Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
https://freeross.org/[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“History is, in fact, the quenching and the withdrawal of this relationship of symbiosis to the rest of nature.”
“Hedonists are people who don’t take hallucinogens, to my mind, because it largely is very hard work. I mean it isn’t always hard work, but as a life, as a path, it’s extremely hard work.”
“The issue of psychedelics, of plant transformation, of losing the ego, is the most closely held facet of reality in a dominator society.”
“There is no rational way to save the world. Our only hope is a miracle. And the only place a miracle is going to come, so far as I can tell, is from psychedelics. That’s the only miracle in town.”
“I really think that the major political obligation upon all of us is to get more stoned. Take larger hits.”
“Most things in the world are hyped. Most things are over-sold and under-delivered, but in my experience sex, music, and psychedelics deliver. They are actually better than advertised.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And I’m happy to begin today by thanking fellow salonners David B. and Simon T., who both have recently made donations to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.
00:00:37 ►
And thank you again, you guys. I really appreciate your help.
00:00:41 ►
Now, before we get into today’s program, there are a couple of announcements that I’d like to pass along first.
00:00:47 ►
To begin with, one of our fellow Saloners has posted a notice on our forums that he is in the early stages of planning a small psychedelics conference to be held in Berlin this autumn.
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So if you’re going to be in Europe this coming September and are interested in perhaps speaking,
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well, you can find more information about this on the Salon’s forums, which, as you know, you can get to simply by clicking the forums link at the top of the psychedelicsalon.com website.
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Also, I’d like to let you know about some podcasts that I’ve been interviewed on lately.
00:01:22 ►
A couple of weeks ago, I spent Sunday evening on the live radio program Inner Journey with Greg Friedman.
00:01:29 ►
And then last week, I joined Bruce Dahmer
00:01:31 ►
on the Third Eye Drops podcast,
00:01:34 ►
where the two of us were interviewed by Michael Phillip.
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And then I was also interviewed
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for the Novelty Generators podcast
00:01:41 ►
by fellow salonner and Planque Norte lecturer Niles Heckman.
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And I’ll link to those podcasts in today’s program notes
00:01:49 ►
in the event that you want to hear a few more of my stories.
00:01:54 ►
Now, let’s get on with today’s program.
00:01:58 ►
Originally, I thought that I would have another new speaker for you to listen to today,
00:02:02 ►
but, well, those plans had to be pushed back a bit, and so I’m just going to play yet another talk by Terrence McKenna for you today.
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This one is the beginning of a weekend workshop that was held in December of 1989, and today I’m
00:02:18 ►
going to play the Friday night session that begins just after they’d gone around the room with each
00:02:23 ►
participant saying
00:02:25 ►
a little bit about themselves.
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And as you’re going to hear in just a moment, the first minute or so of this session didn’t
00:02:32 ►
get recorded, and it just kind of picks up as Terrence begins his rap for the evening.
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Then after the Friday evening talk, we’ll pick up with the beginning of the Saturday
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morning session.
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pick up with the beginning of the Saturday morning session.
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So this sexual permissiveness is another aspect of the archaic revival.
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And, you know, national socialism in Germany was a negative aspect.
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It isn’t entirely positive.
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It’s simply a revivification of archaic form.
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That’s all it is.
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Some of you may know there was something in the 1880s called the Celtic Revival.
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This was an effort to imbue everything from poetry
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to furniture design coming out of England
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with a spirit of the archaic Celtic mind.
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But what the archaic revival that I’m talking about is, it’s a global phenomenon and a necessary phenomenon. You see, what happens is when a society begins to come apart, when the metaphors that have sustained it for perhaps thousands of years begin to wither on the vine,
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there is an unconscious, it is not rational,
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there is an unconscious reflex
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which sweeps through the society.
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It is to go back into time
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to the last model that made sense
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and then put it in place.
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Now, an easy example that lets us understand this
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is the breakup of the medieval world in Western Europe
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about 500 years ago.
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It came to a place where it no longer made any sense
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and forward-looking thinkers reached back into time
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to the models of ancient Greece and Rome
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and created what we call classicism. I mean, bear in mind that classicism is a creation
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of the 15th, of the 16th century. You know, they are as far from classicism as we are from the mentality that built Chartres Cathedral.
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And yet they went back into Roman law, Greek philosophy, Greek religion, and tried to revivify these forms and did so very successfully and created the European Enlightenment.
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The period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment was this working
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out of classical form. Well, our cultural crisis is much deeper and global. And so when we reach
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back into time for a steadying metaphor, it isn’t Greece and Rome. It isn’t even dynastic Egypt. It isn’t even the hierarchical male-dominated
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societies of Sumer or Babylon or the Harappan civilization of Mahindra Dharo. It’s further
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back in time to about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago in the wake of the last glaciation.
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Someone in the circle tonight mentioned Rian Eisler.
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Eisler, as a student of Maria Gimbutas,
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they have created a revolution
00:05:55 ►
in archaeological thinking.
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The old myth is that
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there was a fluctuation
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between patriarchy and matriarchy, but that there was a fluctuation between patriarchy and matriarchy,
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but that there was always stratification and hierarchy.
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Eisler is saying, no, this isn’t what it was.
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It isn’t matriarchy and patriarchy.
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It’s partnership versus dominator.
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And the great gift that comes out of this recasting of the problem is you get rid of
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gender tension in talking about it. It’s not about men versus women. It’s about one kind of mind,
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the dominator mind, in contrast to another kind of mind, the partnership mind.
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The partnership mind is seeking to maximize group values,
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create horizontal linkages among systems,
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and hold down the tendency to vertically stratify the organization
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into some kind of dominance hierarchy.
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the organization into some kind of dominance hierarchy.
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These two things play off in the transition from nomadic pastoralism,
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which was a partnership arrangement, into the early city style of living.
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In a way, you see, pastoralism is a transition from true hunting and gathering to true city dwelling and agriculture. And in this transition, and this is my contribution,
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if it is a contribution to this discussion of human origins, there was a kind of symbiosis. There was a flirtation with a kind of symbiosis
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in our early history as human beings. The relationship between human beings and psychedelic on the plains of Africa 20,000 to 12,000 years ago
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was a kind of
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religio-biological dynamism
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of a sort that has not existed
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since history.
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History is in fact the quenching
00:08:21 ►
and the withdrawal
00:08:22 ►
of this relationship of symbiosis to the rest of nature.
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So what I will argue this weekend is that in our private, personal, small lives,
00:08:36 ►
we can create our own archaic revival by exploring shamanism, hallucinogenic plants. These are the technologies and the tools
00:08:48 ►
of prehistory. We can do that in our own lives, but also we are part of this larger generalized
00:08:57 ►
societal phenomenon that is major. I mean, it is major. Because what we’re discovering is not a new way to measure the speed
00:09:09 ►
of light, not a new way to make war against our neighbors, but actually an entire aspect of reality
00:09:20 ►
that has been culturally blocked from our awareness
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because we are embedded so deeply
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in the dominator style of language
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that we cannot even cognize this other reality
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unless we have recourse to some boundary-dissolving,
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neurophysiologically-perturbing tool of some sort.
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And there are various, I mean, an excellent tool
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and the way most people, at least in modern life,
00:10:00 ►
I think, come against the psychedelic experience
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is they nearly die I mean you know
00:10:07 ►
you pull somebody out of a burning airplane or something and they’re immediately ready to talk
00:10:13 ►
turkey about what’s real and what is not they have no illusions it’s been shorn from them
00:10:20 ►
but this is a very hit and miss method because you lose half the people when you try
00:10:26 ►
to bring them through that way so so what is needed you see is a a challenge needs to be put
00:10:35 ►
a little more strongly than a challenge it it has to be you have to feel the actual bite of fear because that is an indication that the existential mode in which
00:10:50 ►
you’re operating in is real. I mean, what is always put against people who use hallucinogens
00:10:57 ►
is that they’re hedonists. Well, hedonists are people who don’t take hallucinogens to my mind because it largely
00:11:06 ►
is very hard work
00:11:08 ►
I mean it isn’t always hard work
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but as a life
00:11:11 ►
as a path
00:11:13 ►
it’s extremely hard work
00:11:16 ►
and
00:11:17 ►
the reason for that
00:11:20 ►
is that it’s real
00:11:21 ►
and this is
00:11:23 ►
the main thing
00:11:26 ►
that I am interested to put across
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and the main way in which I think
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I differ from the New Age
00:11:33 ►
and I think the shamanic option
00:11:36 ►
differs from all other options.
