Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Today’s podcast begins with Terence talking about the elephant in the ayahuasca room: purging, puking, barfing, vomiting or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately he moves on and speculates that the human break with nature came about due to a change in the climate. And he ends this part of the workshop talking about the dire state of affairs on the planet on that February day in 1991 as the First Gulf War was raging. Two of my favorite quotes from this talk are: “The modern nuclear family, and I’ve got one I know whereof I speak, is just a cauldron for neurosis. It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.” … and “The way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet. You can’t join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet. They withdraw your membership application.”

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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.

00:00:23

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:30

And I want to begin by passing along a message that, well, you may have already received it.

00:00:35

Apparently, someone is using an email and pretending to be James Fadiman.

00:00:42

This person has asked people to contact him about being in a microdose study being run by John Hopkins.

00:00:45

Now, none of this is true. It’s not James Fadiman and no such study is being run by John Hopkins. Now, none of this is true. It’s not James Fadiman, and no such study is being done by John Hopkins. Hopefully, you haven’t responded

00:00:51

to the links in that bogus email if you received it.

00:00:56

Well, now today we’re going to listen to the next to last part of a weekend workshop with

00:01:01

Terence McKenna. And to be completely honest with you,

00:01:07

I think that I’ve probably overdone it here by playing so many of his talks.

00:01:09

For what it’s worth, I’m really excited

00:01:12

about some of the new programs

00:01:13

that I’ll be podcasting this year.

00:01:15

And I think that there are already enough

00:01:18

Terrence McKenna talks here in the salon

00:01:19

to last us for a while.

00:01:21

But next week, I’ll be playing the last talk

00:01:24

in this workshop,

00:01:27

and then we’ll get on with some new material.

00:01:31

But for today, we’re going to listen to a bit more McKenna.

00:01:36

As you listen to this talk, it will become clear to you that even though many of us didn’t buy into Terrence’s end of history

00:01:41

and arrival of the Eschaton rap,

00:01:43

well, he most certainly believed it himself back in 1991.

00:01:48

And as you listen to him talking about these things,

00:01:51

it may be a good time to examine your own mind in regards to the future.

00:01:56

When Terence gave this talk some 25 years ago,

00:02:00

he and many of his followers were quite sure that in some manner or other

00:02:05

the world was going to go through a significant shift if not end altogether in 2012.

00:02:11

Well, I think it’s safe to say that that made-up emergency is now safely behind us.

00:02:17

For myself, I must admit that for a long time I’ve been hoping to live long enough

00:02:23

to at least see the end of the American Empire. For, as you know, all empires eventually come to an end. But over the last few years,

00:02:32

it’s slowly dawned on me that this ugly empire isn’t going to dissolve anytime soon. And if you

00:02:39

subscribe to the idea that today’s America isn’t at all unlike ancient Rome, well, then it would also be good

00:02:46

for you to realize that it took Rome somewhere around 400 years after its peak of power before

00:02:52

it was completely gone. What I’m getting at here is that, in my opinion, we should be gearing

00:02:58

ourselves and our families up for the long haul. What if the American empire outlasts everyone who is alive at this very moment?

00:03:06

What if the only change we are going to experience in our lifetimes is more of the same?

00:03:12

More police violence, more surveillance, more income disparity, more wars, more refugees.

00:03:18

You get the idea.

00:03:19

The question I think that we should be asking ourselves is,

00:03:24

how are we going to organize our own little local clans?

00:03:27

You know, groups that can interact and survive during the centuries that it takes for this empire to come to an end.

00:03:34

Think of occupied France during World War II.

00:03:37

Maybe it’s time that we begin to organize the resistance while we still can.

00:03:42

But for now, hold that thought until I return after we first listen

00:03:46

to what Terrence has to say. So, with that cheerful little note, let’s join Terrence on an afternoon

00:03:54

in February of 1991 when this talk was first given. At that time, the senior living member

00:04:01

of the Bush-Clinton crime family, had begun the first Gulf War.

00:04:06

And today we’re still in the midst of the second Gulf War

00:04:09

that was begun by his screwhead son.

00:04:12

And the world situation itself seems to be getting worse each day.

00:04:16

If anything, the world seems to be a bigger mess

00:04:19

than it was when Terrence gave this talk.

00:04:22

So what if things aren’t that much different

00:04:24

from what they are today, 25 years from now?

00:04:28

In that case, where will you be?

00:04:30

What will you be doing?

00:04:31

But here’s the kicker.

00:04:33

If you do it right, 25 years from now,

00:04:36

you and your friends can be enjoying more freedom and joy

00:04:39

than most of the other people on the planet.

00:04:42

Of course, I’ll be dead by then,

00:04:44

so you won’t be able to tell me whether I’m wrong or not.

00:04:48

Actually, your life is much more in your hands than you may think sometimes.

00:04:52

So why not take charge of it?

00:04:55

And I’ll have more to say about that when I return.

00:04:58

But first, here’s Terrence McKenna, who is going to begin by talking about throwing up.

00:05:04

Barfing.

00:05:07

But not because of all the bad news. This time it’s because of first ingesting a jungle brew called ayahuasca.

00:05:14

The purging effect of ayahuasca. In South America, ayahuasca is called la purga, and

00:05:21

for every person who hallucinates, there are probably five or six who just get sick and throw up.

00:05:30

And this is culturally sanctioned.

00:05:33

A lot of people, Peruvians are just like everybody else, a lot of people are ambivalent about being swept away by titanic visions.

00:05:43

So people will just sip it in these ayahuasca circles and then vomit.

00:05:47

It’s a tremendous worm killer,

00:05:52

and worms are a major source of mortality in the tropics.

00:05:56

If you take ayahuasca once a week, intestinal parasites are history for you.

00:06:02

So it does have an effect on the health.

00:06:07

There’s also been research done at SFMed

00:06:11

to show that on petri dishes, at any rate,

00:06:15

dilute ayahuasca kills the trypanosomal phase

00:06:19

of the malarial organism.

00:06:21

Well, if it is in some way even partially prophylactic for malaria, then this is another

00:06:27

factor that would make it important for people to be taking it. They like the vomiting and stress it.

00:06:36

When we went down there in 76, at first we didn’t vomit. We would fight the vomiting,

00:06:42

fight the nausea. And it’s not overwhelming.

00:06:45

Usually you can win it. And because I thought, you know, you should keep the whole dose down.

00:06:51

But then a couple of times they dosed me heavily and I couldn’t keep it down. And I discovered

00:06:56

that the really strong waves of hallucinations seemed to follow immediately upon the vomiting.

00:07:09

immediately upon the vomiting and I think it’s probably very good to purge some of the people we were with were very secular and they would tell us all this stuff you’re not supposed to

00:07:15

eat sugar you’re not supposed to have sex no salt no alcohol and then we would just observe them

00:07:20

completely pigging out on all of these things and then we would say well what’s

00:07:25

the deal and said oh yeah well that’s why we take ayahuasca then we get rid of all this bad stuff

00:07:31

so it was this kind of thing but i think it’s very uh it’s very cleansing it’s the only one of these

00:07:39

uh plant things as i said where there’s not a net energy loss. You actually feel better the next day.

00:07:47

And then what they say, and this is, you know, field work for the future, what they say is that

00:07:53

taking ayahuasca is just the beginning of ayahuasca and that the real thing is to keep a special diet and do it repeatedly over weeks.

00:08:06

And I suspect from my own experiences down there

00:08:10

that there is a way to tiptoe into something that if it’s not Buddhahood,

00:08:16

you could sell it on the Western market for Buddhahood.

00:08:20

I mean, there is a way to chemically tiptoe into a place of humor, balance, equilibrium, caring, openness, anticipation of difficulty, attention to other people’s needs.

00:08:37

I mean, it actually begins to happen.

00:08:39

It’s what I call appropriate activity.

