Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

Today’s podcast features a series of raps by Bruce Damer who is backed up by the Faye Steen House Band led by: Joe Oppenheimer on loops, FX, and acoustic, with Darcy Davis on keys, and Aengus Donald on percussion. The recording was made in Melbourne, Australia in 2015. This is followed by Lorenzo giving a few of his thoughts about the state of the world today and a way in which alchemy may be applied to heal it.

Alien Dreamtime
Directed by Ken Adams
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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 we’re going to do something a little different today.

00:00:27

Last year, when Bruce Dahmer was visiting various festivals and psychedelic communities in Australia,

00:00:33

he gave a talk in Melbourne that inspired some musicians who were in attendance

00:00:37

to suggest that he do a version of that talk to music, live music.

00:00:43

Now, let me back up a bit here. Years ago, one of the ways

00:00:47

in which Terrence McKenna became known to a much wider audience was by his appearance at raves,

00:00:53

where he would give a talk while a DJ spun in the background, or groups like Lost at Last played.

00:00:59

And ever since Terrence began this trend, well, a lot of us tried our hands at copying this new way of

00:01:05

giving a psychedelic talk. I’m not sure, but I think that this may have begun at one of Fraser

00:01:11

Clark’s events at Megatriplice in London. The way that I heard Terrence tell the story was

00:01:16

that after he spoke one night at Fraser’s, he was approached by a leader of a group called the

00:01:22

Shaman to do something original for their next album.

00:01:26

So they went over to this person’s apartment, sat around the kitchen table,

00:01:30

and recorded Terrence kind of giving an off-the-cuff rap.

00:01:34

And at the time, Terrence thought that this was to be an audition for a more professional recording session.

00:01:40

But as it turned out, that live recording at the kitchen table that night

00:01:44

is what we can now listen to on the Shaman’s album Boss Drum.

00:01:48

And if you haven’t already heard that bit, you really owe it to yourself to give it a listen.

00:01:53

In my opinion, it’s one of the best 15 minutes of Terrence McKenna that you’re going to hear.

00:01:59

Maybe the seminal Terrence McKenna musical talk is Alien Dreamtime, which was produced by my friend Ken

00:02:06

Adams, who you’ve heard from here in the salon on several occasions. And like certain books that are

00:02:12

required for the well-equipped psychedelic library, Alien Dreamtime is also a must-have CD for the

00:02:18

serious collector. But getting back to introducing today’s program, it is a musical-slash-spoken-word piece by Bruce Dahmer,

00:02:27

who is backed up by the Fay Street House Band, led by Joe Oppenheimer on loops, effects, and acoustic,

00:02:34

with Darcy Davis on keys, and Agnes Donald on percussion.

00:02:39

Now, if you’ve never tried to do this yourself, you may think that it couldn’t be all that difficult.

00:02:45

However, I did try it one night myself, and I know differently.

00:02:49

I won’t bore you with the whole story, but late on the Saturday night,

00:02:53

just before the 9-11 attacks, at a learning party rave in Hollywood,

00:02:58

Matt Palomary and I attempted to give a talk while being backed up by Jacques Oliver on the keyboards.

00:03:04

And, in case you don’t know it, Jacques is also the creator of the background

00:03:08

theme music here in the salon. Anyway,

00:03:11

it didn’t work out quite as well as we planned it, probably because

00:03:16

we so seriously mistimed our drugs and began

00:03:19

to peak much too soon. But that’s another story.

00:03:23

My point being that these spoken word gigs are

00:03:26

not all that easy to pull off, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I first got to listen

00:03:32

to the recording that I’m about to play for you. We all have our own reference points for works

00:03:37

like this, but I have to admit surprising myself at what first came to my mind when I heard this rap by Bruce. Of all the times and places, it took me back to a trip that I took to New York City in the spring of 1960.

00:03:52

My friends and I wanted to experience the hottest scene going on at the time,

00:03:57

and so we went down to Greenwich Village to a beatnik coffee shop to listen to the Beats recite their new poetry,

00:04:03

which was performed with live music in the background.

00:04:07

And that is the emotional place that I found myself in when I began listening to Bruce

00:04:13

and the Fay Street House Band.

00:04:15

I hope that something as interesting happens to you right now as well. so when you’re all ready i shall

00:04:34

tell you a story

00:04:38

that might fit for mycelium definitely fits for these pants.

00:05:03

So should I get going?

00:05:07

The floor is yours.

00:05:11

Are we okay down there on the floor?

00:05:15

We’re all right?

00:05:18

Okay.

00:05:19

Okay.

00:05:22

So how y’all are, as they say in Cajun, in our side of the pond?

00:05:29

How y’all are?

00:05:32

Doing all right?

00:05:34

You all are good?

00:05:37

So where were we, Joe?

00:05:39

What should we do?

00:05:40

What do you want to hear?

00:05:46

Madre on Mars.

00:05:51

Well, the Madre and I went to Mars one night,

00:05:55

but we first stopped over at the moon.

00:06:00

The Madre’s question was,

00:06:03

where out here can I live?

00:06:06

Where can I live?

00:06:10

And having done work for NASA for years, I decided to give it a run.

00:06:18

So I said, jump on my backpack, you know, juice up my jetpack.

00:06:26

We’re going on a trip.

00:06:30

So we first went to the limb of the earth

00:06:33

and she said,

00:06:34

that’s my domain.

