Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The great emphasis for the fall into history is this broken connection with this Mind in nature.”
“We can move no faster than the envelope of language which we generate to describe our journey.”
“We need to take the engineering of our language seriously.”
“The poverty of our language, that it’s such a low-grade signal, that we’re using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people. And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently helped us all that much.”
“I heard the electronic media described as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light.”
“And somewhere in between eloquence and poetry there is a side tree into demagoguery, which you have to watch out for.”
“I think the whole thing about psychedelics is that they synergize cognition, and that cognition allows us to image each other and to understand each other.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And as our long time fellow salonners here can tell the newcomers,
00:00:29 ►
I’ve, well, I’ve probably played Terrence McKenna a little too much over the last ten and a half years now.
00:00:35 ►
Well over 200 times.
00:00:38 ►
But as you will soon hear, by early 1991,
00:00:42 ►
Terrence himself was beginning to get a little tired of talking mainly about psychoactive substances,
00:00:49 ►
you know, where they came from and how to use them.
00:00:51 ►
And so today, you’re going to hear Terence confronting that fact himself,
00:00:56 ►
and then branching off into what over time became a new tangent for him.
00:01:01 ►
By February of 1991, some people were coming back to Terrence’s workshop simply to find out what’s new. At least that was the case on the West Coast at places like Esalen. But for what it’s worth, news about this guy named Terrence McKenna had not really reached more than a handful of people on the East Coast by then.
00:01:27 ►
by then. It wasn’t until Zandor interviewed Terence for Mondo 2000 sometime in 1993 that I first learned about him. But out on the west coast, well, Terence was already quite well known.
00:01:33 ►
In fact, the lady who is now my wife began attending his lectures as far back as 1983,
00:01:39 ►
an entire decade before I even heard his name. So that should give you a little idea of how different the culture is on the two coasts of this country.
00:01:50 ►
And as you listen to Terence talking about various psychedelics,
00:01:54 ►
keep in mind that back when he was giving this talk,
00:01:56 ►
there was next to nothing available other than his lectures
00:02:00 ►
in the way of literature or recorded information about substances such as ayahuasca,
00:02:06 ►
for example. There were scholarly texts here and there, but as far as I know, when Terence gave the
00:02:12 ►
talk that we are about to listen to, the only information about ayahuasca in the popular press
00:02:17 ►
was William Burroughs’ Yahé letters, which didn’t exactly present a very positive picture about that substance.
00:02:26 ►
So let’s see what the state of psychedelic information was like back then
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as we join Terrence McKenna and a small group of friends
00:02:34 ►
for a weekend of mind candy in the early winter of 1991.
00:02:40 ►
This is the first time I’ve been at Esalen this year,
00:02:46 ►
and by my way of counting decades, that means it’s the time in the new decade.
00:02:52 ►
And I’ve been away from the part of my life that means traveling for about four months.
00:02:59 ►
And always in that period, I try to think about what I’m doing and how the rap is evolving and the world and the tension between these things.
00:03:11 ►
And, you know, Leo came to see what’s new.
00:03:17 ►
This is a question that I ask myself about this rap, is what’s new.
00:03:24 ►
And then there’s always a tension between people who say
00:03:27 ►
i i don’t know very much about you and then the faces i recognize who i know can deliver this
00:03:34 ►
stuff chapter and verse the same intonation and the same inflection you. And they must greet the other characters with sinking hearts because
00:03:48 ►
then we’re going to go all the way back and start from the beginning. Because part of
00:03:56 ►
what I do is I try to lead people’s attention to the psychedelic experience through traditional shamanic use of visionary plans.
00:04:11 ►
And that has become, it’s my life’s enthusiasm.
00:04:16 ►
But it’s become more and more for me
00:04:19 ►
a kind of public service work almost because I don’t think anybody should go to the grave without
00:04:32 ►
having a psychedelic experience I think that’s an obscene thing to contemplate you know that
00:04:38 ►
it’s just like part of living you know you do certain things and that’s one of them and you can reject it or embrace it, but you know, you do know about these things. And so that’s this generalized
00:04:53 ►
thing which I can lead people to and that I know a lot about, the botany, the chemistry,
00:05:02 ►
the ethnography, the neurophysiology, the history, all of this stuff,
00:05:07 ►
because this is just what my intellectual life has been. And then there’s this other thing
00:05:13 ►
which become, which is, I have a different relationship to, and I’m much less certain of, but I enjoy more.
00:05:31 ►
And that’s sort of the what I think’s happening end of things. And it’s pure and simple, a kind of ego trip,
00:05:36 ►
because it’s just model making about reality.
00:05:41 ►
But for me, the psychedelic experience didn’t stop at the water’s edge of psychotherapy
00:05:50 ►
it seems instead to have like expanded to fill all intellectual space so that it has become
00:06:01 ►
literally an explanation for everything and has embedded within it explanations for everything.
00:06:11 ►
So instead of just taking the psychedelic experience
00:06:15 ►
and attempting to integrate it personally and therapeutically,
00:06:32 ►
and therapeutically, I’ve tended to emphasize the global, historical, and group impact of what it is.
00:06:37 ►
And then that casts me in the role, I mean, I shudder that the word should pass my lips, but the role of a kind of a philosopher, a kind of a gadfly, a social critic, somebody who’s standing off and looking
00:06:48 ►
at what’s happening to the world. And this has led me to this notion of what I call the
00:06:57 ►
archaic revival, that we can understand a structure as complex and chaotic as the 20th century, let us say,
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if we have recourse to an overarching metaphor that I call the archaic revival.
00:07:17 ►
It’s a very simple notion.
00:07:20 ►
It’s that when a society slams into some kind of wall, when a society becomes unraveled because the conditions upon which it has been premised become so radically altered that they are unrecognizable,
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A society has a response, almost like a drowning man response. And the response is to reach back into time for the last steadying metaphor,
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the last moment when everything made sense.
00:07:59 ►
Now we have a beautiful textbook example of this embedded in Western history
00:08:05 ►
where as the medieval world
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began to crack up
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under the emergence of mercantilism,
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secular centers of power,
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banking, and so forth,
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Western civilization reached backward
00:08:25 ►
into its own history
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seeking some kind of steadying metaphor
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and what they finally came to grips with
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or rested on
00:08:36 ►
were the metaphors of classicism
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Greek philosophy
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Roman law
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Roman architecture and so forth and so on.
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And the whole post-Renaissance pre-industrial world
00:08:53 ►
is the working out of the values of classicism,
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values that had been dead in the ground 1,500 years at that point,
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in the ground 1,500 years at that point,
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but revivified and brought forward to create the secular world of modernity
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with its values of democracy and so forth and so on.
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Now, in the 20th century,
00:09:18 ►
the crisis is much more profound
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and the values that we have to reach back to are so ancient that they cannot be found
00:09:31 ►
in the historical continuum at all they are prehistoric they are archaic and this then
00:09:40 ►
is an effort to explain the 20th century. It’s larger than the New Age,
00:09:46 ►
larger than the psychedelic movement of the 60s.
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The entirety of the 20th century
00:09:52 ►
has gone on under the aegis of this archaic revival.
00:09:59 ►
It begins with Freud and Jung,
00:10:01 ►
or earlier with Impressionism.
00:10:04 ►
It works its way up through Abstract Expressionism.
00:10:09 ►
And it has positive and negative manifestations.
00:10:13 ►
Fascism is a negative manifestation.
00:10:16 ►
But it’s the shattering of the linear image inherited from print.
00:10:21 ►
inherited from print,
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the tremendous impact that primitive art had on Cubism
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and this sort of thing
00:10:30 ►
in the teens and twenties of this century.
00:10:33 ►
This is a revitalization of Western values
00:10:39 ►
by a bringing forward of the archaic values.
00:10:44 ►
At the center of the archaic values. At the center of these archaic values is the institution of shamanism
00:10:52 ►
as brilliantly described and delineated by Mercier Léod, for example.
00:11:02 ►
Merci Eliade, for example.
00:11:05 ►
And at the center of shamanism is this hallucinogenic, psychedelic encounter
00:11:13 ►
with a vegetable intelligence of some sort.
00:11:20 ►
And this is confounding to science.
00:11:26 ►
Science as presently constituted cannot handle this kind of a notion.
00:11:33 ►
And yet it is an experience upon which shamanism is based.
00:11:40 ►
But that’s remote news because who among us can claim credentials in that fraternity.
00:11:46 ►
But it’s also an accessible experience within the confines of the modern encounter with psychedelics.
00:11:57 ►
And this is, it was that experience really that set me on my career as you see me before you because
00:12:07 ►
I just couldn’t believe such a thing was possible you don’t have to be a believer
00:12:14 ►
you can come with all the equipment of rational skepticism and reductionism and
00:12:23 ►
still if you’re willing to connect the pieces together
00:12:27 ►
in the right order, you know, the angel will appear.
