Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Modern philosophy is a desert for my money, and who cares about it? Nobody cares about it. Who’s living their life according to the conceptions of modern philosophy, nobody as far as I can see.”
“We live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.”
“We’re like people who don’t remember who we are or where we came from. And we just wander mumbling through the streets of our cities, foraging in garbage cans and frightening other people.”
[Quoting another] “Coming into being is nothing else than presentation through sense.”
“Too much light is trapped in the organic matrix.”
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491 - McKenna, Alchemy, and the World Today
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I would like to begin today by thanking two new lifetime members of the Salon’s forums.
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They are Rudamont and Dax, and their donations are going to be used to help offset some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts,
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for which I will remain grateful forever.
00:00:43 ►
Thank you again, you guys.
00:00:45 ►
Now, last week I mentioned that I had decided to stop using email,
00:00:50 ►
and I’m here to report that it’s been a very restful week for me
00:00:53 ►
by not even opening my email client,
00:00:56 ►
and I’m not having any withdrawal symptoms in case you want to try this for yourself.
00:01:02 ►
However, I want to mention email again today, but for a sad reason.
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As you have most likely heard already, a few days ago Ray Tomlinson died, and Ray is the man who
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actually invented email. While I was still working in the corporate world, I had the good fortune to
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work on a few projects with Ray at the BBN headquarters, where many of the legendary figures of the early internet development years worked. And while most of them don’t really have
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a lasting place in my memory, Ray most certainly did. I found him to be a soft-spoken, funny,
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and wonderful person to be around, not to mention the fact that he was an awesome engineer whose
00:01:43 ►
modesty was legendary.
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I still remember one afternoon when a friend of mine asked him how he came up with the at sign in the email address,
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and like Ray was always very unassuming, his answer was unassuming too.
00:01:57 ►
He simply said, well, it wasn’t rocket science.
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Just look at your keyboard and it should be even obvious to a child.
00:02:04 ►
While email was the most publicly notable of Ray’s work,
00:02:08 ►
his contributions to Internet technology were immense.
00:02:13 ►
So now, let’s get back to where we left off last week
00:02:16 ►
when Terence McKenna, in a May of 1991 workshop,
00:02:21 ►
was waxing eloquent about alchemy and the hermetic tradition. And we’ll pick up where
00:02:26 ►
the conversation left off last week, but about 10 minutes from now, when Terrence is describing
00:02:32 ►
ancient Rome, see if it doesn’t bring to mind the first of the reading where you broke off, I have a puzzlement around the use of the word mind in this context.
00:02:49 ►
It’s Scott’s translation of this word nous.
00:02:53 ►
It simply means this universal permeating intelligence.
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And the statement there is that it is only available to an elite through…
00:03:07 ►
Through asceticism and desire, intent.
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And then there are prescriptions.
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We haven’t gotten into this, but, you know, they lived a life of purity,
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although their definitions of purity varied widely.
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purity, although their definitions of purity varied widely.
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That’s part of the flip-flop that man is brother of God and
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still we have to earn it, it makes it not
00:03:35 ►
kind of a denial of that. That’s right.
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No, this persists right up until, well, to this
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moment, but for instance the quote I always love is from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.
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Thomas Hobbes, you know, was the great theoretician of modern government and social organization.
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And he was basically a paranoid SOB.
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And he says, in the Leviathan he says man to man
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is like unto an errant beast
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and man to man is like unto a god
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and it’s absolutely true
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you know our noblest aspirations and our most hideously
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dehumanizing activities take place in the context of our relationship to other people.
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This is what the alchemists were trying to do.
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You see, they were trying to separate the gold from the dross.
00:04:37 ►
They were trying to take the errant beast, and when we look at alchemical art,
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we will see dragons, dogs, pigs.
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We will see the errant beasts, and we will see the angelic beings
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that are trying to be separated out of our nature.
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This is within each and every one of us.
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Man to man is like unto a god, and man to man is like unto an errant beast.
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This question has to do with the mind.
00:05:07 ►
According to my understanding of some of the Platonic tradition,
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Neoplatonic thought, this has to do with the divided vine in Plato.
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Well, you raise an important point.
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It further complicates the picture, but it’s how it was, folks.
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And that is, the reference here is to Neoplatonism,
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which is a kind of parallel tradition to what we’re talking about.
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Plato had at least a couple of phases in the evolution of his thinking.
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The young Plato is a rational thinker but the
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later Plato apparently after he fell under the influence of Pythagorean schools it becomes a
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full-blown mystic and then in the late Roman Empire now this is almost a thousand years after Plato. We have to remember, in our minds,
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all these people get squeezed together like they could all have dinner together. But, you know,
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Plotinus is as far from Plato as we are from King Canute. So you have to bear in mind the scale of history but so 900 to 1000 years after Plato
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Byzantine school of
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philosophy arose
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around Porphyry
00:06:31 ►
Plotinus and Proclus
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as the major
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exponents and they worked
00:06:38 ►
with the late Plato and
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elaborated a beautiful
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mystical cosmology
00:06:43 ►
this is what I did a workshop here on a year ago.
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And many of those ideas and terms parallel conceptually
00:06:52 ►
the stuff in the Corpus Hermeticum.
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And if you’re of a certain intellectual bent,
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you may find yourself more comfortable with the Neoplatonists than with this this material tends
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to be emotional uh evocative poetic and while there’s great poetry in plotinus there’s also
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very tight thinking that goes along with it and there are other traditions I mean I’m making it simple for you
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there was a whole tradition of what was called
00:07:28 ►
the Chaldean oracles
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and this was a
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collection of
00:07:33 ►
a hundred
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or more fragments
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all of which
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were the
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great commentary of Eusebius
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in 30 volumes,
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Iamblichus, one of them.
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That’s all lost.
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We don’t have that material,
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and it is, in a way, the most mysterious of these traditions
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because it just didn’t survive.
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And it may be that that, the Chaldean oracles,
00:08:02 ►
is the missing link to push this stuff back several centuries deeper into time
00:08:07 ►
because the Chaldean oracles may actually be pre-Platonic.
00:08:11 ►
There’s considerable evidence of that.
00:08:14 ►
But these are very arcane matters.
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I mean, you have to give yourself over to a lifetime of learning these languages
00:08:21 ►
and the philology of these languages to penetrate this stuff.
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The Hermetic Corpus was largely Alexandrian and there were also
00:08:32 ►
Christian Platonists in Alexandria. There were certain centers, Rome, Byzantium,
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Alexandria, Heliopolis in Egypt was a cult site that was maintained for a very long time.
