Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
https://flipboard.com/@lorenzohagerty/psychedelic-salon-beqt65mhy#![NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Trust your perceptions. Trust your intuition. And then accept the consequences, because this is what existential validity must be.”
“Must it not be that humanity is the yeast of of the Gaian alchemical rarefaction, and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation.”
“Speciation of a single plant can occupy fifty or sixty thousand years. It never happens more quickly than that, and the grinding down of glaciers from the poles, these are processes that take hundreds of thousands of years. With the advent of human beings an entirely new ontos of becoming, an entirely new category of becoming is introduced into the entire cosmos, as far as we know, because we cannot verify that there are other self-reflecting beings in the universe.”
“Memory is a time-binding function. It’s a way of somehow taking the past and calling up its essential properties so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience.”
“Our bridges are burning behind us. We see no way back.”
“If you believe in something you have precluded the possibility of believing in its opposite, and you have hence limited your freedom.”
“Every belief has consequences.”
More Terence McKenna and Hermeticism
Podcast 223 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 1
Podcast 224 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 2
Podcast 225 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 3
Podcast 226 – McKenna: “Hermeticism and Alchemy” Part 4
Previous Episode
494 - The Alchemical Angel Will Not Die
Next Episode
496 - Something a Little Different
Similar Episodes
- 492 - The Dizziness of Things Unsaid - score: 0.86089
- 211 - Empowering Hope in Dark Times - score: 0.85457
- 369 - Timothy & Terence - score: 0.85336
- 373 - Thoughts About Gnosticism, Art, and Music - score: 0.85209
- Podcast 708 – Beyond Realism - score: 0.84409
- 248 - The Magic of Plants (Rites of Spring) Part 1 - score: 0.84188
- 370 - Modeling Human History - score: 0.82560
- 223 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 1 - score: 0.82467
- 491 - McKenna, Alchemy, and the World Today - score: 0.82378
- 483 - Catalysts of Consciousness - score: 0.82107
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And to begin, I would first like to thank the most recent donors to the salon
00:00:29 ►
who have made their contributions through the forums.
00:00:32 ►
And these wonderful fellow saloners are
00:00:34 ►
George C., Rock Z., Candy R., and Paris Films,
00:00:41 ►
all of whom are now subscribed to the forums as lifetime members.
00:00:46 ►
And on behalf of all of our fellow Slauners, I want to thank you all very much,
00:00:50 ►
because thanks to your generous donations, these podcasts are going to keep on coming.
00:00:56 ►
Also, I’d like to mention the fact that this past week or so,
00:00:59 ►
we’ve been experiencing a few problems with the forums.
00:01:03 ►
And my guess is that by updating several plug-ins recently,
00:01:06 ►
I’ve introduced a few collisions here and there between them.
00:01:10 ►
And I’ll try to get all of that untangled as soon as I can.
00:01:14 ►
So, let’s get back to the last part of the Terrence McKenna workshop
00:01:18 ►
that we’ve been listening to for the past few weeks.
00:01:21 ►
Now, I have to warn you that I had to cut out about 20 minutes of this talk.
00:01:27 ►
You see, after about 10 minutes, you are going to begin hearing Terrence’s voice
00:01:31 ►
begin to warble a little bit.
00:01:33 ►
At first, I thought that my tape player had caused it,
00:01:36 ►
and so I exercised the tape several times and digitized it twice.
00:01:41 ►
And both times, it came out exactly as in exactly the same way at the same point.
00:01:47 ►
Granted, it still may be my player, but I’m guessing that the problem was actually in
00:01:52 ►
either the original recording or in my copy of the tape.
00:01:57 ►
Either way, after a while it didn’t become exactly unlistenable.
00:02:01 ►
It was more like it started to, well, make me laugh a little bit because
00:02:05 ►
Terrence started sounding more and more like he was drunk or something. Obviously, it was kind of
00:02:11 ►
distracting, so I had to cut it out, but if you absolutely want to know what he was saying in that
00:02:16 ►
part, I’m posting it at the end of this podcast after I sign out. And yes, the speed of that
00:02:23 ►
section can be adjusted, but since it’s not uniform,
00:02:26 ►
it would take a lot more time to fix than I care to give it. However, if you or one of our other
00:02:32 ►
fellow salonners wants to give it a try, fixing the speed and then post it in the comments for
00:02:38 ►
today’s program notes, well, that would be great. And I also want to mention one last thing before I play today’s talk,
00:02:46 ►
which, of course, is the final segment of a May 1991 workshop
00:02:50 ►
about the Hermetic tradition that was led by Terence McKenna.
00:02:54 ►
Well, this now marks the salon’s 234th talk featuring Terence.
00:03:00 ►
Obviously, he has had a big impact on me.
00:03:03 ►
In fact, had I never come across him and his work,
00:03:06 ►
I would now most likely be a retired corporate geek living in Florida,
00:03:10 ►
and quite depressed, I suspect.
00:03:13 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:03:15 ►
you also know that there were some of Terrence’s ideas,
00:03:19 ►
such as the time wave, that I never could buy into,
00:03:22 ►
and that I rejected out of hand.
00:03:26 ►
Knowing how deeply Terrence was invested in his time wave that I never could buy into and that I rejected out of hand. Knowing how deeply Terence was invested in his time wave ideas actually I guess should have caused me to shy away from him,
00:03:32 ►
but for some reason his lectures continue to draw me like a moth to a flame. Not all of them, but
00:03:38 ►
many of them to be sure. So when we get to the last seven minutes or so of this talk, just before I return with a few afterthoughts, well, when you listen to him take off on a poetic rhapsody about the eschaton or whatever he wants to call it, well, those are the verbal flourishes that continue to draw me in.
00:03:57 ►
Not so much for the words themselves, but for the feeling and thoughts that they provoke in me.
00:04:03 ►
But then don’t forget that I’m just an old sentimental Irishman who loves bardic prose.
00:04:09 ►
And now with that nonsense out of the way,
00:04:12 ►
I’ll begin by playing the last minute or so from last week’s podcast
00:04:16 ►
so as to remind you where we left off.
00:04:19 ►
And then I’ll pick up with the final segment.
00:04:21 ►
I’ll pick up with the final segment.
00:04:25 ►
All magical codes, if you know the Trithymian
00:04:27 ►
method, within a few hours
00:04:30 ►
you can get plain text.
00:04:32 ►
Well, the Vonage manuscript
00:04:33 ►
did not yield at all
00:04:36 ►
to this method.
00:04:38 ►
And
00:04:38 ►
the CIA formed
00:04:41 ►
a working group that for
00:04:43 ►
over ten years would invite scholars in to have a look at this.
