who were not politically associated with this,
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later in the 30s, it was ceded to Peru,
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refer to it as the devil’s paradise.
00:26:01 ►
And the idea is that savages
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note this word, savages
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are savage
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and therefore we must be more savage
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in other words, preliterate culture
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is taken as an excuse for
00:26:22 ►
the rise of the beast in the colonizer.
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And this is entirely done, how this trick is done,
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is through the misuse and abuse of language,
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where civilization is what is being brought to these people,
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even though what appears to be being brought to them
00:26:47 ►
is the institution of prostitution,
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social diseases, slavery, madness, and death.
00:26:55 ►
But in fact, no, that isn’t it.
00:26:58 ►
It’s civilization.
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It’s a set of reasonable values.
00:27:04 ►
Well, the consequences of working out the reasonable values
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that were exported into the colonial world throughout the 18th and 19th century,
00:27:14 ►
the consequence of that is the appalling contradiction presented by modernity,
00:27:21 ►
where the major portion of real wealth of great nations is shoveled into a
00:27:30 ►
standing crop of weaponry which had better never be used, because if it is used, it spells
00:27:37 ►
Armageddon. If it’s not used, it’s simply the worst investment anybody ever dreamed up. So this kind of betrayal of
00:27:51 ►
language and use of scapegoats, see, that’s what was happening with the United States vis-a-vis
00:27:57 ►
the Soviet Union. The scapegoat, the godless communist, it’s what was happening in the
00:28:03 ►
Putumayo between the rubber barons and the Indians
00:28:06 ►
they were exploiting
00:28:07 ►
they thought they were civilizing them
00:28:09 ►
so the imaging
00:28:12 ►
of the world
00:28:14 ►
gives permission for various
00:28:16 ►
kinds of relationships to it
00:28:18 ►
and people never question
00:28:21 ►
you know
00:28:22 ►
once they pledge
00:28:24 ►
allegiance to a given linguistic model of
00:28:28 ►
reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought. This is what Goebbels
00:28:35 ►
understood so perfectly. You repeat and you repeat and you repeat and then when people
00:28:41 ►
ask themselves in the privacy of their own mind the moral question your answer is on the surface waiting to be heard goebbels was the first person
00:28:52 ►
to create a system where sitting in an office in berlin he could throw a switch and speak
00:29:00 ►
to the german people and this this m McLuhan talked a lot about this
00:29:06 ►
the notion of the creation
00:29:08 ►
of the public
00:29:09 ►
what is the public
00:29:11 ►
it’s something that comes out
00:29:14 ►
of print culture, it’s post
00:29:16 ►
medieval, it’s a phenomenon
00:29:17 ►
that can only exist in the presence
00:29:19 ►
of newspapers essentially
00:29:21 ►
that’s what gave it it’s boost
00:29:23 ►
and the public
00:29:26 ►
is a very different thing
00:29:29 ►
from the democratic notion
00:29:32 ►
of the people.
00:29:35 ►
Because the public is this body
00:29:37 ►
of quote-unquote informed opinion.
00:29:41 ►
But this informed opinion
00:29:43 ►
is tremendously subject to whim, pressure, located,
00:30:09 ►
dragged forward, forced to recant whatever accounts they gave of the violence. These film
00:30:17 ►
clips are being shown side by side on the evening news where three weeks ago we were hearing that the army would never attack the
00:30:27 ►
beloved students now the army is patriotically rounding up dissidents hooligans bandit elements
00:30:36 ►
and those who would destroy the compact between the party and the people this is just a shift in language. Remember the scene in 1984 where the party hack is giving the speech and midway through the speech he’s handed a telegram on the podium that tells him that the enemy has changed, it’s no with Oceania and have begun bombing Eurasia
00:31:06 ►
the other state
00:31:07 ►
and in mid stride
00:31:10 ►
he doesn’t even have to end a paragraph
00:31:13 ►
he can just turn the language
00:31:15 ►
and plow off in another direction
00:31:19 ►
well, is there any cure for this
00:31:23 ►
or are we simply the prisoners each of us in our own way, of people smarter than ourselves?
00:31:31 ►
Well, not really, I think, because outside the domain of language is some kind of domain of authentic feeling. We have thousands of words for technological
00:31:51 ►
processes, widgets, and what have you. Our vocabulary of feeling comprises about ten
00:31:59 ►
words. You know, love, hate, disgust, revulsion, obsession, like that. we need to be aware of an internal horizon of self-perception that is extremely rich and complicated and shifting all the time. the top-down values of the culture that we wear like clothing,
00:32:46 ►
that’s who we are.
00:32:47 ►
This is what McLuhan said
00:32:49 ►
when he said we wear culture
00:32:52 ►
like an overcoat.
00:32:54 ►
It’s something sold to us.
00:32:56 ►
You go out and buy it
00:32:57 ►
and you try it on.
00:32:59 ►
If Time magazine doesn’t fit you,
00:33:01 ►
maybe The Economist will.
00:33:03 ►
If neither fits,
00:33:04 ►
well, try the Journal of Foreign Affairs.
00:33:06 ►
You’ll find an overcoat that fits
00:33:09 ►
and then that will become part of your culture.
00:33:12 ►
I saw the cartoon in the New Yorker last night,
00:33:15 ►
the well-dressed man and his wife leaving a party
00:33:19 ►
and he’s saying to her,
00:33:20 ►
how can we relate to people who belong to the Book of the Month Club?
00:33:26 ►
You know, these are strong cultural disparities.
00:33:33 ►
So to overcome culture, really, which I view as provisional and semi-toxic,
00:33:56 ►
and semi-toxic, there has to be a way back to bedrock, to something that is satisfyingly transcendental in an immediate sense.