00:06:35

That is my space

00:06:37

that you guys are trying to erase.

00:06:43

And as you erase my space and you rub out my green,

00:06:50

I look to you for the climbing machine.

00:06:55

And I first saw it when you sent those three guys to the moon,

00:07:01

the big white thing.

00:07:03

And I said, I want one of those for my collection.

00:07:09

If you’re sending three jockey pilots to the moon, why can’t I go?

00:07:17

So I said to her, let’s do it.

00:07:21

So instead of the white penile machine of the Saturn V

00:07:27

I took her on my back in my jet pack

00:07:31

and as we approached the moon we looked for a place to set down

00:07:37

I said do you want an ocean, a mare or a highland

00:07:42

she said I want an island where I can try my mind in it.

00:07:52

So we went to the top of Shackleton Crater. We went to the place where I thought we’d come back later where she could take hold where there was water, but it was so, so cold.

00:08:11

So I took her down and she reached into the ground.

00:08:15

She put her tongue around and she said, I can’t live here.

00:08:24

I can’t imbibe this dust

00:08:26

what have you done

00:08:29

bringing me

00:08:30

without any

00:08:33

without any

00:08:38

consideration

00:08:40

of what I need to live

00:08:43

so I need to live. So I said to her,

00:08:46

that was my answer to you.

00:08:52

I need to find out what you need to live.

00:08:58

And she said, well, okay.

00:09:03

I’ve got a really powerful body,

00:09:06

but you have the mind and you’re carrying the intellectual booty

00:09:16

that can take my body to where I need to be.

00:09:22

And I said, why did you choose us?

00:09:27

And she said, I ran out of time.

00:09:30

The earth is past middle age, past its prime.

00:09:35

And I said, what do you mean?

00:09:37

She said, I can’t hold the plants on the land much longer.

00:09:42

The ice scraped them off last time

00:09:45

and the deserts are pushing them out yonder.

00:09:49

There will be no more plants on the land

00:09:52

in 400 million years.

00:09:55

I can’t hold it back.

00:09:58

The earth tilted and tilted the wrong way

00:10:02

into the sun and the deserts are growing.

00:10:08

So I said, well, why didn’t you do it with the dinosaurs?

00:10:14

And she said, I got bored with the dinosaurs.

00:10:19

So one night I said, off with their heads, collectively,

00:10:26

the Tyrannosaurus, the Pterosaurus, and the Pterodactyl

00:10:31

just didn’t interest me anymore.

00:10:37

They were very self-centered.

00:10:39

None of them looked up to the sky.

00:10:42

So one night I ordered the airstrike.

00:10:47

And the airstrike came in.

00:10:50

And it hit in Mexico, your current day Yucatan.

00:10:56

And it took them all down.

00:10:58

And I picked you guys, the mammals.

00:11:02

I said, couldn’t you try again with the arachnids

00:11:05

you know wouldn’t they be

00:11:08

better at dealing

00:11:10

with the radiation

00:11:11

and she said

00:11:14

they’re my backup

00:11:18

plan

00:11:19

my backup jack up plan

00:11:22

and so I said,

00:11:28

all right, you’ve got a deal.

00:11:30

We’re going to Mars.

00:11:33

I got a special inside track.

00:11:37

I know how to drop the belly pan off the rover,

00:11:43

and I can show her.

00:11:46

So we sailed to Mars.

00:11:50

We bounced off Phobos.

00:11:51

We ricocheted off Deimos,

00:11:54

and we went through the atmosphere.

00:11:58

No need for airbags here.

00:12:02

We ended up in Gusev Crater,

00:12:06

and I said,

00:12:07

we’ll be back later.

00:12:10

I showed her the snowy mountaintops

00:12:13

of the solar system’s

00:12:15

most tall mountain,

00:12:17

Olympus Mons,

00:12:19

so tall that it sticks

00:12:21

out of the atmosphere.

00:12:26

It snows up there, but you can’t ski.

00:12:32

Then I took her back down to the equator

00:12:35

where a dust storm was kicking up,

00:12:37

and I said,

00:12:39

Mother, if you want to clean your dishes,

00:12:42

just hang them outside.

00:12:46

And I took her to the poles, and she really liked that scene.

00:12:51

Lots and lots of frozen water.

00:12:54

You could build a jacuzzi there in an instant.

00:12:59

So then we headed back to Gusev,

00:13:02

and in Gusev was a little machine,

00:13:05

a little machine going crunch, crunch, crunch on the ground,

00:13:09

driving three inches an hour, crunch, crunch, crunch, driving on its own.

00:13:17

Human seers at Jet Propulsion Lab out for their lunches in the commissary, not paying attention.

00:13:29

So I whipped out my screw gun, and with my screw gun I said,

00:13:35

Madre, take a look.

00:13:39

And I put the gun under the belly pan, found the six bolts. I shunted them off, dropped that belly pan,

00:13:51

and then said, Madre, put your hand here. Put your hand on the I said what do you feel

00:14:05

she said I feel life

00:14:08

there’s life in here

00:14:11

I said what kind of life

00:14:14

she said some of my greatest creations

00:14:17

13 species of bacteria

00:14:21

all asleep dried up

00:14:24

but they are my great creations they’re complex of bacteria, all asleep, dried up.

00:14:27

But they are my great creations.

00:14:29

They’re complex.

00:14:32

They have a hundred million year warranty.

00:14:38

So I said to her, you see, we’re not so bad, us monkeys.