00:08:42

But I think what it is is it’s a kind it’s the dissolving of the ego

00:08:46

it’s not something dramatic

00:08:49

it’s just that you stop being

00:08:51

an introspective

00:08:53

selfish

00:08:54

misbehaving

00:08:56

loutish

00:08:58

unfocused

00:08:59

dweeb

00:09:00

and you know

00:09:02

but without anything dramatic happening this sloughs away and underneath

00:09:08

is this shining caring attention giving person i’ve been in these places and god knows if it

00:09:17

can trick me into enlightenment it will work for anybody because i don’t think i have the

00:09:23

credentials for the real thing. But that’s what

00:09:27

feeds this notion that I talked about a little this morning, that we’re in a state of dysfunctional

00:09:34

neurosis caused by the absence of these plants in our lives. If we had these plants in our lives we would just feel better

00:09:45

and we’re like

00:09:48

rainforest creatures that have learned to adapt

00:09:52

to a desert

00:09:53

we live in this desert, we survive in it

00:09:57

but constantly we’re haunted

00:10:00

by a memory of a golden age

00:10:03

a better time,

00:10:06

when our sexual neuroses,

00:10:08

our acquisitiveness,

00:10:11

our fear of each other,

00:10:14

all of these things were somehow not present.

00:10:16

And the rationalists just sneer and say,

00:10:18

oh, it’s a golden age,

00:10:21

it’s been going on since Vico and the Bible. But I don’t think so.

00:10:24

I think the myth of the fall into history

00:10:27

is very real,

00:10:29

that something bad has happened to us.

00:10:32

And that’s why we’re dysfunctional,

00:10:35

why we’re unable to solve our problems.

00:10:38

You know, it began with the rise of the ego,

00:10:44

male dominance

00:10:45

property, possession

00:10:47

control of women by men

00:10:49

so forth and so on

00:10:50

that was all happening in the late nomadic pastoral phase

00:10:54

as soon as you add agriculture into the picture

00:10:57

you get overproduction

00:10:59

then you have hoarding

00:11:01

now you can really go to hell in a handbasket

00:11:04

because you have more food than you can eat,

00:11:07

but you must protect it from starving neighbors.

00:11:11

And how you’re going to then maintain a moral vision

00:11:14

in a world where you fight people off who want your food supply.

00:11:19

And then, as I mentioned this morning, the phonetic alphabet and all these things.

00:11:25

But I feel this very deeply.

00:11:28

It’s not a metaphor, this thing about how there has been a connection broken with the earth.

00:11:35

All this yipping about the goddess is an effort to find this broken connection and plug it back in. When we find it, it’s not going to be like another religion

00:11:48

or a political reformation or something like that.

00:11:52

It’s much deeper than that.

00:11:54

It’s actually our lost other half.

00:11:58

And there’s a lot of talk that goes on about gender politics

00:12:03

in human society,

00:12:07

men versus women and so forth and so on.

00:12:11

But when you stand off and get a little perspective on that, we human beings, all of us, are so yang

00:12:16

that if there is a tension between us and the feminine,

00:12:20

it isn’t within our species.

00:12:23

It’s between us and vegetable nature, the slow-moving planetary mantle of life that is the counterpoise to our own furious and frenzied and destructive way of living out organic existence.

00:12:45

And as soon as that connection was broken in Africa

00:12:50

with the psychedelic religion,

00:12:54

we began to go to hell in a handbasket.

00:12:57

And the connection was not broken by an act of ill will

00:13:02

or an act of intentionality.

00:13:05

It was simply broken by a fluctuation of the climate.

00:13:11

The mushrooms which had been available for thousands and thousands of years

00:13:18

ceased to be available.

00:13:20

The land became drier.

00:13:22

The great mushroom festivals became seasonal

00:13:25

the boundary dissolving, ego dissolving

00:13:29

orgiastic festivals became less and less

00:13:32

frequent, became centered on the solstices

00:13:35

and the equinoxes and as the mushrooms

00:13:38

became scarcer and

00:13:40

cultural sophistication advanced

00:13:43

there were experiments with preserving mushrooms.

00:13:49

And the most successful, or perhaps unsuccessful,

00:13:52

depending on how you view it,

00:13:54

was to preserve them in honey.

00:13:57

All graduates of Levi-Strauss’ thought

00:14:00

will understand the complexity of honey.

00:14:03

But what is important for our argument is that

00:14:06

honey is itself capable of becoming a psychoactive substance through fermentation.

00:14:14

But what you get then is mead or honey beer. Well, the qualities of a drug like alcohol on a social menu are completely different from

00:14:29

the impact of a psychedelic on a social menu the psychedelic was in was promoting boundary

00:14:37

dissolving sexual arousal group sexual activity and and that sort of thing the alcohol thing

00:14:46

empowers

00:14:47

misconstruing of social queuing

00:14:50

and

00:14:51

it does

00:14:54

this weird thing, it lowers

00:14:55

sensitivity to social boundaries

00:14:58

at the same time that it

00:15:00

empowers the personality

00:15:02

to overreach those boundaries

00:15:04

I mean, how much sexual imprinting on the part of women in our society,

00:15:11

early sexual imprinting,

00:15:14

goes on in the presence of intoxication by alcohol?

00:15:18

I mean, it’s just almost basic to the game,

00:15:21

and even more so before the last 50 years or so.

00:15:26

I mean, you can almost say of Western civilization,

00:15:29

nobody got laid for a thousand years unless they were juiced because they were so uptight.

00:15:34

I mean, alcohol was the way you got to that moment in many cultures.

00:15:41

Well, so this is just to show how unconsciously over centuries one plant ritual,

00:15:50

one plant style can give way to a completely different plant style. And once the drying of

00:15:58

the African continent had proceeded to the point where people were migrating out of Africa and settling in the

00:16:06

ancient Middle East, then you have all the institutions that we associate with the illness

00:16:14

of our own society. You have male dominance, stratified social hierarchy, and a city-state defended by armed men, a class of armed men.

00:16:28

Add on to that a couple of thousand years later the phonetic alphabet, and it’s no wonder that

00:16:34

there’s no sense at all of the living mystery of being in a dynamic balance with nature

00:16:41

that we come out of. Anybody want to say anything on all that?

00:16:47

Somebody asked last night

00:16:49

about how are we going to save the world.

00:16:52

And since this evening,

00:16:53

I thought maybe we should talk about that

00:16:55

a little bit,

00:16:56

because this evening I’ll show you the time wave.

00:16:59

And it argues that we don’t have to save the world

00:17:02

because the world is going to disappear

00:17:06

up its own nose in 22 years anyway

00:17:09

so

00:17:10

there’s not a whole lot of obligation on us

00:17:15

to worry about it, we’re simply the witnesses to the end game

00:17:18

but nevertheless, since that sounds to me

00:17:21

like a long shot and I’m the inventor of the thing

00:17:24

it might be good to prepare a backup position

00:17:29

just in case the emanization of the eschaton

00:17:35

is delayed somehow

00:17:37

you know it’s pretty hard

00:17:43

to figure out rationally where we’re going from here.

00:17:51

Does anyone have any idea where we’re going from here?

00:17:56

I mean, if you just extrapolate the trends in place,

00:18:01

they lead to a world so science fiction-y that

00:18:05

it’s hard to imagine

00:18:07

and

00:18:08

you know in some of these

00:18:13

meetings we’ve talked about how

00:18:16

the psychedelic viewpoint

00:18:18

is always trying to

00:18:20

meld

00:18:22

things together to make a

00:18:23

coincidencia positorum out of apparently

00:18:26

dichotomous

00:18:28

positions but there is

00:18:30

this one issue where it’s very

00:18:32

hard to get it going both

00:18:34

ways and that is

00:18:36

to try and figure out what our

00:18:38

relationship to the earth

00:18:41

is and

00:18:42

then what we can do about it

00:18:44

are we is our destiny

00:18:47

to become the stewards of the earth

00:18:50

are we to become like ecology

00:18:53

tenders, gardeners

00:18:56

on a planetary scale

00:18:57

honoring species diversity

00:19:00

detoxifying environments

00:19:03

and promoting and somehow glorifying

00:19:10

the steady state of ecology?

00:19:13

Or is that now impossible

00:19:17

and do we have to accept that you don’t make an omelet

00:19:23

without breaking eggs

00:19:24

and that

00:19:25

the egg which we’re about to break

00:19:28

is an entire living

00:19:29

planet and that somehow

00:19:32

in the name of

00:19:34

the angel which wants

00:19:35

to be born from the human

00:19:37

soul we are

00:19:40

going to

00:19:42

justify about

00:19:43

to witness,

00:19:47

the destruction of an entire planet for the birthing of some kind of hyper-technological space-faring species.