00:04:49 ►
And if you’re interested in this, Marie d’Imperio, who was a great Renaissance scholar, wrote a book called The Vonage Manuscript, An Elegant Enigma,
00:05:02 ►
in which she traces the efforts of the CIA to figure this thing out and
00:05:08 ►
figure out what it could be. Well, there the matter rested until about three years ago when,
00:05:18 ►
I think his name is Leo Levertov, some kind of military historian one of these
00:05:26 ►
peculiar people who
00:05:28 ►
live for this stuff
00:05:29 ►
he got a hold of it
00:05:31 ►
and he said
00:05:33 ►
and D’Imperio goes through
00:05:35 ►
all the decipherment
00:05:37 ►
and there were many efforts at decipherment
00:05:40 ►
there was a scholar at Yale
00:05:41 ►
in the 20s named Brumbaugh
00:05:44 ►
who was a very respected man, who ruined himself by claiming a complete decipherment of the Vonage manuscript.
00:05:53 ►
And, you know, the way the game is played is you say what your rules for the decipherment were, you give them to a colleague, you give the rules to a colleague,
00:06:05 ►
and you give your colleague a page of text. If he can’t translate it with your rules,
00:06:12 ►
then you are viewed as a deluded and misguided person, and your career goes down in flames.
00:06:20 ►
Well, the Brumbayan method for deciphering the deciphering the Vonage manuscript had to do
00:06:27 ►
with confined pools of letters where it would get you to a pool of five or six letters but then you
00:06:35 ►
could freely choose which one you used and critics of Brumbaugh demonstrated that you could make this thing say anything you wanted it to.
00:06:46 ►
Brumbaugh supported Dee’s claim.
00:06:49 ►
He claimed that it deciphered out into a Roger Bacon manuscript that described a series of riots
00:06:57 ►
between the students and the black friars at Christmastime in 1385 at Oxford.
00:07:05 ►
But nobody else could make it say that or make it say anything.
00:07:10 ►
So Brumbaugh disgraced him and ruined his career.
00:07:16 ►
And then there were other efforts at decipherment,
00:07:19 ►
which I won’t bore you with.
00:07:20 ►
But along comes Leo Levertov just four years ago and he wrote a book called
00:07:27 ►
the Vonage Manuscript a liturgical manual for the catharites and he his great breakthrough
00:07:37 ►
if you accept his translation and I do I know people who don’t but they don’t seem to have read him as carefully as
00:07:48 ►
i have i think the dude has it pretty well nailed to the barn door his great breakthrough was to
00:07:56 ►
realize that it’s not in code it is not an encrypted manuscript at all.
00:08:10 ►
What it is, is it’s a synthetic alphabet, yes.
00:08:15 ►
It’s an alphabet that no, and one of the things that baffled the CIA was they looted the libraries of Europe
00:08:18 ►
and they could never find another example of what is called a Vonage script.
00:08:23 ►
And this was just baffling
00:08:25 ►
I mean how could there be
00:08:27 ►
no other example
00:08:30 ►
of this script
00:08:31 ►
well it appears that what happened
00:08:33 ►
was
00:08:35 ►
someone
00:08:37 ►
created a synthetic alphabet
00:08:40 ►
and then
00:08:42 ►
in a
00:08:43 ►
mixture of medieval polyglot Flemish with a huge number of loan words in Old French, Middle High German, and Swedish,
00:09:11 ►
wrote down a sacramental manual for the dying in the Catharite sect.
00:09:16 ►
Now, what is the Catharite sect?
00:09:29 ►
You’re probably familiar with something called the Albigensian Crusade. This was not a crusade carried on against the infidel for the recovery of Jerusalem,
00:09:31 ►
but rather a series of military actions carried on by the Pope
00:09:38 ►
against communities in southern France in the early 1200s, and these people were Catharites. They were,
00:09:52 ►
as far as we can tell, and we can’t tell much because we only have descriptions of the Catharites
00:10:00 ►
written by the people who were burning them at the stake. In other words, no original Catharite documents survive.
00:10:09 ►
We just have what they screamed out on the rack as they were being put to death by the bishops of the church.
00:10:17 ►
And this was a horrific incident in European history.
00:10:29 ►
incident in European history. To give you the flavor of it, the second Albigensian crusade was prosecuted by a general of the Pope named Simon de Montfort, and his lieutenants came to him
00:10:38 ►
at a point, and some of you may have visited the city of Carcassonne in southern France,
00:10:46 ►
which is a walled medieval city, very beautiful.
00:10:50 ►
And Simon de Montfort’s lieutenants came to him and told him,
00:10:56 ►
they said, we have cornered the Catharites at Carcassonne.
00:11:03 ►
But the problem is there are 6,000 Catholics
00:11:07 ►
within the city walls
00:11:09 ►
and he said kill everybody
00:11:13 ►
God will recognize his own
00:11:15 ►
so that was the spirit
00:11:19 ►
in which this thing went forward
00:11:22 ►
and they did
00:11:23 ►
so what we do know which this thing went for, and they did. They did.
00:11:30 ►
So what we do know about the Catharites is that they had a sacrament, the holiest…
00:11:37 ►
Well, first let me tell you a little bit more about them.
00:11:41 ►
At first it was thought that they were pretty much heterodox Christians.
00:11:48 ►
They were into nudity and vegetarianism.
00:11:53 ►
They sound like early hippies as far as we can tell.
00:11:58 ►
They got together, men and women, and they took off their clothes.
00:12:03 ►
They bathed, whether there were orgies or not, we don’t know.
00:12:07 ►
They were vegetarians.
00:12:10 ►
And the one thing we do know was that they had a sacrament called the Consolamentum. It was ritualized vivisection, or not vivisection, the term escapes me.
00:12:33 ►
But anyway, when you were dying, a fellow cather would cut your wrists and open your veins in a warm bath of water and you would die in that state.
00:12:49 ►
You did not die a natural death. And this was called the consolamentum. Well, what Leo Levitoff
00:12:57 ►
is claiming is that the Vonage manuscript is a description, a manual, for the perfect eye of the Catharite sect
00:13:09 ►
telling how to properly carry out the consolamentum.
00:13:15 ►
And I see no reason to challenge it.
00:13:19 ►
I mean, even with my limited knowledge of German,
00:13:31 ►
with my limited knowledge of German, once you get the vowel and the letter assignments right into this weird manuscript, into this weird language, and change it into English
00:13:38 ►
text, or, you know, alphabetic text is what I’m trying to say, you can see that there’s enough German there
00:13:46 ►
and then these loan words in Flemish and so forth.
00:13:51 ►
It looks to be true.
00:13:54 ►
And what emerges from this,
00:13:56 ►
if we accept the Vonage manuscript
00:13:58 ►
as the only primary document on the Catharite faith,
00:14:10 ►
only primary document on the Catharite faith is that this was not a form of heterodox Christianity at all. It was much more radical than that, and this may explain the church’s fury at this group
00:14:18 ►
of people. It was a cult of Isis. It can be traced straight back into the mystery religions of Eo-Isis in Egypt.