00:34:05 ►
In an immediate sense. So it cannot be a philosophy, as far as I’m concerned maybe philosophies work for the more rarefied among
00:34:08 ►
us and they have the
00:34:09 ►
consolation of
00:34:11 ►
I don’t know, Episcopalianism
00:34:13 ►
Orthodox Judaism, Logical
00:34:15 ►
Positivism, whatever trip
00:34:17 ►
they’ve got running, but I’ve
00:34:19 ►
always found philosophy to be
00:34:22 ►
recreational
00:34:22 ►
and won’t really serve
00:34:25 ►
well so then what is there
00:34:27 ►
first of all there is nature
00:34:31 ►
nature silently attended
00:34:35 ►
is still
00:34:37 ►
a modality
00:34:40 ►
that is beyond the reach of the language
00:34:44 ►
of most of us
00:34:45 ►
and of those of us who need it most fortuitously
00:34:50 ►
because we have the smallest vocabulary for its description.
00:34:55 ►
So when we go into nature,
00:34:58 ►
it’s a flirtation with a kind of iridescence.
00:35:03 ►
It’s a search for, I mean I blush to use such a
00:35:10 ►
word, but a lost innocence, which most of us associate with childhood. Some of us had
00:35:16 ►
terrible childhood, so we just associate it with the lost paradise of Eden or a utopia.
00:35:24 ►
the lost paradise of Eden or a utopia.
00:35:32 ►
But in nature, there is an implicate order.
00:35:40 ►
There is the bedrock out of which the human iridescence springs. And human culture is an extremely evanescent transitory and uh non-equilibrium
00:35:52 ►
kind of condition i mean the the pulse beat of this planet is measured in millions of years
00:35:59 ►
culture is a phenomenon of the last 40,000 years
00:36:05 ►
and that’s generous.
00:36:07 ►
So culture has about it
00:36:10 ►
this miraculous, instantaneous
00:36:13 ►
and almost intrusive quality
00:36:17 ►
against the background of the rest of the body of nature.
00:36:22 ►
But going into nature is not simply a prescription for joining the Sierra Club.
00:36:28 ►
What going into nature means is taking seriously the alchemical faith
00:36:36 ►
that preceded the positivist flowering of science
00:36:41 ►
and looking into the heart of matter with the expectation of encountering
00:36:48 ►
a mystery. Now, in the most practical sense, what this has to mean is the psychedelic experience,
00:37:00 ►
hallucinogenic plants. It cannot mean anything else.
00:37:05 ►
Now, of course, we’re in the slightly uncomfortable position
00:37:09 ►
of having that be illegal.
00:37:13 ►
But that in itself should be a sufficient indication
00:37:18 ►
for most people that something is going on.
00:37:20 ►
I mean, my take on legality is essentially that of Charles Dickens, who was
00:37:26 ►
sort of an Edwardian anarchist. And his famous throwaway line on that was, the law is an ass.
00:37:37 ►
And, you know, it’s sadly true in this case. But I’m not really interested in it as a legal issue. I’m interested in it as a
00:37:47 ►
human rights issue, if you want to put it that way. In other words, my assumption is that
00:37:55 ►
in the same way that the Western mind reached a certain place where it recognized that slavery,
00:38:08 ►
place where it recognized that slavery, whether it made economic sense or not, was morally insupportable. And in the same way then that a universal right to own property, if you’ve got
00:38:17 ►
the money, has been more or less institutionalized and the oppression of women is now recognized as a kind of self-defeating strategy of male dominance.
00:38:28 ►
In the same way that these things have been signposts in the continuing history of human self-definition,
00:38:38 ►
so shall be the understanding that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in the age of modern pharmacology has to mean the right to control your own state of mind in the appropriate, you know, subject to the constraints of time, place, and manner, so forth and so on. So that’s enough about the socio-political end of it.
00:39:05 ►
What is more interesting is
00:39:07 ►
the thing in itself,
00:39:11 ►
what it is.
00:39:12 ►
That it is something
00:39:14 ►
which our cultural
00:39:16 ►
biases, reaching clear
00:39:18 ►
back to the phonetic alphabet
00:39:19 ►
and to
00:39:21 ►
the male dominance,
00:39:24 ►
the fear that societies run along the lines of male dominance
00:39:28 ►
have of boundary dissolution.
00:39:31 ►
I mean, for a thousand years in Western civilization,
00:39:34 ►
the only boundary dissolution that was socially sanctioned
00:39:39 ►
was getting plastered.
00:39:41 ►
And that appears to have been specifically for the purpose of getting laid
00:39:45 ►
i mean as far as uh research can tell us for a thousand years nobody got laid who wasn’t stone
00:39:53 ►
drunk because everyone was such a paragon of social rectitude well um i mean it’s truer than you think. Alcohol is clearly a medium for permission in a Calvinist milieu.
00:40:11 ►
Well, I could talk about this in all kinds of different ways.
00:40:14 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:40:15 ►
I talked about scapegoats, and I talked about the misuse of language.
00:40:20 ►
I suppose since I got that deep into it, I might as well say what I’m thinking, which is that the drug issue now looms as an obvious new horror. I mean, it has will be made that this is a godless drug.
00:40:47 ►
The problem here is, again, a problem of language.
00:40:54 ►
We have one concept, drug.
00:40:56 ►
It moves from aspirin to heroin through LSD and on into television.