00:19:55

Well, I always assumed that Apollonian and Titanic,

00:20:02

as that latter possibility is,

00:20:04

that that’s what was actually going to happen

00:20:06

that there was too much momentum

00:20:08

to do anything else

00:20:10

that we couldn’t stop our breaking out

00:20:14

from this planet and probably ruining it

00:20:17

in the process

00:20:19

and the mushroom cheers this kind of stuff on

00:20:24

and says,

00:20:30

this is what the planet was born for, this is what the species exists for, that there can be no sentimentality about carbon chemistry.

00:20:37

Information is on the march to higher and higher dimensions of self-reflection,

00:20:42

and we are strangers here on our way

00:20:45

to a grander and odder tomorrow

00:20:47

in short, pure Gnosticism

00:20:49

this universe is only a shell of our becoming

00:20:55

and that was always my position

00:21:01

because I assumed it was inevitable

00:21:03

now I think that it’s not inevitable,

00:21:07

that it is in fact impossible and unreachable. We’re not going anywhere. You can forget the

00:21:13

triumphant march to the stars. You can forget all that Robert Heinlein stuff. We don’t have it,

00:21:21

we’re not together enough. Monkeys too much. The kind of creature, the kind of planning, foresight, social coordination,

00:21:31

and technical intelligence that is required to cross between the stars is out of our reach.

00:21:38

And meantime, we are slipping into the quicksand of a toxified planet.

00:21:43

into the quicksand of a toxified planet.

00:21:48

Okay, well then, if it’s not possible to leave the planet and to take the high road, then what’s left?

00:21:53

Are we, can we get hold of this situation?

00:21:57

Can we halt what’s going on?

00:22:01

Well, my style is to always try to go back to first principles,

00:22:06

to get behind the problem,

00:22:08

behind the problem,

00:22:09

to try and boil everything down

00:22:11

to some kind of mega problem

00:22:13

that then maybe can be dealt with.

00:22:17

And you’ve heard me say,

00:22:19

or many of you have many times,

00:22:21

that for my money,

00:22:23

the problem is ego, that there is too much ego that we cannot

00:22:29

the concept of ownership and of my right to to mercedes and a split level and then everybody

00:22:41

else is right and so forth there isn’t’t enough glass, metal and plastic in this planet

00:22:47

to give everybody a Malibu-style lifestyle.

00:22:51

It just isn’t going to happen.

00:22:54

Well, so then what lies ahead?

00:22:56

If we’re not going to space, what lies ahead?

00:23:02

And it looks to me like unless there’s very careful social management,

00:23:09

great difficulties lie ahead.

00:23:14

The species equivalent of what I’ve been calling ego

00:23:18

is the inability to curb our drive to reproduce ourselves.

00:23:26

As a species, this is our chauvinistic,

00:23:30

the center of our chauvinistic complex.

00:23:33

We have put economic systems in place

00:23:38

that have implicit in them the assumption

00:23:42

of more and more and more and more people.

00:23:47

And it’s more and more and more people that are destroying the planet

00:23:52

because capitalism has this built-in assumption of, you know, ever-expanding populations.

00:24:01

This notion that there is some value in just endlessly producing people is impossible

00:24:08

for me to understand. I mean, you would have to bring the Catholic Church around on this issue.

00:24:17

But I think that, you know, it’s like the greening of Buddhism or something like that.

00:24:28

Celibacy has always been marketed as a fine and mighty thing.

00:24:33

I could never understand why.

00:24:35

It just seemed to me a source of neurotic contortion.

00:24:39

But we could define celibacy differently.

00:24:43

We could define celibacy as a commitment not to have children.

00:24:49

That’s a meaningful celibacy from society’s point of view.

00:24:54

You’ve actually done something for society.

00:24:57

And you haven’t pushed yourself out of shape.

00:24:59

We don’t need you to become a eunuch.

00:25:02

We just need a little restraint. Well, then the problem

00:25:07

then with this rap, I think, is that it seems to be to go against one of our most cherished icons,

00:25:15

which is the nuclear family. But I’m beginning to think that the nuclear family is actually a dinosaur and that it is far from being this wonderful institution,

00:25:30

thousands of years old,

00:25:32

which is our last link with anything meaningful and human.

00:25:37

That’s not what the nuclear family is.

00:25:39

The nuclear family was dreamed up in 1600,

00:25:43

right before the Thirty Years’ War.

00:25:45

And before that, everybody lived in extended families

00:25:50

in multiple generational dwellings,

00:25:54

and women had great support in child rearing

00:25:58

from their sisters and the wives of their brothers

00:26:01

and so forth and so on.

00:26:02

The modern nuclear family, and I’ve got one, I know whereof I speak,

00:26:09

is just a cauldron for neurosis.

00:26:12

It makes impossible demands on everybody involved.

00:26:18

And the last census showed that something like three-quarters of American households

00:26:25

are no longer organized that way.

00:26:29

They have some other arrangement.

00:26:33

I think that this one woman, one child thing is,

00:26:38

first of all, it rests upon women to implement it.

00:26:42

Second of all, it seems to me it’s tremendously empowering of women

00:26:47

because the second child,

00:26:51

to my observing mind,

00:26:53

the second child is the way that male dominance

00:26:57

is driven home in the modern marriage

00:27:01

and that a woman can be independent with one child.

00:27:07

With two children, if she’s not superhuman,

00:27:10

she’s going to have to cut a deal

00:27:12

with the prevailing system of male dominance

00:27:16

that is in place.

00:27:19

Well, I just toss these ideas out there

00:27:21

because I think it’s interesting we never hear these things.

00:27:27

It could be very easily done and if we are not going to go to space, then I think we have to

00:27:35

immediately plan a sane future. We cannot continue as we have. Now, you might object, and I’m sure many people would, that this one woman, one child

00:27:47

thing is a tremendous interference in basic civil liberties. But you have to remember,

00:27:55

we’re not comparing it to heaven. We’re comparing it to the future we’re going to have if we don’t get some of these problems under control.

00:28:06

And the thing I like about this idea is people volunteer.

00:28:11

It’s self-organizing.

00:28:13

We don’t have the central committee on population and eugenics control

00:28:18

saying who may have children and who may not.

00:28:22

You appeal to people’s higher self. I think that in our society

00:28:28

presently, there’s a lot of tension around the issue of having or not having children.

00:28:35

And many people manage, if they don’t have children, to define themselves as somehow

00:28:40

incomplete. I think this is a terrible mistake

00:28:45

that the reflexes that served

00:28:48

during the last glaciation,

00:28:50

you know, to propagate furiously

00:28:52

as much as possible,

00:28:54

may not be the reflexes

00:28:57

that really serve the community

00:28:59

as we approach six billion people

00:29:02

on the planet.

00:29:04

So I would like, instead of all this ballyhooing of the nuclear family

00:29:08

that we get from politicians,

00:29:12

I would like the independent choices of women

00:29:16

to limit childbearing to be supported.

00:29:21

And I think men could support that society could support that

00:29:26

and that single

00:29:28

area of activity

00:29:30

would give us breathing space

00:29:32

to solve all our other problems

00:29:35

because every other area

00:29:38

where we make a start

00:29:39

toward a solution

00:29:40

it’s swept away

00:29:42

by population growth

00:29:44

this is just unconscionable it’s swept away by population growth. This is just unconscionable. It’s intolerable.

00:29:48

Speaking of unconscionable, as a former Catholic

00:29:52

I think it behooves me to just stomp

00:29:56

all over them. They have a population

00:29:59

policy which I equate with the final solution for the

00:30:04

Jews in Nazi Germany.

00:30:06

I mean, how in the world you can support continued uncontrolled birth in the third world

00:30:14

when it shoves millions of people into poverty and death?

00:30:18

Entire societies go on to the triage list,

00:30:22

and people are squawking that it’s immoral

00:30:25

to intervene in this situation

00:30:27

I just don’t understand

00:30:29

this is to me, this is another bugaboo

00:30:31

of mine, but this is to me

00:30:33

a perfect example of what I call

00:30:35

the poisonous nature of ideology

00:30:37

that you know

00:30:39

will sink in a sea of slime

00:30:42

if it’s up to the Pope

00:30:43

rather than just change your mind you know you

00:30:47

speak ex cathedra they said it one way say it another way times change god said times change

00:30:54

so here’s the change i mean it’s it’s absurd and you know this war was justified under the grounds that evil was out of control in a part of the world.