00:14:41

We’re erasing your green.

00:14:46

We’re winnowing your oceans of all life.

00:14:50

We’re consuming everything as hamburgers.

00:14:53

But we’re not so bad.

00:14:57

We got life to Mars.

00:14:59

We did it.

00:15:02

We did it without intending it.

00:15:04

But that’s how it always works.

00:15:11

So she turned to me and she said, then there is hope.

00:15:14

This project has some hope.

00:15:15

It has some shape.

00:15:17

It’s not all about the dope.

00:15:21

All about you dopes.

00:15:26

Dope is how we see the answers, I said.

00:15:29

You gave us all the dope.

00:15:30

Ayahuasca,

00:15:32

ergotamine,

00:15:34

mushrooms.

00:15:38

It’s all about the dope. The dope in the minds of the monkeys.

00:15:42

It gives us vision.

00:15:44

It gives us hope. It’s about the dope. So keep delivering it.

00:15:51

It’s a Hollywood finish. It’s going to be a car chase. It’s down to the last minute.

00:15:58

We will erase the last rainforest as we prep for the launch,

00:16:08

for the ascension, for the bubble to burst,

00:16:13

and for life to spread outside the confines of the earth.

00:16:19

And the Madre said, that’s cool.

00:16:21

You’ve got a deal. He said, we’ll consume it all but we will deliver

00:16:26

on the commitment

00:16:28

you will find another home Anybody have another request?

00:16:59

You mean the endogenous thing?

00:17:02

Yeah.

00:17:02

Should I describe endotripping?

00:17:06

All right.

00:17:07

So let’s do a…

00:17:10

Yeah, that sounds good.

00:17:12

A kind of a…

00:17:14

Yeah.

00:17:19

So when you were eight years old,

00:17:30

So when you were eight years old and you were a great being,

00:17:36

you could leap as twice as high as your body, the length of your body.

00:17:41

You could smell things all at once.

00:17:42

You were like a dog.

00:17:48

You could have lots of feelings at once, but they didn’t overwhelm you. They didn’t kill you. You could see everything all smushed together

00:17:57

or all separate. Remember that when you were eight? You were just so flexible you were amazing and one of the things you did or you could do

00:18:09

which most of us have forgotten about is when you went to sleep if you could get to sleep

00:18:17

you close your eyes and behind your eyes, because you always had stimulating days, you saw flashes,

00:18:29

little flashes. Those flashes were also washes. They were also patterns moving back and forth.

00:18:39

And as you became an adult later on, you thought of them as inconveniences.

00:18:46

You thought of them as, oh, I’m overstimulated.

00:18:51

Oh, I need to go to sleep.

00:18:53

I have to get up and go to work.

00:18:55

Isn’t this a terrible thing that these flashes are happening?

00:19:00

Well, when I was eight and I saw the flashes I thought these are amazing these are just amazing

00:19:09

I want them to grow I want them to grow into something how do I do that and the way I

00:19:17

worked that was just to give them attention and say oh these, these are great. Every one that flashed across my vision, I was like,

00:19:26

that’s cool. Then the next one happened. The next one, little pinky things, scarlet things,

00:19:35

washes started sweeping across one after the other, wash after wash after wash. Just loved it.

00:19:42

wash after wash after wash.

00:19:43

Just loved it.

00:19:48

Then slightly in the field of view,

00:19:49

there was little jewels,

00:19:51

little rotating jewels went by.

00:19:54

Just little jewels going by.

00:19:55

I was like, oh, this is so good.

00:19:58

And I wanted them so much,

00:20:01

I said, I will do anything to keep them going.

00:20:06

So I wished that, and they did.

00:20:08

They did keep going.

00:20:10

But they told me one thing.

00:20:14

They said, you must get out of our way,

00:20:17

and we can really come on.

00:20:20

So I said, how do I do that?

00:20:23

And they didn’t answer.

00:20:29

And I had to figure it out. It was, how do I get out of my own way?

00:20:48

How do you get out of your own way? And the answer is the following. How do you get out of your own way?

00:20:58

How do you get out?

00:21:11

And then the blotches started, the colored blotches were dancing.

00:21:18

And all I was was the crystal sphere, the tiniest sphere. All I was and the world’s opened.

00:21:33

And everything happened.

00:21:38

Landscapes.

00:21:40

No language.

00:21:45

It’s very hard to talk about this with language because there wasn’t any.

00:21:49

It was just voyaging.

00:22:02

Later I tried to draw it and then I started drawing more of it. I drew a craft, spacecraft. This was the era of Star Wars, the first movies.

00:22:08

So everything looked like the Millennium Falcon

00:22:11

or the TIE Fighter or something

00:22:15

even crazier. Globule-tired

00:22:19

city parkscapes moving along.

00:22:26

Factory City parkscapes moving along. Factory ships half destroyed, blowing out their ballast.

00:22:34

Near collisions of whole civilizations.

00:22:40

Very, very weird landscapes that I dare not tread into.

00:22:48

So this went on and on and on.

00:22:53

I drew it layer after layer after layer on big notebooks.

00:22:59

I stopped taking notes in school.

00:23:03

I stopped writing English.

00:23:06

All I did was draw layer upon layer upon layer of these worlds

00:23:11

as the teachers droned on.

00:23:15

And then I found out I could remember everything the teachers said

00:23:19

by simply looking at what I drew.

00:23:23

Looking at the drawing, I remembered the entire year.