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If you’re interested in this stuff but you don’t like to absorb it this way,
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Flaubert of all people, the Flaubert of Madame Bovary,
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wrote an incredible novel called The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which he
00:09:09 ►
describes second century Alexandria in a fictionalized form and gives you a real flavor
00:09:18 ►
for the intellectual complexity of the Alexandrian world. You see, Christianity had not yet gelled. It was many
00:09:28 ►
things. So you not only have Gnostics of five or six schools, Simonists, Valentinians,
00:09:39 ►
Basilidians, and so forth. But you also have Christians,
00:09:46 ►
a number of cults calling themselves Christians,
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that were also in furious competition.
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Docetists, Montanists, and later Nestorians.
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There were gymnosophists from India,
00:10:00 ►
people who were actually carrying yogic doctrines
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into the Mediterranean world. Plus,
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you then have all the surviving cults of the older Egyptian strata, the cults of Isis and Seville
00:10:16 ►
and Adonis and Dionysus, and it just goes on and on. I mean, the richness of this intellectual world is very,
00:10:27 ►
there’s nothing comparable in our experience.
00:10:31 ►
And it shows the passion with which people were trying to understand
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the dilemma of a dying world,
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because this is what they were confronted with.
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The intellectuals of the empire could feel it all slipping through their hands.
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And Flaubert gives a wonderful picture of this.
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I mean, Flaubert has a very romantic streak,
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and it’s like smoking hashish to read this book.
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I mean, the attention to fabric and architecture and food and odor.
00:11:08 ►
And then because the subject matter is the temptation of St. Anthony,
00:11:13 ►
it’s an excuse to describe these temptations
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in all their sensual richness and erotic kinkiness.
00:11:21 ►
It’s a wonderful way to absorb this material
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but you know
00:11:28 ►
somebody else
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raised a point about the elitism
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or an elite group of people
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and if one considers
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society as you have in Alexandria
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or some of the
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large centers, the only people who
00:11:41 ►
really had access to this
00:11:43 ►
were people who first of all had this were people who, first of all, had
00:11:45 ►
money.
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Correct.
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And who were well-educated.
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Could read.
00:11:51 ►
Yeah.
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Yes, you had to be able to read.
00:11:53 ►
There already you have an elite group.
00:11:55 ►
That’s right.
00:11:55 ►
That’s right.
00:11:56 ►
No, very definitely what survives from a civilization is its literatures.
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And these literatures are usually the production of an elite.
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And we have to remember, you know, don’t have any illusions about the Roman Empire. I mean,
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I always think of the wonderful description. I don’t even know why it’s there. But Boris
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Pasternak in Dr. Zhivago goes off on a rip about ancient Rome, and he describes it as a bargain basement on three floors.
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I mean, this was an empire that lived by human cruelty.
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It was on the backs of slaves that this airy intellectual speculation was based. I mean, it was a tremendously pluralistic society,
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but that pluralism was maintained by standing armies of enormous size and policies of occupation
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of enormous cruelty. I mean, because of our relationship to the Christian tradition, we’re aware of such things as the Zealot Revolt of 69
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and the reign of Herod Antiochus in Jerusalem and so forth and so on. But that was just one
00:13:13 ►
little corner of the empire. And in Armenia, in Gaul, in Spain, in North Africa, military governors
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were carrying out outrageous suppressions of native populations.
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I mean, it was not a pretty time to be alive.
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And what comes down to us then is the yearning to escape from that.
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No wonder these people saw the earth as a cesspool and a trap, because that’s what it was for them without doubt.
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And our own age is very similar.
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I mean, we do not have slavery,
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but we suffer under propaganda,
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mass manipulation of ideas,
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and the degradation and exploitation of the third world
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on a scale the Roman Empire couldn’t even dream of.
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So there is a great affinity.
00:14:12 ►
If any of you are interested in this kind of thing,
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I highly recommend a book by Hans Jonas called The Phenomenon of Life.
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It’s a book of philosophical essays.
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But there’s one essay in there
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called Gnosticism and the Modern Temper
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in which he shows that
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once you take Gnosticism and dump the angels
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and the star demons and all the
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colorful bric-a-brac of late Roman
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thinking, what you have is a thoroughgoing
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existentialism
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completely compatible with Jean-Paul Sartre,
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Jean Genet,
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and the kind of intellectual despair
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that characterized the post-World War II generation in Europe.
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Heidegger.
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Heidegger is thoroughgoingly Gnostic
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in his intentionality.
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It’s just that the language is modern and stripped of this magical thinking.
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And by being stripped of magical thinking, in a way, the modern recension of that state of mind is even more hopeless and disempowering fortunately i think we’re moving
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out of the shadow of that but you know i’m 44 years old i grew up reading those people and
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it made my adolescence much harder than it needed to be i mean my god there wasn’t an iota of hope anywhere to be found, you know.
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And that’s why, for me, psychedelics broke over that intellectual world like a tidal wave of revelation.
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I mean, I just, I quoted to you last night Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement that nature is mute.
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I mean, this is, now I see this as an obscenity almost,
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an intellectual crime against reason and intuition.
00:16:09 ►
It’s the opposite of the Logos.
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It’s the absolute antithesis of the Logos.
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And much of our world is ruled by men older than I am
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who are fully connected into that without any question,
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and they just think all the rest of this is namby-pamby,
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ecological soft-heartedness or some sort.
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There is no openness to the power of bios,
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to the fact of a living cosmos.
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This is what Rupert Sheldrake is always trying to say.
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The reinvestiture of spirit into matter,
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the rebirth of the world soul is a necessary concomitant to what we now understand about the real nature of the world.
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In a way, the theory of evolution, which was born in the 1850s,
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theory of evolution, which was born in the 1850s, is the beginning of the turning of the tide. Because even though the first hundred years of evolutionary theory was fantastically concerned to
00:17:15 ►
eliminate teleology, eliminate purpose, nevertheless, nobody ever understood that except the hardcore evolutionists to everybody
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else evolution meant ascent to higher form and once you know i once heard someone say if it
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doesn’t have to do with genes it ain’t evolution well that’s a tremendously limited view of what
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evolution is i mean the inorganic world is evolving, the organic world
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is evolving, and there the currency is genes, but also the social and intellectual world of human
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beings is evolving, and there the currency is not genes but means. So that idea carries with it the implication of ascent to higher form
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and correctly broadened and understood becomes permission for a return to optimism
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and to the kind of hope that these folks were trying to articulate.