00:41:04 ►
These things can all be spoken of
00:41:06 ►
as drugs
00:41:07 ►
so then what this means immediately
00:41:10 ►
is somebody has stacked the
00:41:12 ►
rhetorical deck
00:41:13 ►
against a reasonable discussion
00:41:15 ►
of the matter because our
00:41:18 ►
vocabulary is so
00:41:19 ►
impoverished, I mean are we to believe
00:41:22 ►
that we need the same
00:41:24 ►
policy for television as we need for, are we to believe that we need the same policy for television as we need
00:41:26 ►
for heroin? Are we to believe that psychedelic psychotherapy is to be treated with the same
00:41:35 ►
hand that resolves the crack cocaine issue? So while the government squawks education, no education is taking place. Rather, what is
00:41:48 ►
taking place is a poisoning of the linguistic domain in which we will then be expected to forge
00:41:56 ►
a solution. So what I’ve tried to say on this issue, and some of you who saw this month’s Mother Jones may
00:42:05 ►
have noticed that they
00:42:07 ►
put me in there.
00:42:09 ►
More picture than text,
00:42:11 ►
which tells you something about an age of
00:42:13 ►
symbols. But
00:42:15 ►
what I’ve tried to say is
00:42:17 ►
that we need to define
00:42:19 ►
drugs operationally.
00:42:22 ►
We need to say
00:42:23 ►
what it is we don’t like, and then we need to find out
00:42:28 ►
what it is that does what we don’t like. Okay, what is it we don’t like? I submit to you that
00:42:37 ►
what we don’t like about drugs is unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior. Unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior.
00:42:46 ►
Unexamined, obsessive, habitual behavior.
00:42:50 ►
Meaning, you know, somebody’s into something,
00:42:52 ►
and by God, if you get in their way,
00:42:54 ►
when they’re on their way to it,
00:42:57 ►
you’re in trouble.
00:42:58 ►
They do not question their obsession.
00:43:03 ►
They indulge their obsession.
00:43:06 ►
And they will tolerate no discussion of it.
00:43:09 ►
So unexamined, habitual, obsessive behavior is extremely objectionable to all of us, I think.
00:43:16 ►
I mean, we call anything that we don’t like, we call it robot-like, automaton, unthinking, zombie, so forth and so on. Well,
00:43:30 ►
imagine if our partners in the new global materialism, the Japanese, had introduced
00:43:40 ►
into this country at the end of World War II a drug which, within a few years,
00:43:47 ►
made such deep inroads into the American population
00:43:51 ►
that people were spending an average of five hours a day loaded on this drug.
00:43:58 ►
What would we think?
00:43:59 ►
We would think that it was a crime against a culture on the scale of Auschwitz.
00:44:06 ►
But as a matter of fact, we did this to ourselves.
00:44:10 ►
Television, introduced at the close of World War II,
00:44:14 ►
has become a form of electronic heroin.
00:44:19 ►
And it isn’t even your trip.
00:44:21 ►
They don’t even let you go on your own trip.
00:44:24 ►
You get a trip designed on Madison
00:44:27 ►
Avenue to sell, you know, this year’s model of the crap mobile or whatever else is being pushed.
00:44:37 ►
So unquestioningly, and even as I speak, I’m sure there are people in this audience who are
00:44:43 ►
revolted at my lack of patriotism and love for an American institution of such nobility and depth as TV.
00:44:52 ►
Well, you know where I pulled back from TV? Really pulled back from it?
00:44:57 ►
It was when I made a mild knock on TV and someone in the audience said,
00:45:01 ►
knock on TV and someone in the audience said
00:45:03 ►
well you can say anything you want
00:45:05 ►
about television but you must
00:45:08 ►
admit that it’s given our children
00:45:10 ►
a wonderful education
00:45:11 ►
concerning nature
00:45:13 ►
anyway
00:45:14 ►
pursuing the theme of
00:45:18 ►
operationally defining
00:45:19 ►
drugs
00:45:21 ►
to give us a little more linguistic scope
00:45:24 ►
psychedelics
00:45:28 ►
in contrast to television
00:45:32 ►
and heroin dissolve
00:45:35 ►
habitual patterns of activity
00:45:39 ►
and promote examination
00:45:43 ►
of motives and allow a restructuring of habit. psychologists such as Humphrey Osmond and Hoffer were obtaining 40% cure rate of chronic alcoholism
00:46:15 ►
with one high dose exposure. Well now understand, this doesn’t mean that Ld is a cure for alcoholism i mean if you think that you don’t
00:46:27 ►
know anything about how drugs work that 40 cure on one high dose exposure to lsd of alcoholism
00:46:35 ►
means that this person took this psychedelic it dissolved their boundaries it dissolved their
00:46:41 ►
defenses they came face to face with the fact that they were killing
00:46:45 ►
themselves. And when they came down, they reached into their bowels and found enough intestinal
00:46:52 ►
fortitude to chop it off. Well, this is real. This is the dream of all other therapies. Now, AA achieves this, but at the cost of closing the mind.
00:47:08 ►
You know, a truly devoted graduate of AA
00:47:13 ►
does not have an open mind on the drug issue
00:47:17 ►
because they have been taught that opening your mind
00:47:20 ►
even a little bit may lead you back to the bottle.
00:47:24 ►
Well, they’re trying to solve a
00:47:26 ►
personal dilemma in the context of neurosis. I’m sympathetic to that. But in the meantime,
00:47:32 ►
the rest of this forbidden domain.
00:47:59 ►
What are we going to do about it. In other words, authentic boundary dissolving internal hierophany does
00:48:10 ►
in fact reliably occur in the presence of these plants and compounds. But nobody knows
00:48:18 ►
what to do about it. We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer that even as a community
00:48:25 ►
we have a lot of trouble figuring out
00:48:28 ►
how you just face the answer,
00:48:31 ►
how you come to terms with the options
00:48:34 ►
that are actually available.