00:23:29

So to study was to simply

00:23:31

remember the drawing.

00:23:36

So this became my practice.

00:23:40

A practice that you couldn’t practice.

00:23:43

You could only do it.

00:23:46

And later on, I could see code.

00:23:49

I could see millions of lines of computer code.

00:23:54

I could debug it this way.

00:23:56

I could debug code this way.

00:23:58

I could see structures flowing into structures this way.

00:24:02

flowing into structures this way.

00:24:08

Later on, I could see avatars in cyberspace and fantastical virtual worlds.

00:24:13

I could see them and then make them.

00:24:17

So I started to bring these worlds alive in virtual worlds.

00:24:24

And then one day, I was put in touch

00:24:28

with this man named Terence McKenna,

00:24:31

who also created worlds and entered

00:24:36

them. He wanted to enter my worlds,

00:24:40

worlds made out of language and technology,

00:24:43

virtual worlds.

00:24:46

So one day we swapped places and he let me enter his worlds.

00:24:53

And I entered his worlds, but in a different way.

00:24:59

But Terrence didn’t know that my worlds were made from his worlds.

00:25:10

So I kept going and I kept doing what I now call endo, the endogenous way.

00:25:18

Doing it what Terrence called on the natch.

00:25:22

What Terrence felt was never possible, On the Natch.

00:25:27

And I do it to this day.

00:25:30

But recently, I’ve worked out a way to do them together.

00:25:37

The On the Natch way, the Endo way, and the Entheo way all merged into one.

00:25:49

endo way and the entheo way all merged into one and now i’m going to some places i can tell you so that’s my story of what happens when you’re eight years old and you see the flashes flashes, it can lead to a lot of things, including some spectacular crashes, crashes into realities

00:26:13

that you can break and splay and restructure.

00:26:20

So now I’m restructuring theories of the origin of life with this endo way.

00:26:28

I’m coming up with the way that we may have begun in a cycle of flowing molecular vesicles.

00:26:38

I’m restructuring, revisioning, and endo-tripping the trips we may take into space

00:26:46

in new kinds of spacecraft, how we can capture comets, how we can digest them,

00:26:55

and so how we can live in the solar system.

00:27:00

And it all starts with the little flashes, folks. The little flashes.

00:27:08

So don’t bat your lashes.

00:27:11

This is the real deal.

00:27:14

These flashes.

00:27:15

And they’re still going on in your adult brain.

00:27:20

It’s still accessible.

00:27:22

It’s still a path for the successful in the endo way.

00:27:30

So there you have another one.

00:27:36

Getting it. So…

00:28:06

the next story I’m going to tell you is the story of a visitation by an orb

00:28:11

how many of you are into orbs?

00:28:15

you’re into orbs?

00:28:18

this is an orbiting crowd

00:28:20

so

00:28:23

I was in Peru in the Maloca having drunk the vile liquid. The shaman had played

00:28:35

his heart out. The musician had Icaro’d until midnight hour. And there was a bit of a break.

00:28:49

So I lay down on the floorboards, and I looked in between the bench seats, kind of like the

00:28:57

yoga seats that are here, and I said, and I asked, I’d like to see it.

00:29:05

Could I please see it?

00:29:08

And I didn’t see it.

00:29:11

It didn’t come, the thing that I’d asked to see for some years.

00:29:17

And of course, you kind of got to follow the leads.

00:29:24

You sometimes don’t get what you want and so i sat up

00:29:29

and then desert dave our musician the charango master he lit up suddenly and he started playing

00:29:39

the charango and the phenomenal thing happened to our room. The heart entered the room.

00:29:47

My heart opened.

00:29:49

My mind left like a baseball cap.

00:29:52

My mind floated up like a dragonfly,

00:29:56

like a firefly dragonfly.

00:29:59

And I watched my mind flow down

00:30:03

and end up on the maloca floor.

00:30:07

And I can sense that my mind was really pleased to be there,

00:30:12

to be disconnected from me.

00:30:14

It didn’t have to do all the terrible things that the mind does

00:30:19

when it’s connected to a person.

00:30:21

It chilled out.

00:30:23

It was like, thank God I’m not connected to that guy anymore.

00:30:29

And so I opened it up. I was like a Coke bottle without a cap on it. I was open to the cosmos.

00:30:39

And the charango music flooded in. And my heart was sootheded my heart rose out of my throat up through my non-existent

00:30:49

mind up into the the skull cup the gourd of my skull and then it went up and it went into the

00:30:59

cathedral the magisterial cathedral that formed in the tryptamine dome of ayahuasca.

00:31:08

And you sit up and you realize you are witnessing the most magnificent magnificence

00:31:16

that a human being can experience.

00:31:21

This incredible dome with its ribs flowing with light.

00:31:27

And you are open to it.

00:31:31

And the shaman gets up because he senses it.

00:31:34

He senses that your heart has moved up.

00:31:38

And the whole room’s heart moves up.

00:31:41

And he picks up the harmonica.

00:31:43

And when he plays the harmonica it brings the greatest

00:31:48

power to bear that a human being can witness the harmonica brings the power it brings

00:31:57

the magenta shard directly piercing you and holding you.

00:32:05

And you are kept.

00:32:07

You are captured by the power.

00:32:11

And so all this happened.

00:32:14

All this happened.

00:32:15

And I lay back down, laid my head back down, still mindless.