00:11:39 ►
So far as I have been able to determine,
00:11:42 ►
it’s the only thing which works.
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And, you know, I get a lot of flack about this and people say, well, that’s just a terrible thing to say.
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I mean, you’ve just devalued 10,000 years of ontological speculation on the part of
00:11:57 ►
Buddhism, Hinduism, and so forth. I know, but I was there. It didn’t work. That’s all
00:12:02 ►
I’m saying. It didn’t work. It works when you’re stoned.
00:12:05 ►
Then they all work.
00:12:07 ►
Then they all work.
00:12:08 ►
Mantra, mudra, the whole crowd.
00:12:10 ►
It works.
00:12:11 ►
But it’s as though, you know,
00:12:15 ►
you have to have a battery to run the car
00:12:18 ►
and the spiritual machinery that we’re given
00:12:21 ►
is the equivalent of a Maserati
00:12:24 ►
without any gas in the tank.
00:12:26 ►
The issue of psychedelics, of plant transformation, of losing the ego is the most closely held facet of reality in a dominator society. And what I will argue this weekend for you
00:12:49 ►
is that the ego, as we experience it as moderns,
00:12:55 ►
is actually a pathological condition.
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The ego is like a calcareous tumor or a cyst.
00:13:06 ►
It begins growing in the personality
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in the absence of hallucinogenic substances
00:13:13 ►
because in the absence of hallucinogenic substances,
00:13:18 ►
assumptions get rolling
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and there’s no stopping these assumptions
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because they are never held up to a reasonable standard, you know.
00:13:27 ►
They’re just simply taken for granted.
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And the whole style of dominator society is a taking for granted.
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So, you know, many people over the past 25 years
00:13:42 ►
have said that it’s a fine thing to take psychedelic plants,
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makes you copulate in the street and love your neighbor.
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And I agree with all of that.
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But having been raised a good Catholic girl,
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I want to go further and create a compelling reason why this is correct, a compelling reason that doesn’t rest on the needs of the individual but actually addresses the needs of society. But the issue is ego and how when there was this very tight symbiosis
00:14:28 ►
with vegetation,
00:14:30 ►
the ego could not arise
00:14:32 ►
and there was a direct pipeline
00:14:35 ►
into something which we call the overmind,
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the logos, the gnosis, the goddess,
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a direct pipeline into a transcendental reality,
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which if it weren’t for psychedelics,
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probably most of us could be convinced that this transcendental reality doesn’t exist.
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I mean, except for people who take psychedelics,
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the only other people who contact these things on a regular basis are,
00:15:08 ►
well, pathological is too strong a word, but they are definitely more delicately balanced than the rest of us. The big news about psychedelics is that
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they’re democratic, you know, and it’s not like summoning flying saucers where you go to the same
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cornfield on eight successive nights and
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freeze your ass off and get nowhere the thing to bear in mind is that this is on demand
00:15:32 ►
you know it is on demand i mean it’s not a hundred percent certain but if it’s 95 percent
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certain this is big news and what is it that is delivered on demand? Literally, the fulfillment
00:15:50 ►
and transcendence of our wildest dreams. Not the white light, not all any of these cheerful
00:15:57 ►
hypostatizations of Eastern religion, but, you know, instead thousands of overdressed elves pounding their way into your inner sanctum
00:16:08 ►
and squeaking at you in languages that are not scripted on this planet. What are we to make of
00:16:15 ►
such a thing? What are straight people to make of it? I mean, it’s hard enough for heads to come
00:16:23 ►
to terms with this stuff.
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And I think we’ve dealt with it so far by just saying,
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well, heads are pathological people,
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and we do not have to listen to what they report because anybody crazy enough to take one of these drugs on their own
00:16:37 ►
without expert psychiatric supervision can’t be trusted anyway.
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Well, this is just nonsense.
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supervision can’t be trusted anyway.
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Well, this is just nonsense.
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This is, what is really going on is a continuing insistence
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on an expression of shamanic forms
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that people will not let
00:16:57 ►
the world’s oldest religion die.
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And it is more than drumming,
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fasting, humming, whistling, and all that.
00:17:07 ►
For my money, it centralizes on some kind of technique
00:17:12 ►
for creating a rupture of plane, an ecstatic experience,
00:17:17 ►
an inflow of information that is completely unexpected.
00:17:23 ►
I mean, to me, the world divides
00:17:26 ►
into two kinds of people.
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People who know that this is possible
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and people who either don’t know
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or if it’s suggested to them,
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deny it.
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Absolutely.
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It’s as fundamentally a part of who we are
00:17:44 ►
as our sexuality is
00:17:46 ►
now the interesting thing about sexuality
00:17:49 ►
is that we can almost make the statement
00:17:52 ►
no one escapes
00:17:54 ►
I mean when you’re an 11 year old boy
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or a 9 year old boy
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you may say girls are yucky
00:18:01 ►
and I’m never going to have anything to do with it
00:18:03 ►
but life hormones have a way of channeling
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us inevitably toward these then boundary
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dissolving and shattering experiences where we discover
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we seem to discover what people are for
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say my god they’re not just to drive me to school and to take
00:18:24 ►
me to dance lesson they’re not just to drive me to school and to take me to dance lesson.
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They’re actually into this other thing.
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The psychedelic experience is optional.
00:18:34 ►
You can go from birth to the grave
00:18:37 ►
and never come near this,
00:18:41 ►
never have an inkling.
00:18:44 ►
And most people do. But that is not, to my mind, a proper use of the
00:18:50 ►
opportunity afforded by human existence. To my mind, the purpose of human existence is to try
00:18:58 ►
and figure out a way in, out, over, up, somewhere.
00:19:09 ►
In other words, we come out of an unguessable abyss who knows what it is, what we came from.
00:19:12 ►
And we go into death,
00:19:15 ►
about which we know practically nothing.
00:19:17 ►
We have a few cheerful stories to ease us on the way,
00:19:21 ►
but who would want to make bet on all of that?
00:19:24 ►
So what you have is suspended between eternities,
00:19:30 ►
a moment, 45, 55, 75 years,
00:19:35 ►
in which you can sit on your can
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or you can subscribe to one of these prepackaged religions
00:19:42 ►
that gives you all the answers
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and probably sets you up for a lot of sexual repression.
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Or you can say,
00:19:51 ►
my God, I’m alive.
00:19:53 ►
Apparently, I’ve awakened in the control room of reality.
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And if I could just figure out what these buttons and levers are,
00:20:03 ►
I could, you know, do something profound,
00:20:09 ►
interesting, worthy.
00:20:11 ►
Yes?
00:20:11 ►
Yeah, I have a question.
00:20:14 ►
Well, see, there’s never been a fair discussion
00:20:18 ►
about the whole spectrum of mystical phenomenon.
00:20:23 ►
A person who goes to an ashram and controls diet and breath and it
00:20:31 ►
certainly they must attain some amount of spiritual satisfaction and there must be many paths away
00:20:39 ►
from ordinary consciousness that lead to states of satisfaction of various sorts,
00:20:47 ►
either void states or states of great emotional empathy or states of great detachment.
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I mean, we can imagine each in our own way what these things would be.