00:31:08

It was just running roughshod over whole nations and peoples.

00:31:12

But this population policy thing is pushing many more people into death and degradation

00:31:19

than the policies of the Ba’athist party in Iraq, believe me.

00:31:24

So I think we need to think about these things.

00:31:27

Why psychedelics, why this is appropriate in a weekend like this,

00:31:31

is because the rest of society has this tremendous intellectual constipation,

00:31:38

momentum, stodginess.

00:31:41

They can’t change their mind simply because they can’t change their mind. Psychedelics

00:31:47

are almost the precondition for clearing the table for a rational discussion of, you know,

00:31:54

how can we create a sane and human future? How many people should be on this earth? And what

00:32:02

mix? What should be the role of men and women toward each other toward nature toward the children toward the future we we need to have this kind of a global discussion the calendar is a wind blowing at our backs because by great good fortune

00:32:26

we will live through a millennial year

00:32:30

happens once every thousand years

00:32:33

it’s a great opportunity for us

00:32:35

to make a shrewd public relations move

00:32:39

and force an evaluation

00:32:42

of where we’ve been

00:32:44

and where do we want to go.

00:32:46

Well, let’s see.

00:32:47

954, King Canute unites England and invades Norway.

00:32:53

We started there. We end now.

00:32:56

George Bush invades Iraq.

00:32:59

It looks like we haven’t come very far in a thousand years.

00:33:04

The bombs are smarter,

00:33:06

the politicians are as stupid as they ever were.

00:33:11

But now we are a global society

00:33:14

united by electronic media,

00:33:17

thinking as one mind.

00:33:20

And it’s very important, I think,

00:33:23

in this last decade before the millennium to try and shed some of the ideology of the past and try and plot a way toward a sane world.

00:33:35

I mean, we’ve talked about a number of things here.

00:33:37

A technical fix, visible language, which can be accomplished either through drugs and computers or a combination of the two.

00:33:48

A social fix, one woman, one child.

00:33:53

And these things are not mutually exclusive.

00:33:58

There are other things that can be done, but I think this population thing is just very basic,

00:34:05

and the debate that can be spawned around it, the education that can go on around talking about this population thing,

00:34:14

will lead in to all of these other issues, because what we’re actually doing is we’re coming to the end of our childhood,

00:34:23

and we are being given, metaphorically, the keys to the end of our childhood and we are being given metaphorically

00:34:25

the keys to the family car

00:34:28

and the family car is the planet

00:34:30

and so now they’re saying okay go forth and drive

00:34:34

and try to stay out of trouble

00:34:38

and

00:34:39

I don’t think any area of discussion

00:34:43

should be off limits.

00:34:46

I think if pharmacological invention against human bestiality and cloddishness is possible,

00:34:56

then that should be entertained.

00:34:57

If we can consciously limit our population, that should be entertained.

00:35:01

And, you know, there’s a slew of exotic possibilities.

00:35:07

I mean, if everybody were the size of a piss ant we could all live in Utah

00:35:09

or you know

00:35:14

some people think we’re going to be downloaded

00:35:17

into a black cube on the back side of the moon

00:35:20

I don’t know

00:35:21

I suspect it’s going to be more mundane than that

00:35:25

and that instead of just waiting

00:35:27

for the flying saucers to save us

00:35:30

it’s actually going to take

00:35:32

an act of human self-discipline

00:35:35

and

00:35:35

self-control

00:35:38

it looks like

00:35:40

tragedy

00:35:41

there’s a lot of blood and moaning

00:35:43

and thrashing and agony you

00:35:46

would never dream that this was not only part of the plan but the culmination of

00:35:51

the plan and you know we are birthing something here the question is are we

00:35:58

birthing something that will honor the planet or is the planet the placenta of this birth

00:36:05

and when it’s over with

00:36:06

the planet will be finished with

00:36:09

and it’ll just be disposable somehow

00:36:12

I mean that’s a mind-boggling concept

00:36:14

but we don’t know what’s going on here

00:36:16

we do not know what is happening here

00:36:20

the rest of nature presents no problem

00:36:24

I mean through the theory of molecular genetics

00:36:27

and darwinism and so forth we understand nature on its surface pretty well but when we come to

00:36:36

ourselves you know we’re a miracle and a mystery the language the, the spiritual yearnings all this is very puzzling in the context of mindless nature

00:36:49

I don’t take issue with the idea

00:36:53

it’s obviously a great idea

00:36:54

but I can’t imagine it having more adherence than the flat earth theory

00:36:58

is this the idea about limiting population?

00:37:01

yeah, I can’t imagine it ever catching on

00:37:03

unless there was some other psychological mutation. I mean,

00:37:07

only a handful of people would ever…

00:37:11

And plus,

00:37:12

it seems like it’s a woman’s solution,

00:37:14

but men are making the laws about birth

00:37:15

control and abortion.

00:37:18

Well, you’re saying

00:37:20

that it would never catch

00:37:22

on disturbs me, because

00:37:23

essentially you’re saying

00:37:25

I wasn’t persuasive.

00:37:29

So I’m dead in the water.

00:37:32

If I can’t persuade you,

00:37:34

how am I going to persuade

00:37:36

the matrons of Beverly Hills?

00:37:39

They wouldn’t even come here

00:37:40

in the first place.

00:37:41

You may persuade all of us,

00:37:42

but we’re already a tiny minority.

00:37:45

Well, this brings up the subject of meme replication.

00:37:50

Do you all know what a meme is?

00:37:52

A meme is the smallest unit

00:37:55

out of which ideas are made.

00:37:58

In the same way that a gene is…

00:38:01

Proteins are made by genes,

00:38:03

well, ideas are made by memes.

00:38:06

And what I see myself doing here, I mean, very consciously, I’ll reveal the game plan to you,

00:38:12

is I’m a meme generator, and you are meme receivers.

00:38:20

And then your job is to generate the meme again.

00:38:24

And faithful copying is very important here

00:38:28

just like in genetics

00:38:29

because if you get it wrong

00:38:30

it’s not the same meme

00:38:32

please pay attention

00:38:37

so I really believe

00:38:41

I mean maybe this is the last shred of my idealism,

00:38:46

but I really do believe the best idea will win,

00:38:49

that the best idea will replicate and consume and digest

00:38:55

and replicate its competition, and it will win.

00:39:00

And that this is why I’m very optimistic,

00:39:02

because I love the environment of electronic media.

00:39:06

As long as we can be allowed to meet like this and talk, we can win.

00:39:13

Because, you know, it was William Blake who said a wonderful thing.

00:39:19

He said, the truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed.

00:39:29

Do you understand?

00:39:30

In other words, if you can tell the truth to somebody and they understand you, belief is automatic.

00:39:38

You don’t even have to worry about that.

00:39:41

What’s important is that they understand you.

00:39:42

about that. What’s important is that they understand you.

00:39:43

And so

00:39:44

what we’re trying to do here

00:39:47

is build understanding.

00:39:50

I think

00:39:51

what objection

00:39:54

would people have to this?

00:39:56

I mean, what is the

00:39:57

great rhetorical comeback

00:40:00

to this idea?

00:40:02

Oh, you’ve got it? What is it?

00:40:04

Well, just not to one, this idea? Oh, you’ve got it? What is it? Well, just not that

00:40:06

one, it’s an idea

00:40:07

that crosses a lot of

00:40:10

religious beliefs

00:40:11

and political beliefs, but there’s also

00:40:14

just another thought about

00:40:15

when you brought forth that idea of the solution of

00:40:17

one woman, one child,

00:40:20

there’s the classic Gandhi statement

00:40:22

of there’s enough for the world’s need

00:40:24

but not enough for the world’s greed,

00:40:25

which gets back to where you originally started out with,

00:40:29

you know, in this situation because of ego,

00:40:31

nuclear family systems have been set up politically, economically, etc.

00:40:35

So, you know, maybe we can move all those people from the back streets of India

00:40:39

and move them all the way to Montana.

00:40:41

We don’t have to be this big.

00:40:42

There seems to be, you know, the Earth,

00:40:42

And Montana, we don’t have to be this big.