00:14:31 ►
And I have not seen any critical commentary on Levitov’s work. His book was published by this weird press in Redondo Beach that specializes only in books on military
00:14:48 ►
encryption. I mean, their catalog is a revelation to see. I mean, it’s amazing. And the book on the
00:15:01 ►
Vonage Manuscript stands out like a sore thumb because most of it is like three-letter dictionaries
00:15:07 ►
of three-letter words in Swahili
00:15:10 ►
and their numerical transforms and stuff like that.
00:15:15 ►
So that’s the history to date of the Vonage Manuscript.
00:15:21 ►
And it’s not that askew of our subject
00:15:28 ►
because all of this heterodoxy in Europe blends together.
00:15:37 ►
The presence of Theodore de Bry as an alchemical printer in Heidelberg may be a clue because there were survivals
00:15:49 ►
of this Catharite faith in the form of a heresy called the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit.
00:15:57 ►
If any of you are familiar with the altarpiece called the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
00:16:07 ►
It’s thought that this was created by a commission
00:16:14 ►
for a congregation of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit.
00:16:23 ►
And the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit. And the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit
00:16:25 ►
was always associated for some reason,
00:16:28 ►
we don’t know why, with printers.
00:16:32 ►
Printers seemed to be the profession
00:16:35 ►
that the Brotherhood favored.
00:16:38 ►
And like the Catharites,
00:16:39 ►
they practiced ritual nudity,
00:16:43 ►
vegetarianism,
00:16:44 ►
and gathering together in a ritual bath.
00:16:50 ►
Just let go of the whole idea complex, they would be liberated from this kind of minutia.
00:16:59 ►
So belief kills the spirit. The spirit transcends belief.
00:17:07 ►
So I wanted to say that.
00:17:09 ►
Then someone asked about Bruno and Dee.
00:17:14 ►
Since I suggested you read Giordano Bruno
00:17:17 ►
and the Hermetic tradition,
00:17:19 ►
it’s ironic that so little time was spent on Bruno.
00:17:22 ►
But on the other hand,
00:17:24 ►
I recommended you read the book so you should be was spent on Bruno. But on the other hand, I recommended you read the book
00:17:26 ►
so you should be well informed on Bruno.
00:17:30 ►
For me, Bruno, we just didn’t get into that particular historical episode
00:17:36 ►
because I wanted to tell you about the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
00:17:39 ►
But the thing to remember about Bruno
00:17:42 ►
is his discovery of the infinitude of the cosmos.
00:17:48 ►
And that by an act of unencumbered observation, I mean, how many people had looked at the night sky before Bruno? And they had not seen what he saw, which was infinite space and suns hung like lamps unto the uttermost extremes of infinity.
00:18:11 ►
By an act of pure cognition, he was able to destroy an entire cosmological vision that had limited and confined the human soul for millennia.
00:18:29 ►
That’s half of his story. The other half is he was burned at the stake for refusing to back down
00:18:36 ►
from this. And it’s a model for us all that trust your perception trust your intuition and then accept the consequences
00:18:50 ►
because this is what existential validity must be as far as the relationship between d and bruno
00:18:59 ►
the relationship is that they were both derivative of the magical school
00:19:07 ►
that can be traced back to Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettlesheim
00:19:12 ►
who was the model for, another model for Faust
00:19:16 ►
Agrippa wrote De Libre Quattro De Occultata Philosophia
00:19:22 ►
four books of Occult Philosophy. And that was the core work for European magic.
00:19:33 ►
All magic is derivative,
00:19:35 ►
all European magic can be traced back to the Agrippa system.
00:19:40 ►
And Agrippa was the direct student of the abbot Trithemius of Sponheim
00:19:46 ►
that we mentioned yesterday as the source of all the magical codes in the Middle Ages.
00:19:51 ►
If you’re interested in a brilliant but fictional treatment of John Dee and Giordano Bruno,
00:20:02 ►
I’d like to recommend a novel to you
00:20:05 ►
it’s called Egypt
00:20:07 ►
spelled A-E-G-Y-P-T
00:20:10 ►
it has the A in front of the E
00:20:13 ►
it’s by John Crowley
00:20:15 ►
the same gentleman who wrote Little Big
00:20:18 ►
which is a wonderful novel
00:20:20 ►
about the magical interface between two worlds.
00:20:25 ►
But his book, Egypt, fully half of the book is given over
00:20:31 ►
to a wonderfully rich retelling of the relationship between Bruno and Dee.
00:20:37 ►
Now, some people have wanted to say that Dee and Bruno
00:20:41 ►
actually crossed physical paths in London.
00:20:45 ►
But I’ve looked into it, and they missed each other by about two weeks.
00:20:50 ►
Bruno was setting sail for England as Dee was setting sail for France
00:20:57 ►
and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment episode that I talked about.
00:21:03 ►
enlightenment episode that I talked about.
00:21:07 ►
Then someone asked about tantra and the contrast between the imaginative internalized invocation
00:21:16 ►
of the anima or the animus, depending on your own sexuality,
00:21:22 ►
and that contrasted with something which actually happens between two
00:21:29 ►
people. We didn’t talk that much about the concept of the chemical wedding, or the alchemical
00:21:37 ►
marriage is another way of putting it. But this is the western resonance to the eastern idea of tantra. And it is the idea
00:21:50 ►
that sexual energy being the rawest and most accessible energy to the organism can be channeled into a higher spirituality. Well, it’s entirely so.
00:22:08 ►
The problem is, of all paths,
00:22:10 ►
this is probably fraught with the greatest difficulty
00:22:16 ►
because sexuality is such a debased coinage in the modern world. In other words, you have to make your way with great care
00:22:29 ►
and great purity of intent into this. In Eastern Tantra that is actually practiced in this physical
00:22:39 ►
manner, there is usually the admonition is that you should have no attachment to your tantrika,
00:22:48 ►
that the relationship should be entirely given over to the technical details of this union.
00:22:58 ►
And of course it has to do with the forestalling of orgasm and the raising of energy within the organism.
00:23:04 ►
the forestalling of orgasm and the raising of energy within the organism.
00:23:09 ►
In the chemical marriage, in the alchemical marriage, due honor is given to the importance and uniqueness of the other person.
00:23:20 ►
In other words, it isn’t the idea of the temple prostitute
00:23:23 ►
who serves as the vessel for this process,
00:23:28 ►
but there’s actually an effort to keep individual identities and individual dignity, in some sense, together.