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The thing to get clear about the psychedelic experience is that first of all it isn’t
00:21:05 ►
at all clear that it is on that
00:21:07 ►
gradient of spiritual
00:21:10 ►
development
00:21:11 ►
we don’t say here
00:21:13 ►
exactly what it is
00:21:15 ►
not that you know you’re closer to God
00:21:18 ►
if you have it or you’re closer
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to the source if you have it
00:21:21 ►
all we’re saying is there seems to be
00:21:24 ►
waking, sleeping
00:21:25 ►
and one other thing
00:21:26 ►
which very few people
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know much about
00:21:28 ►
which is
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this situation
00:21:30 ►
when these
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self-transforming
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elf machines
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squealing mantras
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come and talk to you
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it isn’t a void state
00:21:40 ►
it may not be
00:21:41 ►
a mystical state
00:21:43 ►
now what confuses
00:21:44 ►
the discussion is that at low doses, psychedelics are all kinds of things because they accept projection very readily and they grow beneath the strobe light of expectation, if you will. But the trick is to get to the place where your participation in willing
00:22:10 ►
the trip to happen is no longer an issue. You see what I mean? Once it no longer requires your
00:22:19 ►
cooperation, then you’re getting close to the good stuff and we all myself included are tremendously
00:22:27 ►
chicken shit about this because uh you can take huge amounts of these organic psychedelics and
00:22:36 ►
be nowhere near death i mean you can take doses that no one of us would ever consider. And an ordinary physician would say,
00:22:46 ►
well, he’ll sleep it off, give him some oxygen,
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or yeah, they’ll be all right, you know.
00:22:52 ►
So we really just skin the lower edge of this thing.
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And this is a worldwide phenomenon.
00:22:59 ►
I mean, I have found this in shamanism in the Amazon,
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other places as well.
00:23:06 ►
People are very cautious with the mystery,
00:23:11 ►
especially once they know how deep it can get.
00:23:14 ►
Because until you have had this experience
00:23:17 ►
where it’s no longer you thinking strange thoughts
00:23:21 ►
or having unusual insights,
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it’s that reality has dissolved,
00:23:26 ►
the carpet is speaking to you,
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you can’t find your knees,
00:23:31 ►
and everything has come apart.
00:23:33 ►
This is very impressive.
00:23:37 ►
And inside this place,
00:23:41 ►
it isn’t as you might imagine
00:23:43 ►
if you had a reductionist view of brain function.
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And a lot of
00:23:48 ►
early psychedelic literature
00:23:50 ►
makes this mistake.
00:23:52 ►
They give you the idea that you’re
00:23:54 ►
going to see beautiful patterns,
00:23:57 ►
drifting lights,
00:23:59 ►
clouds of
00:24:00 ►
transparent color.
00:24:02 ►
This is in the first
00:24:04 ►
five minutes
00:24:05 ►
as whatever it is begins to lock hold.
00:24:08 ►
That’s called hypnagogia.
00:24:10 ►
That’s not the trip.
00:24:12 ►
That’s just your brain telling you
00:24:14 ►
that something is about to happen.
00:24:16 ►
When the thing really begins to happen,
00:24:20 ►
it completely transcends
00:24:24 ►
any kind of straight description of what is possible. And
00:24:29 ►
it’s not a white light. It’s not an undifferentiated void. It’s much more like a place.
00:24:36 ►
It’s much more like a place. There are entities in there. They are not made of flesh and blood they’re made of
00:24:45 ►
light and language
00:24:47 ►
but they are alive
00:24:48 ►
they come toward you
00:24:50 ►
they’re aware of you
00:24:51 ►
you communicate with them
00:24:54 ►
they offer
00:24:56 ►
trade goods
00:24:59 ►
in the form of ideas
00:25:01 ►
this seems to be
00:25:03 ►
the currency
00:25:04 ►
of the other realm,
00:25:06 ►
is ideas.
00:25:08 ►
They’re saying, what can you show me?
00:25:10 ►
Here’s what we’ve got up today.
00:25:12 ►
And trade ideas.
00:25:15 ►
Now, if you were to ask a shaman,
00:25:17 ►
what are these things?
00:25:19 ►
What are these creatures in this other place?
00:25:22 ►
He would unhesitatingly reply,
00:25:25 ►
oh, well, those are the ancestors.
00:25:27 ►
Those are the ancestors.
00:25:28 ►
Those are the souls of the dead.
00:25:31 ►
Well, if we were to entertain this notion seriously
00:25:35 ►
for even a moment,
00:25:36 ►
our entire reality structure would unbuckle.
00:25:42 ►
I mean, we are much more willing to believe
00:25:44 ►
that it’s friendly extraterrestrials from our tourists
00:25:47 ►
coming to check on what’s going on
00:25:49 ►
than that it’s my dead uncle.
00:25:52 ►
I mean, that is just too weird to wrap your mind around.
00:25:57 ►
And yet, if we want to apply a principle of parsimoniousness,
00:26:03 ►
meaning you don’t make it any more complicated
00:26:06 ►
than you have to, then
00:26:08 ►
we are living
00:26:09 ►
intelligent beings, and
00:26:12 ►
probably the closest you can
00:26:14 ►
get to us is our souls.
00:26:16 ►
So before you go off looking
00:26:18 ►
for extraterrestrials or
00:26:20 ►
fairies, you might consider the possibility
00:26:22 ►
that the human being
00:26:24 ►
is organized in some way that
00:26:26 ►
actually persists after death. One thing that we’ll talk about here is the future. What is to
00:26:35 ►
become of us? How can we make sense of our situation and continue to live and honor not only the planet,
00:26:45 ►
but the unborn generations to come.
00:26:49 ►
The current situation is we borrow against the unborn.
00:26:54 ►
I mean, we are using up our share, our grandchildren’s share,
00:26:58 ►
their grandchildren’s share.
00:27:00 ►
We’re using it up.
00:27:01 ►
No society in history has ever been so rapacious
00:27:04 ►
that it left its children no world to inhabit.
00:27:10 ►
And I think, you know,
00:27:11 ►
there is no rational way to save the world.
00:27:17 ►
Our only hope is a miracle.
00:27:20 ►
And the only place a miracle is going to come,
00:27:24 ►
so far as I can tell, is from psychedelics. That’s the only miracle in town. There aren’t any others. These ge of us, based on our own authenticity,
00:27:47 ►
can confirm the fact that, hey, there’s a universe next door.
00:27:53 ►
It may be as big as this universe or it may be as small as Rhode Island.
00:27:57 ►
We don’t know yet because, you know, we’ve never really been able to explore it.
00:28:02 ►
But this is what all the big excitement is about. Now our culture,
00:28:07 ►
prodigal, dominator, male conscious, war making, so forth and so on, has fallen away from this
00:28:16 ►
awareness. And I, tomorrow, will explain in excruciating detail how this happened. But basically what happened,
00:28:26 ►
I’ll tell you the, I’ll cut to the chase here tonight.
00:28:29 ►
What happened was they ran out of dope.
00:28:32 ►
And as soon as,
00:28:33 ►
as soon as they ran out of dope,
00:28:38 ►
now what does this mean, they ran out of dope?
00:28:40 ►
It means that on the African veldt,
00:28:44 ►
it progressively became more and more dry
00:28:47 ►
and as it became more and more dry
00:28:50 ►
the mushrooms were less and less available
00:28:53 ►
to be the driving force
00:28:55 ►
in this ecstatic, orgiastic
00:28:58 ►
ego-dissolving religion
00:29:00 ►
which was the religious form of human social life
00:29:04 ►
at that time as the climate became more dry, the mushrooms became more scarce. The ceremonies occurred less often. In some cases, they occurred only a couple of times a year. And in the meantime, everybody turned into less fully functioning members of society
00:29:28 ►
because ego, sense of property, my food, my women, my territory,
00:29:34 ►
this kind of thing began to get going.
00:29:38 ►
Eventually, there were so few mushrooms that they had to be preserved in honey so that supplies could be built up
00:29:48 ►
sufficient for them to be taken. Well, this is all fine except that honey is itself capable of
00:29:55 ►
fermenting into alcohol and you get mead from fermented honey. So over a very long period of
00:30:02 ►
time, what began as a mushroom cult that turned into a
00:30:07 ►
mushroom cult preserving its mushrooms in honey turned into just a frat rat beer bust a thousand,
00:30:16 ►
five thousand years later. And notice that there’s no blame. It’s nobody’s fault. I mean,
00:30:21 ►
that there’s no blame.