00:40:44

There seems to be, you know, the Earth,

00:40:49

one seems to be self-generating to an extent of different, you know, other thoughts need to be…

00:40:54

So you would argue that we are, that steady state is sufficient,

00:40:59

that we should not try to reduce population,

00:41:02

but that we should just stay at a certain number

00:41:05

and that the earth is sufficient to support that number.

00:41:08

The problem is a great leveling will have to take place

00:41:14

to give a decent standard of living to most people,

00:41:17

and that leveling is going to come right out of this society

00:41:21

because we’re at the top of the pyramid.

00:41:24

No, I think a different consciousness

00:41:26

towards the usage.

00:41:27

Towards matter.

00:41:29

Well, but this gets close to being

00:41:31

a virtual reality solution.

00:41:34

You either are saying people should become Zen monks

00:41:38

or we’re going to give them an electronic simulacrum

00:41:43

of the world that will be very cheap to produce, but as satisfying as reality. I’m sure that an across all kinds of religious and social taboos,

00:42:07

but I think that if you look at each one of those taboos,

00:42:10

you’ll find them rooted in male dominance,

00:42:13

and that what this is is it’s at a lightning stroke.

00:42:18

You just end male dominance.

00:42:21

Women with one child and a government supporting that as a policy

00:42:27

with subsidies

00:42:28

in a stroke would liberate

00:42:31

women from much of the

00:42:33

machinery of their oppressive

00:42:35

position in society

00:42:37

so

00:42:38

and then people say well but what about

00:42:41

people who want more than one children

00:42:43

one child well good lord the world is adrift in orphans, awash in orphans.

00:42:50

And then if you say, well, but I want my child, well, then we’re right.

00:42:54

But that’s what we’re saying no to is this genetic ego chauvinism.

00:42:59

I mean, once you can have your one child,

00:43:03

but just the notion that your genes are to be spread like chaff to the wind is…

00:43:08

It’s not the idea. It’s how do you… how will people even listen to it?

00:43:12

It’s so… against all their conditioning.

00:43:15

Not just…

00:43:16

No, I think it’s actually… isn’t it happening?

00:43:19

Aren’t there…

00:43:19

China is mandatory.

00:43:22

You get penalized if you have more than one child.

00:43:24

But that’s not what we want.

00:43:26

We don’t want that.

00:43:27

But I get the feeling that there are thousands of women

00:43:31

with one child around

00:43:33

who have made a decision to live

00:43:36

without a permanent man in their life

00:43:39

or perhaps with a permanent man in their life,

00:43:41

but they have made the decision that in order to have a career,

00:43:44

a degree of independence, a degree of financial comfort life, but they have made the decision that in order to have a career, a degree of independence,

00:43:45

a degree of financial comfort

00:43:48

that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

00:43:50

I think this is happening

00:43:51

on an undetected and large scale.

00:43:54

It’s just that we have not given it any support,

00:43:57

but we should.

00:43:59

We should say,

00:44:00

these women are the heroes of the future.

00:44:02

These are the people

00:44:03

who are creating the new paradigm.

00:44:05

It’s not being created in seminars at Esalen.

00:44:07

It’s creating as people actually create new kinds of lives

00:44:12

in order to deal with the world as they find it.

00:44:15

In Japan, just recently, there’s a big controversy

00:44:18

that’s been raging for the last few months about this issue,

00:44:21

and they’re trying to get the women there to only have one child

00:44:28

they’re offering on cash incentives i mean granted the cash incentives in the way of their economy

00:44:33

are quite minimal but you know again it’s not it’s not self-expression but well now it’s interesting

00:44:43

i’d like to know more about this, because first of all,

00:44:46

Japan is one of the most child-worshipping

00:44:48

societies in the world.

00:44:50

Second of all, it’s one of the most

00:44:52

consumer-intense

00:44:54

societies in the world.

00:44:56

So, if the Japanese

00:44:58

government is encouraging a one-woman,

00:45:00

one-child policy,

00:45:01

there should be immediate

00:45:03

relief and release of resources somewhere else in

00:45:07

the world, because probably the Japanese child also is using 800 times as much resources.

00:45:15

Well, I’m all for this. I think it should be debated. If I’ve made a serious error,

00:45:20

if somebody can run the demographic modeling, I’d like to know how fast will it fall

00:45:25

unlike you who thinks it couldn’t be sold

00:45:28

I’m already grappling with the problem of

00:45:31

how would you persuade people to stop it

00:45:34

as they observed decade over decade

00:45:38

over decade themselves get richer

00:45:41

better taken care of

00:45:43

their vast estates become ever more vast,

00:45:46

the cost of art falling,

00:45:49

the cost of everything falling?

00:45:51

How would you say,

00:45:52

okay, folks, we’ve been at this 125 years.

00:45:55

Now everybody go back to having as many children as they want.

00:46:00

I think this would be the real problem,

00:46:02

is to shut it off once you’ve demonstrated

00:46:04

what a good thing it is.

00:46:07

Yeah.

00:46:08

Well, we’ve already seen some level of this in the baby boom generation

00:46:15

deferring having children.

00:46:18

So we’ve had a, right now at a 20-year-old age,

00:46:22

we have a decline in the population.

00:46:26

That’s kicking to a new boom behind that.

00:46:30

But the implications are the incredible value that would be placed on the children that you did have.

00:46:39

Oh, incredible value.

00:46:40

These children would have an education, and they would inherit a sane, detoxified,

00:46:46

non-violent, I mean, it’s what we want.

00:46:49

And I’m amazed that the

00:46:52

mushroom could get it together in one sentence.

00:46:54

Here’s a question, how do you save the world?

00:46:58

Says, you know, one woman, one child

00:47:01

and then you go back and you run the scene and you say, my God,

00:47:03

this is it. All we have to do is sell

00:47:06

it. But now, why

00:47:08

should it be hard to sell? I think a lot

00:47:10

of people have children

00:47:11

because they think they should.

00:47:15

And it makes

00:47:16

them poorer,

00:47:18

it scatters their energy,

00:47:20

and not everyone

00:47:22

finds it, you know,

00:47:23

a tremendously rewarding experience.

00:47:25

You can tell that by the statistics on child abuse, abandonment, and that sort of thing.

00:47:32

I think we should see it not as a biological function

00:47:37

that we’re all likely to participate in in our lives,

00:47:41

but the highest calling to which a human being can aspire and the generation

00:47:47

of new people for the next twist of the spiral. Yeah, Billy.

00:47:52

Well, I think he wanted to include with that a restructuring of the family in order that

00:47:56

children could have co-children, because that’s a big thing for having more than one children.

00:48:02

A big motivation is to provide growth made

00:48:05

play made

00:48:06

the archaic model is the long

00:48:10

house or the extended

00:48:11

family and I think

00:48:13

that what the automobile

00:48:15

did to the nuclear

00:48:17

family which was first of all it made

00:48:20

it possible but it’s a

00:48:21

completely maladaptive

00:48:23

style men become breadwinners they have offices

00:48:28

far from the home they are ground down by a set of concerns that their wife and children never see

00:48:36

the woman is essentially a hearth slave chained to the tasks of the house and to the idiot cycle of consuming that children have too tight an interaction with each other

00:48:49

not a tight enough interaction

00:48:51

there are not multiple role models

00:48:54

in the form of uncles, cousins, aunts

00:48:57

coming and going

00:48:59

in an Amazonian tribe

00:49:02

if you have a hassle with your family,

00:49:07

you just take down your hammock and move three posts down to your uncle’s family.

00:49:14

And it’s a big deal.

00:49:15

You’ve moved out.

00:49:16

But it’s only from me to Cheryl, you know.

00:49:19

But it’s a statement about space and commitment.

00:49:23

And then if you piss on your uncle, he’ll throw you out.

00:49:26

And then you have to go somewhere else.

00:49:27

And children move and they choose their role models.

00:49:32

And it’s all, we really have to get back to feeling human,

00:49:38

to feeling good about ourselves.

00:49:40

I am in total agreement with you.

00:49:43

But what I am feeling increasingly pessimistic about

00:49:45

is that we and i use the term collectively are ever going to be able to get that kind of unity

00:49:51

and agreement behind anything i don’t see anything to indicate that we’re moving in that direction

00:49:57

and it absolutely breaks my heart but yes if we got behind just that one idea of course it would

00:50:03

transform the world.