00:12:33 ►
And this is really confounding
00:12:38 ►
because, first of all, if the paradigms of our society,
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if the paradigms of our society such as science
00:12:46 ►
and these huge edifices of intellectual energy
00:12:50 ►
that have been erected
00:12:52 ►
are to be challenged
00:12:53 ►
we each I think expect them to be challenged
00:12:57 ►
somewhere far from where we are
00:13:00 ►
like at the mass accelerator
00:13:04 ►
in Batavia, Illinois on the dark side of venus
00:13:09 ►
these are the places where we expect the scientific paradigm to break down in the heart of the sun
00:13:16 ►
or in the first milliseconds of the universe’s existence you don’t expect the paradigms of
00:13:23 ►
science to break down in your own backyard on a Saturday night simply because you’ve eaten a mushroom, you know.
00:13:32 ►
But they’re more fragile than we thought, apparently.
00:13:39 ►
I heard Tim Leary recently say all natural laws are simply local ordinances. There’s truth
00:13:49 ►
to that. The problem is I think Einstein beat him to it. So to my mind, the way in which
00:13:58 ►
the psychedelic experience transcends the therapeutic dimension, is that it actually had some kind of special, intimate role
00:14:10 ►
in human emergence
00:14:14 ►
and in the relation of human beings to nature in prehistory.
00:14:20 ►
You see, there’s a mystery on this planet,
00:14:27 ►
and it literally is a mystery. you have to go in like a detective
00:14:29 ►
and look at the scene of the crime
00:14:32 ►
and try and figure out what the hell happened here
00:14:35 ►
apparently there was a population of monkeys
00:14:39 ►
and then
00:14:41 ►
without anybody knowing what happened, there emerged tool using, language using, cognition projecting animals of a whole different sort. And then why did the forward progression of the epigenetic breakthrough,
00:15:10 ►
because that’s what it was,
00:15:12 ►
suddenly there was coding, there were alphabets, there was language.
00:15:17 ►
These are epigenetic phenomena, means not coded into the genes.
00:15:21 ►
But why has the epigenetic breakthrough been such a bummer?
00:15:28 ►
Why has it led into greater and greater cruelty,
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greater and greater disconnection from the earth,
00:15:39 ►
sexism, racism, you name it?
00:15:44 ►
sexism, racism, you name it.
00:15:50 ►
Now see, we come out of a fairly rasty line. If you look back through the primate line,
00:15:54 ►
the phenomena of male dominance
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and hierarchical organization
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and stuff like that
00:16:03 ►
reaches right through the hominoid line back into the higher
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primates we have always been in this bad way at least this is what the primatologists tell us
00:16:19 ►
but i think not i think that during the last
00:16:27 ►
million years and because of pressure on
00:16:33 ►
us to expand our diet from an arboreal
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fruit oriented diet into an omnivorous
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diet that included meat because of that
00:16:44 ►
pressure to expand diet,
00:16:47 ►
we were exposed to all kinds of mutagenic chemicals.
00:16:53 ►
Not only hallucinogens, but growth hormones, galactagogues,
00:17:00 ►
these are compounds which promote milk production,
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contraceptives of various sorts, a whole spectrum of tertiary alkaloids and amines that are produced by plants in the environment for rapid natural selection on the numerous sportings,
00:17:28 ►
the numerous mutations
00:17:29 ►
that were being cast up by this process.
00:17:33 ►
Food is the key to the human emergent scenario.
00:17:38 ►
Well, then in there you have drugs,
00:17:43 ►
hallucinogens specifically. Originally they were called consciousness have drugs. Hallucinogens specifically. Originally
00:17:46 ►
they were called consciousness
00:17:47 ►
expanding drugs.
00:17:49 ►
Well, you can imagine
00:17:51 ►
what a premium
00:17:53 ►
consciousness would have been
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at in this
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highly competitive
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welt environment
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when all of these
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ungulate mammals and hunting mammals were coming together and
00:18:09 ►
establishing niches in the newly emergent African grassland. And I think then that a kind of miracle
00:18:19 ►
occurred. It was not symbiosis as biologists know it, where genes of two organisms lock into each
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other and become codependent for millions and millions of years. It was not that. But it was
00:18:38 ►
a flirtation with symbiosis. It was that the mushroom-human interaction,
00:18:48 ►
which was also mediated by cattle
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because this was a situation of nomadic pastoralism,
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the mushroom-human interaction
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caused a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops.
00:19:05 ►
And those loops led directly into the production of what we call humanness.
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And it’s very easy to understand how this occurred.
00:19:16 ►
It’s like so.
00:19:18 ►
The point is here that encounter with a food item caused a series of very natural actions and reactions
00:19:30 ►
which had the quality of reinforcing conscious self-reflection.
00:19:38 ►
Broca’s area, which is the language-forming portion of the brain
00:19:43 ►
or thought to be implicated in language formation in the brain
00:19:47 ►
is extremely stimulated by psilocybin
00:19:52 ►
and people who take psilocybin
00:19:56 ►
sometimes fall into spontaneous states of glossolalia
00:20:00 ►
language like vocalization
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where there is syntactical structure in the absence of assigned meaning.
00:20:09 ►
It’s almost as though, you know, language was, the precondition for language was in the human organism and then this brought it out the descent the early descent of the soft palate in the human
00:20:26 ►
fetus is something which happens in the fetal form of no other primate and seems
00:20:34 ►
to indicate a specific mutation towards the the formation of speech that is less than a million years old. So, see, I want to account for everything.
00:20:52 ►
I want to understand how it comes
00:20:55 ►
that out of animal and mammalian organization
00:20:59 ►
can come a minded species
00:21:02 ►
that over a span of time as brief as 10,000 years
00:21:07 ►
can go from a technology on the edge of the Neolithic
00:21:12 ►
to a technology on the edge of the solar system.
00:21:16 ►
And it is a phenomenon of mind.
00:21:21 ►
It is mind in action that we are witnessing. Now it’s a curious
00:21:28 ►
peculiarity of our own society that the great catalysts of mind, the psychedelic plants,
00:21:39 ►
are for us taboo. So we have to undergo the greatest intellectual transformation
00:21:47 ►
in the history of the planet, literally,
00:21:51 ►
in a stance of guilt, uncertainty,
00:21:56 ►
and looking over our shoulder over this issue of mind.
00:22:01 ►
Mind is a taboo thing to us.
00:22:03 ►
We found religions to it. We outlaw its expressions. We
00:22:08 ►
dance around it. It just drives us crazy. We don’t know what to do with it. Well, I guess
00:22:16 ►
my notion is, and it’s, I can’t, I mean, I’m forced to this position by the evidence.
00:22:27 ►
I feel no natural affinity to such an airy-fairy point of view.
00:22:35 ►
But what I’ve been forced to conclude is
00:22:39 ►
that there actually is a mind with which we share this planet. I mean the details don’t press
00:22:48 ►
me because after all I’m only a monkey. But the great mystery of history and the great
00:22:57 ►
um, impetus for the fall into history is this broken connection
00:23:05 ►
with this mind in nature.
00:23:09 ►
And this is what all these yogans
00:23:11 ►
and religions and, you know,
00:23:14 ►
rishis and roshis and bikshus
00:23:17 ►
and bikshunis,
00:23:18 ►
this is what all the hollering is about,
00:23:21 ►
is that there is something going on.
00:23:24 ►
It isn’t entirely a con game. It’s not God Almighty.
00:23:29 ►
It’s not, you know, the force that hung the stars like lamps in heaven. It’s not that. But it is
00:23:36 ►
something is going on. Biology has more than one intelligent facet on this planet. And shamanism somehow found its way toward this.
00:23:49 ►
And 50,000, 150,000 years ago found a way into dialogue with this other mind.
00:24:00 ►
But it’s a fragile dialogue because the other mind is so alien.
00:24:04 ►
But it’s a fragile dialogue because the other mind is so alien and the rise of historical forces and styles of analysis
00:24:10 ►
unfriendly to mental phenomena
00:24:14 ►
have made it recede from us literally.
00:24:19 ►
And now it can only be found by going literally totally outside of this society.
00:24:28 ►
Now to find it, you must break the law.
00:24:31 ►
Within the confines of the law, it cannot be found.
00:24:36 ►
But if you’re willing to put the law behind you
00:24:39 ►
by flying to a country where the law does not pertain
00:24:43 ►
and then going to these so-called primitive people,
00:24:48 ►
what you discover is that while we have made the prodigal journey into history
00:24:55 ►
with smart bombs and high-definition television and all that,
00:24:59 ►
in the remote corners of the earth, in the rainforests and tundra lands of this planet,
00:25:06 ►
this Paleolithic secret has been kept.