00:30:24 ►
It’s nobody’s fault.
00:30:27 ►
I mean, you can’t blame the planet for getting drier.
00:30:29 ►
And that was the real force which propelled us into the nomadic pastoral mode
00:30:33 ►
in the first place,
00:30:35 ►
into the creation of this mushroom religion
00:30:37 ►
on the plains of Africa.
00:30:39 ►
And then when that unstable situation
00:30:42 ►
changed into something else,
00:30:45 ►
our human institutions were transformed yet again
00:30:49 ►
into the incipient dominator culture
00:30:53 ►
of which we are the inheritors.
00:30:57 ►
And the only way now to do anything about this
00:31:01 ►
is with a kind of pharmacological intervention because we don’t have 500 years to
00:31:10 ►
straighten this mess out and educate they’re always saying educate educate we don’t have time to
00:31:15 ►
educate everybody we probably have 50 years before we will so completely lose control of the toxic
00:31:23 ►
processes that we’ve set in motion on this planet
00:31:26 ►
that there will be no holding back the cascade of consequences. So we have 50 years. So in that
00:31:33 ►
period of time, it seems to me the fastest way to re-enchant the world, to create an archaic revival is to revive the tradition of ecstatic trans-shamanism,
00:31:48 ►
which means revive the tradition of psychedelic plant use.
00:31:55 ►
And I think that’s all I’m going to say this evening.
00:31:59 ►
In the course of the weekend,
00:32:01 ►
we’ll talk about what is it like to do this,
00:32:04 ►
what were the stages along the way, we’ll talk about what is it like to do this? What were the stages along the way?
00:32:07 ►
How can culture get this screwed up?
00:32:09 ►
And then can it be saved?
00:32:12 ►
And then finally, the more personal dimension,
00:32:15 ►
which is, you know, what is this going to mean?
00:32:20 ►
What does it mean?
00:32:22 ►
I mean, I think this is really the thing which drags us all together here.
00:32:27 ►
It’s why I keep doing these things. Because, you know, this is not a course in acupuncture or
00:32:34 ►
overtonal chanting, or not that I put any of those things down. I don’t. They certainly have their
00:32:40 ►
place. But this is a class gathered together to discuss the impossible and the
00:32:48 ►
unspeakable as a real thing. It’s not some philosophical hypostatization. It’s something
00:32:55 ►
that most of the people in this room have had their hands on. Well, how can we then create a collective language so that we can understand this reality and then anchor it to within the group a sense that we are part of
00:33:28 ►
a change. Not that we’re bringing back the 1960s. That’s not it. It’s that we’re bringing back
00:33:36 ►
the 15th millennium before Christ. That’s what we’re shooting for and everything leading up to this
00:33:45 ►
has been prelude
00:33:47 ►
we are like the prodigal son
00:33:50 ►
I’m sure you all know the story of the prodigal son
00:33:53 ►
I don’t, but the basic notion is
00:33:55 ►
he left the family
00:33:58 ►
and the father grieved for him
00:34:00 ►
and kept him in his mind
00:34:02 ►
and finally the prodigal son returned.
00:34:06 ►
And this reunified the family.
00:34:09 ►
The fall into history is a prodigal experience.
00:34:15 ►
We have now wandered for 10,000 years
00:34:18 ►
in the desert of male dominance,
00:34:20 ►
historicity, linear thinking,
00:34:23 ►
phonetic alphabets, bad advertising, you name it.
00:34:27 ►
And the only way that edifice of phenomena can be redeemed
00:34:34 ►
is if we bring the snake around
00:34:37 ►
and let it take its tail in its mouth.
00:34:41 ►
In other words, history was, there was a reason for it. It was not simply a random
00:34:48 ►
walk into error. The reason for history was to empower us to then live shamanic ethics,
00:34:58 ►
no more as pitiful hunter-gatherer bands oppressed by disease
00:35:05 ►
and resource constraints
00:35:08 ►
within the environment.
00:35:10 ►
That isn’t what we are now.
00:35:12 ►
Now we are, in a sense,
00:35:14 ►
the pinnacle of creation.
00:35:16 ►
We are the dominant species
00:35:18 ►
on this planet.
00:35:20 ►
Dominant in the sense
00:35:22 ►
that what we do matters.
00:35:24 ►
It’s not what flatworms do that matters now.
00:35:27 ►
It’s what we do.
00:35:28 ►
We send out ripples of perturbation
00:35:31 ►
that affect every organism on the planet.
00:35:35 ►
So in a sense, the healing of the planet,
00:35:39 ►
the saving of the planet,
00:35:41 ►
and the healing and saving of ourselves
00:35:44 ►
is obviously the same task.
00:35:47 ►
The third declension of that is it’s a personal task. It’s very easy to get up on a soapbox and
00:35:55 ►
exhort people and say, well, you know, you should be doing this and those people over there have it
00:36:01 ►
all wrong. They should be doing that. But I really think the major political obligation upon all of us
00:36:08 ►
is to get more stoned, take larger hits.
00:36:13 ►
Because it’s…
00:36:16 ►
Then you find out…
00:36:17 ►
You know, who was it?
00:36:18 ►
I think it was Arthur Eddington who said,
00:36:20 ►
we must find out what is true in order to do what is right. How can you do what is right
00:36:30 ►
if you don’t know what is true? Well, the task of finding out what is true means the exploration
00:36:38 ►
of the experience of being human. Our sexuality, obviously. Our ability to care for our parents and to care for
00:36:49 ►
our children, obviously. But then this other thing as well, this massive internal dimension
00:36:57 ►
in the mind that is as much a part of our human nature as any of the rest of us,
00:37:08 ►
and in fact, probably a dominant part.
00:37:14 ►
You know, years ago, these things were called consciousness-expanding drugs.
00:37:17 ►
It was a good old phenomenological description.
00:37:19 ►
Consciousness-expanding drugs. Well, if there is one iota of truth in the notion that these drugs expand consciousness, then we have to line up and take them because consciousness is what we are starving for. It is the absence of consciousness that will shove this planet irrevocably into the abyss. If yoga works, use it. If psilocybin works, use it.
00:37:46 ►
Whatever works must be used
00:37:48 ►
because we are beyond a debate on methods now.
00:37:53 ►
This is a sinking submarine.
00:37:55 ►
Anybody who has any idea about what should be done
00:37:59 ►
should be very, very carefully listened to.
00:38:01 ►
And as I say, I scrounged the world,
00:38:07 ►
sat at the feet of various people
00:38:09 ►
in various countries and traditions,
00:38:12 ►
and my personal take on it
00:38:14 ►
is that there are no human answers.
00:38:18 ►
There are only answers in the plants.
00:38:20 ►
And it is for us then to find those answers.
00:38:25 ►
And this is what we’ll attempt to discuss
00:38:28 ►
and delineate this weekend.
00:38:31 ►
One question.
00:38:31 ►
Before the last ice ages,
00:38:33 ►
what models have there been?
00:38:35 ►
Well, there have been many.
00:38:38 ►
There have been five or six ice ages
00:38:40 ►
in the last 125,000 years.
00:38:43 ►
The last interglacial lasted about 11,000 years from about 40,000
00:38:51 ►
B.C. to about 32,000 B.C. and then the ice came again. As recently as 13,000 years ago,
00:39:01 ►
the ice was a mile deep at Sidon in Lebanon. And if any of you have been to
00:39:06 ►
northern Israel, try to imagine a mile deep of ice right there. Each time the ice came south,
00:39:14 ►
it bottled up hominid species in Africa. They couldn’t get out as they previously could.
00:39:20 ►
And then there was intensified natural selection because of increased pressure on natural resources. So in a way, the disystolic ebb and flow of last glaciers melted were the first people to leave Africa as pastoralists. herded cattle and had a very complex social form
00:40:05 ►
based on cattle and nomadism and so forth and so on.
00:40:13 ►
The previous people to leave Africa at the interglacial before that
00:40:18 ►
were simple hunters and gatherers.