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It seems to me that mine is is if it is available through trial
00:18:27 ►
then we’re back in a separation
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I got it, you don’t
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sometimes I do it
00:18:31 ►
this is to me
00:18:34 ►
a false separation
00:18:36 ►
yes, you’re right
00:18:38 ►
but it’s a separation necessary
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for philosophical discourse
00:18:42 ►
that’s why philosophical discourse
00:18:44 ►
is not the
00:18:46 ►
top of the mountain
00:18:47 ►
language itself
00:18:50 ►
is the process
00:18:51 ►
of making distinctions
00:18:54 ►
that are false
00:18:55 ►
this is why all language is a lie
00:18:57 ►
this is why the ultimate
00:19:00 ►
truth lies in something
00:19:01 ►
unspeakable but the ascent
00:19:04 ►
to the unspeakable but the ascent to the unspeakable
00:19:05 ►
is through this kind of philosophical analysis
00:19:09 ►
let me see
00:19:12 ►
that reminds me of something
00:19:13 ►
but does somebody else have something they want to
00:19:15 ►
well it’s the vehicle
00:19:19 ►
but eventually there’s no road
00:19:22 ►
and you have to park the vehicle
00:19:23 ►
and get out and walk
00:19:25 ►
I think and that’s the journey
00:19:28 ►
Plotinus
00:19:29 ►
the great neoplatonist
00:19:31 ►
has this wonderful phrase
00:19:33 ►
he calls the mystical experience
00:19:36 ►
the flight of the
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alone to the alone
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and I
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love this image
00:19:43 ►
it’s so uncompromising and it’s so it’s about as true as something can be
00:19:50 ►
and still move in the realm of language because it’s saying you know finally words fall away
00:19:58 ►
and finally there is only that which cannot be said many Many of you who’ve stuck with me
00:20:06 ►
know that I love to quote this poem
00:20:08 ►
by this obscure poet
00:20:10 ►
who died in the trenches of France
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in the First World War,
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Trumbull Stickney.
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And he wrote a poem called Meaning’s Edge.
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And the punchline goes like this.
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Meaning’s Edge. I this. Meaning’s edge.
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I look over meaning’s edge
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and feel the dizziness of the things you have not said.
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And I think that every one of these weekends,
00:20:38 ►
this is the effort to carry you to the edge of an abyss
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and then push you over into the dizziness of the things unsaid.
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And they’ll always be unsaid.
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I mean, they are…
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Wittgenstein, God bless him,
00:20:54 ►
had the concept of what he called the unspeakable.
00:20:58 ►
He said philosophy operates in the realm of the speakable,
00:21:01 ►
but eventually we must confront that which cannot be said,
00:21:07 ►
the dizziness of things unsaid.
00:21:09 ►
And that’s where real authenticity
00:21:12 ►
then flows back into the world of community and speech,
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but it comes from a place of utter silence and unsayability.
00:21:23 ►
How could it be otherwise?
00:21:24 ►
I mean, what hubris
00:21:25 ►
it would be to expect that the
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small mouth noises of English
00:21:30 ►
could encompass
00:21:32 ►
being
00:21:33 ►
I mean that’s a primary error
00:21:36 ►
that all philosophy
00:21:37 ►
chooses to make at the beginning
00:21:39 ►
of its enterprise in order to do
00:21:41 ►
this set up shop at all
00:21:43 ►
no these are lower dimensional slices of its enterprise in order to do this set up shop at all no
00:21:45 ►
these are lower dimensional
00:21:47 ►
slices of a
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reality that is ultimately
00:21:51 ►
unitary
00:21:53 ►
ineffable
00:21:54 ►
unspeakable and
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dazzling
00:21:58 ►
anybody else
00:22:01 ►
no
00:22:03 ►
should we do more? Yeah, please.
00:22:06 ►
Philosophical discourse is verbal and mental masturbation.
00:22:11 ►
Absolutely.
00:22:13 ►
And masturbation, you see, because it is…
00:22:18 ►
There’s a pun here, but it’s autopoetic.
00:22:23 ►
It is completely out of yourself.
00:22:27 ►
There is no union with the other.
00:22:32 ►
And the other is what you’re always trying to get to.
00:22:35 ►
The other is a common term in these literatures.
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The other is that which cannot be fully known.
00:22:44 ►
The other is that which cannot be fully known.
00:22:53 ►
You know, I always like to quote the British enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane,
00:22:55 ►
who made a wonderful statement. He said, the universe is not only stranger than we suppose,
00:23:01 ►
it is stranger than we can suppose.
00:23:06 ►
And that’s a dizzying perception.
00:23:09 ►
It’s one thing to think it’s very strange.
00:23:12 ►
It’s quite another thing to realize
00:23:14 ►
that it is stranger than you can suppose.
00:23:17 ►
You may suppose and suppose and suppose,
00:23:20 ►
and you will fall so far short of the mark
00:23:23 ►
that it’s absurd.
00:23:25 ►
That’s what it means to be in the presence of a mystery, you see.
00:23:29 ►
The modern word mystery translates out to unsolved problem.
00:23:37 ►
That’s not what a mystery is.
00:23:39 ►
A mystery is not an unsolved problem.
00:23:41 ►
A mystery is a mystery.
00:23:49 ►
an unsolved problem. A mystery is a mystery and ratiocination can exhaust itself and make no progress with it. And that’s what’s at the core of our being. And that was what was at the core
00:23:55 ►
of this ancient perception. I mean, these were thoroughly modern people. They were shoved up
00:24:01 ►
against the same things that tug at our hearts and our minds and our souls.
00:24:07 ►
And beyond that, there’s not a whole hell of a lot that you can say about it.
00:24:12 ►
This is an idea that will not die, but its practitioners, as you say, they end up in footnotes.
00:24:19 ►
They do not have a happy fate.
00:24:21 ►
Certainly Henri Bergson, with his idea of the
00:24:25 ►
Elan Vital
00:24:26 ►
this is an effort to preserve
00:24:29 ►
this idea of the world soul
00:24:31 ►
and yet you know
00:24:33 ►
the fate of Bergson his influence
00:24:35 ►
on modern philosophy
00:24:38 ►
is certainly minimal
00:24:40 ►
Alfred North Whitehead
00:24:42 ►
is my great
00:24:44 ►
favorite I mean I think Whitehead is my great favorite I mean I think Whitehead
00:24:46 ►
is just you know the cat’s
00:24:49 ►
pajamas and he has this idea
00:24:52 ►
of a living cosmos
00:24:54 ►
that life and vitality extend right down
00:24:58 ►
into the electron and yet
00:25:01 ►
in spite of his mathematical
00:25:04 ►
contributions the fact that he wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead is not taught.
00:25:11 ►
I mean, there’s some, I guess, one university in this country where they take him seriously.
00:25:17 ►
The modern philosophy is a desert for my money.
00:25:22 ►
And who cares about it?
00:25:24 ►
Nobody cares about it nobody cares about it who’s living their life
00:25:27 ►
according to uh the the conceptions of modern philosophy nobody as far as i can see but yes
00:25:35 ►
vitalism was this impulse in biology that persisted clear up until the 1920s with embryologists like Driesch and his school.