00:23:40 ►
And this is, you know, the higher up the mountain you go
00:23:45 ►
the steeper it becomes
00:23:47 ►
and when you begin to scale the heights
00:23:50 ►
of alchemical or tantric sexuality
00:23:53 ►
the fall back into the negrado
00:23:57 ►
can be shocking indeed
00:24:00 ►
so that’s just an admonition
00:24:04 ►
it’s not designed to scare you off
00:24:07 ►
it’s just to say that in an age
00:24:09 ►
as sexually obsessed as our own
00:24:12 ►
you have to, as the I Ching says
00:24:16 ►
inquire of the oracle once again
00:24:19 ►
if you have purity of intent
00:24:23 ►
okay yeah, great if you have purity of intent. Okay.
00:24:25 ►
Yeah, great.
00:24:27 ►
Is there also a feeling between the two?
00:24:30 ►
Yes, it’s a complete alchemical system,
00:24:34 ►
and the energy is passed between.
00:24:36 ►
This is probably the highest completion that is possible.
00:24:42 ►
You know, the idea of romantic love, I mean, I don’t want to digress
00:24:47 ►
too much into this, but the ideal of romantic love was introduced into Europe in the 1400s
00:24:56 ►
and earlier at the Angervine Court of Eleanor of Aquitaine by troubadours. And this troubadour tradition can,
00:25:07 ►
scholarship now reveals pretty convincingly
00:25:11 ►
that this is an esoteric Sufi system.
00:25:17 ►
It also occurs in Indian teachers such as Chaitanya.
00:25:26 ►
You know, Chaitanya is the guy who the Hare Krishnas go back to,
00:25:30 ►
but the radical teaching of Chaitanya was
00:25:33 ►
that you could achieve ecstasy not by sitting in yoga,
00:25:36 ►
but by dancing and singing on street corners.
00:25:40 ►
And it’s now pretty clearly shown that Sufi, the penetration of Sufi ideas into Bengal was happening at the same time that these Sufi ideas were coming across from North Africa and into Spain and southern France. So it’s a tremendously old and vital tradition, but you have to be very careful.
00:26:08 ►
The Romantic impulse is a real double-edged sword. It has been ever since the early 19th century, because you see the rise of Romanticism, as that term is normally understood, meaning the movements in art and literature of the early 19th century.
00:26:26 ►
The rise of romanticism was a response to the dehumanization
00:26:32 ►
that was going on at that time,
00:26:34 ►
the rise of industrialism and the further retreat into cities
00:26:40 ►
more massive than any that had ever been built before.
00:26:43 ►
Did you want to say something like that?
00:26:45 ►
There’s a way to add that.
00:26:47 ►
Your question was about healing,
00:26:48 ►
and I think there’s a tremendous difference
00:26:51 ►
between the Indian and Tibetan tantric systems
00:26:53 ►
in what is practiced in Taoism
00:26:56 ►
in terms of dual cultivation or single cultivation.
00:27:01 ►
In the Taoist system, certainly self-healing
00:27:04 ►
is of paramount importance before you can even consider dual cultivation. Indian and Tibetan systems where dakinis and various deities are invoked in the process
00:27:25 ►
of their alchemical union. It’s really quite different from the Taoist system, which is
00:27:32 ►
devoid of belief in gods.
00:27:35 ►
Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, I talked yesterday about the alchemical stages. When you have reached the albedo, the final whitening certain portion of yourself before you then embark on these tantric double experiments.
00:28:17 ►
Because, you know, a lot of tantric text reads very vampire radical.
00:28:27 ►
I mean, it’s all about expelling the semen and then sucking it back in,
00:28:30 ►
and it’s like an energy war.
00:28:31 ►
It turns into black magic.
00:28:34 ►
The losing partner in these deals
00:28:38 ►
is just left a withered husk,
00:28:41 ►
and this is not a higher completion to be sought for. You’re correct. There is, in fact,
00:28:49 ►
there are supposedly, whether they’re myths or documented stories about one Chinese Empress who
00:28:59 ►
caused the death of more than a thousand men because of her vampirism.
00:29:06 ►
And it was sexual in nature.
00:29:07 ►
It was sexual in nature.
00:29:08 ►
Uh-huh.
00:29:13 ►
Okay, then a couple of other points here and then we’ll break up.
00:29:16 ►
The gentleman here who had nothing to comment
00:29:20 ►
or wanted to sit it out
00:29:21 ►
reminded me,
00:29:23 ►
since we were talking about the Valentinian system this
00:29:26 ►
morning, my favorite archon, aside from Sophia, who’s so interesting because of the little story
00:29:33 ►
about how she made the universe, but the 12th archon in the Gnostic system is a unique entity.
00:29:42 ►
I don’t know of another religious system that has this notion
00:29:45 ►
the 12th Archon in the Valentinian
00:29:48 ►
system is called the Watcher
00:29:50 ►
and that’s
00:29:52 ►
all he does
00:29:53 ►
he does not input into the
00:29:56 ►
system at all
00:29:58 ►
but is the witness
00:30:00 ►
and somehow
00:30:01 ►
then this creates a validating
00:30:04 ►
dimension that is very important
00:30:06 ►
so I just want to affirm
00:30:08 ►
that the watcher is a very strong platform
00:30:14 ►
on which to stand
00:30:16 ►
I mean would that I could learn to keep my mouth shut
00:30:19 ►
would that we all could
00:30:22 ►
so the watcher is a good archon
00:30:26 ►
to keep active on your inner altar.
00:30:31 ►
So then the future occurs three times in the list
00:30:35 ►
and we don’t have a lot of time
00:30:39 ►
but what I would like to say about it this morning is
00:30:42 ►
if you extrapolate all that has been said here,
00:30:47 ►
then you should see that…
00:30:51 ►
Remember how I said that one view of alchemy
00:30:59 ►
was that the alchemist intervened in natural process
00:31:03 ►
in the role of a catalyst. For those of you who aren’t
00:31:07 ►
chemists, a catalyst is something which causes a chemical reaction, which is going on anyway,
00:31:14 ►
to proceed at a faster rate. But the catalyst is not consumed in this process. It simply accelerates it. And if we think of nature as a great alchemical furnace
00:31:30 ►
that continuously produces and bring forth wonders, then must it not be that humanity is the yeast of the Gaian alchemical rarefaction
00:31:48 ►
and that human history is the process of catalyzing the alchemical condensation.
00:31:58 ►
If we look back into nature before the advent of speaking and writing human beings in the last 15,000 years,
00:32:10 ►
what we see are very leisurely processes. I mean, the speciation of a single plant from another
00:32:20 ►
can occupy 50 or 60,000 years.
00:32:27 ►
It never happens more quickly than that. And the grinding down of glaciers from the poles,
00:32:31 ►
these are processes that take hundreds of thousands of years.
