Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanism itself is in Africa.”
“[The psychedelic experience] is about what is real, not what is culturally sanctioned.”
“The ego lives by constraint. It draws lines, and this drawing of lines is a denial of the primary truth of the world, which is that it is seamless and one. Once you start drawing distinctions you’re off into dualism, and it’s no joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil.”
“The Eleusian Mysteries are Cretan Mysteries that have been transplanted to Greece, and that’s really where the psychedelic religion died.”
“The major political task for people like ourselves is to be more stoned, is to find out more about the dimensions of the psychedelic experience.”
“The drugs of the future are likely to be these non-invasive electronic drugs.”
“Virtual reality is very important to creating a sane human future.”
“The human visual apparatus is unbelievably forgiving of error. In fact, the human visual apparatus is set up to suppress error.”
“Computers are becoming more like drugs. Drugs are becoming more like computers. The computers of the future will be taken orally, and the drugs of the future will probably be jacked into.”
“What I think virtual reality is good for is showing each other the insides of our minds.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I’m very pleased today to thank Daniel N., Gary O., Daryl H., James P., and yet another anonymous Bitcoin donor. And with
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the exception of our Bitcoin donor, I think that I’ve already sent you all a personal
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thank you via email. However, I want to thank you one more time here in the podcast because, Thank you. Terence McKenna had just begun his rap that we all know as his Stone Tape Theory.
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What I’ve done today is to cut out a little bit of the more detailed explanation of that theory,
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the parts that we’ve heard several times before, and actually more or less I wanted to cut to the chase.
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At first I actually thought I’d be cutting out a lot more of what can sometimes become a little repetitious,
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if you’ve listened to as many versions of this story as most of us have here in the salon.
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But I hope that as you listen to this yourself, that you’ll be pleased that I left so much of it intact.
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Maybe because this workshop came before he had told the tale so many times, or, well, maybe it was because this time he just wanted to expand a little more on some of the historical perspective and context of his proposed theory.
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But whatever the reason, I left most of it in for you to judge for yourself.
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Like many of us, I’ve listened to Terence tell his stories about early hominids many times and in several
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different ways. But for some reason, today’s version resonated with me in a little different
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way. But hey, that’s just me. Now let’s see what you think when he gets to the point in this rap
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about the Neutophians and the early genetic connection that we may have to psychedelics that could have been passed on to us by our early African ancestors.
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So let’s jump back into the Saturday morning session of this December 1989 workshop
00:02:35 ►
and join Terence McKenna and a few of his friends.
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This three-part process of increased visual acuity,
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increased sexual activity,
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and then increased, for want of a better word, religious activity.
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And in this religious activity, and this is very important,
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there was glossolalia.
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Glossolalia is language-like behavior
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that goes on in a kind of trance-like state.
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And it’s very dear to American fundamentalists of certain stripes.
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But it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
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And many, many shamans give performances
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of glossolalia
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glossolalia
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when they do it
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no they call it
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they say it’s the spirit language
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it’s the language of the spirits
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it’s the language of the haruka
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and this
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what it is clearly
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is a kind of
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seizure and discharge
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of the neurological
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machinery
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I mean language is
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the most complicated thing
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we do, it is orders
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of magnitude more complicated
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even if you’re a structural engineer
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or a software writer well if you’re a structural engineer or a software writer well
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if you’re a software writer you work in language but language is the most complicated thing that
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we do and it appears that it’s in these primates it was like the overflow of intentionality creates then a kind of cascade
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of verbal
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arrhythmia
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of some sort
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and over
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a thousand
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generations
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or so
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this becomes
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integrated
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as a mode
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of activity
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I mean
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it is not easy
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to imagine
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how language
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emerged
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I think the easiest way to imagine it is to think
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that it was done for people’s amusement long before anybody used it for communication.