00:48:38 ►
Well, I’ve talked about it today
00:48:40 ►
in a slightly more political context
00:48:42 ►
because when you hang out in the baths
00:48:44 ►
with these State Department people,
00:48:46 ►
it’s like a virus in the water.
00:48:48 ►
I mean, you find yourself raving about triage,
00:48:53 ►
Saudi uprisings, infrastructures.
00:48:57 ►
There’s just no cure for it.
00:49:01 ►
Are there questions?
00:49:04 ►
So the question is about sexuality
00:49:07 ►
and the relationship of sex to drugs.
00:49:10 ►
Well, it’s kind of a shifting crowd here.
00:49:12 ►
I mean, we’ve been into some of this in other sessions.
00:49:18 ►
My origin scenario for consciousness,
00:49:21 ►
which I just brushed on today,
00:49:23 ►
is this idea that these bioactive amines
00:49:27 ►
triggered increases in visual acuity, which made them important to be kept in the diet.
00:49:32 ►
At slightly higher doses, all psychoactive drugs of the indole type are CNS activators. In other words, they cause arousal,
00:49:45 ►
generalized arousal,
00:49:47 ►
which is a restlessness,
00:49:50 ►
an alertness,
00:49:51 ►
an attention to incoming sensory detail.
00:49:54 ►
But this can also be channeled
00:49:56 ►
almost by decision
00:49:58 ►
into sexual arousal
00:50:00 ►
and sexual activity.
00:50:02 ►
And I think it’s quite a smooth spectrum
00:50:05 ►
from arousal to sexual arousal
00:50:10 ►
through preceded and followed by perhaps chanting,
00:50:17 ►
preceded and followed by perhaps dancing,
00:50:20 ►
and then higher doses of these things usher into the mystical, for want of a better word, this transcendent other.
00:50:41 ►
sex and psychedelics.
00:50:45 ►
Every time they would say that LSD breaks chromosomes,
00:50:48 ►
he would say that it causes orgasms that last,
00:50:52 ►
and then he would add a greater increment of time as the propaganda war required
00:50:55 ►
to hold the numbers steady on both sides.
00:51:00 ►
Certainly sex under psychedelics is quite astonishing, although psychedelics without sex are so astonishing itgent one is very few people go through life without ever brushing up against sexuality.
00:51:36 ►
I mean, you have to have a truly bizarre biography for it to never come and get you.
00:51:41 ►
to never come and get you.
00:51:43 ►
On the other hand,
00:51:45 ►
it is not only possible,
00:51:47 ►
but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave
00:51:52 ►
without ever having a psychedelic experience.
00:51:56 ►
Well, to my mind,
00:51:57 ►
this is just an instance
00:52:01 ►
of an appalling infantilism
00:52:05 ►
that is culturally sanctioned.
00:52:08 ►
I mean, the culture not only doesn’t care
00:52:11 ►
if you never find out about this
00:52:13 ►
and remain forever immature, virgin, good word.
00:52:23 ►
The society, not only does it not care
00:52:25 ►
it’s specifically interested in seeing that you don’t have
00:52:29 ►
this experience
00:52:30 ►
well, it’s part of the birthright
00:52:34 ►
this is what religion was
00:52:37 ►
for the first million years
00:52:39 ►
before it fell into the hands of men who
00:52:43 ►
insist on wearing dresses
00:52:44 ►
you know, it was the celebration before it fell into the hands of men who insist on wearing dresses,
00:52:51 ►
you know, it was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship with nature.
00:52:58 ►
I mean, and it’s still there.
00:53:00 ►
The portals are still there.
00:53:10 ►
there. The portals are still there. Your RS-232 outlet into hyperspace is still in place,
00:53:17 ►
even though, you know, nobody’s may have plugged in in your family line since Alaric burned Eleusis. Nevertheless, the hard wiring is there, the self-recognition. We are children without this, and not in the
00:53:30 ►
sense of innocent, but in the sense of infantile, because this is part of the birthright. How
00:53:38 ►
can anyone else decide for someone else that access to the transcendental reality shall be barred?
00:53:49 ►
I mean, if somebody somewhere in the world puts a lien on a religion,
00:53:54 ►
people are waving their arms in outrage.
00:53:57 ►
This is deemed to be one of the most fundamental kinds of interference
00:54:01 ►
with the dignity of the individual.
00:54:04 ►
Well, but if your religion involves the practical accessing
00:54:08 ►
of the transmundane through means sanctioned by millennia of usage.
00:54:16 ►
I mean, I’m not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory.
00:54:21 ►
I’m an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.
00:54:26 ►
And to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality,
00:54:33 ►
why, it’s ludicrous.
00:54:34 ►
You just have to read your Thoreau to know what you do in that case.
00:54:38 ►
And if you don’t have time for Thoreau, I’ll tell you.
00:54:41 ►
You just ignore it. It’s a bunch of baloney. That’s a completely
00:54:45 ►
out of hand move on the part of the oppressor dominator mentality. So sex took me on a trip
00:54:57 ►
there, but I hope you liked the first part of the answer. Yeah. We can’t all be Stanley.
00:55:18 ►
Yeah. We can’t all be Stanley. We can’t all be Alfred Russell Wallace. We can’t all be Bjorn Borg. So people opt for vicarious sensation. is going because the technologies to carry it a great distance are far advanced.
00:55:28 ►
This comes to a very interesting question which boils down to, in its most press, in
00:55:35 ►
its most cogent form, the question, is man good?