00:32:35 ►
With the advent of human beings,
00:32:38 ►
an entirely new ontos of becoming,
00:32:43 ►
an entirely new category of becoming, is introduced into the entire cosmos,
00:32:50 ►
as far as we know, because we cannot verify that there are other self-reflecting beings in the
00:32:57 ►
universe. And this new ontos of becoming is what I call epigenetic, as opposed to genetic. All other change in the living world,
00:33:10 ►
in the world of bios, of ZOA, it occurs through genetic change, random modification of the genome,
00:33:20 ►
which is then subject to random selection. But with the advent of speech and writing,
00:33:29 ►
epigenetic means outside genetics,
00:33:33 ►
epigenetic processes become possible
00:33:36 ►
and time accelerates.
00:33:40 ►
One way of thinking about what is happening in this cosmos is that it is a gradual conquest of dimensionality by becoming or process.
00:33:55 ►
I mean, we hardly have a word inclusive enough.
00:34:10 ►
forms of life were probably slimes on certain kinds of clay, self-replicating molecular systems.
00:34:18 ►
And then certain portions of this chemistry became light-sensitive. And then there was the sense of the division between light and darkness, which generated the notion of here and there on some tremendously basic level within these early organisms.
00:34:30 ►
Once you have the concept of here and there, motility, the ability to move,
00:34:36 ►
the cilia that dot the surfaces of protozoans and stuff like this are elaborated,
00:34:43 ►
and a new dimension enters the picture, the dimension of time.
00:34:48 ►
Because notice that a journey from here to there is a journey from now to then.
00:34:56 ►
And then as more refined perceptual apparatus arose
00:35:02 ►
and more refined systems of moving animal bodies arose, a steady conquest of dimensionality occurred, the movement of animals onto the land and so forth. and memory must be mediated by language, except at a very crude, instinctual level.
00:35:25 ►
Memory is a time-binding function.
00:35:29 ►
It’s a way of somehow taking the past
00:35:34 ►
and calling up its essential properties
00:35:38 ►
so that they are co-present with the given moment of experience.
00:35:50 ►
co-present with the given moment of experience. And when you, it’s one thing at the level of the song and dance of preliterate peoples, but once you begin to chisel stone and write books,
00:35:56 ►
then you’re into the epigenetic domain in a big way. And once you cross the threshold into the world of electronic media and that sort of thing, once you achieve powered flight, once you can hurl instruments outside the solar system, these are time-binding functions. The alchemical intent, recall, was to accelerate nature’s intent toward perfection.
00:36:29 ►
And the alchemists all believed that nature was growing toward a state of unity and perfection
00:36:36 ►
that given millions and millions of years, everything would turn to gold.
00:36:41 ►
Everything would find its way toward the Plotinian one. So now we live in a world that appears to be on the brink of its own death or extinction. And the reason we make that assumption is because our bridges are burning behind us. We see no way back to the world of the hunting and gathering pastoralists
00:37:09 ►
of the high Paleolithic of the Saharan grasslands.
00:37:14 ►
We see no way back to the Gothic piety of a Europe with under 30 million people in it.
00:37:23 ►
Our bridges are burning,
00:37:25 ►
and our religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity,
00:37:31 ►
the major Western religions persistently insist
00:37:35 ►
that we are caught in a tightening spiral
00:37:40 ►
of ever-increasing speed
00:37:42 ►
that is carrying us toward an unimaginable confrontation with
00:37:47 ►
something which they call God, the second coming, the Messiah, you name it. As cool-headed a
00:37:56 ►
rationalist as Arnold Toynbee, when he sat down to write a study of history, he finally had to face the question, what is history for? And the best he
00:38:08 ►
could come up with is, history must be about the entry of God into the domain of three-dimensional
00:38:18 ►
space. Well, we don’t know what God is. Let’s not call it God, let’s call it the philosopher’s stone, let’s call it the philosophic hydrolith. And I believe that the chaos of our world, the apocalyptic intuition
00:38:33 ►
that informs our religions and our dreams, is because ahead of us in time, and now not that far ahead of us in time is something which, taking a page from the mathematical concern called dynamics,
00:38:52 ►
we can call an attractor.
00:38:55 ►
The attractor lies ahead of us in time.
00:38:59 ►
Universal process is not driven by a downward cascade of Cartesian casuistry. That’s the scientific notion,
00:39:09 ►
and it leads to a universe of entropy and heat death millions of years in the future.
00:39:14 ►
But what we see around us is a continuing and accelerating complexification as human beings, machines, ecosystems.
00:39:28 ►
The solar system itself is beginning to knit itself into a tighter and tighter organization.
00:39:37 ►
I believe that alchemy provides the best metaphors for understanding this.
00:39:43 ►
Nature is the great alchemist par excellence,
00:39:48 ►
and we, as its minions, through history,
00:39:54 ►
are accelerating the condensation of being toward the unimaginable,
00:40:00 ►
so that in my system, my way of thinking,
00:40:11 ►
so that in my system, my way of thinking, there’s ultimately a symmetry break with ordinary history.
00:40:19 ►
And I call it all kinds of different things, but here this morning, the transcendent other.
00:40:28 ►
The transcendent other casts an enormous shadow across the lower dimensional landscape of time.
00:40:33 ►
The stirring of the earliest life forms in the Devonian seas caught the call,
00:40:36 ►
and every step that has been taken since then
00:40:40 ►
has been ever quicker, ever quicker
00:40:43 ►
toward the transcendental other. It beckons us. And
00:40:48 ►
history is haunted by this thing. History is the shockwave of eschatology. History is a process
00:40:59 ►
that lasts, let’s be generous, 25,000 years. The wink of an eye in geological time.
00:41:08 ►
And in that 25,000 years, religious systems rise and fall,
00:41:14 ►
governmental systems, teachers come and go,
00:41:18 ►
and there is a sense of being caught in a whirlpool
00:41:23 ►
that is spinning us toward fusion with the unimaginable.
00:41:29 ►
And this is why the skies of Earth are haunted by flying saucers.
00:41:33 ►
They aren’t coming from other solar systems.
00:41:37 ►
They are scintillas.
00:41:39 ►
Remember this alchemical term, sparks.
00:41:41 ►
They are scintillas being thrown off from the alchemical quintessence
00:41:47 ►
which lies like a great attractor at the end of time. And the purpose of science and technique
00:41:54 ►
and electronic media and information transfer and all of this stuff is to knit us together, to dissolve our boundaries,
00:42:11 ►
and to bring us to a point of singularity where language fails,
00:42:18 ►
where we lean over meaning’s edge and feel the dizziness of things unsaid.
00:42:29 ►
And this lies now, I believe, within our lifetimes, within the lifetime of most of us, this is actually going to break through. I mean, I’m like one of those people carrying a sign that says, repent for the
00:42:35 ►
end is near. It’s as nutty a position as you can possibly hold. That’s why I suspect it has a reasonable chance of being dead on.