00:32:22

And my cheek hit the floorboards

00:32:26

and I looked out into the jungle

00:32:29

and I looked across the river

00:32:31

and I looked at the top of the fronds

00:32:36

of the forest canopy across the river

00:32:39

and there it was

00:32:42

the orb was there

00:32:44

the orb was there.

00:32:47

The orb was presenting.

00:32:52

Oh my God, there it is.

00:32:57

What I’ve sought for so long is there.

00:33:00

What do I do now?

00:33:03

It’s just there.

00:33:06

Is it 13 billion years away or is it right here

00:33:09

so I asked it

00:33:12

are you in the past

00:33:14

are you the big bang

00:33:18

and it said I’m always here

00:33:21

I’m the cosmogenerator

00:33:23

I’m not the cosmogenesis.

00:33:27

The cosmogenesis is a guy that I knew a long time ago,

00:33:33

but he’s out of the picture.

00:33:37

So I crawl back into the maloca,

00:33:42

holding this thing in my head.

00:33:44

How can I possibly hold this thing in my head how can i possibly hold this thing in my head

00:33:49

what am i do with this thing so i crawled over to scott and scott my professor friend

00:34:00

the world’s expert on the golden mean, on the golden proportion.

00:34:07

He was chit-chatting.

00:34:09

He was telling somebody else about the formulas.

00:34:15

The formulas that generate all the numbers.

00:34:19

The formulas that have phi and phi in them

00:34:23

and they generate all the whole numbers.

00:34:26

And I tried to see these formulas in my head.

00:34:30

And I tried to see these formulas.

00:34:32

I’d never seen them on the page.

00:34:35

And I said, Scott, wait a minute.

00:34:39

I’ll be right back.

00:34:40

And I rolled my body toward the mandala, the mandala that was hanging in the maloka.

00:34:48

And I sat up in front of the mandala. And the mandala is the Hoover vacuum cleaner of energy

00:34:56

in such circumstances. It is blasting energy into the maloka. And you get a nice breeze off of it.

00:35:08

And so I said, now where do I go?

00:35:12

Now where do I go?

00:35:14

And I went in, let mind go, let it go,

00:35:19

let the mathematics go, let Scott go,

00:35:23

let the maloca go, let Scott go, let the Moloka go.

00:35:26

And closed my eyes, and the orb was inside.

00:35:33

The orb was right in front of me.

00:35:36

The orb was there.

00:35:40

And I blinked, and I looked back,

00:35:45

and around the orb were orbiting the unities.

00:35:51

These small spheres were moving,

00:35:54

ever moving around the belly of the orb, the equator.

00:35:59

They were moving, and so I looked closer and closer,

00:36:04

and they were moving to avoid each other as they orbited,

00:36:11

moving to avoid each other.

00:36:13

And I saw the patterns of the avoidances,

00:36:17

and suddenly it was all making sense.

00:36:23

These patterns were generating reality.

00:36:28

These very patterns.

00:36:30

So I pulled back, I closed my eyes again,

00:36:34

crawled back to Scott,

00:36:37

and said to Scott,

00:36:39

I am seeing it.

00:36:41

We need to go to see your notes.

00:36:45

I need to read the equations.

00:36:48

So we dragged ourselves to his tombo.

00:36:53

He took out his flashlight.

00:36:55

He cracked open his notebook.

00:36:57

And there were the equations.

00:37:00

And I said, oh my God, there they are.

00:37:02

and I said oh my god there they are

00:37:04

the equations that take you

00:37:07

from the orb

00:37:09

to reality

00:37:10

these are the equations that generate

00:37:13

all reality

00:37:14

and then I said

00:37:17

Scott I’ve got to close my eyes

00:37:19

and I closed them again

00:37:21

and this time

00:37:23

there were thousands of unities

00:37:26

flowing around the orb.

00:37:28

Thousands, skaters, gliders, shifters.

00:37:34

And they were generating these flow patterns.

00:37:38

And the flow patterns were distinct whirls

00:37:41

like the whirls of soft tissues coming off, soft tissues.

00:37:48

And those worlds and those folds were the formulas.

00:37:53

And I realized, oh my God, this is how the universe is made all the time.

00:38:00

We found the answer.

00:38:09

the time. We’ve found the answer. This is how you go from the fuzzy orb to the individual atom.

00:38:18

The atoms are made, but they’re not just made, they’re operated. They’re operated all the time.

00:38:24

This is the cosmogenerator.ator is generating the whole cosmos.

00:38:30

So that was about all I could do for that night.

00:38:36

So I slunk back to my tombo and I crashed out.

00:38:40

And thought that would be the end of it.

00:38:50

But two nights later, it was our day trip our day trip that one time you’re going to take the medicine by day and weird things happen on these day trips weird things happen like it rains, and the rains hit the top of the maloca,

00:39:08

and they cause a timbre in the air,

00:39:11

and they crystallize the energy.

00:39:16

And then you can stand up and sculpt the energy and spray it onto people.

00:39:19

So I always do this.

00:39:20

I stand up and I spray energy on people.

00:39:29

It’s really amazing on the day trip.

00:39:40

And one more time, I called out for the orb. I said, are you there? Are you still out there can you be there by day can i see you in the day because we always think we can only

00:39:50

see the celestial at night but sure enough there it was over the jungle top once again

00:39:59

and i was in the middle of getting up, and I said to it,

00:40:06

as I always say at these moments,

00:40:10

are you a machine?