00:50:07

But there are a lot of other ideas too.

00:50:10

It just seems to me that we, again,

00:50:12

the ego is driving the machine and unless there’s that radical shift

00:50:14

in consciousness on this large level,

00:50:17

I just don’t see it happening

00:50:18

and I feel exceedingly discouraged by that.

00:50:21

Well, what I liked, as I said,

00:50:24

about this idea was number one it didn’t

00:50:26

depend on men that eliminates half of everybody so that we’ve a limit now it’s critically dependent

00:50:35

on half of the human race and then what i really like about it is that the women that it is least

00:50:41

important to convert are the women that it would be hardest to convert.

00:50:48

In other words, it’s least important to convert the women of India,

00:50:55

the women of Bangladesh,

00:50:56

because their children aren’t impacting on resources anyway.

00:51:01

So it should be easiest to reach the college educated, high tech, independently minded,

00:51:10

liberal, financially comfortable American or European woman. Well, if that’s who we have to

00:51:18

convince, then I feel hope. I feel that that’s a constituency from which I would expect fair treatment,

00:51:27

a decent hearing, and so forth. Yeah, I’m just working this out over the past 10 days,

00:51:34

so I’m very interested in feedback. It’s not really my bailiwick, but this how do we save

00:51:41

the world thing comes up all the time. And many people in these workshops ask me the question,

00:51:46

what can I personally do?

00:51:50

And I never had, I just had some namby-pamby answer.

00:51:53

You should be aware of, oh God, I don’t know.

00:51:58

Well, here’s something you can do.

00:52:01

Limit your reproductive expression to one child.

00:52:03

You are having, This is the most politically

00:52:06

high impact

00:52:07

act you will ever have.

00:52:10

I mean, the people on the other

00:52:12

side of the planet that you will never meet

00:52:14

will thank you if they

00:52:15

but could.

00:52:17

Men should support

00:52:20

women in this choice.

00:52:22

Is it celibacy or

00:52:23

sterilization what choices

00:52:25

that women are making do we have to demand

00:52:27

you mean

00:52:29

after the first child what happens

00:52:32

yeah well I think that

00:52:34

there are many options

00:52:35

so they should all be exercised

00:52:37

we’re not talking about mass sterilization

00:52:40

here I have two

00:52:41

children as soon

00:52:44

as I had my second child I had had a vasectomy. It just seemed

00:52:47

to me like the socially responsible thing to do. I will not stand up in front of a group of people

00:52:53

and advocate vasectomy because I think I was lied to about what it’s like.

00:53:02

I mean, they said, oh oh it’s a little procedure

00:53:05

a little procedure snip snip

00:53:07

he said hey

00:53:08

I won’t give you the gory details

00:53:11

but

00:53:12

it’s certainly politically

00:53:15

a defensible thing

00:53:16

I think this is where if you’re serious

00:53:19

about making a political impact

00:53:21

this is where we can all

00:53:23

have a tremendous impact and it’s on us

00:53:25

because our children are such

00:53:27

rapacious users

00:53:29

of the world

00:53:31

and its resources, and somehow we have to

00:53:34

recognize that.

00:53:36

Cut down the numbers, then we can still

00:53:38

use the same power. I see what you’re saying.

00:53:40

No, no. Solar is

00:53:41

screwed. No, all I’m suggesting

00:53:44

here is that this would buy us breathing

00:53:46

time I’m not saying

00:53:48

to figure out how we’re going to solve

00:53:52

the very problems you’re talking about I’m not

00:53:54

suggesting we go back to the 17th century

00:53:56

and live on vast estates

00:53:58

and burn coal and wood because

00:54:00

there are only half a billion of us

00:54:02

on earth no I think that

00:54:04

if we drop the pot if we take off this population pressure,

00:54:08

then there will be breathing time to implement the other solutions that you’re talking about,

00:54:14

a solar economy, a hydrogen economy run on hydrogen split from seawater.

00:54:21

There are a number of these kinds of things.

00:54:24

And also we have to correct the gaseous

00:54:27

imbalance of the atmosphere. This billion people that I’m talking about will be kept

00:54:32

fully employed as combination archaeologists and waste cleanup artists because there will

00:54:41

be centuries of detoxifying and cleaning up the earth to be done.

00:54:46

Well, I think what you’re skirting around here is the possibility

00:54:50

that the genetic plan has a whole other scenario going,

00:54:57

and that we’re actually agents of a grander plan that’s being acted through us.

00:55:05

And that’s where the theme of leaving the planet comes around again and again.

00:55:10

Like Tim Leary talks about often,

00:55:13

the plan of the gene is to fill up niches with new species

00:55:20

and then the pressure generated by overcrowding

00:55:26

species and then generate and then the pressure generated by overcrowding spawns the the creative intelligent leap to the next whatever the next frontier is and that as a human species we’ve

00:55:32

been filling up the ecological niche of basically the planet’s surface really because we’re so

00:55:37

adaptable well see the problem with that from my point of view is that, and the problem with all these forced evolution scenarios,

00:55:45

is they have no mercy on the individual.

00:55:50

I mean, in this nice phrase, filling up the niche, what are we talking about?

00:55:55

10 billion people? 20 billion people?

00:55:57

How hellish does it have to get on this planet before governments dedicate every penny they’ve got to building spaceships to escape.

00:56:07

I mean, it could get that bad, but I would prefer not to be crisis-driven, you know,

00:56:14

not to always be moving to the next phase because the bridge behind us is on fire.

00:56:20

I think in credence to the fact that there’s an underlying, possibly an underlying scenario that we have to come make an agreement with.

00:56:27

I think ultimately we’ll be a space-faring species, but I think we have to prove our worthiness for that.

00:56:37

And the way you prove your worthiness is by not wrecking your home planet.

00:56:42

You can’t join the galactic club if you wreck your home planet.

00:56:48

They withdraw your membership applications.

00:56:52

So, in order to save our planet, we’re going to have to become excellent planners,

00:57:01

able to coordinate diverse points of view, able to honor diverse points of view.

00:57:09

All the things we haven’t yet learned to do.

00:57:11

And then, when we’ve balanced our accounts on this planet, we’ll be able to go out into the universe.

00:57:19

I really wouldn’t want us to go any other way i mean i don’t like the scum to the stars scenario that you know we

00:57:26

will pillage rape and burn our way to our tourists the same way we did to fort laramie or something

00:57:32

i i don’t like that i think that we we have to pass certain tests before we can enter the galactic club. Yeah, there is also, you know, there is a realm of art.

00:57:46

I mean, we will, through virtual reality and things like that,

00:57:51

we want to both save the Earth

00:57:54

and live in this titanic dimension

00:57:59

where our engineering dreams can be unfolded against black space.

00:58:04

And it’s the tension between these two things,

00:58:06

the garden planet we come from

00:58:08

and the truly titanic dreams

00:58:12

that are being dreamed even now, you know.

00:58:15

I mean, of ships the size of Manitoba

00:58:18

that would carry a billion people to the stars,

00:58:21

stuff like that.

00:58:23

I mean, it isn’t here now,

00:58:24

but on the other hand

00:58:26

nothing that is here now was here even a hundred years ago

00:58:31

well see there was a there you get a fair amount of agreement when you talk about saving the world

00:58:39

and you talk about what we should stop. We should stop population, stop pollution, stop nuclear

00:58:47

proliferation. Where it gets tricky is when you move into the area of what could be done,

00:58:54

not turning switches off, but turning switches on. And then it becomes really complicated

00:59:01

to know exactly what to do. For instance, you instance, there’s a CO2 debt in the atmosphere

00:59:09

that is the accumulation of several centuries of fairly intense industrial activity.

00:59:15

Well, recently it’s been proposed that for cheap, for like $25 million,

00:59:29

cheap for like 25 million dollars the cost of a bad movie you could uh you could divert iron ore tankers from the great lakes uh to the south pacific and pelletize hematite ore and dump it

00:59:39

into the sea in the south atlantic to create a temporary algal bloom

00:59:45

that would, the theory is

00:59:48

this huge algal bloom would take place

00:59:51

there would be a massive release of oxygen

00:59:54

into the atmosphere

00:59:55

and then the algal bloom would consume the hematite

00:59:59

and the algae would die

01:00:01

and there would be a net gain of 3% oxygen

01:00:04

in the planetary atmosphere.