00:55:41 ►
Or what is man?
00:55:43 ►
Because what we appear to be moving toward
00:55:45 ►
is a technological domain
00:55:48 ►
where we will be able to be
00:55:50 ►
whatever we want to be.
00:55:53 ►
And, you know, it’s a litmus test
00:55:56 ►
for what we want to be.
00:55:58 ►
I mean, if you could be whatever you wanted to be,
00:56:01 ►
would you watch triple X rated movies
00:56:04 ►
every waking moment?
00:56:06 ►
How many people would?
00:56:08 ►
This is the great fear
00:56:10 ►
that the dominators have about the drugs.
00:56:13 ►
Their position is,
00:56:15 ►
if drugs were legal,
00:56:16 ►
everybody would be a junkie.
00:56:19 ►
A cheerful view of human nature.
00:56:22 ►
You know?
00:56:23 ►
They’re saying, you know,
00:56:23 ►
you want to legalize these things? Don’t you
00:56:25 ►
understand what it would be like?
00:56:28 ►
Well, I, as
00:56:29 ►
a user of drugs,
00:56:32 ►
am insulted by
00:56:33 ►
the implication.
00:56:36 ►
The government has never
00:56:38 ►
been a major factor
00:56:40 ►
in the decisions
00:56:41 ►
I made about my program
00:56:44 ►
of ingestion.
00:56:45 ►
And I think that it’s preposterous to suggest
00:56:50 ►
that the moral rectitude of the government
00:56:52 ►
stands between a dope-crazed population
00:56:56 ►
and the object of its fondest desires.
00:56:59 ►
I think it’s all in language.
00:57:02 ►
it’s all in language.
00:57:09 ►
If a gram of cocaine costs what a tube of airplane glue costs,
00:57:12 ►
you know, you don’t see a lot of gentlemen
00:57:14 ►
with neatly trimmed gray beards
00:57:16 ►
driving Porsches with airplane glue in their fur.
00:57:20 ►
It just doesn’t happen.
00:57:22 ►
Because it’s tacky.
00:57:24 ►
It’s tasteless
00:57:25 ►
drugs are very subject
00:57:29 ►
to the images in language
00:57:31 ►
one of the funny things that goes on
00:57:33 ►
it may have changed now
00:57:35 ►
but the last time I was in the Amazon
00:57:37 ►
in the lowland Amazon
00:57:39 ►
they grow coca
00:57:41 ►
but it’s not part of the huge criminal syndicates
00:57:44 ►
that grow the highland coca, which is much stronger.
00:57:49 ►
So we go up these rivers, hundreds of miles up these jungle rivers, and people are growing coca, and they invite you to chew coca with them. that there is any rapport established, they want to go on this rap about how
00:58:07 ►
this is not a drug.
00:58:10 ►
I know you think this is a drug.
00:58:12 ►
This is not a drug.
00:58:13 ►
This is a food.
00:58:14 ►
This is making us strong.
00:58:16 ►
This allows us to work.
00:58:19 ►
Without this, we would be nothing.
00:58:21 ►
Well, what he’s saying is, you know,
00:58:24 ►
adopt my language so that you can see this
00:58:28 ►
reality as we see it. And in fact, they’re quite right. I mean, you can chew coca for weeks on end
00:58:36 ►
and when you leave the Amazon and fly home, it’s no big deal. All this, you know, the most virulent family of addicting drugs is always presented.
00:58:48 ►
I mean, crack has changed it a little bit.
00:58:50 ►
The classic virulent addicting drugs are the opiates.
00:58:56 ►
Well, opium was known for 3,000 years before anyone noticed that it was addicting.
00:59:08 ►
and years before anyone noticed that it was addicting. The earliest known account of addiction is in 1603. William Playfair, a name freak. So for thousands of years, opium had been used and not
00:59:18 ►
been recognized as addictive. Now, you know, you have millions of people running around thinking
00:59:23 ►
that if they get within several feet of it, Satan will sink his claws into them.
00:59:28 ►
This is all a grand silliness.
00:59:31 ►
And not that heroin addiction is not a problem.
00:59:35 ►
I don’t want to imply that.
00:59:37 ►
But what I’m trying to say is the way we see these things, the way we image them, is what gives them their power. Does
00:59:49 ►
that do it for you? Other comments?
00:59:54 ►
Why hadn’t it been seen that it was addictive? Because it was part of the culture?
00:59:59 ►
No, because opium really isn’t terribly addictive. I mean, the only time in history that opium was turned into a social problem
01:00:11 ►
was in the 19th century.
01:00:15 ►
Yes, just to review your history for you for a moment,
01:00:19 ►
in the 1840s a series of international incidents went on in the Far East
01:00:24 ►
that have come to be called the Opium War.
01:00:28 ►
Well, what was the Opium War about?
01:01:07 ►
imperialism, the British East India Company had created a huge distribution system for tea. Tea was grown in Ceylon and they had very advanced ships for that time, over 200 of them, and they had coal, they had facilities from Aden and Port Said,
01:01:12 ►
and all of this was maintained at great expense for the tea trade. Well, they were so efficient at producing tea
01:01:15 ►
that they created an economic collapse of tea around 1840.
01:01:20 ►
So the board of directors of the British India Company got together
01:01:24 ►
and they said, we have all these ships, tea is worth nothing, what are we going to do? And then someone said, well, why don’t we grow opium in Goa, which is in India, south of Bombay on the west coast of India, why don’t we grow opium in Bombay and we’ll sell it in China?
01:01:47 ►
And they said, well, that’s a good idea.
01:01:49 ►
What does the Chinese government think about this?