00:25:46 ►
And mechanical biology has been at great pains to suppress that.
00:25:54 ►
That’s why Rupert Sheldrake is such a breath of fresh air
00:25:58 ►
because he can be seen as a person carrying the vitalist message back into science.
00:26:06 ►
I mean, his new book on the greening of science and nature
00:26:09 ►
is nothing more than a manifestation,
00:26:13 ►
I’m sorry, a manifesto for the re-recognition
00:26:17 ►
of the presence of the world soul.
00:26:21 ►
What about the Native Americans that were living that philosophy until you left them out
00:26:26 ►
yes well aboriginal people
00:26:28 ►
not only the Native Americans but the tribes
00:26:31 ►
of the Amazon
00:26:31 ►
if you live next to nature
00:26:34 ►
this is such an overwhelming perception
00:26:36 ►
that it’s never called into question
00:26:39 ►
but you see we trace
00:26:41 ►
we most of us trace
00:26:42 ►
our civilization to
00:26:44 ►
desert dwellers who invented agriculture, which gave us surpluses.
00:26:50 ►
So then we had to build walled enclosures to defend our surpluses from starving neighbors.
00:26:56 ►
And we’re talking 6,000 B.C. at Jericho for this kind of stuff. And so we have been cut off from the natural mind
00:27:07 ►
longer than any other group of people on earth.
00:27:11 ►
This is how we are able to carry out the demonic,
00:27:14 ►
in the negative sense,
00:27:16 ►
the demonic reconstruction of the world that we have.
00:27:20 ►
I mean, what we have done is, you know, if there is a sin, then we have sinned,
00:27:29 ►
you know. Robert Oppenheimer said, beyond all rational argument, the physicists have known sin,
00:27:36 ►
and it’s because they reached into the heart of matter without reverence, and their best trick
00:27:42 ►
was to call down the light that burns at the center of stars,
00:27:46 ►
and they call it down to the test centers of our deserts and onto the heads of our enemies,
00:27:52 ►
if necessary. But this is a cosmic sin. It’s an abomination. It’s the story of Western civilization.
00:28:02 ►
The first great error was the urbanization. Well, I don’t know, first great error was the
00:28:05 ►
urbanization, well I don’t know
00:28:07 ►
first great error, the invention of agriculture
00:28:10 ►
was a pretty staggering
00:28:11 ►
bad turn
00:28:14 ►
then urbanization
00:28:15 ►
and then a piece of bad luck
00:28:17 ►
that really we didn’t need to have
00:28:20 ►
befall us, which was the invention
00:28:22 ►
of the phonetic alphabet
00:28:23 ►
and with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and with the invention of the phonetic alphabet
00:28:26 ►
we moved away from symbolism and
00:28:30 ►
lost even the symbolic connection to the world and that happened with the evolution of
00:28:38 ►
Demotic Greek and and even earlier languages linear a and B and that kind of stuff.
00:28:45 ►
McLuhan talks a lot about this.
00:28:48 ►
I mean, we live in a universe so alienated that we can barely conceive of the way back.
00:28:55 ►
But hopefully, you know, archaeology is a wonderful thing.
00:29:02 ►
I mean, we are actually, as I said to you last night,
00:29:04 ►
digging into the stratigraphic layers
00:29:07 ►
of our past
00:29:08 ►
and reconstructing
00:29:10 ►
these ancient intellectual machines
00:29:12 ►
and setting their gears,
00:29:14 ►
turning and seeing how it works.
00:29:17 ►
And hopefully, when we recover,
00:29:20 ►
we’re like amnesiacs.
00:29:22 ►
We’re like people who don’t remember
00:29:23 ►
who we are or where we came from,
00:29:26 ►
and we just wander mumbling through the streets of our cities,
00:29:30 ►
foraging in garbage cans and frightening other people.
00:29:36 ►
And yet if we could wake up an archaeology and the rebirth of an awareness of the goddess
00:29:45 ►
and the pushing of science to the point where its irrational foundations become more clear.
00:29:53 ►
This is all part of a program of awakening of an archaic revival
00:29:58 ►
that will then make us part of the living world
00:30:02 ►
rather than a disease, a parasitic force upon it.
00:30:09 ►
This refers to the theme I touched on a little bit last night
00:30:13 ►
of the importance of the imagination
00:30:15 ►
and how I think that our destiny lies in the imagination.
00:30:23 ►
God is ever-existent
00:30:25 ►
and makes manifest all else,
00:30:27 ►
but he himself is hidden
00:30:29 ►
because he is ever-existent.
00:30:32 ►
He manifests all things
00:30:34 ►
but is not manifested.
00:30:36 ►
He is not himself brought into being
00:30:39 ►
in images presented through our senses,
00:30:41 ►
but he presents all things to us
00:30:44 ►
in such images.
00:30:46 ►
It is only things which are brought into being
00:30:49 ►
that are presented through sense.
00:30:51 ►
Coming into being is nothing else
00:30:54 ►
than presentation through sense.
00:30:56 ►
This is so thoroughly modern.
00:30:58 ►
It’s just staggering.
00:30:59 ►
I mean, for 1,000 or 1,500 years,
00:31:02 ►
people couldn’t say anything that clearly.
00:31:05 ►
It is evident then that he who alone has not come into being
00:31:09 ►
cannot be presented through sense,
00:31:12 ►
and that being so, he is hidden from our sight.
00:31:16 ►
But he presents all things to us through our senses,
00:31:19 ►
and thereby manifests himself through all things and in all things,
00:31:26 ►
and especially to those whom he wills to manifest himself.
00:31:31 ►
For though thought alone can see that which is hidden, inasmuch as thought itself is hidden
00:31:38 ►
from sight, and if even the thought which is within you is hidden from your sight, how can he, being in himself, be manifested to you through your bodily eyes?
00:31:51 ►
But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind,
00:31:54 ►
then, my son, he will manifest himself to you.
00:31:58 ►
For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe,
00:32:03 ►
and you can behold God’s image with your eyes and lay hold on it with your hands. To my mind, this is the permission for the psychedelic experience, that we lay hold of the image of the ineffable through the eyes.
00:32:21 ►
through the eyes.
00:32:23 ►
If you wish to see him,
00:32:25 ►
think on the sun,
00:32:27 ►
think on the course of the moon,
00:32:29 ►
think on the order of the stars.
00:32:33 ►
The sun is the greatest of the gods in heaven.
00:32:35 ►
To him, as to their king and overlord,
00:32:38 ►
all the gods of heaven yield place. And yet this mighty God,
00:32:41 ►
greater than earth and sea,
00:32:43 ►
submits to have smaller stars circling above him.