00:42:55 ►
So that is the point of talking about alchemy and this melding and the production of the quintessence and all that.
00:43:05 ►
It is because we are a gnat’s eyelash away from a full confrontation with the transcendent other. Our dreams are haunted by it.
00:43:08 ►
Our reveries are filled with it.
00:43:10 ►
If we take a psychedelic drug, it’s revealed before us in all its splendor.
00:43:16 ►
This is the force that is pulling us inexorably toward completion.
00:43:25 ►
I remember once in a psilocybin trance,
00:43:30 ►
I expressed concern about the state of the world,
00:43:34 ►
and the noose spoke, the logo spoke,
00:43:38 ►
and it said, no big deal.
00:43:40 ►
This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. This is the,
00:43:49 ►
we are in the birth canal of a planetary birthing. And as you know, if you come upon a birth in
00:43:59 ►
progress, you would never dream that this is the culmination of a natural process. It looks like a catastrophe of some sort. There is moaning and groaning and screaming and thrashing and blood is being shed and therecosmic reflection of the completion of human history.
00:44:28 ►
And not only human history, because we are simply the hands and eyes of all life, all process on this planet.
00:44:38 ►
The Gnostics believe that the earth is like an egg,
00:44:43 ►
and that a moment will come
00:44:46 ►
when the egg must be split asunder.
00:44:49 ►
You know, I love to quote
00:44:51 ►
the Grateful Dead.
00:44:53 ►
You can’t go back
00:44:55 ►
and you can’t stand still.
00:44:57 ►
If the thunder don’t get you,
00:44:59 ►
then the lightning will.
00:45:02 ►
That is what we are being funneled toward.
00:45:04 ►
That is the message of alchemy.
00:45:07 ►
That is the quintessence and perfection
00:45:09 ►
of the human enterprise,
00:45:12 ►
the biological enterprise.
00:45:14 ►
I like to recall the Irish toast,
00:45:17 ►
may you be alive at the end of the world.
00:45:20 ►
And we have a real crack at it.
00:45:24 ►
It’s not a pessimistic vision.
00:45:28 ►
It’s the most optimistic vision that one can suppose,
00:45:33 ►
and I think that’s where I’d like to leave it this morning.
00:45:36 ►
Thank you.
00:45:43 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:45:50 ►
So, 25 years ago, Terence thought that he and those who were there with him at the time may actually still be alive at the end of the world.
00:46:06 ►
the world. Sadly, Terrence didn’t make it himself, and the world is still going, but I suspect that most of the other people who attended that workshop are still with us. And it doesn’t take
00:46:11 ►
too close a look at the world situation to infer that, well, maybe we should all be carrying signs
00:46:17 ►
that say, repent, the end is near. Of course, it all depends on what one thinks of as being near, doesn’t it?
00:46:26 ►
Well, this is the last of the tapes from Terrence’s May 1991 workshop that dealt with alchemy and the hermetic corpus.
00:46:35 ►
And from some of the comments that I’ve been seeing, you might have enjoyed it as much as I have.
00:46:40 ►
In the next few weeks, I’ll be playing talks from several other people, but have no fear, there is still more of Terrence McKenna to come this year.
00:46:48 ►
And if you still want to listen to more about alchemy from Terrence, you can go back and re-listen to podcasts 223 through 226, which were titled McKenna, Hermeticism and Alchemy.
00:47:02 ►
And now I’d like to welcome our new readers to the Psychedelic Salon magazine on Flipboard.com.
00:47:08 ►
If you’re ever up late at night and can’t get to sleep, you’ll now find over 1,400 articles posted there.
00:47:16 ►
And that should keep you busy until the sun comes back up.
00:47:20 ►
Now, here are the titles of a few news stories that I’ve posted over the last several days.
00:47:26 ►
Six branding tips unique to cannabis business.
00:47:30 ►
Americans will spend $23 billion a year on legal weed by 2020.
00:47:36 ►
Pot legalization hasn’t done anything to shrink the racial gap in drug arrests.
00:47:42 ►
Supreme Court rejects state’s challenge to Colorado pot law.
00:47:47 ►
First month of recreational weed sales in Oregon generates $3.5 million in tax revenues.
00:47:53 ►
The three most important marijuana battleground states in this year’s elections.
00:47:59 ►
The real, but exaggerated danger of stoned driving.
00:48:04 ►
Put weed in your ceviche for next-level weekend vibes.
00:48:09 ►
Five Reasons Blue Dream is the most popular marijuana strain.
00:48:14 ►
And five substances that are far more addictive than marijuana and that are legal.
00:48:19 ►
Here’s Action Bronson at a high-tech cannabis lab whipping up dabs.
00:48:25 ►
Here’s Action Bronson at a high-tech cannabis lab whipping up dabs.
00:48:31 ►
Are you surprised to know that black Americans are systematically shut out of the legal weed industry?
00:48:34 ►
Vaping weed is good for your skin.
00:48:40 ►
A $200 blunt and other products from the world of high-end weed.
00:48:46 ►
NFL lineman gives $10,000 to marijuana research and urges the league to match the donation. How potent is that pot brownie? Dry ice in a blender might crack the case.
00:48:54 ►
And mathematician compares DMT experience with LSD experience, which is about our old friend
00:49:01 ►
Ralph Abraham, of whom there are almost 50 podcasts here in the salon.
00:49:07 ►
And before I go, I’d like to remind you once again that right after I sign off,
00:49:12 ►
I’ll play that 20 minutes of today’s talk that I had to cut out due to the poor quality of the recording.
00:49:18 ►
I hope that if you listen to it, that you’ll find something there worth your time.
00:49:23 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:49:27 ►
So, you know, there is much still to be learned
00:49:32 ►
and still to be teased apart in the art history
00:49:36 ►
and the history of heterodox thinking in Europe,
00:49:45 ►
of which alchemy then is seen to be one facet
00:49:50 ►
of a faceted gem that includes
00:49:54 ►
the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit,
00:49:57 ►
early Freemasonry,
00:50:01 ►
Catharites,
00:50:04 ►
survivals of Manichaeanism, Bogomils in Yugoslavia, there are Bogomilvostrian graves on the southern coast of Thessalonica, and just a whole zoo of intellectual systems that have been forgotten
00:50:31 ►
and overlooked. This is what I meant when I said we will explore the stratigraphy of lost
00:50:40 ►
thought systems. And in some cases, we possess quite complete skeletons in the
00:50:47 ►
case of alchemy in the case of the Boga mills and the Cathars what we possess is
00:50:54 ►
almost a foot bone or a tooth or a footprint but someday with luck, new textual material will emerge
00:51:07 ►
and a new understanding of the role of heterodoxy
00:51:11 ►
in the formation of modern thought will emerge.
00:51:16 ►
Questions?
00:51:17 ►
Questions?
00:51:19 ►
Yes, and bless you.