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It still exists.
00:25:13 ►
It’s not like the pablum that we are sold as spiritually integrated realities.
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It is in fact the real thing.
00:25:31 ►
And somehow it’s important for the historical crisis that we’re in.
00:25:41 ►
that we’re in.
00:25:47 ►
The more I see of shamanism and of the interior realities
00:25:50 ►
that these plants reveal,
00:25:53 ►
the more I’ve come to see
00:25:55 ►
that the real nature of reality
00:25:57 ►
is that of a tale.
00:26:00 ►
It’s a story of some sort.
00:26:03 ►
It isn’t the spin, charge, and angular momentum of hurrying electric necessity
00:26:13 ►
that we inherit from 19th century physicalism.
00:26:19 ►
It isn’t that at all.
00:26:21 ►
It’s a story. And somehow the collectivity
00:26:26 ►
of humanity, of human life,
00:26:31 ►
is telling this story.
00:26:34 ►
And it’s a Perils of Pauline kind of thing.
00:26:38 ►
You know, we are at the ninth hour.
00:26:41 ►
The dear lady is strapped to the railroad tracks.
00:26:53 ►
ninth hour the dear lady is strapped to the railroad tracks and I think that the answer lies in reconnecting the super hyper modern world with this mysterious world of this rainforest spirituality.
00:27:07 ►
And I don’t…
00:27:10 ►
My approach is phenomenological.
00:27:14 ►
I don’t say that this will make you a better person.
00:27:17 ►
I don’t say that this is the path that Buddha trod
00:27:23 ►
or that Alan Watts trod or that Buddha trod or that Alan Watts trod
00:27:26 ►
or that anybody trod.
00:27:27 ►
I’m just saying this is the most interesting thing
00:27:31 ►
I’ve ever encountered.
00:27:33 ►
It contravenes all expectation
00:27:36 ►
and most people, including myself,
00:27:39 ►
would never believe such a thing existed
00:27:42 ►
if they hadn’t had their nose rubbed in it.
00:27:47 ►
I cannot lose the conviction
00:27:49 ►
that it has something to do
00:27:52 ►
with the historical dilemma that we’re in,
00:27:55 ►
even though it has always existed.
00:28:00 ►
But the rediscovery of it by high-tech societies,
00:28:09 ►
by people such as ourselves, is pregnant with possibility.
00:28:21 ►
And it is not, I’m convinced, from a fairly long amount of time spent actually hanging out with some of these folks in their scenes,
00:28:28 ►
it is not that we are returning to a completed font of ancient wisdom.
00:28:31 ►
It isn’t that somebody knows what’s going on and we have to go to them
00:28:33 ►
and then it’ll be laid out.
00:28:35 ►
It’s that we thought we knew
00:28:38 ►
what was going on
00:28:40 ►
and every other mature culture on the planet
00:28:44 ►
lives in the light of the truth
00:28:47 ►
that nobody knows what is going on.
00:28:51 ►
Shamanism as I have encountered it
00:28:53 ►
is entirely open-ended and experimental.
00:28:55 ►
Where shamanism is driven by ritual and taboo
00:29:01 ►
and that sort of thing,
00:29:02 ►
it isn’t shamanism.
00:29:04 ►
It’s religion and it’s decadent
00:29:07 ►
and it’s useless as far as I’m concerned.
00:29:10 ►
Shamanism is the tradition of science
00:29:15 ►
before there was the division
00:29:19 ►
between the inside and the outside,
00:29:22 ►
before there was the division
00:29:24 ►
between the observer and the outside. Before there was the division between the observer and the observed.
00:29:27 ►
When you simply worked on the primum materia of being in the world, which was both yourself
00:29:36 ►
being in the world and then whatever else was in your immediate environment. Science has, it’s a weird
00:29:48 ►
tear because the price of
00:29:52 ►
power is metaphors which nobody can understand.
00:29:57 ►
I mean, we are all imprisoned by this.
00:29:59 ►
There may be some pretty bright people in this room. I dare say there’s nobody
00:30:04 ►
in here who could build a TV set from scratch,
00:30:07 ►
and that’s just a throwaway object in our society.
00:30:12 ►
So, you know, we don’t have what used to be called understanding.
00:30:18 ►
We assume that it is on deposit somewhere,
00:30:22 ►
but we don’t carry it around with us
00:30:25 ►
the way people used to do.
00:30:29 ►
Well, yeah, it’s like the American economy.
00:30:33 ►
So basically this is the venue
00:30:36 ►
or this is the area in which we’ll play
00:30:39 ►
talking about culture
00:30:42 ►
as a potentially transformable medium.
00:30:47 ►
Talking about mind as a kind of field in transformation.
00:30:57 ►
Something on its march through matter,
00:31:00 ►
through the monkeys, and on Lord knows whither. And we, as witnesses to this, I think
00:31:10 ►
that, you know, what people seem to lack is larger and larger views of where they stand
00:31:20 ►
in the cosmos, correctly nested and lined up for them
00:31:25 ►
so that they get a correct sense of scale and importance,
00:31:31 ►
which does not mean that you end up
00:31:34 ►
by reducing the human being to a gnat,
00:31:38 ►
because that’s not the correct proportion
00:31:41 ►
of a human being in this universe. We now know enough about the complexity of the human
00:31:50 ►
brain to replace the human being at the center of a cosmos of complexity. This is where human beings stand at the apex of creation,
00:32:07 ►
is in the realm of complexity.
00:32:11 ►
And somehow I connect the simple cybernetic notion of complexity
00:32:18 ►
into Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of novelty and see complexity not simply as a kind of
00:32:28 ►
ramifying of detail that is ultimately a gridlock,
00:32:34 ►
but rather out of complexity
00:32:37 ►
emerges new states of order.
00:32:40 ►
Novelty, the precondition for the emergence of novelty
00:32:44 ►
is complexity. I was with Al Wong last
00:32:48 ►
week at a meeting and he said, crisis means opportunity. And it does because it means
00:33:01 ►
bifurcation along the many world lines of possibility.
00:33:06 ►
Crisis means opportunity.
00:33:09 ►
Novelty will often come
00:33:11 ►
in the form of crisis.
00:33:14 ►
But what novelty always leads toward
00:33:17 ►
is some kind of greater knitting together.
00:33:22 ►
And because now we do not speak to each other
00:33:26 ►
under the normal conditions
00:33:28 ►
of discourse, now we speak to each
00:33:30 ►
other in a situation of
00:33:32 ►
war, so I
00:33:34 ►
think it would be interesting this
00:33:36 ►
weekend to spend more
00:33:38 ►
time trying to
00:33:40 ►
invoke the
00:33:42 ►
feeling
00:33:43 ►
of the topological manifold
00:33:46 ►
of the history to come
00:33:51 ►
and recently around us.
00:33:53 ►
Because from my point of view,
00:33:56 ►
there’s no surprises
00:33:57 ►
in what’s going on.
00:33:59 ►
There’s tragedy,
00:34:01 ►
but there’s no surprises.
00:34:04 ►
And there’s a way of looking at the future that will insulate you
00:34:10 ►
against uh against further disappointment in the short run because it isn’t that the gates
00:34:19 ►
are swinging open toward elysium. Not yet. Not yet.
00:34:27 ►
Eventually, but not yet.
00:34:30 ►
And the, you know, timing is everything.
00:34:34 ►
The curse of prematurity is… I can talk about that, but another time.
00:34:41 ►
Yeah.
00:34:41 ►
I want to do a little something on history as the shockwave
00:34:45 ►
of eschatology
00:34:46 ►
oh I think before we’re through
00:34:48 ►
history is the shockwave of eschatology
00:34:52 ►
will be covered up one side
00:34:54 ►
and down the other
00:34:55 ►
ordinarily eschatology
00:35:02 ►
refers to the branch of theology
00:35:06 ►
that deals with the last things, the end of the world,
00:35:11 ►
the final unraveling.
00:35:13 ►
I guess esch must be the Greek prefix for dealing with the end.
00:35:21 ►
In Christian theology, there is this notion of what’s called the eschaton
00:35:27 ►
the eschaton is the second coming
00:35:30 ►
but it’s also the general judgment
00:35:32 ►
and I like this idea
00:35:36 ►
although I’m not that fond of Christian hermeneutics
00:35:40 ►
I do like the idea of an attractor
00:35:43 ►
at the end of the historical process that’s pulling everything toward it.
00:35:51 ►
I use the word eschatology a lot, and maybe with equal frequency the word ontology,
00:36:01 ►
which refers to how we know things.
00:36:04 ►
Ontos is knowing. Ontology is the study to how we know things. Ontos is knowing.