00:32:49 ►
Who is it then, my son, that he obeys with reverence and awe?
00:32:53 ►
Each of these stars, too, is confined by measured limits and has an appointed space to range in.
00:33:01 ►
Why do not all the stars in heaven run like and equal courses? Who is it that has
00:33:07 ►
assigned to each its place and marked out each for the extent of its course? And then it goes on and
00:33:14 ►
on. And then here is an amazing modern anticipation of modernity. Would that it were not possible for you to grow wings and soar into the
00:33:29 ►
air. Poised between earth and heaven, you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea, and the streaming
00:33:38 ►
rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars, and the swiftness of the movement with
00:33:47 ►
which heaven encompasses all. What happiness were that, my son, to see all these born along with one
00:33:55 ►
impulse, and to behold him who is unmoved moving in all that moves, and him who is hidden made manifest through his works.
00:34:07 ►
This is an image of the planet seen from space.
00:34:11 ►
I mean, it’s absolutely the unified image of our planet,
00:34:18 ►
and it is, I think, the central image in this early hermetic thing.
00:34:25 ►
This is the unifying, this is as close to an image of what Godhead is
00:34:30 ►
that they were able to reach.
00:34:31 ►
I mean, this is a shamanic flight that delivers a scientific description
00:34:39 ►
of the earth moving in space.
00:34:41 ►
This is written A.D. 150.
00:34:44 ►
This is book five. Nobody had that insight
00:34:50 ►
until we reached Giordano Bruno. And if you read Giordano Bruno in the Hermetic tradition,
00:34:57 ►
you know that Bruno was burned at the stake. And the reason he was burned at the stake was because he looked up into the sky
00:35:06 ►
and did not see the stellar shells
00:35:11 ►
and the angelic hierarchies.
00:35:14 ►
Bruno had a mystical experience
00:35:17 ►
and when it was over he said,
00:35:20 ►
the universe is infinite.
00:35:23 ►
The stars go on forever.
00:35:28 ►
And that single statement was just the intellectual dynamite
00:35:34 ►
that destroyed the whole medieval Hellenistic,
00:35:37 ►
the entire previous cosmological vision was left behind with that single statement it was such a powerful statement
00:35:47 ►
that he had to go to the stake for that and we have never recovered from from that perception
00:35:55 ►
it was a fundamental perception and it occurred because he looked without precondition into the night sky and did not see you know wheels and demons and
00:36:08 ►
angels and shells of cosmic fate and necessity and he just said you know that’s bullshit what is
00:36:16 ►
there is infinite space infinite time the stars are hung like lamps unto the utmost regions of infinity
00:36:26 ►
and this then inaugurates
00:36:29 ►
the beginning of modernity
00:36:30 ►
and it’s a perception
00:36:34 ►
that arose on the foundation
00:36:37 ►
of all of this earlier thinking
00:36:40 ►
here’s another passage
00:36:43 ►
on the imagination. Yes?
00:36:47 ►
This somehow is the way of reaching the vision.
00:36:50 ►
Well, the practice, we know a lot less about that because there was much secrecy around this.
00:36:59 ►
What we have are the philosophical discourses, and then when we talk about alchemy this afternoon,
00:37:06 ►
we’ll see that there the technique
00:37:09 ►
becomes projection onto matter,
00:37:12 ►
that you enter into a kind of self-hypnosis
00:37:17 ►
where by having these,
00:37:20 ►
what we call naive ontological categories,
00:37:23 ►
in other words, not being sure exactly how much
00:37:26 ►
of mind is in matter or how much matter is in mind, you can erase the boundary between self
00:37:34 ►
and world and project the contents of the unconscious onto chemical processes now what went on in the early phase
00:37:46 ►
here we don’t know
00:37:47 ►
the hermetic the chismagistic hymns
00:37:49 ►
are largely
00:37:50 ►
as you see them here
00:37:53 ►
philosophical discourses
00:37:55 ►
there was stress on diet
00:37:58 ►
and
00:37:59 ►
purity
00:38:00 ►
asceticism was typical of the
00:38:03 ►
hermetic approach in Gnism, it went one of several
00:38:09 ►
ways. There were schools of Gnosticism which were vegetarian and puristic. And then because they
00:38:19 ►
felt that man was no part of the universe, that man was somehow hermetically sealed, if you will,
00:38:29 ►
hermetically sealed against contamination from the universe,
00:38:33 ►
some Gnostic schools said you can do anything you want.
00:38:38 ►
You can have any kind of sexual arrangement you want.
00:38:41 ►
You can do anything you want because you are not,
00:38:43 ►
do not think that you
00:38:45 ►
are part of the universe. And so you had Gnostic schools side by side, some orgiastic and quasi
00:38:53 ►
tantric and some ascetic. There were Gnostic sects that, you see, because the idea was that light was trapped in matter by the act of procreation, there were Gnostic sects that only practiced forms of sexual union that couldn’t lead to conception.
00:39:22 ►
homosexual sects there were sects which only practiced
00:39:24 ►
anal intercourse
00:39:26 ►
and for them
00:39:28 ►
that was the same as
00:39:30 ►
celibacy because the real
00:39:32 ►
concern was not to trap
00:39:34 ►
any more of the light
00:39:36 ►
and you know I don’t seriously
00:39:38 ►
advocate this but I think in our
00:39:40 ►
current situation of overpopulation
00:39:43 ►
a little dose
00:39:44 ►
of this kind of thinking wouldn’t be a bad thing.
00:39:48 ►
I mean, too much light is trapped in the organic matrix.
00:39:52 ►
And so they, and these Gnostic sects that, for instance, were exclusively homosexual or exclusively practiced anal intercourse, Of course, they were suicide sects.
00:40:07 ►
They disappeared very quickly
00:40:09 ►
because they could only make converts
00:40:12 ►
by missionary conversion.
00:40:17 ►
You didn’t have children.
00:40:19 ►
You couldn’t hand it on.
00:40:20 ►
But it shows how thoroughgoing their rejection of of the world was how contaminated
00:40:27 ►
they felt themselves to be by the material world and but then you also had as i mentioned these
00:40:35 ►
optimistic schools that saw nature as something to be perfected and and said man has been set onto the earth
00:40:45 ►
not to reject it
00:40:47 ►
but to perfect it
00:40:49 ►
and utopianism
00:40:53 ►
the belief that one can create a perfect society
00:40:57 ►
it goes back
00:40:59 ►
into these hermetic ideals
00:41:03 ►
because the idea was that a perfect society
00:41:07 ►
could be the goal of the alchemical work.
00:41:11 ►
Let me read you a passage from Giordano Bruno.
00:41:17 ►
This is a wonderful passage from the Picatrix.