00:51:23 ►
There’s one, the Bourne Blood book on Freemasonry.
00:51:29 ►
It’s just recently been published.
00:51:33 ►
And I’ve just about finished it.
00:51:38 ►
This person is an English historian from Kentucky in this country.
00:51:45 ►
And I think he sort of solved the problem of Freemasonry. an English historian from Kentucky in this country.
00:51:48 ►
And I think he sort of solved the problem of Freemasonry in his country,
00:51:50 ►
which is a very interesting history,
00:51:54 ►
because the Masonic historians themselves
00:51:57 ►
have been arguing over this for a couple hundred years.
00:52:00 ►
So it’s strange that the Vonage manuscript
00:52:03 ►
may all of a sudden,
00:52:08 ►
the last couple of years, sort of resolved,
00:52:11 ►
and then it seems that this Freemasonry thing is also… Yes, you make an interesting point.
00:52:15 ►
John brought me, John Galavis brought me
00:52:18 ►
an article yesterday.
00:52:21 ►
You know, we’re all tied up now in this pluto return i’m not an astrologer but john brought
00:52:30 ►
me an article talking about how the Corpus Hermeticum
00:52:52 ►
was translated. And we are now in a period that is astrologically exactly equivalent to that period,
00:53:05 ►
and the Vonage manuscript appears to have been deciphered.
00:53:10 ►
I mean, I’m willing to accept it.
00:53:12 ►
You mentioned this revelation of the true nature of Freemasonry,
00:53:18 ►
and of course what is going on at the moment
00:53:22 ►
that is askew of our subject, but tremendously exciting and relevant
00:53:30 ►
to the idea of lost knowledge coming to light, is that this is the golden moment in Mayan studies. It is happening right now, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
00:53:49 ►
The logjam has been broken. The Mayan glyphs are being deciphered. No shit. And it has to do with an entirely new approach that some Russian linguists have taken.
00:54:08 ►
And if any of you are, it will never happen again.
00:54:14 ►
So far as I know, there are now, with the Mayan decipherment, no real undeciphered languages left.
00:54:24 ►
No real undeciphered languages left.
00:54:31 ►
The Harappan script was deciphered a few years ago, but really it wasn’t that interesting because we only possessed something like 6,000 characters in Harappan.
00:54:40 ►
But the literature of the Maya, when you take not only the hieroglyphic, the stone texts, but when you add in the ceramic texts, why we have a lot of Mayan material. deciphered at a furious rate. If you’re interested in this, Linda
00:55:05 ►
Sheel has written a book called
00:55:09 ►
A Forest of Kings.
00:55:12 ►
And what a, how I
00:55:15 ►
do envy this woman because what
00:55:18 ►
she is doing is writing
00:55:21 ►
the first history of the Maya
00:55:23 ►
in a thousand years.
00:55:26 ►
I mean, we’re not now dealing in the realm of gods and myths.
00:55:32 ►
We’re dealing with stuff like on the 14th of May, 642,
00:55:40 ►
an army from Al-Kharakol met an army from Tikal
00:55:45 ►
and triumphed and deposed three flint and placed on the throne.
00:55:54 ►
It’s this kind of stuff, real history.
00:55:58 ►
And the conceits of Mayan religion and Mayan courtly life are all coming into focus,
00:56:07 ►
and it’s very exciting.
00:56:11 ►
It’s all these people who have tried to make the Maya into some kind of Atlantean civilization
00:56:20 ►
should be running for cover at this point because the picture that emerges is not as pretty as we might wish.
00:56:32 ►
But hey, know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
00:56:38 ►
I would choose truth over illusion anytime no matter how damaging it might be to somebody’s conceptions of these things
00:56:50 ►
so and if any of you are interested in these subjects another area where this has occurred is
00:57:00 ►
some of you may know the book by Michael Chadwick called The Decipherment of Linear B.
00:57:08 ►
Linear B is a proto-Minoan language, and a linguist at Cambridge named Michael Ventris,
00:57:18 ►
a genius in the 50s, took this language. There was no Rosetta Stone.
00:57:27 ►
This is the amazing thing.
00:57:29 ►
You know what I mean by a Rosetta Stone.
00:57:32 ►
You see, in the 19th century,
00:57:35 ►
the great mystery was how to read
00:57:37 ►
the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
00:57:39 ►
And before they were deciphered,
00:57:42 ►
the Egyptians were treated like the Maya,
00:57:51 ►
and people thought that the secrets of the universe were chiseled on those obelisks and tombs.
00:57:56 ►
Well, then a scholar in the Grand Army of Napoleon, Champillon,
00:58:12 ►
was a soldier, found a tablet which had a column of demotic Greek, a column of another language,
00:58:18 ►
I forget which one, and a column of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And they were able to realize that it was saying the same thing three times, and that opened it up for them. But that’s like a crib sheet, because it’s easy if you have the same text in a known language.
00:58:35 ►
But in the case of the Maya, and in the case of Linear B, and in the case of Harappan,
00:58:44 ►
there was no Rosetta Stone.
00:58:46 ►
Well, then you talk about an excruciatingly difficult problem to solve.
00:58:53 ►
And I’ll explain to you how it was done with the Maya because it’s so neat.
00:58:59 ►
It turns out that Mayan is a rebus language.
00:59:05 ►
What does this mean?
00:59:07 ►
Do you remember when we were kids and in comic books there would be these things
00:59:13 ►
where it would show a picture of an eye,
00:59:18 ►
and then it would show a picture of a saw going through a log of wood,
00:59:24 ►
and then it would show a picture of a saw going through a log of wood, and then it would show a picture of an ant,
00:59:27 ►
and then it would show a picture of a red rose.
00:59:30 ►
This is a sentence which says,
00:59:34 ►
I saw ant rose.
00:59:37 ►
But now notice what’s going on here.
00:59:42 ►
It’s that it’s all based on puns
00:59:46 ►
that depend entirely on a knowledge
00:59:50 ►
of the spoken language.
00:59:52 ►
If you lose the sounds
00:59:55 ►
of the spoken language,
00:59:58 ►
how the hell could you ever tell
01:00:00 ►
that a picture of an eye, a saw,
01:00:03 ►
an insect, and a rose says, I saw my maternal relative on my
01:00:10 ►
mother’s side. I mean, it just is impossible. It’s absolutely impossible in that situation to
01:00:19 ►
reconstruct meaning unless you have the sounds. Well, how do you recover the sounds
01:00:25 ►
of a language dead a thousand years?
01:00:29 ►
Well, these Soviet linguists
01:00:34 ►
had the good sense to go and look
01:00:39 ►
at living Mayan languages,
01:00:42 ►
of which there are 15 living Mayan languages, of which there are 15 living Mayan languages in the Americas.