00:36:06 ►
Ontology is the study of how we know.
00:36:10 ►
And if I say that there needs to be,
00:36:13 ►
like if there’s an ontological division between things,
00:36:17 ►
it means never the twain shall meet.
00:36:20 ►
I mean, they’re like fire and water.
00:36:22 ►
They have an ontological distinction.
00:36:26 ►
Okay.
00:36:27 ►
Well, I realized that I hadn’t really introduced myself.
00:36:31 ►
I was so involved in getting it all run through.
00:36:36 ►
So I thought, for those who are unfamiliar with all this,
00:36:40 ►
that I should introduce myself.
00:36:43 ►
It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing.
00:36:47 ►
Why, I don’t know. But I started out as an art historian with a focus in Asian languages.
00:37:01 ►
And I got out of that because I discovered I couldn’t really learn these Asian languages
00:37:06 ►
to the sufficient facility that would be necessary for a life of scholarship in all of that.
00:37:14 ►
And as a child, my thing was a certain kind of thrill,
00:37:24 ►
a certain kind of thrill,
00:37:26 ►
a certain iridescence that I chased through many different venues.
00:37:31 ►
I mean, it began with,
00:37:33 ►
well, I don’t know what it began with,
00:37:36 ►
but you cut into it with fossil collecting
00:37:40 ►
and then butterfly collecting
00:37:43 ►
and then in the protophalic phase rocket manufacture
00:37:50 ►
which occupied me for several very dangerous years but i was lucky to survive and and i think
00:38:00 ►
after rockets came jackson pollock and it was just one thing after another.
00:38:06 ►
And when I look at leading ultimately to, for me, psychedelics,
00:38:11 ►
which were the quintessence of what I had been seeking
00:38:15 ►
in all these other things, in science fiction,
00:38:19 ►
in insect collecting, all of these things.
00:38:23 ►
insect collecting, all of these things.
00:38:32 ►
It was a kind of edge, a kind of opening into a world that I had really come to believe didn’t exist
00:38:35 ►
because I was raised in the Midwest, in western Colorado,
00:38:42 ►
in the Sputnik era.
00:38:49 ►
Midwest in western Colorado in the Sputnik era. If you had talked to me in 1960, I probably wanted to be the world’s first Marxist astronautical engineer or, you know, something like that. And so for me, the psychedelic experience was this unexpected encounter with a grail that I had given up on.
00:39:14 ►
And I was deep into, you know, existential philosophy and that French writer who lived in prison all his life. I read a lot of writers
00:39:28 ►
who never got let out of prison, I remember. It was all very, you know, grim and claustrophobic.
00:39:35 ►
And then, you know, I was swept along with the energies of my generation. And I had the good fortune to go to the University of California at Berkeley
00:39:48 ►
in the fall of 1965.
00:39:52 ►
And it was just like being a little iron particle
00:39:56 ►
being drawn into the black hole of the cultural furnace
00:40:02 ►
that was forging the metaphors of at least the decade, if not
00:40:07 ►
the millennium. And all of these things were there. And I saw then, it was weird, it was
00:40:17 ►
a strange disjuncture, because at the same time that i was rejecting then under the influence of psychedelics
00:40:27 ►
and radical politics rejecting uh western values politics civilization i was also for the first
00:40:36 ►
time having it come within my reach because you know i came from a town where for excitement
00:40:43 ►
people would go down to the five and ten and watch them unpack crates on Saturday nights.
00:40:49 ►
I mean, that was the big thing of the week.
00:40:52 ►
So, you know, so here then it’s like in the Bob Dylan song, you know,
00:41:01 ►
with, who is it, with the professors you have discussed,
00:41:05 ►
great lawyers and crooks, something like that.
00:41:09 ►
And so I got, in the act of passing through the university,
00:41:14 ►
you know, a keen sense of Western institutions and the crisis that they were in.
00:41:21 ►
And I took that with me to India and Nepal,
00:41:26 ►
where I was looking at Buddhist shamanism,
00:41:30 ►
and then later to the Amazon.
00:41:33 ►
And I discovered, basically, I gave you the punchline last night,
00:41:39 ►
that the reality is in this archaic dimension
00:41:43 ►
that we have drifted so far from.
00:41:47 ►
I don’t find it in any of the religious declensions out of that,
00:41:52 ►
even the ones that have very good public relations,
00:41:55 ►
such as yoga, for instance, and stuff like that.
00:41:59 ►
I mean, it’s thin soup compared to, you know,
00:42:03 ►
the 100,000 volt spiritual energy that was flowing in the late Paleolithic.
00:42:11 ►
So then my, you know, there were many adventures and many travelings and a lot of weird knocking around
00:42:21 ►
because it took me a long time to grow up.
00:42:24 ►
In fact, I only now
00:42:26 ►
got a reasonable shot at it, I think. But I became convinced. I went to the Amazon,
00:42:35 ►
searched through Asia, was not satisfied with that spiritual offering. Went to the Amazon and there discovered that these traditions,
00:42:47 ►
these dimensions are still being accessed.
00:42:53 ►
But the Amazon is caught in a cultural crisis,
00:42:58 ►
just like the rest of the planet.
00:43:00 ►
You all are extremely over-informed, I’m sure,
00:43:05 ►
on the crisis engulfing the world’s rainforests.
00:43:09 ►
But what is never said
00:43:11 ►
along with that is that even if
00:43:15 ►
the World Wildlife Fund
00:43:18 ►
and the IMF and all of these people
00:43:21 ►
actually get their ducks in a row
00:43:24 ►
and save the world’s rainforests.
00:43:27 ►
They will not save the human ethnomedical information
00:43:32 ►
that has been gathered over the past 100,000 years
00:43:37 ►
because that’s all oral information
00:43:40 ►
and it’s not being handed on.
00:43:43 ►
People are going off to work in sawmills and
00:43:46 ►
wait tables and guide tours, and nobody is picking up on this stuff. And this is not a
00:43:53 ►
noble savage rap or some kind of sob sister thing about the nobility of tribal peoples. It’s a hard fact that like 85% of the prescription medicines
00:44:09 ►
in general medical use today are plant-derived drugs of some sort.
00:44:16 ►
I mean, I could say that by destroying this Amazon medical knowledge,
00:44:21 ►
we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, but it’s more serious than that. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot but it’s more serious than that we’re shooting
00:44:25 ►
ourselves in the head so the my my real world political ambitions boiled down to trying to save
00:44:35 ►
that information and this handout you got this morning is the result of that. We bought land in Hawaii,
00:44:46 ►
incorporated as a 501c3,
00:44:48 ►
bought more land,
00:44:49 ►
and our hobby,
00:44:51 ►
and by we I mean my wife Kat and I,
00:44:53 ►
she really runs this on a day-to-day basis.
00:44:59 ►
We try to save plants
00:45:01 ►
with a history of medical importance
00:45:06 ►
in tribal culture.
00:45:10 ►
And then that’s pretty much the goal.
00:45:13 ►
Somebody else has to take the ball from there.
00:45:18 ►
Homeopaths, drug companies, we’re trying not to be judgmental.
00:45:23 ►
We just don’t want the germplasm of this stuff to fall away. Well, I mention it because that’s the physical foundation of all the other ideas that I put out.
00:45:37 ►
It’s the idea that the most important thing to be preserved is this connection with the plants
00:45:45 ►
connection back into nature
00:45:48 ►
this is what is being stretched
00:45:49 ►
to the breaking point
00:45:51 ►
and if sufficiently interrupted
00:45:54 ►
the whole
00:45:55 ►
human
00:45:57 ►
mega system
00:45:59 ►
will become toxic and go critical
00:46:02 ►
and we have no idea
00:46:03 ►
how close we are
00:46:05 ►
to the cusp of this event
00:46:08 ►
because it isn’t a scenario
00:46:11 ►
where things get gradually worse and worse
00:46:13 ►
we’re in that scenario
00:46:15 ►
it’s that out ahead somewhere there’s a drop off
00:46:20 ►
there’s a cusp where the combined effect
00:46:23 ►
of all this wrong headedness takes a sudden quantum leap in its expression.
00:46:31 ►
And at that point, you know, it may be irreversible.
00:46:35 ►
We don’t know how much time we have.
00:46:40 ►
And people say to me, you know, well, why psychedelics?
00:46:44 ►
Why is that so important?
00:46:48 ►
It arises out of my sense of urgency
00:46:51 ►
that there may be a smorgasbord of solutions to the human dilemma
00:46:58 ►
if you assume a millennium,
00:47:01 ►
and then fewer if you assume 500 years.
00:47:05 ►
But I assume less than 50 years
00:47:08 ►
because I think there’s just, you know,
00:47:12 ►
business as usual in all dimensions,
00:47:16 ►
resource extraction, toxification,
00:47:20 ►
nuclear proliferation,
00:47:22 ►
spread of infectious disease, so forth and so on.