01:01:52 ►
So they inquired,
01:01:53 ►
and the Chinese government told them to get lost,
01:01:56 ►
that they weren’t interested in having raw opium
01:01:59 ►
sold at dockside by British traders in Chinese cities.
01:02:04 ►
Well, they went back to the foreign office
01:02:07 ►
and the wheels turned
01:02:10 ►
and gunboat diplomacy was used
01:02:15 ►
to force the Chinese to open their doors to opium.
01:02:21 ►
Opium had been known in China for thousands of years
01:02:24 ►
as an obscure item in the
01:02:27 ►
materia medica, but it had never been a social vice. From 1840 on, tens of thousands of tons
01:02:35 ►
of opium at rock-bottom prices were unloaded, produced by Indian cheap labor at immense profit to the East India Company and unloaded in China.
01:02:49 ►
So, you know, we think that governments, this stance of being the keeper of moral values
01:02:57 ►
that is affected by government in the so-called drug war is just another convenient foil because when it suits government’s purpose,
01:03:08 ►
it deals dope. Certainly, you know, the cocaine trade could only exist with the connivance of
01:03:19 ►
the Central Intelligence Agency. I mean, if you don’t believe that, you don’t understand how it works out there
01:03:25 ►
because it’s just as plain as the nose on your face. I mean, where do you get a half a billion
01:03:31 ►
dollars in a hurry if you’ve got to outfit a rebel army and topple a socialist, democratic socialist
01:03:40 ►
government somewhere? Well, the only place you get a half a billion dollars or a hundred million even in a hurry
01:03:46 ►
is you take a flyer on drugs.
01:03:50 ►
The original cocaine epidemic
01:03:53 ►
was practically promoted by the media
01:03:57 ►
because coke was thought to be
01:03:59 ►
this rather fashionable little upper.
01:04:03 ►
It wasn’t until people had been doing it for five or six years
01:04:06 ►
and exhibiting signs of madness, breakdown,
01:04:10 ►
and physical dissolution of the middle of their face
01:04:13 ►
that people began to catch on that it’s not such a good thing.
01:04:19 ►
And then, of course, crack cocaine,
01:04:21 ►
that was not hatched by the agency.
01:04:23 ►
That was just the perverseness of human ingenuity
01:04:27 ►
that could take a problem and turn it into a real problem.
01:04:31 ►
Remember the great heroin epidemics of the past after the Vietnam War?
01:04:36 ►
Well, you should look at the police statistics on crack.
01:04:41 ►
Looking at the statistics as they now stand,
01:04:44 ►
it’s like there were no drugs before crack. Looking at the statistics as they now stand, it’s like there were no drugs before
01:04:47 ►
crack. Crime levels were so low relative to what they are now. Burglaries, assaults were
01:04:55 ►
so rare. And yet when those events were going on, the great heroin epidemic of the 1970s
01:05:01 ►
and so forth, we were asked to believe, you know, that society was being ripped apart at the seams.
01:05:07 ►
So it’s all very relative
01:05:09 ►
and it’s all according to who it serves.
01:05:14 ►
Does it have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry?
01:05:19 ►
In other words, drugs, you don’t want it to be invasive.
01:05:23 ►
You don’t want it to insult the brain you don’t want it to insult the brain
01:05:25 ►
you don’t want to insult the brain
01:05:27 ►
physically with a toxin
01:05:30 ►
well how do you tell?
01:05:32 ►
well a very good
01:05:34 ►
way to tell is
01:05:36 ►
to ask the question how long
01:05:37 ►
does a drug last?
01:05:40 ►
a drug that lasts 14 hours
01:05:42 ►
is clearly
01:05:43 ►
more invasive and more toxic than a drug that lasts 14 hours is clearly more invasive and more toxic than a drug that lasts 2 hours
01:05:49 ►
because what this turnaround time to get back to the baseline of consciousness is an indicator of is how much affinity enzyme systems already present in the brain
01:06:08 ►
have for the incoming substance
01:06:10 ►
and to what degree they recognize it,
01:06:14 ►
can de-animate it, de-alkalate it,
01:06:16 ►
and turn it into harmless and excretable byproducts.
01:06:21 ►
So you want a drug that very quickly returns you to the baseline of consciousness and there should be no hangover, no residuum. This is why alcohol is obviously, you know, people feel like danced on something or other the next day because this is a systemic poison you know and so that’s the first criteria
01:06:46 ►
how close an affinity to
01:06:48 ►
neurotransmitters and
01:06:50 ►
neuroregulators does it have
01:06:52 ►
another
01:06:54 ►
consideration is
01:06:56 ►
is it
01:06:58 ►
synthetic or natural
01:06:59 ►
now people argue
01:07:02 ►
with this one because people
01:07:04 ►
are in my humble opinion, quite lumpen about granting a distinction between the synthetic and the natural.
01:07:14 ►
I mean, they just say, well, we’re natural.
01:07:19 ►
That’s what people say.
01:07:19 ►
We’re natural, so anything that comes out of the lab, that ought to be natural, too.
01:07:24 ►
Well, would you mainline plutonium? I don’t think so.
01:07:28 ►
So I’ll make the argument for natural substances on two levels.
01:07:34 ►
One, fairly rational, which is that a substance that occurs in plants
01:07:42 ►
has been use-tested in living systems for millions and millions of years.
01:07:47 ►
It is a constituent of organic life.
01:07:51 ►
The proof of that is that it is present there.