00:41:21 ►
Remember Picatrix?
00:41:22 ►
This was the book of 12th century magical texts that began to
00:41:27 ►
introduce these hermetic ideas. And this passage is the core passage that inspired the Rosicrucians
00:41:36 ►
and numerous other utopian movements. here is Francis Yates
00:41:45 ►
Hermes Chismagistus is often
00:41:48 ►
mentioned as the source for some
00:41:50 ►
talismanic images and in other
00:41:52 ►
connections but there is in particular
00:41:54 ►
one very striking
00:41:56 ►
passage in the fourth book of
00:41:58 ►
Picatrix in which Hermes
00:42:00 ►
is stated to have been the first
00:42:02 ►
to use magical images
00:42:03 ►
and is credited with having founded a marvelous city in Egypt.
00:42:09 ►
And here is the passage from the Picatrix.
00:42:12 ►
There are among the Chaldeans very perfect masters in this art,
00:42:17 ►
and they affirm that Hermes was the first who constructed images
00:42:21 ►
by means of which he knew how to regulate the Nile
00:42:25 ►
against the motion of the moon.
00:42:27 ►
This man also built a temple to the sun,
00:42:30 ►
and he knew how to hide himself from all
00:42:33 ►
so that no one could see him, although he was within it.
00:42:38 ►
Now, those of you who are scholars of Rosicrucianism
00:42:41 ►
know that one of the things that was always said about Rosicrucians was that they
00:42:45 ►
were invisible. This was how Robert Flood proved to people that he wasn’t a Rosicrucian. Say,
00:42:54 ►
you’re looking at me, so how can I be one? And so he’s in the temple, but he could not be seen
00:43:01 ►
within it. It was he, Hermes Trris Magistus II, who in the east
00:43:06 ►
of Egypt constructed a city 12 miles long, within which he constructed a castle, which had four
00:43:14 ►
gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate, he placed the form of an eagle. On the western
00:43:21 ►
gate, the form of a bull. On the southern gate, the form of a lion. And on the northern gate the form of a bull, on the southern gate the form of a lion,
00:43:26 ►
and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a dog.
00:43:29 ►
Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices.
00:43:34 ►
Nor could anyone enter the gates of the city except by their permission.
00:43:39 ►
There he planted trees, in the midst of which was a great tree,
00:43:43 ►
which bore the fruit of all generation
00:43:46 ►
on the summit of the castle he caused to be raised a tower 30 cubits high on the top of which he
00:43:53 ►
ordered to be placed a lighthouse the color of which changed every day until the seventh day
00:43:59 ►
after which it returned to the first color and so the city was illuminated with these colors
00:44:06 ►
near the city there was abundance of waters
00:44:09 ►
in which dwelt many kinds of fish
00:44:12 ►
around the circumference of the city
00:44:15 ►
he placed engraved images
00:44:17 ►
and ordered them in such a manner
00:44:19 ►
that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous
00:44:23 ►
and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm.
00:44:27 ►
The name of the city was Adocentine.
00:44:31 ►
Now, what we’re familiar with from the Platonic literature
00:44:35 ►
is a quasi-rational, largely rational approach to utopian thinking
00:44:40 ►
that you get in the Republic.
00:44:43 ►
However, students of the Republic will recall
00:44:45 ►
that the fifth or tenth book of the Republic
00:44:50 ►
contains the myth of Ur,
00:44:52 ►
which we went over in detail in the section I did on Neoplatonism.
00:44:57 ►
And the myth of Ur is one of the most bizarre and puzzling passages
00:45:01 ►
in the entire ancient literature.
00:45:06 ►
You recall Ur, E-R, was a soldier who died.
00:45:11 ►
He was killed in battle.
00:45:12 ►
But after eight days, he returned to life.
00:45:16 ►
And then he told a story that is the absolute puzzlement of ancient scholars.
00:45:23 ►
It’s highly mathematical.
00:45:26 ►
It has to do with the spindle of necessity and the description
00:45:29 ►
of some kind of cosmic machine and all the
00:45:32 ►
ratios of the gears of this machine
00:45:35 ►
are given and nobody knows what is being
00:45:38 ►
talked about, but here we have a different
00:45:41 ►
thrust, a magical utopianism
00:45:44 ►
and the idea of a perfected human society using magic
00:45:48 ►
because these engraved images that he ordered in such a manner
00:45:55 ►
that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous,
00:45:58 ►
that means he was able to deflect the energies of cosmic fate. The city was immune to astrological malefic influence.
00:46:11 ►
It was protected.
00:46:13 ►
And when we talk later about the alchemical aspirations of the Rosicrucians
00:46:19 ►
and John Dee and Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia,
00:46:24 ►
we’ll see that this impulse toward an alchemical
00:46:27 ►
kingdom returns again and again. In a way, utopianism is the four-gated city of utopian
00:46:36 ►
magical dreaming is one version of the philosopher’s stone. It’s a kind of diffuse notion of the philosopher’s stone,
00:46:47 ►
but it’s a society in perfect harmony
00:46:49 ►
with fully realized beings living within it,
00:46:54 ►
practicing a cosmic religion
00:46:56 ►
that frees them from the impulses of cosmic fate.
00:47:07 ►
The other thing that is going on in some of this alchemical imagery
00:47:09 ►
is a kind of subtext
00:47:13 ►
of late alchemy
00:47:14 ►
is what’s called the Ars Memoria
00:47:17 ►
the art of memory
00:47:18 ►
and in fact Francis Yates has a book
00:47:23 ►
called The Art of Memory.
00:47:26 ►
And this is a lost art, literally.
00:47:30 ►
It begins with the Roman orator Cicero and was practiced up until the early 17th century.
00:47:51 ►
of was people, orators, it was considered very bad form to read your speech if you were an orator.
00:47:52 ►
And so you had to memorize your speech and there were tricks of memory.
00:47:57 ►
And the commonest mnemonic trick was to think of a building was called the memory palace a
00:48:09 ►
building that is familiar to you I’ve done this myself with the University of
00:48:15 ►
California because it’s an area that I’m very familiar with because I was a
00:48:19 ►
student there and there are many buildings and many hallways and many floors and what you do is when
00:48:27 ►
you make your speech in your mind you are moving through the memory palace and at various points
00:48:34 ►
you construct what are called emblemata and the idea of these emblemata is that they be as unusual, shocking, and unexpected as possible
00:48:50 ►
in order to be memorable to you. So say you’re giving a speech about the seven deadly sins. well so then luxuria might be for you a nun copulating with a dog
00:49:08 ►
and you’ll set the nun and the dog in a little niche in the hallway of the memory palace
00:49:14 ►
well then when you reach that place in your imaginary journey
00:49:18 ►
all these associations will spring to mind
00:49:21 ►
and you will be able to give your speech
00:49:28 ►
Flawlessly to us this sounds
00:49:31 ►
Tortured and peculiar but it works quite well
00:49:39 ►
One of the great practitioners of the Ars Memoria was Giordano Bruno and he wrote a book called
00:49:46 ►
Los Pejo de la bestia triumphant, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast.