00:47:25 ►
Business as usual is the most catastrophic scenario you can imagine.
00:47:30 ►
You just have to extrapolate these trends 15 years into the future
00:47:34 ►
and you get a future none of us would want to live in.
00:47:41 ►
Well, so I thought then this morning, because of the interest expressed by the group,
00:47:51 ►
that we could probably use a discussion about ayahuasca as a kind of a bridge to many of these
00:48:00 ►
other issues. Some people don’t know what ayahuasca is. Some people are keenly interested. Some people’s interest is personal
00:48:06 ►
in that they’re going to take it
00:48:09 ►
and they view it as an experience
00:48:11 ►
that lies ahead of them
00:48:12 ►
and what should they think about that.
00:48:14 ►
I’m interested in all of that,
00:48:17 ►
but I’m also interested in studying it,
00:48:20 ►
talking about it for the issues it raises
00:48:23 ►
about psychedelics generally in culture.
00:48:27 ►
And it’s a good one because there’s a confluence of stuff happening there.
00:48:34 ►
First of all, let me give you the basic facts.
00:48:38 ►
Ayahuasca is a Quechua word.
00:48:41 ►
It means vine of the dead. It is used to refer to a huge jungle liana, a woody
00:48:49 ►
epiphyte of the Malfugaceae called Banisteriopsis capi. And this plant was first described to science
00:48:58 ►
in 1853 by Richard Spruce. And throughout the upper Amazon basin of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru
00:49:06 ►
this plant is boiled
00:49:11 ►
or sometimes merely used
00:49:13 ►
in a cold water infusion
00:49:14 ►
almost always in the combination
00:49:17 ►
with one other plant
00:49:19 ►
to produce a beverage, a drink
00:49:23 ►
that is, if made properly, extremely hallucinogenic
00:49:29 ►
and is the basis for a shamanism over a very wide area in South America,
00:49:37 ►
both the indigenous tribal shamanism and the mestizo shamanism
00:49:43 ►
that has arisen in the populations that have moved up these rivers.
00:49:47 ►
Well, there are several things interesting about ayahuasca.
00:49:51 ►
First of all, from a chemical point of view, what it is, is the Banisteriopsis capi contains beta-carbolines,
00:50:01 ►
such as haramine, harmaline, tetrahydroharman.
00:50:06 ►
And they are, while themselves hallucinogenic at high doses,
00:50:11 ►
they’re not being utilized as hallucinogens in this brew.
00:50:15 ►
They are instead acting as MAO inhibitors, monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
00:50:22 ►
They are inhibiting the monoamine oxidase system in the gut so that the
00:50:28 ►
chemical constituent of the second plant is able to survive passage through the gut and enter the
00:50:36 ►
bloodstream. And the constituent of the second plant is DMT or dimethyltryptamine. Normally this is a compound that has to be smoked to be active,
00:50:48 ►
but the inhibition of the MAO makes it active orally, so it becomes an orally active hallucinogen.
00:50:56 ►
Well, the first thing to say about this is we’re dealing in a realm of extremely sophisticated pharmacological theory where a compound normally destroyed in the stomach
00:51:08 ►
is made absorbable in the intestine
00:51:12 ►
by being complexed with a second compound
00:51:16 ►
which suppresses an enzyme system.
00:51:19 ►
I mean, Western pharmacology didn’t get to this kind of thinking
00:51:22 ►
until the 1950s.
00:51:23 ►
These people have been doing it since the year zero.
00:51:28 ►
Second thing interesting about ayahuasca is that when you carry out an exhaustive survey of the constituents of ordinary brain metabolism in human beings,
00:51:43 ►
you discover both these compounds present in ordinary metabolism.
00:51:48 ►
In other words, this is not so much an invasive compound coming in from the outside as it is
00:51:56 ►
a metabolite. What ayahuasca is, is actually a soup of human neurometabolites
00:52:05 ►
that are going to shift the ordinary ratios of DMT, serotonin, and beta-carbolines in the brain.
00:52:15 ►
So in a way, it’s unlike any other drug because it’s entirely composed of neurotransmitters
00:52:25 ►
what else is interesting
00:52:27 ►
about it? What caught
00:52:29 ►
the eye of these
00:52:31 ►
early ethnographers
00:52:33 ►
was the persistent
00:52:35 ►
reports among these tribal people
00:52:38 ►
that
00:52:39 ►
ayahuasca induced
00:52:41 ►
states of telepathy
00:52:43 ►
and in fact up until 19, I believe, well, no, no.
00:52:49 ►
In 1923, Hochstein and Paradis, two European chemists,
00:52:54 ►
characterized the alkaloid in ayahuasca.
00:52:57 ►
And they actually named it telepathy.
00:53:00 ►
And it was carried on the books as telepathy until the 1940s when it was realized that harming a compound previously isolated from a giant Syrian roo was the same compound.
00:53:16 ►
And then by the rules of nomenclature, that name took precedent.
00:53:20 ►
But it was for a while called telepathy.
00:53:23 ►
Well, what about this? This is very interesting to me. It’s subtle. It’s hard to analyze. Telepathy is something which happens within a domain of shared language ordinarily.
00:54:10 ►
ordinarily. I’ve taken ayahuasca numbers of times with people in these native settings, and there is a kind of processing of group intention that I imagine is very impressive if you are, if you share, you know, if you’re part of a tribe of 70 people that has hunted, traveled, and died with each other for your whole lifetime.
00:54:12 ►
And then you take this stuff.
00:54:15 ►
I imagine you’re pretty well melded together. And it’s the notion that the elders of the tribe get together under situations of social stress.
00:54:23 ►
And then they take the ayahuasca
00:54:25 ►
and they see what is to be done.
00:54:28 ►
If it’s a matter of moving the hunting ground,
00:54:32 ►
retracting hostilities from some other group,
00:54:37 ►
moving up a river, this is the kind of thing.
00:54:40 ►
Well, if you think about shamanism,
00:54:42 ►
it has always been about these group dynamical inputs from the environment. Primarily in many societies, a shaman is a weather predictor. And weather becomes very important because weather is impacting on the food production capacity of the group and all kinds of other things.
00:55:04 ►
on the food production capacity of the group and all kinds of other things.
00:55:14 ►
Then finally, and to my mind, the unique and promising aspect of this ayahuasca thing and what makes it unique among all the hallucinogens that I know
00:55:18 ►
is there is in the Amazon this folk notion of
00:55:26 ►
what is called an Icaro.
00:55:28 ►
I-C-A-R-O.
00:55:30 ►
Icaro. And an
00:55:32 ►
Icaro is a magical song.
00:55:35 ►
It’s something,
00:55:36 ►
it’s similar to the notion
00:55:37 ►
of the peyote song.
00:55:40 ►
That while intoxicated
00:55:42 ►
upon ayahuasca,
00:55:43 ►
you will be given a vocal empowering.
00:55:48 ►
But what’s interesting about these Icaros is that they are,
00:55:54 ►
within the context of the culture where this is going on,
00:55:58 ►
they are criticized as pictorial and sculptural compositions, not as music.
00:56:06 ►
In other words, this is sound which is designed for beholding, not for hearing.
00:56:15 ►
And I have seized upon this as possibly a tiny eye of a needle through which we might propel an entire global civilization
00:56:28 ►
to a new ontological order of language.
00:56:31 ►
Because what’s happening among these tribal people
00:56:35 ►
is that quite literally, language is beheld.
00:56:41 ►
It’s seen.
00:56:43 ►
Sound is used as the acoustical carrier wave
00:56:47 ►
for a visual impression.
00:56:52 ►
Now, there are different things to be said about this.
00:56:55 ►
First of all, it is, I think,
00:56:57 ►
probably a generalized characteristic
00:57:00 ►
of the unhistoricized or the unneuroticized human being
00:57:09 ►
that they are able to do this.
00:57:12 ►
That we’re talking here about a neuro-linguistic form of organization
00:57:19 ►
very close to the software level.
00:57:23 ►
In other words, potentially open to manipulation.
00:57:26 ►
McLuhan wrote a lot about how even within historical time,
00:57:33 ►
sensory ratios have shifted in European human beings.
00:57:38 ►
The famous story of how Thomas Aquinas was the only man in Europe
00:57:45 ►
of his era who could
00:57:47 ►
read without reading
00:57:49 ►
aloud and they would bring
00:57:51 ►
him books of scripture and open
00:57:53 ►
them before him and without making
00:57:55 ►
a sound he would stare into these
00:57:58 ►
books and then they would close
00:57:59 ►
them and question him about it
00:58:01 ►
and he knew what he had read
00:58:03 ►
and they just were knocked off their chairs by this
00:58:07 ►
McLuhan and Carpenter did studies in the 50s
00:58:12 ►
where they showed movies to Bushmen
00:58:17 ►
and everything was going along fine
00:58:20 ►
until somebody walks out of the frame
00:58:22 ►
and then just pandemonium breaks loose.