00:40:12

Are you a machine that made us?

00:40:17

Where is spirit in you?

00:40:20

All I’m seeing is a machine.

00:40:24

And it said said get up

00:40:26

stop thinking

00:40:28

and start moving

00:40:30

do the dance

00:40:33

and I started to dance

00:40:36

and it started to dance

00:40:38

and its dance infused me with spirit

00:40:42

no figuring out.

00:40:45

No mechanics.

00:40:47

That’s a given.

00:40:50

It said it’s all about the dance.

00:40:52

Can’t you see that I dance the cosmos into reality?

00:40:58

You dance.

00:40:59

You get the others up to dance.

00:41:02

That is spirit.

00:41:02

Get the others up to dance.

00:41:04

That is spirit.

00:41:54

That is how the cosmos is a living, breathing, moving entity. Thank you. You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:42:00

And now that Bruce has taken us to the far edges of the cosmos,

00:42:04

it’s my job to bring us back down to Earth again and see if we can get back into our very clear little eight-year-old minds for a reboot, so to speak.

00:42:14

For the past several weeks, we’ve been listening to Terence McKenna explore some of his thoughts about alchemy.

00:42:25

me. And I suspect that I’m not the only one who has made the connection between some of the ways in which alchemical thinking parallels what I like to call psychedelic thinking. To me, psychedelic

00:42:32

thinking is mainly the thought processes that we allow to escape from whatever boxes that we

00:42:37

normally would have them in and allow these ideas to soar and take new forms. An example for me

00:42:44

would be what Bruce was just talking about

00:42:46

when he described the new way that he found to recall what had been said in class. Instead of

00:42:52

doing what he and his classmates had been taught about taking notes, he drew pictures and they,

00:42:58

in turn, led him to the discovery of a new way to remember the lessons of the day. It was an idea that was way out of the school’s box,

00:43:06

and to me that was a psychedelic idea.

00:43:10

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a couple of the books that Terrence mentioned,

00:43:14

and so I’ve discovered that some of the ways in which I view psychedelic thinking

00:43:18

are very similar to states of mind that the alchemists of old either held or attempted to hold.

00:43:25

Of course, all this is very problematic due to the fact that using small mouth noises

00:43:32

and scratches on paper or pixels on a screen to create the words being used to describe

00:43:38

some of these mind states, well, it’s a seriously deficient way to converse about these ideas.

00:43:44

But that never stops us, does it?

00:43:47

So here’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately in regards to alchemy, psychedelics, and the state of the world today.

00:43:55

And with a topic that broad, you see, well, I can say almost anything now.

00:44:00

Which should be your first clue about listening to me.

00:44:03

which should be your first clue about listening to me.

00:44:09

And that is that I actually do realize that all of my best ideas may be nothing more than interesting-sounding bullshit.

00:44:13

If you’re listening to this podcast more than a year after I’ve recorded it,

00:44:16

well, there’s a good chance that I’ve changed my mind about all or some of this.

00:44:21

So don’t go taking anything I say as something that you should hold on to.

00:44:25

What I’m hoping is that I can maybe get you to thinking about these things on your own,

00:44:30

and that maybe you’ll come up with some more coherent ways to bring these thoughts into other

00:44:35

minds. Now, even if you are living in a cave somewhere, you know about the recent terrorist

00:44:42

attacks in Brussels, and as the aftermath of that tragedy was unfolding in the background of my life,

00:44:49

I was also reading The Chemical Wedding by Lindsay Clark,

00:44:52

a book that Terrence recommended several weeks ago.

00:44:56

As I neared the end of the book, I came across this thought.

00:45:00

Quote,

00:45:01

It was about holding together.

00:45:03

If we were to find a key to the explosive condition of the world,

00:45:07

it could only be done by holding contraries together.

00:45:11

That was the key.

00:45:14

So, holding contraries together,

00:45:16

the old coincidencia appositorum that we’ve heard Terence speak of so many times,

00:45:22

it’s a phrase that I think I’ve heard so often

00:45:24

that now I don’t even stop for a moment

00:45:26

to actually think about what that means.

00:45:29

But at the time that I read that thought

00:45:31

that I just quoted to you,

00:45:33

I had recently been thinking about the Brussels bombing.

00:45:36

And while I’m not proud of this thought,

00:45:39

I was actually thinking that perhaps

00:45:41

that racist madman Trump might be right

00:45:43

about his stance on Muslims.

00:45:45

However, I immediately remembered a Japanese-American friend of mine

00:45:49

whose parents had been forced into a concentration camp here in the States during World War II.

00:45:55

What a terrible blot on U.S. history that event was.

00:45:58

This nation didn’t inter Germans or people from any other country with whom we were at war,

00:46:03

only the Japanese.

00:46:04

Maybe because they looked different, I don’t know.

00:46:07

But I still recall some of her stories about the devastating effect

00:46:11

that that program of unjust incarceration had on her family.

00:46:16

And so my knee-jerk reaction about Muslims,

00:46:18

well, it only lasted for a fraction of a second.

00:46:21

But where did that dark thought come from, I asked myself.

00:46:25

And then I remembered some of the talks that we’ve heard from Ann Shulgin

00:46:28

about dealing with our own shadows.

00:46:31

And as a little aside here, I’d like to mention that just this past week,

00:46:35

our dear friend Ann Shulgin turned 85.