00:40:21 ►
And what I will argue this weekend is it’s this pastoral form, the human beings and
00:40:28 ►
their flocks, that was the Edenic moment. That’s when we had fully left the animal nature behind
00:40:37 ►
and we had not yet encountered the dominator style at all. And there was a period of 10,000, 15,000 years
00:40:47 ►
that was absolute bliss.
00:40:50 ►
I mean, what we were made for.
00:40:52 ►
And this is the myth of Eden.
00:40:56 ►
And the destruction of Eden,
00:40:58 ►
maybe we’ll talk about that myth,
00:40:59 ►
is definitely the destruction of an equilibrium
00:41:03 ►
by episodes of aridity and drying.
00:41:08 ►
And a whole world in balance.
00:41:11 ►
A minded world.
00:41:12 ►
I mean a world with song, with dance, with painting, with music, with story, with astronomy, with medicine.
00:41:22 ►
A whole world was lost there.
00:41:26 ►
And that loss is the itch that we can’t scratch.
00:41:30 ►
This is why human beings are addictable to almost everything.
00:41:36 ►
We’re like the children of a dysfunctional relationship.
00:41:40 ►
We were torn from something very important to us
00:41:44 ►
and it has left us with an existential longing
00:41:47 ►
that money, power, women doesn’t do it.
00:41:55 ►
And I think it’s because we had this
00:41:58 ►
Edenic symbiotic relationship
00:42:00 ►
that history is a fall.
00:42:03 ►
History is a declension from that state of perfect equilibrium.
00:42:09 ►
And history, if allowed to go on unchecked, is ultimately fatal to everything. So we have to
00:42:16 ►
steer back toward this partnership mode. Okay, well that’s it for this evening.
00:42:23 ►
okay well that’s it for this evening go to the baths
00:42:25 ►
get some sleep
00:42:26 ►
do whatever you have to do
00:42:27 ►
see you at 10 a.m.
00:42:29 ►
thank you
00:42:30 ►
okay
00:42:37 ►
well I talked a little bit last night
00:42:39 ►
I didn’t really introduce myself
00:42:41 ►
which I suppose I should
00:42:43 ►
I’m pretty comfortable here so I tend to assume
00:42:47 ►
that in some sense everybody knows everybody
00:42:51 ►
but
00:42:52 ►
how I got to be doing what I’m doing
00:42:59 ►
was basically simply because I was so impressed
00:43:03 ►
with the psychedelic experience
00:43:08 ►
as I went along through life.
00:43:11 ►
I’m not sure whether I was set up for it or what,
00:43:14 ►
because before I ever heard of the psychedelic experience,
00:43:18 ►
I had a kind of an insatiable curiosity.
00:43:23 ►
And I think this is part of
00:43:25 ►
the psychedelic personality.
00:43:29 ►
I was, as a kid,
00:43:31 ►
I was a rock and fossil collector.
00:43:34 ►
And I was a pretty weird kid.
00:43:37 ►
I didn’t, I wasn’t big on Big League,
00:43:40 ►
Little League, and that sort of thing.
00:43:42 ►
I was usually off in the dry deserts around where I lived, digging for fossils and that sort of thing. I was usually off in the dry deserts
00:43:45 ►
around where I lived
00:43:46 ►
digging for fossils and that sort of thing.
00:43:50 ►
And then I got into butterflies.
00:43:54 ►
This was about age 11.
00:43:57 ►
And this was in the pre-Buddhist phase of society.
00:44:00 ►
So the slaughter of insects
00:44:02 ►
was not viewed with the same horror
00:44:04 ►
that is reserved for it today.
00:44:08 ►
And then I got into rockets as I hit adolescence.
00:44:13 ►
And Freudian interpretations aside,
00:44:17 ►
there is something immensely satisfying about burning up all this metallic fuel in a few seconds
00:44:25 ►
and sending something hundreds and hundreds of feet into the air.
00:44:30 ►
And then I sort of, I read Aldous Huxley and Ashley Montague
00:44:37 ►
and all those people, and I sort of turned on science
00:44:42 ►
and my previous naive love of nature rocks stars and butterflies and I discovered what
00:44:51 ►
was called then the humanities and I was completely taken by this whole notion I had never given human
00:44:59 ►
nature a thought this is me age 13 and so then i got into history and art history and literature
00:45:09 ►
and it was fairly obnoxious actually because just you know always right no matter what it is you
00:45:17 ►
don’t know was sort of my attitude and eventually this kind of insatiable curiosity i think will lead most people to
00:45:30 ►
this sort of triggered discovery which is that most things in the world are oversold and under deliver but in my experience sex
00:45:50 ►
music and psychedelics deliver they are actually they are actually better than
00:46:00 ►
advertised and this means
00:46:06 ►
this is the place to put the pressure
00:46:08 ►
and to check it out
00:46:10 ►
see what’s going on
00:46:12 ►
and
00:46:13 ►
I was very fortunate
00:46:16 ►
just in my history
00:46:18 ►
I went to the University
00:46:20 ►
of California at Berkeley
00:46:22 ►
in the fall of 1965
00:46:24 ►
which meant that somehow this kid from this to the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1965,
00:46:28 ►
which meant that somehow this kid from this coal mining town in Colorado
00:46:30 ►
had been able to figure it out
00:46:33 ►
to the point where I was at ground zero
00:46:37 ►
of the cultural explosion of the 1960s.
00:46:41 ►
I remember my parents reading these horror stories about the University of California they
00:46:47 ►
said well there are 40,000 students there you’ll be lost you’ll be a nameless atom in a sea of
00:46:54 ►
humanity said that’s right that’s the plan
00:46:59 ►
because I understood that something about my development required anonymity.
00:47:12 ►
Well, LSD was breaking out,
00:47:17 ►
and even marijuana was a tremendous deal back then.
00:47:22 ►
I mean, I can remember as a senior in high school
00:47:26 ►
starting to smoke pot, and it was very interesting,
00:47:30 ►
but the thing that came along with it that I had not expected
00:47:34 ►
was what I named back then the head ethic,
00:47:39 ►
and that there were these people called heads
00:47:41 ►
who were very weird,
00:47:45 ►
and they seemed to have an entirely different perspective on reality than everybody else.
00:47:51 ►
And at that time, it was more conspiratorial than being a communist or a homosexual
00:47:57 ►
or anything you can possibly imagine.
00:48:00 ►
I mean, you kept it under wraps.
00:48:03 ►
And in fact, then when I went to Berkeley,
00:48:06 ►
it was sort of disappointing to realize
00:48:08 ►
that this meme was apparently going to sweep the world
00:48:12 ►
and our little thing was going to expand
00:48:16 ►
to the dimensions of a social phenomenon.
00:48:22 ►
And, you know, up to that point,
00:48:24 ►
I think probably my story parallels a lot of people’s story of that time and generation. But in January of 1966, someone who worked on an army project at Stanford in a menial capacity brought me some DMT
00:48:47 ►
that they had gotten out of the lab
00:48:49 ►
and I was
00:48:52 ►
I’d taken LSD three or four times
00:48:55 ►
and immediately proclaimed myself an expert
00:48:58 ►
on the subject and it seemed to be there was nothing else
00:49:01 ►
that was talked about in the circles that I was in
00:49:04 ►
so I asked this guy well what is this said, well, you should just try it. And I said,
00:49:09 ►
well, how long does it last? And he said, well, five minutes. He said, okay, I’ll try it. That
00:49:15 ►
was all I felt I had to know about it. Well, I don’t know how many of you have smoked DMT but it is like being struck by
00:49:26 ►
metaphysical lightning
00:49:27 ►
I mean it’s the most appalling
00:49:29 ►
thing that can happen to you this side
00:49:32 ►
of the grave if it’s
00:49:33 ►
right if it’s right
00:49:35 ►
because
00:49:36 ►
you know what happens is
00:49:40 ►
very rapidly
00:49:43 ►
over a space of maybe 30 seconds
00:49:46 ►
the universe is entirely replaced
00:49:49 ►
by something else
00:49:51 ►
and the thing that’s so astonishing
00:49:55 ►
about what replaces reality is
00:49:57 ►
it’s utterly unexpected
00:50:00 ►
it’s the most astonishing thing you can imagine
00:50:04 ►
in fact what makes it so bizarre
00:50:06 ►
is it’s more astonishing
00:50:08 ►
than you can imagine
00:50:10 ►
it seems to slam through
00:50:12 ►
your capacity for amazement
00:50:15 ►
somebody once asked me
00:50:17 ►
you know is DMT dangerous
00:50:19 ►
and the answer is
00:50:21 ►
only if there is a possibility
00:50:23 ►
of death by astonishment
00:50:25 ►
and you know
00:50:28 ►
hey don’t sell it short
00:50:31 ►
so on the brink of that experience
00:50:41 ►
18 years old
00:50:42 ►
I was a reductionist a Marxist a behaviorist an
00:50:50 ►
atheist you know one of those people and 30 seconds after smoking this stuff
00:51:00 ►
these I encountered for the first time in my life the things I mentioned last night, the self-transforming elf machines, the sense of bursting into an underground space, a huge domed space, but somehow with the sense of great weight above it. And there in that space are these entities
00:51:26 ►
which are not made of matter.