00:58:26 ►
What happened to this person?
00:58:29 ►
Where did they go?
00:58:30 ►
Are they all right?
00:58:32 ►
What does it mean to, you know, so forth and so on.
00:58:35 ►
And of course, the most famous episode of all,
00:58:38 ►
less approximately 500 years ago,
00:58:41 ►
the sudden crystallization of the ability to perceive
00:58:46 ►
perspective in Western painting, which was
00:58:49 ►
something that, you know, they’d been angling toward it
00:58:52 ►
for 250 years from
00:58:54 ►
Piero Dello de Francesca and Duccio
00:58:58 ►
and that crowd on until they got
00:59:01 ►
actually to Caravaggio
00:59:04 ►
and the perspectivists.
00:59:06 ►
There was this sense of this thing breaking through,
00:59:09 ►
and then it crystallized.
00:59:11 ►
Well, I, having gone to the Amazon,
00:59:15 ►
having experienced these visible acoustical states of mind,
00:59:21 ►
I’m wondering if this doesn’t indicate
00:59:25 ►
the human capacity
00:59:27 ►
for a kind of
00:59:29 ►
forced evolution of the
00:59:31 ►
language forming capacity
00:59:33 ►
and that this is what
00:59:35 ►
a large part of
00:59:37 ►
the culture crisis
00:59:39 ►
is about is that we can
00:59:41 ►
move no faster
00:59:43 ►
than the envelope of language which we generate to describe
00:59:48 ►
our journey and the propagation and evolution of language to this point has been left pretty much
00:59:55 ►
to grow like topsy nobody ever conceived of the design or nobody except fascists, I should say, ever conceived of extending the design process into language.
01:00:08 ►
And the fascist experiments in this direction
01:00:11 ►
were always for the purpose of channeling and narrowing thought,
01:00:16 ►
making certain things unthinkable.
01:00:19 ►
You know, if it’s unthinkable, you don’t even have a problem.
01:00:24 ►
This is, for instance, in the Brezhnev era,
01:00:28 ►
the way gay rights and homosexual rights were handled in the Soviet Union was
01:00:34 ►
there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union in those days.
01:00:39 ►
You make something a domain of impossibility and then it doesn’t exist as a problem. And one of them is the extreme, the poverty of our language, that it’s such a low-grade signal that we’re using small mouth noises transduced through acoustical space to try and coordinate a global population of six million people.
01:01:21 ►
And having media to change that into an electronic signal has not apparently
01:01:26 ►
helped us all that much last week i was in a meeting where i heard electronic media described
01:01:33 ►
as the ability to spread darkness at the speed of light
01:01:37 ►
i only wish i’d thought it up myself
01:01:47 ►
so
01:01:51 ►
for my money
01:01:54 ►
where the psychedelic impulse
01:01:56 ►
and the hyper technical impulse
01:01:59 ►
and the archaic revival
01:02:01 ►
all come together
01:02:02 ►
is in this idea
01:02:04 ►
of attempting to clean up our communications with
01:02:08 ►
each other and as a working engineering goal for that as we should attempt to be able to create a
01:02:16 ►
cultural space in which we can see what we mean this is why i’ve been willing to hang out with the virtual reality crowd, because I’ll grasp at straws, and that is a straw, believe me.
01:02:32 ►
But it’s the hope that we could walk in to our imaginations, show each other the confines of our minds. And we’re not, in doing this, creating a new technology.
01:02:47 ►
We’re creating an electronic imaging
01:02:50 ►
of what has always been what shamanism was doing.
01:02:55 ►
The problem for us in this society is that shamanism lies over the border of legality.
01:03:03 ►
So we have to, through a trick,
01:03:07 ►
a technological trick of smoke and mirrors,
01:03:10 ►
create accessibility to the dimension
01:03:12 ►
without trampling on the concerns of the constabulary.
01:03:17 ►
And, you know, we do this to the best of our abilities.
01:03:23 ►
Well, people who asked for ayahuasca, are we covering the
01:03:26 ►
waterfront on this?
01:03:28 ►
Yeah.
01:03:28 ►
What do you mean when you say visualize the sound?
01:03:32 ►
Well, it’s that
01:03:33 ►
there comes
01:03:36 ►
a point in the,
01:03:37 ►
I guess it must be in the linguistic
01:03:40 ►
processing. I mean, I’ve observed it
01:03:42 ►
in my own brain very, very
01:03:44 ►
carefully over and over again.
01:03:46 ►
And what it is, is you sit and you watch and the psychedelic molecules are accumulating at the
01:03:59 ►
synapse over a period of minutes. This is happening. First hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions,
01:04:08 ►
and they are displacing the serotonin from the receptor sites.
01:04:12 ►
And as they switch in and turn the key,
01:04:15 ►
the electron spin resonance signature begins to shift.
01:04:20 ►
And at first you have, it’s literally the sound of rushing water. I mean, all over the world, shamans say this. It’s white noise, I think. It’s the sound of of the ordinary agonist to the receptor,
01:04:47 ►
and then it’s like tinkling, far away tinkling bells or chiming, and it comes closer.
01:04:57 ►
And now at this point, the mind goes to meet it with a projection. The mind always goes to meet the nervous system and they
01:05:06 ►
meet somewhere in cyberspace and the projection goes on to it so for me it’s
01:05:12 ►
a it’s a Nepalese it’s like a Nepalese marching band or it’s an elf band and I
01:05:20 ►
hear him coming and they’re just over the hill and they’re piping away
01:05:26 ►
and it’s you know
01:05:27 ►
and they’re on their way
01:05:30 ►
and very quickly it becomes much much louder
01:05:33 ►
and I’m just flooded with this sense
01:05:37 ►
of the presence of the elfin potential
01:05:42 ►
and then it condenses.
01:05:47 ►
And those of you who are veterans of these things
01:05:51 ►
know that I like to quote Philo-Judeus on the Logos.
01:05:56 ►
The Logos was this informing voice
01:05:59 ►
that was the sine qua non of Hellenistic spirituality.
01:06:04 ►
Everybody was trying to get a connection to the Logos
01:06:07 ►
because it spoke the truth.
01:06:09 ►
Well, Philo-Judeus, who happened to be an exact contemporary of Christ,
01:06:14 ►
born before, died after,
01:06:17 ►
wrote a whole 15 volumes of commentary
01:06:20 ►
on the syncretic religions of his day.
01:06:23 ►
And at one point he’s discussing the etymology of the word Israel.
01:06:28 ►
Interestingly, the word Israel means he who sees, sees God.
01:06:35 ►
And so Philo-Judeus is rapping about this.
01:06:38 ►
And he says, what would be the more perfect logos?
01:06:43 ►
And then he answers his own question. He says, the more perfect logos
01:06:48 ►
would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a noticeable moment of
01:06:59 ►
transition. Well, that’s what the approach of this Elfin band is it begins as a distant sound
01:07:06 ►
it gets louder and louder and louder
01:07:09 ►
and at a certain volume it begins to spread out
01:07:13 ►
into the visual processing
01:07:15 ►
and then whatever it was as sound
01:07:18 ►
gives way to what it is as light
01:07:23 ►
as thing beheld
01:07:24 ►
well these Icaros that these people sing in the Amazon to what it is as light, as thing beheld.
01:07:28 ►
Well, these Icaros that these people sing in the Amazon are the same kind of thing.
01:07:30 ►
I mean, you make a tone,
01:07:33 ►
and it’s a blue ribbon four inches across that hangs in the air,
01:07:40 ►
and then you just, and, you know, it hangs there,
01:07:44 ►
and then you can reach out
01:07:45 ►
and touch it
01:07:47 ►
well tones like that
01:07:49 ►
are literally like broad
01:07:51 ►
broad
01:07:52 ►
paintbrushes
01:07:55 ►
when you paint with tone
01:07:57 ►
but when you modulate
01:07:59 ►
with syntax
01:08:00 ►
you begin to discover you can cut
01:08:03 ►
lace snowflakes with this stuff and you know you can
01:08:07 ►
produce roast shocks and you can do other things and i this is just to me the most mysterious thing
01:08:15 ►
i mean this is i ask no more than to be in the presence of this it’s uh it’s beauty beheld it’s that within the human organism
01:08:27 ►
poised at the apex of animal organization
01:08:31 ►
you’re able to open this doorway with sound
01:08:34 ►
and then unimaginable beauty
01:08:39 ►
of an unimaginable style and quality
01:08:43 ►
pours through
01:08:44 ►
I mean, this alien, asymmetric, orthogonal to ordinary expectations kind of beauty
01:08:51 ►
that I associate with the absolute other, the transcendent other, yeah.