00:46:38

And as some of our old-timers here in the salon can attest,

00:46:42

that is much more of an accomplishment than

00:46:45

us younger people can understand.

00:46:47

However, as I pondered on my own thoughts from the dark side, I tried to figure out

00:46:53

why I had that momentary instinct which led me to my shadow side when thinking about religious

00:46:59

terrorists, in this case Muslims.

00:47:02

I won’t bore you with all of my personal history here but there are two

00:47:05

things that took place early on in my life that basically skewed it in directions other than what

00:47:11

I wanted in my heart. One of those things was being raised in a somewhat strict Catholic family.

00:47:17

Since almost every one of us here in the salon either suffered through a Catholic childhood or

00:47:22

know someone who did. I don’t need

00:47:25

to go into the horror of being a young boy who had it beat into him that he would burn forever

00:47:30

in hell if he had what the priests and nuns called impure thoughts. What a horrible mindset to impose

00:47:37

on a child. But thinking about that caused me to give another thought to these seriously misguided

00:47:44

people who blow themselves up,

00:47:46

taking a lot of innocent bystanders with them.

00:47:48

I’m not trying to justify their actions, but for sure,

00:47:52

they didn’t think this way when they were infants or small children.

00:47:56

Somehow these suicide bombers were reprogrammed from being an innocent, fun-loving little child

00:48:01

into the monsters that they became.

00:48:04

I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that their parents, their religion, and their culture

00:48:09

were the major factors in twisting them so badly,

00:48:13

just as my own mind was twisted, albeit in a less destructive way, by the Catholic Church.

00:48:19

So, I’m an equal opportunity anti-religious person.

00:48:22

I think that all forms of organized religion are counterproductive to us great apes who wish to grow into real human beings.

00:48:31

And for what it’s worth, I’ve decided to classify those particular thoughts of mine as coming from my shadow, my dark side.

00:48:39

The other thing that changed the direction of my life, in ways other than what I wanted for myself,

00:48:51

was the U.S. military draft. Now, today young men in the States don’t have to worry about having their schooling or career path interrupted by spending several years in the military.

00:48:56

But back during the American War in Vietnam, the thought of being forced into the military and

00:49:02

possibly dying in a Southeast Asian jungle hung over all of our heads.

00:49:07

Virtually every educational and career decision that we made back then were shaped by the specter of the military draft.

00:49:14

And so, in 1973, when the draft finally came to an end, well, I was ecstatic knowing that my two sons wouldn’t have to live with that threat hanging over their heads.

00:49:23

my two sons wouldn’t have to live with that threat hanging over their heads.

00:49:28

But today I have to admit that I was wrong in working to eliminate the draft,

00:49:33

because, among other things, changing from an army of citizen soldiers to an army composed of professional warriors

00:49:36

has seriously impacted overall the U.S. military strategy.

00:49:41

While my friends and I were at first delighted with the end of conscription,

00:49:44

we now see that it has taken an unexpected toll on our democracy. strategy. While my friends and I were at first delighted with the end of conscription,

00:49:52

we now see that it has taken an unexpected toll on our democracy. Recently, an essay in Salon Magazine began, and I quote, in the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a new strange military

00:49:59

has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force

00:50:05

that prides itself on its warrior ethos

00:50:08

rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal.

00:50:12

As such, it’s a military increasingly divorced from the people,

00:50:16

with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans,

00:50:20

adulatory as they may feel towards its troops.

00:50:24

Abroad, it’s now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense.

00:50:30

In Washington, it has become a force unto itself,

00:50:33

following its own priorities, pursuing its own agendas,

00:50:37

increasingly unaccountable to either the President or Congress.”

00:50:41

It’s a truly interesting essay, and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes,

00:50:47

in the event that you want to read the entire essay, which I do recommend.

00:50:51

But here are a couple more quotes from it that have bearing on what is going on in the United States today.

00:50:57

And I quote,

00:50:58

In the purer ages of the Commonwealth of Rome,

00:51:02

the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens

00:51:06

who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it

00:51:13

was their interest as well as duty to maintain. But in proportion, as the public freedom was lost

00:51:19

in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art and degraded into a trade.

00:51:26

As the U.S. has become more authoritarian and more expansive, its military has come

00:51:32

to serve the needs of others, among them elites driven by dreams of profit and power.

00:51:38

Today’s American version of the military is enormous, garrisoning roughly 800 foreign bases across the globe,

00:51:46

capable of sending its Hellfire missile-armed drones on killing missions

00:51:51

into country after country across the greater Middle East and Africa,

00:51:55

and possessing a vision of what it likes to call full-spectrum dominance,

00:52:00

meant to facilitate global reach, global power.

00:52:03

meant to facilitate global reach, global power.

00:52:09

In sum, the U.S. military is far more powerful, far less accountable, and far more dangerous.

00:52:13

And finally, I continue to quote,

00:52:18

It is, in other words, a post-democratic Leviathan to be reckoned with,

00:52:33

and not a single Democratic or Republican candidate for commander-in-chief has spent a single day in uniform. End quote. Now, you may think that there is a civilian control of the Pentagon, as the U.S. Constitution calls for,

00:52:40

but that fairy tale ended in November of 1963, when the deep state engineered a coup d’etat,

00:52:44

which is a story that I don’t have time to go into right now. However, if you are

00:52:45

well read, you already know the story of how the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon, along with the mafia,

00:52:52

murdered President Kennedy and essentially took over the reins of power from the women and men

00:52:56

that we had previously elected to run this country. And you don’t have to be a conspiracy

00:53:01

theorist to know these things. All you have to do is read a few of the hundreds of books about the history of those days to discover the truth.