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That, in other words, the first musical instrument was the voice, and I doubt that they sang Verdi
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arias, you know. If any of you have heard Inuit
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throat music Inuit throat music Inuit or Eskimos all kinds of people all over the
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world experiment with glossolalia glossolalia is simply where you ape language in the absence of meaning i mean it’s
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very easy to do
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see it’s all there If the gminulquat e colbect at man kifidic.
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See, it’s all there, except there’s no meaning.
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But there is syntax.
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I mean, if you analyze this stuff, you discover there are connectors,
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there are declensions, there are prefixes, there are suffixes, but no meaning.
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Meaning came very late, I imagine, and probably part of what this had to do with was the explosion in brain size. I mean, who knows how much pathology was expressed. I don’t think you can expect an organ to triple in two million years without having a fair number of duds come out of that. I mean, this organ was really
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evolving under pressure. Well, so then, where all this climaxed then was in this partnership
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paradise. Once nomadism and the relationship to cattle and the relationship to the mushroom,
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and the mushroom, you see, was perceived, I imagine, as female.
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This was definitely a female mindset, what was going on here.
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Probably the language pressure was heaviest on the females
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because the males, sharing a general primate characteristic of being more robust physically than the females because the males sharing a general primate characteristic of being more robust
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physically than the females i mean if you’ve ever seen baboons they’re the most grotesque
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case i mean the male baboon is three times the size of the female i mean he’s just a hunk you
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know and she’s a little creature skittering along beside him. In this partnership situation,
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all of these factors came together
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and there was what was experienced, I think,
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as a kind of paradise,
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a kind of dynamic equilibrium.
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And so I think probably women were
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the keepers of the mysteries of language.
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The cattle were very central to all of this
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because the cattle were a new way of life, a much easier way of life.
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Instead of scavenging off lion kills,
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which is what the previous hominids were doing,
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we actually formed this reciprocal relationship
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where blood, milk and meat
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were available to the human beings
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and in return they propagated
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and increased the size and protected these herds
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but a natural consequence of all this activity
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is for the mushroom to always be there,
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to always be present. And the earliest stratum of religion that we possess is this horned goddess
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image that is, you know, upper Paleolithic, high Neolithic, the great horned goddess. Well, she is the goddess of the animals,
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the mushroom goddess,
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the mother image that was the religious icon
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stabilizing this society.
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Then the question becomes,
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well, if it was so wonderful, what went wrong?
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Well, the same forces that created
00:09:06 ►
it destroyed it which was
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this progressive drying of
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the African continent
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it’s locked up in the mechanics of
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the solar system it doesn’t have
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anything to do with
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you know fate
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and blame
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and when the grasslands
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of the Sahara
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became sparser
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the distance between water holes
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became greater
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the mushroom cult
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as I explained to you last night
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became replaced with a mead cult
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and as these people
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poured into the Middle East
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was a much harsher climate
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they had then to resort
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to agriculture agriculture which had been was a much harsher climate they had then to resort to
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agriculture
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which had been minimal and unfocused
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to that point
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became absolutely necessary
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in the new regime
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of the retreating glaciers
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that were pulling back across Palestine
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and Lebanon
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and Jericho
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which is an
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7,000
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8,000 year old
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site
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on the West Bank
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was the most
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advanced
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civilization
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of its time
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and what was it?
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It was a grain tower
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with a series
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of defensive
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enclosures
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around it
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it indicates
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that agriculture
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had succeeded to the point that it had brought
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with it paranoia. Because if you succeed at agriculture, you produce surpluses. These
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surpluses mean you are a target for raiding by less fortunate people. So this kind of thing was going on. The evidence for all of this
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are these rock paintings in southern Algeria
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on the Tsele Plateau
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where we actually see shamans with mushrooms
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sprouting out of their bodies and dancing.
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This has never been talked about
00:11:02 ►
by ordinary anthropologists
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or students of cultural influences.
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I’m not sure why.
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I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanness itself is in Africa.
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There’s a great deal of stress placed on what’s called Old Europe the Gravettian civilization of Old Europe
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that flourished in Yugoslavia and the Balkans
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but I think when you factor in
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the wetness, until very recently
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the wetness of Africa
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the argument can be made very strongly
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that perfected human society existed there and only there.