01:08:57 ►
Wouldn’t that cause a person that, say, has normal speech or normal sound,
01:09:01 ►
it would cause them through that experience to somewhat, like,
01:09:04 ►
integrate their own sound or articulate their own sound. speech or normal sound, it would cause them through that experience to somewhat like integrate
01:09:05 ►
their own sound or articulate their own sound.
01:09:09 ►
So their own speech become more together.
01:09:13 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:09:14 ►
If any of you are interested in this, in that well-known anthology called Shamanism and
01:09:20 ►
Hallucinogens by Michael Harner, There’s a classic article by Henry Munn
01:09:26 ►
called The Mushrooms of Language,
01:09:28 ►
and he’s talking about this.
01:09:31 ►
Yes, you see, language is some kind of unfinished program.
01:09:36 ►
I mean, it begins with grunts and squeaks.
01:09:40 ►
It makes its way through,
01:09:43 ►
huh, yeah, and you know,
01:09:44 ►
and then you get into people saying things like, you know, if you would simply reset the assembly language to the first order of magnitude in the transformation table and this kind of thing. And then it rises. It’s a gradient. Then you get eloquence, persuasive speech.
01:10:07 ►
And then you get poetry.
01:10:10 ►
And somewhere between eloquence and poetry,
01:10:12 ►
there’s a side tree into demagoguery,
01:10:15 ►
which you have to watch out for.
01:10:16 ►
But it seems to me there’s no barrier between any one of us
01:10:21 ►
starting out slow and building up to making everybody see what we mean.
01:10:29 ►
When we understand something,
01:10:32 ►
we unconsciously reach for those metaphors.
01:10:35 ►
We say, I see what you mean.
01:10:37 ►
It means, I understand.
01:10:39 ►
I was saying to someone this morning,
01:10:41 ►
people imagine that telepathy
01:10:43 ►
is hearing what someone else thinks.
01:10:48 ►
But this is a trivial notion of what it is. What telepathy is, is having someone else’s point of
01:10:57 ►
view. And when you have someone else’s point of view, notice you are them. Because to a large degree, point of view is the defining characteristic of identity. So our individual points of view, if they could be somehow subsumed or shared, we would then understand each other. And I think the whole thing about psychedelics
01:11:26 ►
is that they synergize cognition
01:11:28 ►
and that cognition allows us to image each other
01:11:34 ►
and to understand each other.
01:11:36 ►
I mean, we don’t need to do that.
01:11:38 ►
After all, we come out of a style of monkey troops
01:11:43 ►
and they don’t do this they don’t analyze
01:11:47 ►
each other’s motivation and attack each other’s religious foundations and this
01:11:54 ►
sort of thing but we have created an artificial environment out of meaning. We don’t know what language is but it is
01:12:06 ►
the thing which
01:12:07 ►
has drawn a line
01:12:10 ►
between us and the rest
01:12:12 ►
of nature. Our glory
01:12:14 ►
and our alienation is
01:12:16 ►
tied up with this thing
01:12:18 ►
about language and somehow
01:12:20 ►
we have to carry out
01:12:23 ►
a very careful
01:12:24 ►
deconstruction of language
01:12:27 ►
because the language that we have is killing us.
01:12:32 ►
I mean, it’s making it impossible to think the thoughts that will allow us to save ourselves.
01:12:39 ►
And so we have to go back into the historical situation,
01:12:45 ►
try to understand where we went wrong.
01:12:48 ►
The archaic abandonment of psychedelics
01:12:52 ►
was only the first and most devastating of these.
01:12:56 ►
But other things, other bad…
01:13:00 ►
We’ve had a string of bad luck here on the European continent.
01:13:04 ►
I mean, as if the abandonment
01:13:06 ►
of the psychedelic
01:13:08 ►
goddess religion weren’t enough
01:13:10 ►
then out of a possible
01:13:12 ►
five or six choices as to
01:13:14 ►
how to signify our languages
01:13:16 ►
we went for
01:13:18 ►
a phonetic alphabet
01:13:19 ►
bad choice
01:13:22 ►
bad choice
01:13:23 ►
because the phonetic alphabet is going to further distance us from any connection with anything real. You know, the ideogram carries you back into the image. Rebus writing forces you to keep a connection to the sound of the spoken language. The phonetic alphabet sets you free of all of this.
01:13:46 ►
And then this sets the stage for the narcissism and male dominance
01:13:50 ►
and obsession with abstraction that characterizes the rise of science.
01:13:56 ►
Yeah.
01:13:56 ►
In my secular experience, I had a very strong experience with telepathy.
01:14:02 ►
very strong experience of telepathy.
01:14:07 ►
Yes, well, I don’t have very many stories about absolute violation of the paranormal
01:14:11 ►
where there is no doubt that something weird was going on.
01:14:15 ►
But I had a couple of experiences with telepathy
01:14:20 ►
which absolutely convinced me
01:14:23 ►
that I don’t know what the defining conditions are
01:14:28 ►
but it’s not about tracking it down with the statistical turning of cards there is a way
01:14:34 ►
probably involving drugs where you just can lock into the other person my brother pulled a stunt
01:14:41 ►
where he not only he didn’t read my mind he found a memory of mine
01:14:46 ►
that i had never told anyone and he began to recite it for a bunch of people it was
01:14:53 ►
it was a 14 month old memory that i had not thought of myself for three or four months
01:15:02 ►
and he just picked it up and started raving it
01:15:06 ►
speaking all voices of all the people involved i was appalled and i don’t know you know and but
01:15:14 ►
for me you see i only need a couple of things like that in a lifetime i don’t require that angels
01:15:20 ►
lead me up to my bed each evening just a couple of places where they let the veil rise for a moment like that.
01:15:29 ►
You say, that’s okay.
01:15:30 ►
I’ll never forget.
01:15:31 ►
I saw it.
01:15:32 ►
I know it was real.
01:15:34 ►
Never forget this datum,
01:15:36 ►
because this datum was extremely hard to come by.
01:15:39 ►
You were the witness,
01:15:41 ►
and you had the parameters of proof on it,
01:15:44 ►
and it still happened
01:15:46 ►
so
01:15:47 ►
the stuff is out there
01:15:50 ►
I think it’s good to be
01:15:51 ►
yes I should say this, it’s part of my method
01:15:54 ►
that it’s very good to be
01:15:56 ►
hard
01:15:56 ►
and demanding
01:15:59 ►
and skeptical and rational
01:16:02 ►
too many voices
01:16:04 ►
whisper to us
01:16:05 ►
from every century of space and time
01:16:09 ►
they’re whispering in Malibu.
01:16:12 ►
So we have to…
01:16:14 ►
If it’s real…
01:16:16 ►
Who was it said,
01:16:17 ►
just because they’re dead
01:16:18 ►
doesn’t mean they’re smart?
01:16:21 ►
We have to…
01:16:23 ►
We have to keep the pressure on the phenomena
01:16:27 ►
because the good stuff can take the test
01:16:30 ►
the good stuff can take the test
01:16:33 ►
and you get through all the dross very quickly
01:16:36 ►
if you’re tolerant of dross
01:16:38 ►
you’ll spend so much time sorting dross
01:16:41 ►
that you’ll never get anywhere
01:16:43 ►
so I’m not very patient with mumbo-jumbo.
01:16:46 ►
My guru test is what can you show me quick.
01:16:54 ►
Somebody had a question over here?
01:16:56 ►
A lot of what goes on in high-dose shamanic situations worldwide
01:17:02 ►
is what’s called glossolalia.
01:17:07 ►
Glossolalia, which is normally defined as speaking in tongues, is something actually a little different from that, or at
01:17:13 ►
least the kind induced by hallucinogens. It’s as though you can move the expressive apparatus out of the English groove,
01:17:29 ►
and then from within the depths of the organism, brain and body,
01:17:35 ►
comes a highly modulated, syntactically structured sound,
01:17:43 ►
but it doesn’t contain ordinary meaning
01:17:48 ►
it contains emotional meaning
01:17:51 ►
but there’s no such thing as an emotional
01:17:54 ►
dictionary
01:17:55 ►
we experimented with this quite a lot
01:17:59 ►
because I was so interested in the phenomenon
01:18:02 ►
of syntax without meaning.
01:18:06 ►
And when I first encountered this in the psychedelic state,
01:18:09 ►
I just thought it was like an ecstatic activity that I experienced as thought,
01:18:18 ►
but I couldn’t tell anybody what it was because it just sounded too crazy to talk about.