00:53:09

Unfortunately, simply knowing the truth isn’t enough to set you free.

00:53:14

So, now we find ourselves in 2016, and we see our friends, relatives, and neighbors listening to pinheads like Donald Trump trying to instill fear in everyone.

00:53:25

And so I find myself, during only a brief moment, but a frightening one, thinking that

00:53:31

well, maybe Trump’s ideas will be necessary for a while.

00:53:34

Which is pure bullshit thinking when brought into the light of day, yet I have to admit

00:53:39

that the thought actually passed through my mind.

00:53:42

But here are the actual facts.

00:53:46

thought actually passed through my mind. But here are the actual facts. Did you know that from 2005 through 2015, a total of only 71 Americans have been killed by terrorists on U.S. soil,

00:53:54

and only 24 of them were killed by Muslim terrorists? The rest lost their lives to

00:53:59

screwed up right-wing American white guys. During that same period, there were over 130,000 people who died

00:54:06

in the U.S. from automobile accidents, falling in the bathtub, and things like that. But as a result

00:54:13

of the fear that our politicians and military brass have installed in the people, we have

00:54:18

essentially given up much of our freedom to be left alone and not spied upon. Each year in the U.S. over 41,000 people commit suicide,

00:54:27

but on average only seven U.S. citizens die each year as a result of terrorism. Do you see

00:54:33

something wrong with that picture and with our priorities? So here we are living in a world that

00:54:39

seems to have gone mad. It’s a world in fact that many people think is once again in the midst of a

00:54:45

world war. I want to read a little something more for you. It’s from an essay titled,

00:54:51

A World War Has Begun, Break the Silence, and I’ll link to it in the program notes as well.

00:54:57

I quote, In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the center of Prague, in the heart of Europe.

00:55:06

He pledged himself to make the world free from nuclear weapons.

00:55:10

People cheered and some cried.

00:55:13

A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media.

00:55:16

Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:55:20

It was all fake.

00:55:22

He was lying. The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons,

00:55:27

more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems,

00:55:31

more nuclear factories.

00:55:33

Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama

00:55:37

than under any American president.

00:55:39

The cost over 30 years is more than $1 trillion.

00:55:44

A mini nuclear bomb is planned.

00:55:46

It is known as the B61 Model 12.

00:55:49

There has never been anything like it.

00:55:52

General James Cartwright, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said,

00:55:56

Going smaller makes using this nuclear weapon more thinkable.

00:56:01

In the last 18 months, the greatest buildup of military forces since World War II,

00:56:06

led by the United States, is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler

00:56:13

invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

00:56:19

End quote. It goes on, but I think you get my point. As I’ve often said, on the day that I was born in 1942, the entire world was at war, but things are worse today.

00:56:33

So, now that I’ve most likely spun you down into a deep funk, how about I try to take all of this bad news and old history and try to roll it up into something that you can hold on to in a more

00:56:45

positive fashion. During the course of the past month or so, we’ve been listening to Terence

00:56:50

McKenna talk about the importance of bringing the principles of alchemy back into our lives today.

00:56:56

Not the fake alchemy of turning lead into gold, but the real alchemy, the one that searches for

00:57:01

the philosopher’s stone. Dealing with the dark side of life and with

00:57:06

our own shadows, and at the same time focusing on the good parts of life, is to understand what is

00:57:11

meant by holding two opposites in our mind at one time, that is, dealing with the coincidencia

00:57:17

oppositorum in our own life. We all have our shadow, our dark side, and if we aren’t careful

00:57:23

during these days when events seem to be out of control,

00:57:26

when there are times when we almost are willing to turn ourselves over to the anti-human politicians of the establishment,

00:57:33

the ones who seem to be in charge these days,

00:57:36

when we see that shadow beginning to take hold on our emotions,

00:57:39

it is then, more than any other time, that we need to grab a hold of our own personal philosopher’s stone and deal with our conflicting emotions. And those were the thoughts that were in my mind as I was reading The Chemical Wedding

00:57:56

when I came upon this paragraph.

00:57:59

I quote, Then I saw what was not so obvious, that the holding together could only be done by Quakers,

00:58:07

and that meant not only the Society of Friends, however aptly named,

00:58:11

but men and women everywhere who were prepared to quake,

00:58:16

for quaking was what happened when you endured inside yourself the tension of divisive forces.

00:58:22

It was what happened when you refused to shrug them off,

00:58:25

neither disowning your own violence nor deploying it,

00:58:29

not admitting only the good and throwing evil in the teeth of the opposition,

00:58:32

but holding the conflict together inside of yourself as yours,

00:58:37

the dark and the light of it, the love and the lovelessness,

00:58:41

the terror and the hope.

00:58:43

And as you did this, you changed. The situation changed.

00:58:48

In the end, what mattered was how many people were prepared to quake this way,

00:58:52

for such quaking spirits were the keepers of the keys. It is about holding together. If we were to

00:58:59

find a key to the explosive condition of the world, it could only be done by holding contraries together.

00:59:05

That is the key.

00:59:08

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:59:13

Now go out and become an alchemist yourself.

00:59:16

Find your personal stone.

00:59:18

And be well, my friends. Thank you.