01:00:11

This is big stuff we’re talking, you know, how right or wrong can you be?

01:00:16

Is this the kind of fiddling we should be getting into?

01:00:20

And then the answer is, well, it depends on how bad you think things are.

01:00:24

Obviously, we’re not going to stand by and do nothing

01:00:26

while the planet burns up

01:00:28

and there are other plans like this

01:00:31

there are plans to aerosol spray

01:00:35

powdered lime into the atmosphere

01:00:38

to restore the acid imbalance

01:00:42

in lakes

01:00:43

and they’re talking about doing this on a scale of the northern hemisphere.

01:00:48

You know, millions of tons of lime dust dropped at high altitude

01:00:52

and then allowed to aerosol disperse.

01:00:55

But, you know, they’re afraid that there might be a return of sunlight to space

01:01:01

that would cause a climatological depression.

01:01:04

So when you’re able to make

01:01:05

big corrective changes

01:01:07

you’re able to make big boo-boos

01:01:10

and these

01:01:11

are vast multinational

01:01:14

undertakings which impact

01:01:15

every country and population

01:01:17

on the planet so you know what kind

01:01:20

of administrative machinery

01:01:21

is to be put in place to deal

01:01:24

with this kind of thing.

01:01:25

Well, these are all challenges to human organization and to mind.

01:01:31

And because we’re going to have to design from the ground up, redesign an entire global

01:01:39

system, I think psychedelics as a catalyst to the design process should have an obvious role

01:01:49

i mean we really we have an opportunity to remake the world almost from scratch if we will but use

01:01:58

the tools that we have to do it the tools that allow us to reach people, to educate people, the computer

01:02:08

power that we have to simulate various solutions before we commit to them.

01:02:14

The future is a future of planning.

01:02:17

The mushroom said to me once, very emphatically, it said, if you don’t have a plan you become part of somebody else’s plan

01:02:27

or the implication is some other plan

01:02:31

and we see that happening

01:02:32

it is easier to move around

01:02:36

than you think

01:02:37

this is both a cause for cynicism and hope

01:02:41

as an example of this

01:02:43

I had a funny thing happen

01:02:45

when I was coming down here.

01:02:47

I don’t own a TV.

01:02:48

I own TVs, but I don’t own antennas.

01:02:51

I watch tape, but I never watch broadcast TV,

01:02:54

so I don’t know anything about it.

01:02:55

So I’m reading the entertainment page of the paper,

01:02:58

and it says that Twin Peaks is canceled,

01:03:04

and I’m puzzled

01:03:06

isn’t this the most phenomenally successful

01:03:09

television program in history

01:03:11

isn’t this the show which mobilized hundreds of millions of people

01:03:15

so they had to be home in time to see it

01:03:18

night after night

01:03:19

and I read through this thing

01:03:21

it’s in the business section

01:03:23

and I read through this and it says it’s cancelled, it’s finished.

01:03:31

The public relations ploy of focusing audience attention

01:03:36

on the question of who killed Laura Palmer completely backfired.

01:03:41

The whole thing is a burnt-out case.

01:03:44

It wasn’t the most creative

01:03:45

television show in history

01:03:47

it was junk

01:03:48

a lot of money was spent to make people think

01:03:51

it’s wonderful and now the money

01:03:53

has stopped being spent and

01:03:54

it ain’t wonderful anymore

01:03:56

this is an example of the power

01:03:59

of public relations

01:04:00

that’s all

01:04:02

if you will give me

01:04:03

10 million dollars we can sell this idea to enough people

01:04:11

to make an impact on the history of the planet. You could sell any idea for $10 million. Media

01:04:19

costs money. Ideas are driven by the same market economy that drives everything else. I mean,

01:04:27

it’s an obscene fact, but no idea is sold without hype because the arena of the sale of ideas

01:04:36

is an arena of hype. I mean, it’s all packaging and that sort of thing. This is a very cynical thing. I realized this watching the peace demonstrations

01:04:48

after the war first broke out,

01:04:51

because I come out of that.

01:04:52

I was in the Vietnam Day Committee

01:04:54

and all that stuff back in Berkeley.

01:04:56

So then here’s the CNN broadcast of the peace demonstration.

01:05:01

And here’s some guy, his Adam’s apple,

01:05:04

moving four inches up and down as he speaks screaming

01:05:09

what do you want peace when do you want it no it’s just you know it’s the total turnoff image

01:05:17

they must have been hired by the government to do this don’t they can’t they get some decent public relations don’t they understand

01:05:26

public relations it’s how you are doing it well then it’s insidious then you have agent provocateurs

01:05:33

essentially which was always the problem in the 60s we looked so bad because the cops always led us

01:05:40

well the way money is spent in this country is really obscene.

01:05:48

There was a breakdown of weapons in the paper about a week ago

01:05:52

in an effort so that the ordinary person in the street

01:05:56

could understand what’s going on.

01:05:58

The stealth fighter, is it the F-18?

01:06:04

The F-18A, sitting there on the runway costs $110 million. You know what

01:06:12

you can buy if you have $110 million on the civilian market? You can buy the Trump princess.

01:06:19

That’s what the Trump princess costs. Well, now we think of Trump as just the exemplar of obscene wealth.

01:06:29

I mean, this guy, what a pig, all this money.

01:06:33

All of his money buys him one F-18A.

01:06:39

We build these things by the dozens,

01:06:42

dream of selling them by the hundreds.

01:06:44

So, you know, is Donald Trump a pig? What about their levels and levels? build these things by the dozens, dream of selling them by the hundreds.

01:06:46

So, you know, is Donald Trump a pig? What about

01:06:48

their levels and levels? Some people

01:06:50

make an easy target.

01:06:52

The amount of money being

01:06:54

spent on armament, as opposed to the

01:06:56

amount of money being spent on

01:06:57

anything else, the cure of disease,

01:07:00

housing, education,

01:07:02

you name it, is

01:07:04

totally schizophrenically skewed

01:07:06

but see I think that ideas are permeable

01:07:12

they do leak out

01:07:15

all you have to do is articulate them

01:07:17

that’s why I don’t want to lead a particular crusade

01:07:21

I don’t want to found the committee for one woman

01:07:24

one child, because I

01:07:26

figure like my position is just to lay this stuff out there. And then if it’s heard, that’s how it

01:07:34

tests. I mean, there is an environment of natural selection for ideas as well. And it’s just a

01:07:43

matter of putting these things out there. I had never heard,

01:07:47

it’s like a suppressed statistic, I had never heard the statistic about an American child using

01:07:55

600 to 800 times the resources of an Indian child. I mean, they do not tell you that, because that’s

01:08:02

all you need to know to figure out to reach a whole bunch of conclusions

01:08:06

just on your little old own without anybody leading you by the nose so that that fact is

01:08:14

kept in abeyance and we’re told oh if only all these little brown people would stop breeding

01:08:19

like flies then we they’re not the problem and to break out of it is indeed a challenge,

01:08:28

and it does take unity, and that’s a challenge. Well, and then if you’re lazy, you just wait,

01:08:34

and it also has internal contradictions which will destroy it. If you’re the patient type,

01:08:42

you can just wait for the internal contradictions to destroy it.

01:08:45

The problem is now we seem to be up against a kind of a planetary deadline.

01:08:50

We don’t have centuries to let these things work out.

01:08:55

So a certain urgency creeps in.

01:09:00

This is why anything which catalyzes consciousness,

01:09:04

this is why anything which catalyzes consciousness,

01:09:08

anything which accelerates the production of ideas in the body politic has to be taken seriously.

01:09:13

And when you look back at the 1960s,

01:09:15

that’s what characterized that decade

01:09:18

was a whole bunch of ideas came out with the psychedelics,

01:09:24

and the psychedelics were repressed and pushed off stage

01:09:28

but the ideas remained to shape our society i mean uh feminism uh racial tolerance uh the idea of

01:09:42

feeling concern for people far removed from you in space and time

01:09:47

the notion of brotherhood basically of global community

01:09:52

all that began then and has bedeviled them ever since

01:09:58

and that’s the real legacy of that time

01:10:01

now it just has to be refocused.