01:18:24 ►
what it was because it just sounded too crazy to talk about.
01:18:27 ►
And then over years of working with this, I actually was able to slow it down and make it conversational.
01:18:34 ►
And then I do it sometimes when I’m stoned.
01:18:37 ►
And it’s very, very satisfying.
01:18:40 ►
And I don’t understand why it’s satisfying.
01:18:44 ►
Ralph Metzner and I once had this fantasy that we would hold a weekend
01:18:48 ►
where every English utterance had to be followed by what we called a phase state utterance.
01:18:57 ►
In other words, the ego could speak in English,
01:19:01 ►
but it had to then relinquish to the body, which would speak in Martian.
01:19:07 ►
And this stuff, it sounds like this, to give you the flavor of it.
01:19:29 ►
and it’s you know it has syntax
01:19:32 ►
I played a long tape of it once to a linguist
01:19:35 ►
and as she was backing out of the room
01:19:38 ►
she said
01:19:42 ►
no O’s which is true there, no O’s, which is true.
01:19:47 ►
There are no O’s in what you just heard.
01:19:51 ►
But I don’t know what we can do with it.
01:19:55 ►
I think that what that stuff is, is it’s reflecting.
01:20:01 ►
You see, it happens fast.
01:20:03 ►
It happens at a conversational speed.
01:20:06 ►
It happens at the same speed that English happens.
01:20:09 ►
When I modulate my lips to form words,
01:20:12 ►
my mind is producing in an English dictionary.
01:20:17 ►
It must be working fairly rapidly.
01:20:19 ►
When I relax the need for meaning,
01:20:22 ►
but keep producing this stuff,
01:20:24 ►
the syntactical organization is still there,
01:20:27 ►
almost as though syntax, and I think probably Chomsky and that school has established this,
01:20:33 ►
that syntax is an assembly language, a deeper structure behind the local language.
01:20:41 ►
Well then, what is being expressed by that?
01:20:46 ►
Well, obviously, that for which there are no words.
01:20:50 ►
You know? Yeah.
01:20:52 ►
It seems so much of what you’re talking about has to do
01:20:55 ►
with transition between brain function and mind
01:20:57 ►
and even again the focus
01:21:01 ►
from the auditory to visual. Are there any
01:21:03 ►
brain level cortical uptake studies
01:21:07 ►
on movement between broken work,
01:21:09 ►
these area and occipital lobe visual stuff?
01:21:11 ►
You mean under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs?
01:21:14 ►
No, no.
01:21:14 ►
There was an effort to do studies like this.
01:21:17 ►
A couple of years ago at Cal,
01:21:19 ►
they had a PET scan,
01:21:21 ►
and they wanted to create positron hot drugs
01:21:24 ►
and give them to human beings and my
01:21:27 ►
brother was involved in that but the funding never gelled no we could answer a lot of these kinds of
01:21:35 ►
questions see I think that it’s all about looking at this on many many different levels the brain
01:21:42 ►
of the individual the interfacing between the mind and the brain,
01:21:46 ►
meaning the intellectual and perceptual levers
01:21:50 ►
into the physical brain,
01:21:52 ►
and then also what this does societally
01:21:57 ►
and how it changes perception.
01:22:00 ►
How malleable are we?
01:22:02 ►
How much can be done? And I think, you know, these questions
01:22:08 ►
are just not being looked at. If we were spending as much money on this as we’re spending on smart
01:22:13 ►
bombs, you know, we need to… The mind is obviously our… You know, I said last night that Tao means crisis and opportunity.
01:22:25 ►
The mind is either going to save us or kill us off.
01:22:29 ►
I mean, it is our contribution to the natural order of things.
01:22:34 ►
We alone bear it resplendent.
01:22:37 ►
I mean, dolphins, yes, and all that, but who knows?
01:22:40 ►
But we clearly are the minded creature.
01:23:09 ►
But we clearly are the minded creature. Well, then the efficacy, the meaning, the ultimate judgment on what mind is or is for is going to that psychedelics are catalysts of consciousness. Now, a catalyst is something which causes a slow-moving reaction to move
01:23:17 ►
much faster. That’s all it is. And I don’t doubt that over millions and millions of years,
01:23:23 ►
given the confluence of the factors on the African veld, eventually minded species may have arisen.
01:23:29 ►
And in fact, the Neanderthal type may represent something like that.
01:23:34 ►
But the extraordinary expansion of the human brain over a two million year period.
01:23:48 ►
year period. I was reading a text recently and they referred to it as the single most rapid expansion of a primary organ in the entire history of animal life, the speed with which the brains of
01:23:56 ►
the hominids transformed itself. Well, we’re right in the center of all of this, trying to understand it. And we’ve got it damped down
01:24:06 ►
through 500 years of rationalism to that it’s no big deal. But I wonder how much, you know,
01:24:14 ►
we really do know. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing
01:24:21 ►
their lives one thought at a time.
01:24:30 ►
Unless I’m mistaken, I think that I heard Terence say that ayahuasca was a cold infusion.
01:24:36 ►
Yet, as we all know, the two components of ayahuasca needed to be boiled together for many hours before it’s cooled and drunk.
01:24:39 ►
But I might have misheard him, because I know that in talks he gave a few years later, he
01:24:43 ►
properly described the
01:24:45 ►
process of making this interesting brew. And I’m only pointing this out for our new listeners here
01:24:51 ►
to let them know that when they listen to Terrence McKenna, it’s the thoughts that his talks produce
01:24:57 ►
in your own mind that are important here. Because from time to time, he admits to not having all of his facts in line.
01:25:06 ►
Now when I listened to Terence with you just now,
01:25:09 ►
I couldn’t help but think that here he was,
01:25:11 ►
just approaching the peak of his mesmerizing powers of bardic flight,
01:25:16 ►
and this was also when he was just beginning to become well known
01:25:20 ►
in many towns and villages all over the planet.
01:25:23 ►
And yet, less than ten years later, he was dead.
01:25:27 ►
Life is short, and death comes all too soon, my friends.
01:25:31 ►
So, don’t let this day end without you having done something
01:25:35 ►
that makes you feel good about being alive at this incredible moment in time.
01:25:41 ►
Now, for our fellow swaners who are living in the States right now,
01:25:45 ►
it should be quite obvious to you that the mainstream media has been pushing the Black Lives Matter movement onto the back pages
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and replaced that important news with stories that encourage a dislike of Muslims.
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Now, I don’t expect that any of our fellow salonners have fallen into this so-called Islamophobia, but here’s a little suggestion for you to use
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should one of your friends be leaning in that direction.
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What I do when I hear hateful speech directed at our Muslim friends
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is to bring to mind a Muslim who I greatly admire.
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And there are many examples that I could use.
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For example, one of George Washington’s top officers
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during the Revolutionary War was a
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Muslim. And it was a Muslim who invented the ice cream cone. And what’s more American than an ice
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cream cone? But the Muslim who I most respect is the man who I’ll go to my grave believing has been
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the greatest athlete to live during my lifetime. He is none other than the great boxer Muhammad Ali.
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Now, some people may hold the fact that he refused to serve in the American war against Vietnam
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and giving as a reason that, quote, no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger, unquote. And as a Vietnam
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veteran myself, I completely understand that point of view. Today, I wish that I had had
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the courage to not participate in the killing of people with whom I had no quarrel, but I didn’t
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have the same level of courage as did Ali, who was willing to give up everything that he had spent
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his life until then working for in order to make the point that this was not a necessary war.
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As a result, from the age of 25 until he was almost 29 years old,
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he wasn’t allowed to participate in the sport of boxing.
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Yet, once the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Ali’s favor,
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his stance became one of the rallying cries of the anti-war movement.
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But for me, there was something more that Ali did several years later that I found to
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be above and beyond what most people of those days were doing to support our troops. At the time,
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I was quite active in the movement to bring home the more than 300 men who were still being held
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captive in North Vietnam, more than a decade after Nixon pulled out and abandoned them.
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And during that time, a significant amount of the
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funding required to keep our movement alive came directly from Muhammad Ali. In fact, even though
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he was in the midst of a personal medical emergency, he volunteered to go to North Vietnam himself
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and attempt to negotiate for the release of American prisoners. And Ali did this while
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veterans like Senator McCain and Senator
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Kerry did all that they could to bury the issue forever. Ali is the heroic patriot here, and in
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my opinion, Kerry and McCain are the traitors. But hey, that’s just my opinion. What I’m trying
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to say here is that whenever someone says something bad about a Muslim, I think of the love and hope that
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Muhammad Ali gave to the friends and family members of the men that the U.S. government
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intentionally abandoned. He is a great man, a black man, and a Muslim. We could surely use
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many more people like him. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
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Be careful out there, my friends.