00:49:51 ►
And, my God, Max Ernst, eat your heart out. I mean, this is a surreal epic read as straight plain text
00:49:57 ►
because that’s not how it’s supposed to be read.
00:49:59 ►
It’s an agglomeration of these mnemonic emblemata
00:50:03 ►
that led him on then to probably give a fairly conventional
00:50:08 ►
disputation on one subject or another
00:50:11 ►
but there are even old books of these emblemata
00:50:16 ►
that are before surrealism
00:50:19 ►
these were some of the wildest images
00:50:21 ►
that the western mind would tolerate
00:50:24 ►
the one thing that we didn’t get into this morning some of the wildest images that the Western mind would tolerate.
00:50:28 ►
The one thing that we didn’t get into this morning was talking about the astrological side of it
00:50:33 ►
and the role of the decans.
00:50:36 ►
The decans are these demons, three to a sign,
00:50:40 ►
so there are 36 of them.
00:50:43 ►
And this was thought to be an astrological conceit that goes back to
00:50:49 ►
Egypt as opposed to the ordinary zodiacal significators which go back to Haran in what is now modern Iraq. And these decans were the demons that were summoned
00:51:11 ►
by these Renaissance magi in an effort to control and manipulate fate. You may, if you were paying
00:51:21 ►
attention this morning, noticed that in all the reading I did from the Corpus Hermeticum,
00:51:27 ►
there was really nothing explicitly magical about it.
00:51:32 ►
It was philosophical.
00:51:34 ►
There was one mention, I think, of animating statues
00:51:37 ►
in the description of the four-gated city.
00:51:41 ►
But it was those magical animation passages that really captured the imagination of the
00:51:51 ►
renaissance and they built on that and the idea simply put is that these decans and zodiacal signs are at the center of associative schemata, which include plants, minerals, odors, certain flowers, certain animals. had its deconic assignation and so if you were involved
00:52:26 ►
in
00:52:27 ►
promoting an affair
00:52:30 ►
with a woman or something
00:52:31 ►
like that then you would do an invocation
00:52:34 ►
to Venus
00:52:35 ►
and you would gather
00:52:37 ►
the associated minerals
00:52:40 ►
stones, animals
00:52:41 ►
and you would put them in a room
00:52:44 ►
and then certain musical
00:52:45 ►
certain tonal modes
00:52:48 ►
were also associated
00:52:50 ►
with these things
00:52:51 ►
and so you would play the music
00:52:53 ►
you would have the flowers
00:52:56 ►
present, the minerals
00:52:57 ►
present, the invocations
00:53:00 ►
and what you were trying to do
00:53:02 ►
is create a microcosm
00:53:04 ►
of the macrocosm to draw down this stellar energy.
00:53:11 ►
It wasn’t about the classical Hollywood appearance of demons in a circle.
00:53:16 ►
That’s the stuff of Picatrix, the earlier, somewhat less refined style of magic.
00:53:22 ►
somewhat less refined style of magic
00:53:25 ►
let’s see
00:53:28 ►
yes, oh here it is, I did bring it
00:53:30 ►
I wanted to read you one passage here
00:53:33 ►
from, this is Francis Yates
00:53:37 ►
again in Giordano and the Hermetic Tradition
00:53:40 ►
because this describes this change of status
00:53:43 ►
of the magician that we’re interested in.
00:53:49 ►
And also what we didn’t talk about this morning was the importance of Kabbalah,
00:53:54 ►
which came in quite late but was then worked out in great detail.
00:54:01 ►
This was originally the idea, it was the Jewish contribution to this kind of magic.
00:54:07 ►
It was the idea that since the world had been made by Jehovah, by the speaking of words,
00:54:16 ►
in Principio ad verbum, ad verbo caro factum est, in other words, the speaking of Hebrew was thought to be the use of a primary linguistic tool for the purposes of creation. sometimes practiced silently, the mere constructing of these Hebrew letters
00:54:46 ►
and the setting out of messages in Hebrew was deemed efficacious as well.
00:54:52 ►
And then a further declension for people who were even frustrated with that
00:54:58 ►
was to channel magical languages which were pseudo-Hebraic
00:55:06 ►
in structure and appearance
00:55:08 ►
and this is a
00:55:10 ►
whole branch of
00:55:12 ►
research much too arcane
00:55:14 ►
for us to go into here
00:55:16 ►
the only non
00:55:18 ►
Hebraic magical
00:55:20 ►
language that I may mention
00:55:22 ►
will be Enochian
00:55:24 ►
and Enochian was an
00:55:26 ►
angelic language
00:55:28 ►
channeled to John Dee
00:55:30 ►
and used by him
00:55:32 ►
in his magical
00:55:33 ►
evocations and then later
00:55:36 ►
it was taken up by
00:55:37 ►
Aleister Crowley
00:55:39 ►
and the folks of
00:55:42 ►
the Golden Dawn but there were
00:55:44 ►
many many of these magical
00:55:47 ►
languages. The Vonage Manuscript is written in one of them. But I want to read you this passage
00:55:54 ►
about how the Renaissance changed the status of the magician.
00:56:01 ►
We begin to perceive here an extraordinary change in the status of the magician. The necromancer concocting his filthy mixtures, the conjurer making his frightening invocations were both outcasts from society regarded as dangers to religion and forced into playing their trades in secrecy. These old-fashioned characters are hardly recognizable
00:56:27 ►
in the philosophical and pious magi of the Renaissance.
00:56:32 ►
There is a change in status almost comparable
00:56:35 ►
to the change in status of the artist
00:56:37 ►
from the mere mechanic of the Middle Ages
00:56:40 ►
to the learned and refined companion of princes of the Renaissance, and the magics
00:56:47 ►
themselves are changed almost out of recognition. Who could recognize the necromancer studying his
00:56:54 ►
picatrix in secret in the elegant facino with his infinitely refined use of sympathies,
00:57:01 ►
his classical incantations, his elaborately neoplatonized
00:57:06 ►
talismans. Who could recognize the conjurer using the barbarous techniques of some clavis
00:57:13 ►
salomonis in the mystical pico, lost in the religious ecstasies of Kabbalah, drawing archangels
00:57:21 ►
to his side? And yet there is a kind of continuity
00:57:25 ►
because the techniques are at bottom
00:57:28 ►
based on the same principles.