01:07:55 ►
So that alone argues that it has a certain affinity that places it above a synthetic
01:08:06 ►
the more airy fairy
01:08:08 ►
of my metaphors on this issue
01:08:12 ►
is that I think
01:08:14 ►
I really especially in this area
01:08:18 ►
give great credit to Rupert Sheldrake
01:08:21 ►
and his idea of the morphogenetic field
01:08:24 ►
I really think that, let’s contrast two drugs,
01:08:32 ►
a synthetic drug like ketamine, a pseudo-halocenogen,
01:08:38 ►
and a indole-halocenogen, a true halocenogen like psilocybin.
01:08:44 ►
Well, psilocybin has been taken for thousands and thousands of years
01:08:48 ►
by tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people.
01:08:52 ►
It has a morphogenetic field.
01:08:55 ►
And in a way, when you take a drug, the drug takes you.
01:09:00 ►
I mean, the drug is opening and you are opening
01:09:04 ►
and there is a dimension of human usage?
01:09:30 ►
Does it have a long history of human usage?
01:09:33 ►
That’s, in a way, the most important of all.
01:09:37 ►
No synthetic has a long history of human usage
01:09:42 ►
and most things with a long history of human usage
01:09:45 ►
will turn out to come from a plant.
01:09:47 ►
So what you need is, you know,
01:09:49 ►
all these people who went before,
01:09:52 ►
they proved that substances like psilocybin,
01:09:58 ►
ibogaine, harmaline, mescaline,
01:10:03 ►
the experience of the human community over time proves that these things do not cause birth defects, miscarriages, tumors, blindness, madness, ulcers, so forth and so on in other words uh in since we are not allowed to legally
01:10:26 ►
investigate anything since we are not allowed protocols for human investigation of anything
01:10:33 ►
old or new then really the only human data available is ethnographic data, data on obscure Amazonian tribes and rituals conducted in the Mexican highlands.
01:10:52 ►
Well, to my mind, I’m not an advocate of drugs. I’m an advocate of psychedelics.
01:11:00 ►
Drugs that are not psychedelic interest me approximately as much as I assume they interest everybody else.
01:11:08 ►
I mean, I sometimes do them.
01:11:11 ►
Certain ones I abuse.
01:11:13 ►
Caffeine, most notably.
01:11:15 ►
I can’t abuse alcohol because I’m a migraineur.
01:11:19 ►
But the psychedelic thing is a special category and a special political issue.
01:11:26 ►
I read a book recently, I mentioned this to some of you, by Arnold Trebek, who’s one of these think tank, East Coast type policy formulating consultant to the government type characters. And clearly a good guy on our side
01:11:46 ►
advocating legalization
01:11:48 ►
and meeting the objections to the legalization
01:11:52 ►
of hard narcotics with a number of interesting arguments.
01:11:55 ►
The book is like over 600 pages long.
01:11:59 ►
Well, when you look in the index,
01:12:02 ►
there’s nothing about LSD,
01:12:04 ►
nothing about psychedelics
01:12:06 ►
nothing about MDMA, psilocybin
01:12:08 ►
DMT, DPT, abogaine
01:12:11 ►
STP, none of this
01:12:13 ►
apparently
01:12:15 ►
they’re choosing
01:12:16 ►
to pretend that the issue
01:12:18 ►
of psychedelic therapy
01:12:20 ►
and the issue of the spiritual
01:12:22 ►
dimension that is accessible
01:12:24 ►
through plant chemistry,
01:12:26 ►
it’s too much even for the liberals to handle.
01:12:31 ►
They don’t even want to talk about it.
01:12:34 ►
They want to reluctantly announce that they have lost the war on drugs
01:12:40 ►
and then with great hand-wringing legalize these things with the sense that now this surely
01:12:48 ►
will trigger the end of western civilization as we know it there is no sense of a dimension of hope
01:12:57 ►
opportunity clinical breakthrough nothing like that Yes, the question is language and the fact that
01:13:08 ►
how does what I said about language relate to what I’ve said previously
01:13:13 ►
about the DMT state,
01:13:16 ►
and why is it that some people come back speechless from these dimensions?
01:13:22 ►
I’m glad you asked this question,
01:13:24 ►
probably not because I’m going to answer it,
01:13:27 ►
but because it reminds me of something.
01:13:29 ►
In a way, it’s answering.
01:13:31 ►
I see language as an uncompleted program.
01:13:35 ►
Language is something which wants to be beheld,
01:13:39 ►
but is only heard.
01:13:42 ►
And so there is this tension.
01:13:44 ►
You recall I said a few days ago that after many grapplings with the DMT ecstasis,
01:13:57 ►
that I had the feeling that the place you break into there is a playpen.
01:14:08 ►
It’s an environment created
01:14:10 ►
by someone very strange
01:14:13 ►
who has a very curious notion
01:14:15 ►
of human psychology
01:14:17 ►
and it is an environment
01:14:19 ►
that they imagine
01:14:20 ►
would be reassuring to human beings.
01:14:24 ►
And I’ve stuck with this model for many, many years,
01:14:28 ►
the model of the playpen
01:14:30 ►
and that the self-transforming elf machine entities
01:14:35 ►
were like toys.
01:14:37 ►
They were like attention-grabbing,
01:14:41 ►
colorful teaching devices
01:14:43 ►
to engage the attention of the human being that has just come across.
01:14:49 ►
Well, strange to say, the other night I was thinking about all of this, and a little piece was added.
01:14:58 ►
And I’ll try it out on you.
01:15:00 ►
I tried it out on somebody who’s quite sophisticated about DMT, and they said, that’s
01:15:06 ►
absolutely wrong. That is not what it is. But undaunted, I’ll try it out on you. As you go into
01:15:18 ►
the DMT state, there is this question about the intent of these machine elves.