00:51:29 ►
They appear to be made on one level of light.
00:51:33 ►
On another level, a further level of analysis
00:51:36 ►
that took a number of exposures to this,
00:51:39 ►
they appear to be composed somehow of syntax.
00:51:44 ►
It’s a life form made out of language.
00:51:48 ►
It’s existing in another dimension.
00:51:51 ►
I mean, our sentences have subjects and objects.
00:51:56 ►
This was a subject,
00:51:58 ►
and it was producing objects,
00:52:01 ►
and there were many such subjects. These objects are like superbly machined
00:52:10 ►
Fabergé eggs or the constructions of a mind that is both artist, jeweler and engineer
00:52:20 ►
and they show you these things very quickly one after another the amazement comes
00:52:27 ►
from the fact that in the contemplation of what you’re being shown you know in the back of your
00:52:34 ►
mind the middle of your mind the front of your mind that what you’re seeing is impossible that
00:52:40 ►
there is something about it that if you could carry it into this world,
00:52:47 ►
this world would unravel,
00:52:50 ►
that this level of beauty, perfection,
00:52:56 ►
enfolded intentionality is impossible in this world. And these syntactical beings
00:52:59 ►
are proffering for your inspection these objects.
00:53:04 ►
The objects themselves are somehow alive.
00:53:07 ►
They, in turn, through this condensed language of song,
00:53:14 ►
produce other objects.
00:53:17 ►
And the whole spectacle is one of, you know,
00:53:22 ►
zaniness mixed with beauty, mixed with confusion.
00:53:26 ►
Most of the confusion coming from the precipient
00:53:29 ►
because your mind is literally blown
00:53:33 ►
and struggling with major issues such as,
00:53:36 ►
am I dead? Is this what’s happened?
00:53:39 ►
What has happened?
00:53:40 ►
Something really catastrophic has happened.
00:53:48 ►
This is not how drugs perform i mean drugs push you one way and another way and make you loquacious and make you horny and make you this
00:53:54 ►
and make you that this is not like a drug it’s as though a door has opened and you have been
00:54:00 ►
shoved through into a previously unsuspected domain and when you search your
00:54:06 ►
physiognomy for signs of trouble you don’t find them you find my breathing is normal
00:54:15 ►
my heartbeat is normal my pulse is normal but what the hell is going on? Well, what is going on
00:54:25 ►
is that the visual input into the brain,
00:54:30 ►
whether your eyes are open or closed,
00:54:32 ►
has been taken over by a vision of another place.
00:54:37 ►
And we can imagine other places,
00:54:40 ►
alien worlds, Arctic worlds, jungle worlds,
00:54:42 ►
the interior of buildings,
00:54:44 ►
primitive, advanced, futuristic, but it all goes on within a context of three more than that you can’t really say.
00:55:10 ►
And after many, many exposures to this, and by many, many I mean like a dozen or so, because talk about a drug that is not abusable.
00:55:22 ►
about a drug that is not abusable.
00:55:25 ►
I mean, anyone with any sense will have very little to do with this,
00:55:27 ►
even if they regard it as a lifetime obsession.
00:55:33 ►
I mean, this is not something you do on a daily basis,
00:55:37 ►
is what I’m saying.
00:55:40 ►
So after putting in a lot of thought about it,
00:55:43 ►
I realized that there was a way to map the situation in the DMT space.
00:55:51 ►
And what it is, is it’s this.
00:55:53 ►
When you burst into that space,
00:56:00 ►
it seems like the most alien thing you have ever encountered.
00:56:04 ►
It is, in fact, the most alien thing you have ever encountered. It is, in fact, the most alien thing you have ever encountered.
00:56:07 ►
It completely exceeds expectation.
00:56:09 ►
And yet, on another level, it is an effort on the part of something
00:56:15 ►
to come toward you from a great, great distance.
00:56:21 ►
And the map that seems most applicable to what it is
00:56:26 ►
is it’s a playpen
00:56:29 ►
it’s a receiving area
00:56:31 ►
it’s somebody very strange
00:56:35 ►
it’s their idea of what would make a human being
00:56:39 ►
feel comfortable and reassured
00:56:41 ►
I saw Ralph Metzner on Thursday night
00:56:45 ►
and he and Kathy have a wonderful new child, Sophia.
00:56:50 ►
And so there was Sophia lying in her bassinet
00:56:54 ►
and suspended above her head
00:56:56 ►
were these shiny plastic objects
00:57:00 ►
in bright primary colors
00:57:01 ►
which a series of geared mechanisms keep in motion.
00:57:06 ►
And so she’s just lying there
00:57:07 ►
looking at this thing.
00:57:10 ►
That’s what this DMT receiving area
00:57:13 ►
is for us.
00:57:15 ►
It’s a place designed
00:57:18 ►
to accelerate our learning,
00:57:21 ►
reassure us,
00:57:23 ►
make us feel comfortable
00:57:24 ►
and amuse us. And these things which would shatter the sciences of earth if they could be brought through from this other dimension are the equivalent of rattles, spin arounds and colored blocks. I mean they are the simplest objects imaginable in that other world.
00:57:53 ►
Well, it would not be, I suppose, such big news to wrap a wrap like this if I were swathed in orange robes and had just flew in from Bangalore
00:57:59 ►
and had my world-girdling organization behind me,
00:58:04 ►
because you would just assume that I was an advanced being
00:58:08 ►
and that this was reportage from a world
00:58:11 ►
that you would never have anything to do with.
00:58:14 ►
But the fact is everyone in this room
00:58:16 ►
or most people in this room
00:58:19 ►
are capable of this experience.
00:58:23 ►
I went into…
00:58:24 ►
Nobody was more hard-boiled than I.
00:58:27 ►
I mean, I was an existentialist
00:58:30 ►
in the Sartian mold
00:58:32 ►
and it didn’t keep the elves
00:58:35 ►
from approaching me.
00:58:37 ►
So I have been at concern
00:58:40 ►
to inform UFO people,
00:58:44 ►
Jungian psychologists, spiritual seekers, that, you know, this tremendously
00:58:50 ►
powerful tool lies present at hand. Curiosity pushed far enough will hit the jackpot. The world is not as we suppose. The great thing you see about DMT
00:59:07 ►
is that it settles certain questions assumed to be open.
00:59:14 ►
You know, like one question we all assume to be open is,
00:59:18 ►
well, is this the only universe or not?
00:59:21 ►
Answer, no.
00:59:23 ►
That settles that.
00:59:30 ►
Are there intelligent entities of a non-human sort? Answer,
00:59:36 ►
yes, there are. I don’t know what they have to do with busted up barley fields in England or, you know, Whitley Strieber’s problems, but inside this drug, inside this plant compound, there are entities.
00:59:48 ►
And they are not oblivious to us.