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And that recapturing that is what this,
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is really the task of reclaiming the world.
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If you look at Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve, which is the
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story of our origin, you can see it in a whole different light. It’s the story of a drug bust.
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It’s the story of the suppression of information about plants. Analyze the story.
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It’s a story about an uppity woman, first of all,
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a woman who doesn’t take orders from anybody,
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and she has a relationship with a snake,
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and the snake tells her that if she will eat of the fruit of a certain tree,
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she will gain… It’s the fruit of the fruit of a certain tree, she will gain,
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it’s the fruit of the tree of life, I believe.
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Knowledge, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
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So she does this,
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and she gets her rather dull-witted consort
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to join her in this enterprise.
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And then it says,
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and their eyes
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were opened
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and they saw
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that they were
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naked
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now the fact of
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the matter is
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they were naked
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so opening
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their eyes
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and seeing that
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they were naked
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is one way of
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saying
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they gained
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true information
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about the world
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they were informed
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of their
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existential
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situation
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which was that they were naked.
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Well, when God heard about this,
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the shit hit the fan.
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And there’s a very, very interesting passage in Genesis
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in which Yahweh,
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musing to himself,
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as far as you can tell,
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in the garden says,
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you know, this was bad enough,
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but if they were to eat of the fruit of the tree of life,
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then they would become as we are.
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They would become as we are.
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And so this whole thing has to be shut down,
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and these people have to be kicked out of here.
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And they are.
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He says, you know, you’re going to labor,
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and it’s going to be a bad trip
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and I want you out of here
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and then the final shot is
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an angel with a burning sword
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is placed at the eastern gate of Eden
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so that the human beings
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can never find their way back
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what this is
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is the story of
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the breakup of a woman woman-run psychedelic partnership society by
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aridity the angel at the eastern gate of eden is the the unforgiving saharan sun
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making it impossible to go back you see um and the switch from partnership to dominator society
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is occasioned then by abandoning this set of practices
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which keep the ego under control.
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Now let me make it clear.
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It isn’t that our general tendency
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is toward dominator organization.
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If we relax our vigilance against being assholes,
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the whole thing will slide toward a dominator model.
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The reason this is,
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is because the really primitive primates, the proto-apes, the apes,
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they have very hierarchically structured societies with alpha males at the top and females very
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closely controlled by males and so forth. It was only this very brief period, no more than 50,000 years, where the use of a psychedelic plant made that impossible.
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And the reason it did that is this.
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If you analyze thousands and thousands of psychedelic experiences so that all the individual qualities of the experience are subsumed in the general
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form and then you ask what is what is the psychedelic experience what can we say about it
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that will be true of all 50,000 cases the answer is it dissolves boundaries that’s what this stuff does whatever your boundaries are i mean you
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may be a hindu priest a communist bureaucrat a gay hairdresser in new york it doesn’t matter it will
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totally challenge and overthrow your view of reality because that’s what it does. Boundaries are creations of culture.
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Remember the child lying underneath
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the spinning things in its crib.
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William James,
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great psychologist of the turn of the century,
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said we are born into a blooming,
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buzzing confusion,
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which is a good description of a DMT trip too and
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we reside in that blooming buzzing confusion 18 months two years until we
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get our language skills together and then we begin to mosaic over the
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confusion with concepts and we create culture one of the great strides forward
00:17:26 ►
in the 20th century
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has been the general understanding
00:17:30 ►
on the part of the straight practitioners
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of the art
00:17:33 ►
that language creates reality
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reality is not made of quarks
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and mumesons
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and all that crap
00:17:41 ►
that they’re dishing up
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out of these high energy machines
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that’s a dance of language and all that crap that they’re dishing up out of these high-energy machines.
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That’s a dance of language.
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What reality is made up of is language.
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Reality is made of words.
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And many, many realities can be made of words.