01:10:07

The problems are coming home to roost.

01:10:11

It’s not that abstract anymore.

01:10:13

I mean, this convulsion over petroleum

01:10:15

is going to haunt us for years.

01:10:19

And I think that even in the government chancelleries

01:10:25

and corporate boardrooms of this world,

01:10:28

there’s a fair amount of alarm.

01:10:30

There’s a fair sense that it’s out of control.

01:10:33

People are willing to talk Turkey

01:10:35

within their small private circles.

01:10:39

Who is in charge?

01:10:42

Where are we pointing and where do we want to go?

01:10:45

And it’s a complicated situation.

01:10:48

Are the corporate multinationals black hats, white hats, gray hats, or all of the above?

01:10:55

What are we doing with the nation state?

01:10:58

Is it on its way out?

01:11:04

It’s a tremendous moment

01:11:06

for opportunity

01:11:07

and there will be more chaos

01:11:10

this is just the beginning

01:11:12

the whole rest of this century

01:11:14

is about the surfacing

01:11:17

of the contradictions

01:11:18

in the renaissance structure

01:11:21

of society that we’ve been

01:11:22

working out

01:11:23

it won’t function for an electronic population of six or seven billion people.

01:11:29

And we’re meeting this challenge moment by moment.

01:11:34

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:11:39

thought at a time.

01:11:41

As Terence just said, this convulsion over petroleum is going to haunt us for years.

01:11:48

However, he then went on to say, but we’re meeting this challenge moment by moment.

01:11:54

Now, while I wasn’t very clear in my introduction to this talk,

01:11:57

what I hope today’s program will be leading us to is a further discussion of some of the topics that were touched on by Terrence just now.

01:12:05

You see, while I truly believe that we have at least another century with the

01:12:10

owners of the American empire continuing to have their way with the world, I also believe that

01:12:16

deep inside this troubled world there are ways for us locals to not only survive the empire but

01:12:22

to actually thrive while Rome burns all around us.

01:12:27

Now, something that Terence also said was,

01:12:30

as long as we can meet like this and talk, we can win.

01:12:34

And he said that in conjunction with his comments about who is actually in charge

01:12:38

and is there anything that we can do about our situation.

01:12:42

Well, what we can do, at least for the time being,

01:12:46

is to get together in all kinds of different ways and talk.

01:12:49

During the course of this year,

01:12:51

I hope to be able to Skype into several festivals

01:12:54

and talk with the participants there

01:12:56

about ways in which we can thrive

01:12:58

while the empire washes over us locals.

01:13:01

And as I’ve said before,

01:13:02

I’d be happy to Skype into your local meetings as well. What is important, I believe, Thank you. Over on our forums, I’ve begun a thread titled, The Empire is Falling Apart.

01:13:25

And already there have been eight or ten different people who have begun the conversation.

01:13:31

Soon I’ll be adding a few subsections to this thread, and I hope that we’ll be able to figure out a few ways to help us all survive and to actually thrive during the dark times that we seem to have entered.

01:13:43

actually thrive during the dark times that we seem to have entered.

01:13:50

And this isn’t all about alternative currency, non-corporate sources of work, and alternative living arrangements.

01:13:55

I hope that we can also come up with new ways to have fun-filled days and nights,

01:14:01

and close to home, without first becoming the target of the screwheads who own this country.

01:14:04

So who’s in charge? Well, we are. And I think that there are

01:14:06

a lot of positive things that we can be doing other than buying into the widespread fear that

01:14:11

our governments are creating so as to tighten their grip on we the people. Let’s face it,

01:14:17

if there is one single group of people who already know how to live in a tightly screwed

01:14:22

down police state, it’s the psychedelic community.

01:14:26

We’ve been living within our own set of rules ever since this insane war on drugs first began.

01:14:31

So if you get a chance, why don’t you come over to the forums and add your two cents to the

01:14:36

conversation. Now I’d be remiss, I think, after a lecture by Terrence in which he promoted his one woman, one child idea,

01:14:45

if I didn’t mention a woman who, to me, is a true hero.

01:14:49

Now, if you’re new to the salon, then I should let you know what I’ve said on several occasions in the past.

01:14:55

One of the main reasons that I’m doing these podcasts is to leave a little bit of myself online

01:15:01

where my grandchildren can find it, should they ever want to know a little

01:15:05

about one of their ancestors.

01:15:06

So this is just a personal note to them.

01:15:09

The woman that I’m talking about is named Rindy, and she is the real Rindy who I fictionalized

01:15:15

in the Genesis generation.

01:15:17

I won’t go into her full story, but she had an exceptionally difficult life before we

01:15:22

met.

01:15:23

However, during the time when her daughter was in middle school and high school,

01:15:26

I lived with her and her daughter,

01:15:28

and so I came to understand how unbelievably difficult it is to be a single mother.

01:15:34

It was Rindy, by the way, who broke me out of my conservative shell

01:15:38

and turned me into the radical that I am today.

01:15:41

We produced over a hundred television programs together,

01:15:44

and some of the series

01:15:45

were titled Big Brother’s Latest Lies, Freedom Now, and Reality Check. She also got me involved

01:15:52

in the Vietnam Prisoner of War movement, and we protested together up and down the East

01:15:57

Coast. Without all that I learned from Rindy about being tough and standing up for what you believe in, I would probably still

01:16:06

be a mild-mannered cubicle worker. And she led by example, the example that only a single mother can

01:16:13

provide sometimes. Rindy and I haven’t seen one another for many years now, and we are both

01:16:19

grandparents now. But we stay in touch, and I’m very pleased to say that she is still the shining star

01:16:25

who cracked my conservative shell and had an awful lot to do with making me the person I am today.

01:16:32

Now, as we part, I want to call to mind a man who died the other day and who is going to be

01:16:39

missed by millions. I’m talking, of course, about David Bowie. Over the years, his music and his characters have played a part in many of our lives.

01:16:49

Now, back in the early 1970s, when I was practicing law in Houston, Texas,

01:16:53

one of the songs that was frequently played at our weekend Navy Reserve meetings

01:16:58

was Ground Control to Major Tom.

01:17:02

Now, what seems really funny to me now is that we were so square and straight back

01:17:08

then that we thought the song was about a real astronaut. Tripping wasn’t even in our vocabulary

01:17:14

back then in that straight-laced place called Houston, Texas. At the time, I was living in a

01:17:20

small town that was only 10 miles from the Houston Space Center, and one of the officers

01:17:25

in our reserve unit was actually the person in charge of ground communications for the whole

01:17:30

space program. And in our eyes, he was ground control. Now, fast forward about 15 years or so

01:17:38

to the time when I was living in Dallas and selling ecstasy and had at long last begun

01:17:43

using psychedelics. Needless to say,

01:17:46

the song took on an entirely new meaning for me, as it has for countless psychonauts. So,

01:17:53

I thought that in the memory of David Bowie today, we should let Major Tom end this podcast.

01:18:00

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be careful out there, my friends.

01:18:10

Ground control to Major Tom.

01:18:18

Ground control to Major Tom.

01:18:31

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. Ground control to Major Tom. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

01:18:50

Liftoff. This is Ground Control

01:19:10

It’s a major job

01:19:12

You’ve really made me great

01:19:17

And the papers want to know

01:19:22

Whose shirt you wear.

01:19:31

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare.

01:19:39

This is Major Tom to ground control.

01:19:43

I’m stepping through the door And I’m floating in the most peculiar way

01:19:51

And the stars look very different today

01:19:59

For here am I sitting in a tin can

01:20:08

Far above the world

01:20:16

Planet Earth is blue

01:20:20

And there’s nothing I can do Though I’m past 100,000 miles

01:21:01

I’m feeling very still.

01:21:06

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

01:21:14

So my wife, I love her very much.

01:21:19

She knows.

01:21:23

Ground control to Major Tom

01:21:26

Your circuit’s dead

01:21:28

There’s something wrong

01:21:30

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

01:21:34

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

01:21:37

Can you hear me, Major Tom?

01:21:42

Can you hear

01:21:44

Am I floating

01:21:46

Am I sinking

01:21:48

On above the moon

01:21:55

Planet Earth is full

01:22:00

And there’s nothing I can do Thank you.