00:59:51 ►
They’re not flatworms or pelicans.
00:59:54 ►
They are intelligent.
00:59:57 ►
They are of the same class of being as we are, an intelligent being.
01:00:02 ►
Okay, well then there are questions,
01:00:06 ►
some of which I mentioned last night.
01:00:08 ►
Who are these people?
01:00:11 ►
Are they the dead?
01:00:13 ►
That would be big news.
01:00:17 ►
A drug that allows you to contact Aunt Minnie in the afterlife?
01:00:21 ►
I don’t know how we would, you know,
01:00:22 ►
this is National Enquirer stuff.
01:00:33 ►
What is the most parsimonious explanation that we can give? In other words, what is the simplest and least freaky explanation that we can give? Why should people see these little entities? Well,
01:00:41 ►
one idea that I’ve kicked around, because see, at heart I still am a reductionist, is that personality is actually fractal in some sense.
01:00:54 ►
It’s self-similar.
01:00:56 ►
What does fractal mean?
01:00:57 ►
It means that any object which is made out of smaller versions of itself is fractal.
01:01:07 ►
So if you had a house made out of little houses,
01:01:11 ►
a good example is a fern.
01:01:14 ►
A fern is made out of little ferns,
01:01:16 ►
made out of still littler ferns, you know,
01:01:19 ►
if you examine in and look at it.
01:01:21 ►
Many objects are like this.
01:01:23 ►
Is it possible that the personality
01:01:25 ►
is fractal
01:01:27 ►
Jung made a lot of
01:01:29 ►
metaphorical statements about the
01:01:31 ►
behavior of the psyche based on the
01:01:33 ►
behavior of mercury
01:01:34 ►
the metal, the liquid metal mercury
01:01:37 ►
which was an object of
01:01:39 ►
fascination to the alchemists
01:01:42 ►
and he
01:01:44 ►
said what, he said Mercury is a perfect symbol
01:01:49 ►
or it accepts the projections
01:01:52 ►
of the qualities of the psyche
01:01:54 ►
because the psyche will always
01:01:58 ►
take the shape of its container
01:02:01 ►
as a liquid does.
01:02:04 ►
Psyche is reflective. And in the same way that Mercury of its container as a liquid does.
01:02:06 ►
Psyche is reflective.
01:02:10 ►
And in the same way that mercury is a mirrored surface,
01:02:11 ►
you never see mercury.
01:02:14 ►
You see the reflections of the world around mercury on its surface.
01:02:16 ►
And in the same way that if you have mercury,
01:02:18 ►
I’m sure you all in the era of pre-toxic consciousness
01:02:23 ►
played with mercury,
01:02:25 ►
you can take a ball of mercury and put your thumb down on it quickly
01:02:30 ►
and it will break into little balls that will shoot in all directions.
01:02:34 ►
And each little ball will have a sub-reflection of the larger world in it.
01:02:40 ►
Well, is it possible that we could take the Jungian metaphor of the self as alchemical mercury
01:02:47 ►
and then say well what happens on DMT is the alchemical vessel is essentially hurled down in front of the experience
01:02:59 ►
and the mercury of self shoots everywhere and there are thousands of little versions of the self
01:03:07 ►
then ricocheting off the walls.
01:03:10 ►
Some this big, some this big, some this big, some tiny.
01:03:14 ►
I confess that as much fun as it is to have this image,
01:03:19 ►
I’m not sure it provides an explanation.
01:03:22 ►
You have to have this experience
01:03:24 ►
to realize how resistant to explanation
01:03:28 ►
it’s going to be
01:03:29 ►
well then there are less parsimonious explanations
01:03:34 ►
that these
01:03:37 ►
that these entities
01:03:41 ►
but still not going outside the human van
01:03:44 ►
see the first possibility was it’s dead people that these entities, but still not going outside the human van.
01:03:48 ►
See, the first possibility was it’s dead people.
01:03:50 ►
Those are still human beings.
01:03:52 ►
They just happen to be dead human beings. Then the second explanation was
01:03:55 ►
it’s autonomous fragments of psychic mercury
01:03:59 ►
behaving as small portions of the self.
01:04:02 ►
Okay, we still haven’t gone outside the human domain
01:04:05 ►
for an explanation
01:04:07 ►
a third explanation
01:04:09 ►
is that
01:04:12 ►
this is some future
01:04:14 ►
state of humanity
01:04:16 ►
that these things
01:04:18 ►
are actually
01:04:19 ►
the reason they’re like us but not like us
01:04:22 ►
is because we’re seeing a human
01:04:24 ►
evolutionary form a million years in the future or more,
01:04:30 ►
where finally technology has been interiorized.
01:04:34 ►
The thing is it’s no longer even made of matter, still less of the body of an intelligent monkey.
01:04:47 ►
monkey but nevertheless it is somehow in our line and we’ve just broken into the equivalent of a coaxial cable carrying time travel messages or something like that because there are reports
01:04:55 ►
on dmt of people bursting into spaces where the entities were extremely surprised and basically said, you know, what the hell are you doing here?
01:05:07 ►
So is it that there is
01:05:10 ►
some kind of hyper-dimensional matrix of communication
01:05:14 ►
that we dial in on like primitives
01:05:17 ►
with a crystal radio
01:05:19 ►
who suddenly discover, you know,
01:05:20 ►
that there’s 250 UHF-VHF channels
01:05:24 ►
running around through every
01:05:26 ►
molecule
01:05:26 ►
I don’t know
01:05:29 ►
the other possibility then is
01:05:32 ►
a
01:05:34 ►
non-human
01:05:35 ►
explanation
01:05:37 ►
now the non-human explanation
01:05:40 ►
sets us up
01:05:42 ►
for nut country
01:05:43 ►
because you know there’s so many extraterrestrials
01:05:48 ►
haunting the supermarkets
01:05:49 ►
and trailer courts
01:05:52 ►
of earth
01:05:52 ►
that
01:05:53 ►
nevertheless
01:05:59 ►
science has never really
01:06:01 ►
fairly dealt
01:06:02 ►
with the
01:06:04 ►
question of human origins
01:06:08 ►
and the presence of human beings
01:06:11 ►
in the ecology of this planet.
01:06:15 ►
There is no doubt that if you’re looking
01:06:17 ►
for the fingerprint of alien intervention
01:06:20 ►
in the biosystem of this planet,
01:06:23 ►
the presence of human beings is the major contender
01:06:28 ►
i mean we are not simply another kind of monkey and the most reductionist people when they attempt
01:06:37 ►
to explain how you move from a hominoid ape to a human being use phrases like confluence of mysterious forces as yet
01:06:49 ►
unelucidated factors so means they don’t know missing links they haven’t the faintest idea
01:06:58 ►
here’s a here’s a piece of data to chew over um The tripling of the human brain size
01:07:08 ►
in a period of two million years
01:07:11 ►
was the most rapid acceleration
01:07:15 ►
and transformation of an organ system
01:07:18 ►
of an animal in the history of the earth.
01:07:23 ►
And this comes from this,
01:07:24 ►
that the tripling of the earth and this comes from this that the
01:07:25 ►
tripling of the human brain size
01:07:28 ►
over two million years
01:07:29 ►
was the most rapid transformation
01:07:32 ►
of an animal organ
01:07:33 ►
in the whole history of evolution
01:07:36 ►
and this comes from
01:07:38 ►
Edmundo Wilson, Edward O. Wilson
01:07:40 ►
who as you know is the sociobiologist
01:07:42 ►
and the keeper of the flame
01:07:44 ►
of scientific rhetoric and purity
01:07:46 ►
and he’s pointing his finger at the problem
01:07:52 ►
for anybody trying to talk about the emergence of human beings
01:07:56 ►
out of the hominid apes
01:07:59 ►
what drove this to happen so quickly
01:08:04 ►
and obviously along certain very channelized lines What drove this to happen so quickly?
01:08:09 ►
And obviously along certain very channelized lines.
01:08:12 ►
I mean, human beings, not human beings,
01:08:16 ►
but advanced hominids had been chipping stone and wandering around in Africa for a very, very long time.