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And they can be mutually exclusive realities.
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They do not necessarily map onto each other.
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The world of the Hopi medicine man,
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and the world of the communist bureaucrat, and the world of the Eskimo fishermen are almost mutually exclusive domains. I mean, they can only reach each other over bridges of very
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generalized concepts. So the world is made of language.
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When you take a psychedelic,
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that cultural world is dissolved.
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It’s just psychologically dissolved.
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You know, Rauda Suxley had the notion
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of what he called the reducing valve.
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He believed that following C.D. Broad
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that our senses have evolved
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to only allow in the tiny stream of data
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that is necessary to animal existence.
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That all the rest of the electromagnetic radiation
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and data that is raining onto our eyes
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and our skin and our senses is shunted into the
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unconscious but that when you take a psychedelic the reducing valve is suddenly cranked open
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and here comes all of this stuff and it just washes away all assumptions that are cultural assumptions.
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It puts you, in other words, in contact with the nitty-gritty.
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It’s about what is real, not what is culturally sanctioned.
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So that kind of thing operating in this primitive African situation that we’re talking about means probably something like
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that at every new and full moon
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these small groups of people got together
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and they all took mushrooms together
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and there was group singing
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group sex
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and strong visioning and what the group sex, and strong visioning.
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And what the group sex did on one level
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was it further contributed to the problem of identifying paternity
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so that values tended to be group values,
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not my children and my women,
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but the children and the women.
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And you see, the ego lives by constraint.
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It draws lines.
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And this drawing of lines is a denial
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of the primary truth of the world,
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which is that it is seamless and one.
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Once you start drawing divisions, you’re
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off into dualism. And it’s no joke to say that dualism is the root of all evil. Once you start
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making these distinctions, if you believe in them, then you’ve really cut yourself off. So in the Middle East about 9,000 years ago, out of nowhere, come these people
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called Natufayans, Natufayans. And they have a much higher level of culture than any of the
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surrounding people. It’s interesting, you know, we’re told that the Nile is the cradle of civilization and so forth.
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But did you know that from 17,000 years ago
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until 10,000 years ago,
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almost nobody lived in the Nile Valley?
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For some reason, it was not thought of as desirable.
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Probably it was a malarial lowland and the happening habitat was out on what is now the desert, what was then the grassland.
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So cultural remains in the Nile Valley before 10,000 years ago indicate very only minor cultural stuff happening.
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Ten thousand years ago,
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these new people appear out of nowhere
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called Natufayans.
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They live under the rock faces,
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the undercut rock faces.
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They paint these faces.
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They live for a thousand years in that mode.
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Then they build Jericho. And they live there for a thousand years in that mode then they build Jericho and they live there for a thousand years
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then by 8000 BC
00:22:31 ►
they move up to Chatal Hyoyuk
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on the Anatolian plain
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they are the most advanced people in the world
00:22:39 ►
now it’s always been assumed
00:22:42 ►
on zero evidence
00:22:44 ►
that these people must have a cultural connection
00:22:47 ►
to the Gravettian culture of old Europe.
00:22:51 ►
There is substantial physical evidence
00:22:53 ►
to link them with Africa.
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At Chatal, they had a cult of the vulture,
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which is a quintessential animal of the African grassland.
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The so-called burnished Sudanese ware, a certain kind of pottery that we know where it came from in Africa. We find
00:23:14 ►
fragments of it in the middens at Jericho and at Chatal. So there is strong evidence that these
00:23:21 ►
were the people who had been practicing the partnership paradise model of life.
00:23:28 ►
Around 6,500 BC, wheeled chariot people, probably part of the Kurganian Sea in the Zagros Mountains.
00:23:50 ►
Level 6 and 6B of Chattal is burned through.
00:23:56 ►
Clearly it had been overwhelmed by invaders.