01:15:26 ►
They’re funny.
01:15:27 ►
They’re zany.
01:15:30 ►
But you know how the Three Stooges cartoons operate,
01:15:36 ►
where there’s a lot of finger in the eye and mallet on the head stuff?
01:15:41 ►
So in this DMT place,
01:15:47 ►
there is this mad zaniness,
01:15:50 ►
this sense of a Bugs Bunny cartoon run amok kind of thing.
01:15:53 ►
And everybody,
01:15:55 ►
people who’ve had this experience say,
01:15:57 ►
well, you can’t trust these little guys.
01:16:00 ►
Or you have to be on your toes.
01:16:03 ►
These are magical entities.
01:16:05 ►
These are not love bunnies.
01:16:07 ►
They’re little, you know,
01:16:10 ►
gnome tending toward demon
01:16:14 ►
and you don’t know where to draw the line.
01:16:17 ►
So thinking about this the other night,
01:16:19 ►
I tried to construct emotionally for myself
01:16:23 ►
a picture of a human
01:16:26 ►
situation that
01:16:28 ►
would give me the same
01:16:30 ►
feeling
01:16:31 ►
about what was going on
01:16:33 ►
as I have when I deal with the entities
01:16:36 ►
in the DMT thing.
01:16:38 ►
And it came to me instantly
01:16:40 ►
what it was and what the
01:16:42 ►
missing
01:16:43 ►
ambiance of it is
01:16:46 ►
that I’ve never included in a lecture.
01:16:49 ►
What’s going on, I’m sure, is that the aura of these little guys is
01:16:58 ►
that they’re sharp.
01:17:00 ►
They’re sharp.
01:17:02 ►
They’re funny.
01:17:03 ►
They’re zany.
01:17:25 ►
But they’re sharp. They’re funny. They’re zany. But they’re sharp. And I think what they are is they’re traitors. And the whole funny emotion that invades the DMT exchange has to do with the possibility of getting screwed.
01:17:30 ►
Not getting killed, not being driven mad,
01:17:32 ►
but being taken.
01:17:35 ►
Being taken, quite literally.
01:17:43 ►
And these toys which they offer are trade goods, in effect.
01:17:47 ►
And what they are saying in that place is,
01:17:49 ►
what have you got?
01:17:51 ►
What have you got?
01:17:52 ►
Look at this.
01:17:53 ►
Look at this.
01:17:55 ►
What did you bring?
01:17:57 ►
What do you have to trade?
01:18:00 ►
Well, the opening lasts only a few minutes and as the dialogue is getting started,
01:18:03 ►
the dimension closes upon itself but this is uh
01:18:08 ►
i think the the lost piece of the puzzle
01:18:14 ►
that’s all folks
01:18:18 ►
you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
01:18:26 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:18:30 ►
Well, one positive change since Terence gave this talk back in June of 1989
01:18:36 ►
is that while he was lamenting the fact that there was no formalized scientific psychedelic research then taking place,
01:18:44 ►
that there was no formalized scientific psychedelic research then taking place,
01:18:50 ►
well, today we have quite a lot of such scientific inquiry going on around the world.
01:18:55 ►
There needs to be significantly more, of course, but a good start has now been made.
01:18:59 ►
So, are you ready for my embarrassing story?
01:19:03 ►
This past weekend, when I began working on today’s program, I previewed a McKenna tape that had been sent to me, and to be honest, it really blew me away.
01:19:10 ►
In fact, I was planning on telling you that, in my opinion, it’s the most succinct condensation of Terrence’s thought that I’d ever heard, and I was really excited about passing it along to you.
01:19:27 ►
to you. However, something in the background of my mind caused me, after first editing the tape for sound quality, to double-check some of my old podcasts just to be sure that I hadn’t used it
01:19:32 ►
before. Well, as much as I hate to admit it, my memory isn’t as good as I once thought it to be.
01:19:40 ►
Of course, it may never have been as good as I remember. Did you get that?
01:19:45 ►
You’ll have to think about that one for a moment.
01:19:48 ►
Well, guess what?
01:19:49 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
01:19:51 ►
then you have already heard that particular tape
01:19:54 ►
because I published it in my podcast number 318.
01:19:58 ►
And just to give you a little taste of what’s in that talk,
01:20:01 ►
I’m going to play several short sound bites from it right now.
01:20:05 ►
But I think the work we do with these drugs, we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next
01:20:12 ►
hundred years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain. We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.
01:20:30 ►
There can be no turning back. We are either going to change into this cybernetic, hyperdimensional,
01:20:37 ►
hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into
01:20:46 ►
the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured. And psilocybin is
01:20:57 ►
central to this because psilocybin casts a spotlight into the darkness into which we are moving and shows that this is what lies there.
01:21:08 ►
It is the human soul, essentially, the over-soul of mankind
01:21:15 ►
calling history toward itself across the dimensions.
01:21:21 ►
And it’s taking only a moment, but on the other hand it’s taking 20,000 years and it
01:21:25 ►
is the great great adventure of becoming and we are very very privileged to be in this
01:21:33 ►
final ticking out of the last seconds of the third act. And in case you have been wondering for some
01:21:42 ►
time exactly what Terence means when he speaks of the other,
01:21:46 ►
in addition to the little bits that I just now played,
01:21:50 ►
you’ll also hear him very directly defining the other as he then understands it.
01:21:55 ►
Actually, I don’t know how I missed that before, because it really pins some things down for me.
01:22:01 ►
And hopefully it’ll do the same for you if you take the time to re-listen
01:22:05 ►
to that wonderful talk.
01:22:07 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:22:09 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:22:12 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.