01:00:49 ►
And they discovered one of these dialects where when you set Mayan hieroglyphs in front of these people
01:01:01 ►
and they named what they saw, meaning came out of their mouths and that broke
01:01:10 ►
the log jam and then you know you just rev up your computers and and use all the standard tools of
01:01:17 ►
modern linguistics and philology and the stuff just begins to pour out, clear as day, no problem.
01:01:26 ►
They asked a lion.
01:01:28 ►
Yes, they had to go to a lion.
01:01:31 ►
You’re right. Good point.
01:01:35 ►
It had never occurred to them.
01:01:40 ►
Because they always, always before when they would show this stuff to minds,
01:01:45 ►
they would say, what does it mean?
01:01:48 ►
Instead of saying, what do you see here?
01:01:52 ►
And then when they said what they saw there,
01:01:54 ►
the meaning came out of their mouths.
01:01:57 ►
So it was very, very neat.
01:02:00 ►
It shows once again the hubris of modern scientific methods that we tend to dismiss the aboriginal and the primitive.
01:02:11 ►
I mean, this was to turn it toward my own favorite subject.
01:02:15 ►
This was the state of modern medicine. people in the Amazon basin, you know, what plants do you use for malaria, brain tumor, shrinkage, and so forth and so on,
01:02:30 ►
because they were just dismissed as superstitious primitives.
01:02:36 ►
It was thought that the doctrine of signatures was operating.
01:03:05 ►
They didn’t realize how subtle and how complete human knowledge systems grow under the care of the redemption of spirit from matter
01:03:07 ►
turned into
01:03:09 ►
the project of
01:03:11 ►
redeeming the general
01:03:14 ►
society
01:03:17 ►
of the time
01:03:19 ►
toward a utopian
01:03:21 ►
vision
01:03:22 ►
and this is working right up until the present.
01:03:27 ►
Millenarianism is still with us.
01:03:30 ►
Marxism is the last great millenarian faith, you know,
01:03:36 ►
the belief in the worker state.
01:03:39 ►
It occupies the same relationship to these alchemical utopias
01:03:44 ►
It occupies the same relationship to these alchemical utopias as Heideggerian existentialism has to second century Gnosticism.
01:03:53 ►
The poetry has gone.
01:03:57 ►
The Baroque filigree has been stripped away.
01:04:02 ►
But the impulse is still toward a perfect society
01:04:07 ►
where each from his ability according to his needs and means.
01:04:14 ►
And it lives on.
01:04:16 ►
I mean, democracy is also an effort, let us not forget,
01:04:22 ►
to recapture the style of 5th century Athens.
01:04:27 ►
We forget that this was a city-state, half of whose inhabitants were slaves,
01:04:33 ►
and yet we are so under the spell of the utopian dream
01:04:40 ►
that we continue and Not without
01:04:45 ►
Important reason I think to try to labor toward a just and decent
01:04:51 ►
World where the lion lies down with the lamb and that was and it remains
01:04:58 ►
the alchemical dream dream. I very much enjoyed the kind of
01:05:06 ►
flashbacks to memories
01:05:08 ►
of my
01:05:09 ►
actually majoring
01:05:12 ►
in history in college and the first
01:05:13 ►
history professor that I had
01:05:15 ►
was a wonderful old man
01:05:17 ►
that really
01:05:19 ►
when I now look back at it
01:05:21 ►
the rest of
01:05:23 ►
my major in history was pretty much
01:05:25 ►
politics and all this kind of thing. It’s kind of a wonderful experience to suddenly
01:05:30 ►
get back to what got me turned on about history and what gets me turned on and opens my mind
01:05:37 ►
again to looking at some of these thoughts and some of these things that have been forgotten, suppressed,
01:05:45 ►
and put down and say, that’s bullshit, that’s a traditionally trained scientist and so on.
01:05:54 ►
I mean, to open my eyes to the fact that, yes, there are many things that we must and can learn from what’s gone on before,
01:06:05 ►
all the great ideas that are out there.
01:06:08 ►
We just have to grasp them and find what’s right, apply it.
01:06:13 ►
I, too, am interested in how we make this more meaningful for the future.
01:06:24 ►
One thing that occurs to me to say,
01:06:36 ►
I once, in one of these revelatory dialogues with the Logos,
01:06:38 ►
asked the question, Why me? Why are you telling me this?
01:06:44 ►
Because I was a poor hippie, I was penniless, I was a traveler.
01:06:53 ►
And the answer was instantaneous.
01:06:58 ►
It was because you don’t believe in anything.
01:07:03 ►
Because you don’t believe in anything, because you don’t believe in anything.
01:07:06 ►
And I think that that’s a very pure position to hold.
01:07:12 ►
We’re not trying to ensnare you to abandon your Jewishness or your Presbyterian-ness or belief.
01:07:26 ►
If you believe in something,
01:07:28 ►
you have precluded the possibility of believing in its opposite,
01:07:33 ►
and you have hence limited your freedom.
01:07:38 ►
Everything is to be judged by its efficacy,
01:07:43 ►
by its effectiveness in the real world. And I think that I have a horror
01:07:54 ►
of all belief systems. I just don’t like them. If somebody tells you they have the answer. Flee from this person. I mean, they are obviously some kind of low being
01:08:08 ►
who has not at all recognized
01:08:12 ►
the true size and dimension of the cosmos
01:08:16 ►
that we’re living in.
01:08:18 ►
And if you can keep yourself free
01:08:21 ►
of encumbering beliefs,
01:08:30 ►
then your dialogue with the logos can go forward unhindered. Sometimes when I am in the trance of psilocybin, I will say to the entity, entity begin to show me yourself as you are for yourself don’t give me the scaled down
01:08:49 ►
humanized version begin to show your true nature and after a few moments of that then i have to
01:08:59 ►
raise my hand and say enough you know i can I can’t handle more than that.
01:09:06 ►
This goes back to the statement made yesterday or the day before
01:09:11 ►
about that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose,
01:09:17 ►
it’s stranger than we can suppose.
01:09:21 ►
Therefore, we are given tremendous latitude in what we think and what we conceive
01:09:29 ►
but if you begin to believe something then you are pulled down because every belief has
01:09:37 ►
consequences you know i mean a perfect example is uh as some of you may know, when Muhammad ascended into heaven from the site of what was to become the Mosque of Omar, from the site of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, he happened to be on horseback.
01:10:02 ►
He happened to be on horseback.
01:10:08 ►
Well, if you believe Muhammad ascended into heaven, imagine the theological and hermeneutic problems posed by the horse he was riding
01:10:16 ►
because it went with him.
01:10:20 ►
This is a perfect example of how intellectual baggage drags us down
01:10:27 ►
because belief always then contains absurdity.
01:10:34 ►
I mean, the ontological status of this horse has troubled Islamic theologians for centuries.