00:57:30 ►
Ficino’s magic is an infinitely refined
00:57:33 ►
and reformed version of pneumatic necromancy.
00:57:37 ►
Pico’s practical Kabbalah
00:57:39 ►
is an intensely religious and mystical version of conjuring.
00:57:44 ►
So now we move in this realm.
00:57:47 ►
I mean, these were the companions of princes,
00:57:49 ►
and there was in that 120 years,
00:57:57 ►
from let’s say 1500 to the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War,
00:58:02 ►
a constant effort in various parts of Europe
00:58:05 ►
to try and turn European society toward a kind of magical revolution. I mean, the Europe
00:58:14 ►
of the 11th and 12th century was entirely ruled by scholastic rationalism. Witchcraft was virtually unknown and very curious. It’s the 15th and 16th century
00:58:29 ►
where you get this tremendous proliferation of magical systems, magical ideas, and social
00:58:37 ►
hysterias related to witchcraft, alchemy, conjuring and magic
00:58:46 ►
those are the centuries when these things
00:58:49 ►
really broke out into the open
00:58:51 ►
and alchemy in that period
00:58:55 ►
is basically a story of personalities
00:58:59 ►
wonderful personalities
00:59:01 ►
too many for us to really talk about in detail.
00:59:07 ►
I mean, we have Nicholas and Pertonelle Flamel,
00:59:12 ►
who sought and found the Philosopher’s Stone, according to legend,
00:59:17 ►
and according to legend are living to this day somewhere in Central Asia in perfect happiness,
00:59:23 ►
somewhere in Central Asia in perfect happiness,
00:59:27 ►
having achieved not only the chemical wedding but the water stone of the wise.
00:59:30 ►
And then we have Basil Valentine
00:59:33 ►
who refined red wine
00:59:38 ►
and distilled it in distillation apparatus
00:59:42 ►
until he got essentially pure alcohol.
00:59:48 ►
And upon drinking this, he was so convinced that he had found the philosopher’s stone
00:59:53 ►
that he announced the eminent approach of the end of the world based on his discovery.
01:00:00 ►
And he was not secretive at all. He propagated his recipes and, in fact, sampled the distillates of some of his brother alchemists
01:00:11 ►
and popularized this very widely.
01:00:14 ►
To this day, the reason certain cognacs are in the hands of monastic orders
01:00:21 ►
and no one else can make these things is because they were originally alchemical secrets.
01:00:28 ►
And many of these early alchemists were men of the cloth,
01:00:32 ►
quite a number of them.
01:00:37 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:00:40 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:00:44 ►
Well, we’re going to have to leave Terence’s stroll through the world of alchemy there for today,
01:00:50 ►
but there are still two more tapes in this series that I’ll be playing for you in the near future.
01:00:56 ►
However, I have to be honest with you.
01:00:58 ►
Although I’ve always been interested in alchemy and the Hermetic Corpus,
01:01:03 ►
listening to Terence read from those ancient tracts just doesn’t do much for me.
01:01:08 ►
I guess the language is too reminiscent of some of the religious texts that were forced upon me when I was young.
01:01:14 ►
That said, I do admit to still retaining a curiosity about alchemy,
01:01:19 ►
and so I bought a copy of The Chemical Wedding, that novel that Terrence mentioned in last week’s podcast.
01:01:26 ►
Right now, I’m only about halfway through it, and I’m finding it really interesting.
01:01:31 ►
So, if like me, Terrence’s talk today isn’t resonating all that well with you, but you still have an interest in alchemy,
01:01:38 ►
well, then my suggestion is for you to continue digging into the subject from whatever direction most interests you.
01:01:44 ►
is for you to continue digging into the subject from whatever direction most interests you.
01:01:50 ►
At the very least, I suspect you’re going to experience a few metaphysical aha moments to make your quest worthwhile.
01:01:53 ►
And if alchemy isn’t the avenue that you want to stroll down in your search for ways in
01:01:58 ►
which to create a perfect society, then maybe a book by Toby Hemingway, titled The Permaculture City, might be another
01:02:07 ►
path to showing us how to create a perfected human society, but not through the use of magic.
01:02:13 ►
And while I haven’t finished reading this book yet either, it came highly recommended by Dax,
01:02:19 ►
our new lifetime salonner in the forums. And while there are chapters about growing food,
01:02:21 ►
New Lifetime Saloner in the forums.
01:02:25 ►
And while there are chapters about growing food, of course,
01:02:29 ►
Hemingway also provides a new way of thinking about urban living with practical examples for creating abundant food,
01:02:33 ►
energy security, close-knit communities,
01:02:36 ►
local and meaningful livelihoods,
01:02:38 ►
and sustainable policies for our cities and towns.
01:02:42 ►
So if you’re interested, you can even download a Kindle sample
01:02:45 ►
and check it out. Also, I should mention that one of the books that Terrence spoke about in this
01:02:51 ►
talk today, The Temptation of St. Anthony, is available for free at Project Gutenberg, which
01:02:57 ►
you’ll find at gutenberg.org, G-U-T-E-N-B-E-R-G.org, along with thousands of other classic books in electronic format,
01:03:07 ►
and all of them are free.
01:03:09 ►
And speaking of free stuff, I hope that you’ll get a chance to check out the Psychedelic
01:03:14 ►
Salon’s Flipboard magazine.
01:03:16 ►
I actually have 11 magazines that I flip things into each morning as I read the news, but
01:03:22 ►
the one for the salon may hold the most interest for you.
01:03:24 ►
Each morning as I read the news, but the one for the salon may hold the most interest for you.
01:03:30 ►
For example, in the past week, some of the stories that I’ve flipped include Legalizing weed has done what $1 trillion and a 40-year war couldn’t.
01:03:37 ►
Meet the celebrated chef who cooks secret marijuana dinners to promote pot culture.
01:03:42 ►
Meet the Victorian grandmother hunger-striking
01:03:45 ►
over her medicinal weed arrest.
01:03:48 ►
Why it’s a lot less risky these days
01:03:50 ►
to get your hands on interesting drugs
01:03:53 ►
if you know where to look.
01:03:55 ►
Some Wall Street vets are betting on a weed exchange.
01:03:59 ►
Return of the Jedi’s animator took LSD
01:04:02 ►
while working on Star Wars.
01:04:05 ►
Painkiller deaths are down 25% in legal marijuana states.
01:04:10 ►
And, banned by Facebook, cannabis companies turn to pot-friendly social media.
01:04:16 ►
Those are some of the stories that I posted just this past week.
01:04:19 ►
And, in all, there are over a thousand other stories in the Psychedelic Salon magazine.
01:04:24 ►
My guess is that one or two of them may be of interest for you.
01:04:28 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from
01:04:31 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.