01:08:21 ►
And culture was dull.
01:08:23 ►
It was dull.
01:08:24 ►
And then suddenly, you you know a hundred thousand
01:08:28 ►
years ago something took hold was it language was it fire what was it well we don’t know
01:08:36 ►
and nobody on the straight side of things has any reasonable explanation i think that the the promethean fire that was brought
01:08:48 ►
to human beings that gave us a leg up on the rest of creation was a relationship with these
01:08:56 ►
psychoactive plants and this doesn’t get rid of the mystery this intensifies the mystery you see we now
01:09:05 ►
can analyze what happened
01:09:07 ►
on many many levels
01:09:09 ►
neurophysiological at the level
01:09:12 ►
of the individual, the individual
01:09:13 ►
brain in contact
01:09:15 ►
with exogenous substances
01:09:17 ►
brought in from the biome in the form
01:09:19 ►
of foods, we can deal
01:09:22 ►
with the population genetics
01:09:23 ►
and mechanics of this kind of a confluence of
01:09:27 ►
factors and then finally at a higher level you have to ask why why why why does it take the
01:09:36 ►
form of a personified other well the scenario that i’ve created to explain all this is basically an evolutionary
01:09:46 ►
scenario
01:09:47 ►
I mentioned some of it last night
01:09:50 ►
the planet
01:09:52 ►
undergoes successive
01:09:54 ►
cycles of wetness and drying
01:09:56 ►
30 million
01:09:58 ►
years ago
01:09:59 ►
30 million years ago
01:10:01 ►
longer than we’ve been talking about
01:10:03 ►
Africa was heavily forested from top to bottom.
01:10:09 ►
It was, the world was warmer and it was a climaxed forest ecology.
01:10:17 ►
Then, and these ape forms and primate forms proliferated
01:10:24 ►
and had an arboreal style of life
01:10:27 ►
where they were fruit eating
01:10:29 ►
and they were social or gregarious
01:10:32 ►
and they communicated
01:10:34 ►
through a very minimal language of signals.
01:10:40 ►
And they had binocular vision
01:10:41 ►
because they were insectivores.
01:10:44 ►
So they had binocular vision because they were insectivores. So they had the capacity to coordinate space very well
01:10:52 ►
because of living in the canopy environment.
01:10:56 ►
Under pressure of drying,
01:11:00 ►
the rainforest environment began to shrink.
01:11:03 ►
And when it did, these organisms, these animals,
01:11:08 ►
made their way into the grassland.
01:11:10 ►
And there they had to compete with other large mammals,
01:11:14 ►
ungulate mammals that were evolving there.
01:11:19 ►
Binocular vision was accelerated or really set in place.
01:11:24 ►
It wasn’t so much in these
01:11:26 ►
early primates there was the
01:11:27 ►
precondition for it
01:11:29 ►
but for some reason the eyes moved around
01:11:32 ►
the head and
01:11:33 ►
the theory now is that
01:11:35 ►
bipedalism was basically
01:11:37 ►
an adaptation that allowed
01:11:40 ►
carrying it was
01:11:42 ►
for carrying it was
01:11:44 ►
because the style of these apes was to
01:11:46 ►
have a campsite they weren’t they carried nutrition back to a central site
01:11:54 ►
and this gave them a leg up on competing hominids that were not able to take this this erect position, and free the hands. Well, this is the point.
01:12:08 ►
On the grasslands, in the presence of these ungulate animals,
01:12:12 ►
now bipedal, now binocular,
01:12:15 ►
this is the place where these mysterious, unelucidated factors raise their head
01:12:21 ►
because it’s right there that begins the cascade and the explosion of brain size.
01:12:30 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:12:38 ►
And I’m going to cut it off right there for today because, well, for the next 20 minutes or so,
01:12:43 ►
Terence goes into his stoned ape
01:12:45 ►
theory, which we’ve heard quite a few times here in the salon already. And when I play the next
01:12:52 ►
installment of this workshop, I’ll be picking up right after that often heard rap. Now, if you’re
01:12:58 ►
new here to the salon, don’t worry. There are over a hundred other talks by Terrence McKenna that I
01:13:03 ►
podcast. And should you go back and listen to some of them,
01:13:06 ►
I’m confident that you’re going to hear his proposed stoned ape theory more than one time.
01:13:12 ►
But going back to an earlier part of today’s talk,
01:13:15 ►
I hope that you smiled as much as I did
01:13:18 ►
when Terence answered the question about how we humans got ourselves into the mess that we’re in today.
01:13:24 ►
Do you remember what he said about those ancient humans
01:13:27 ►
who were living in a paradise-like world?
01:13:31 ►
Well, he said that what he thought caused the loss of this life was,
01:13:35 ►
and I quote,
01:13:36 ►
they ran out of dope.
01:13:40 ►
Also, I hope that you pick up on what he was saying
01:13:43 ►
about the challenge of the psychedelic community
01:13:45 ►
being to create a collective language to better describe our experiences during a psychedelic trip.
01:13:52 ►
The first thing that came to my mind when I heard that was last week’s podcast
01:13:57 ►
where Neche Deveno gave a completely new description of a DMT experience.
01:14:02 ►
completely new description of a DMT experience,
01:14:06 ►
one that didn’t include those notorious machine elves that Terrence has saddled our minds with for far too long.
01:14:11 ►
And then, when he said,
01:14:14 ►
And it’s not a white light.
01:14:16 ►
It’s not an undifferentiated void.
01:14:19 ►
It’s much more like a place.
01:14:22 ►
I thought about something that I wrote in the spirit of the Internet back in 1999,
01:14:27 ►
when, as far as I know, I was the first to describe what I call entheospace.
01:14:33 ►
At the time that I published that book, I googled the word, and there were no hits for it.
01:14:37 ►
Yet today, there are close to 1,000 websites on which my definition may be found.
01:14:43 ►
And it’s very reminiscent of what Terence
01:14:45 ►
said. My definition of entheospace is, and I’m quoting from my book here, the realm of divine
01:14:52 ►
mind. Entheospace is actually the sense of place that one has at times when an exploration of one’s
01:15:00 ►
inner landscape leads to the realization that this is much more than just a fascinating
01:15:05 ►
landscape, it is an entire universe. At moments when this realization is so deeply interiorized
01:15:13 ►
as to be an essential part of one’s being, one is said to be in entheospace. When the focus of
01:15:20 ►
one’s consciousness is on entheospace, one experiences a deeply seated sense of being So, I’m pleased to have done my little insignificant part in helping to create a new collective language for us psychonauts.
01:15:39 ►
And one last thing that I want to point out about the talk that we just listened to
01:15:43 ►
is where Terence was speaking about our only hope for the future when he said…
01:15:50 ►
We don’t have time to educate everybody.
01:15:52 ►
We probably have 50 years before we will so completely lose control of the toxic processes
01:15:59 ►
that we’ve set in motion on this planet that there will be no holding back the cascade of consequences.
01:16:06 ►
So we have 50 years. So in that period of time, it seems to me the fastest way to re-enchant the
01:16:15 ►
world, to create an archaic revival, is to revive the tradition of ecstatic trans-shamanism,
01:16:28 ►
the tradition of ecstatic trans shamanism, which means revive the tradition of psychedelic plant use. As you may recall, he prefaced that statement by saying that, in his opinion,
01:16:36 ►
we only had about 50 more years in which to turn things around before environmental and
01:16:42 ►
political degradation passed their points of no return,
01:16:46 ►
before our species entered into a period of permanent decline. Need I remind you that he
01:16:52 ►
said that in 1989, which means that by his timetable, we are now down to our last 23 years
01:17:00 ►
or so. And if you, like me, agree with Terence that psychedelic medicines are the only
01:17:06 ►
hope we humans have to heal ourselves and our world, well, then my question to you is, what are
01:17:13 ►
you waiting for? If you haven’t done so already, then, well, maybe today is the day for you to
01:17:19 ►
stand up and be counted. We’re all in this together, you know. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:17:29 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.