00:24:00 ►
Well now, I don’t know how many of you know about Chattal Hyoyuk,
00:24:08 ►
but this is in some ways the most interesting archaeological site on the planet because this is a 7,000 year old town in Anatolia 7,000 BC which makes 9,000 BP this is a civilization
00:24:20 ►
aside from the monolithic architecture this is a civilization as advanced as Egypt
00:24:28 ►
you know with glass
00:24:30 ►
with a primitive astronomy
00:24:34 ►
with a pharmacopoeia
00:24:37 ►
with agriculture
00:24:38 ►
with husbandry
00:24:39 ►
with an advanced religion
00:24:41 ►
and it exists much much older
00:24:44 ►
than if you grew up in my generation,
00:24:47 ►
you were taught history begins at Sumner.
00:24:50 ►
Well, Sumner was not even a twinkle in anybody’s eye
00:24:55 ►
when Chattel-Huyuk was a civilization
00:24:57 ►
of immense accomplishments and richness,
00:25:00 ►
eventually destroyed by these dominators.
00:25:04 ►
Then that civilization went to Crete
00:25:08 ►
and thrived in that environment
00:25:12 ►
for a very long time
00:25:14 ►
coming down into the time of ancient Greece
00:25:20 ►
the Eleusinian mysteries
00:25:22 ►
are Cretan mysteries
00:25:24 ►
that have been transplanted to Greece,
00:25:27 ►
and that’s really where the psychedelic religion died. It had been dying for thousands of years.
00:25:37 ►
It never really flourished outside of Africa, but in the period when it was happening in Africa, it created in us an appetite bordering
00:25:49 ►
just below the level of a genetic proclivity for boundary dissolution. And this is the key
00:25:58 ►
to understanding our fascination with addiction. You know, this guy Ron Siegel wrote this book about how animals love
00:26:07 ►
to get stoned, and so they do. I mean, elephants like rotted papaya and so forth and so on. But
00:26:16 ►
human beings addict to about 60 compounds and are fascinated with maybe 40 more, this kind of chemical obsessionism
00:26:28 ►
is very hard to explain evolutionarily.
00:26:31 ►
It doesn’t seem to make any sense
00:26:35 ►
unless you hypothesize a situation in the past
00:26:39 ►
in which this was very important to us.
00:26:41 ►
And when we moved out of Africa
00:26:43 ►
and broke this connection with nature,
00:26:47 ►
because that’s what it really is,
00:26:48 ►
when you dissolve the boundaries of language,
00:26:52 ►
what floods back in to fill that vacuum
00:26:55 ►
is the fact of the natural world,
00:27:01 ►
the overwhelming modality that we are placed in
00:27:05 ►
that is not culturally defined
00:27:08 ►
so that kind of relationship
00:27:14 ►
to nature having been disrupted
00:27:17 ►
leaves us with
00:27:19 ►
not only a sense of loss
00:27:22 ►
but a kind of anger a sense of loss, but a kind of anger,
00:27:25 ►
a kind of fury
00:27:27 ►
directed against the natural world.
00:27:30 ►
And if you know the story of Gilgamesh,
00:27:32 ►
you know that he spurned the goddess Inanna,
00:27:39 ►
and she sent a bull to convince him,
00:27:45 ►
and he destroyed the bull.
00:27:49 ►
And then he took his friend Enkidu,
00:27:53 ►
the shaman guy,
00:27:55 ►
and against the will of Enkidu,
00:27:57 ►
they went out together
00:27:59 ►
and they chopped down the tree of life.
00:28:02 ►
This is what Gilgamesh was all about.
00:28:04 ►
So Gilgamesh was all about so Gilgamesh is
00:28:06 ►
like a transitional figure Gilgamesh rejects the goddess destroys the cow
00:28:14 ►
forces the shaman to go with him into the wilderness to cut down the tree of
00:28:19 ►
life how much more explicit does the symbolism have to be? And of course, Gilgamesh is the paradigmatic dominator.
00:28:29 ►
He is almost the founder of the theory of dominator culture
00:28:34 ►
because he’s a builder of cities,
00:28:37 ►
a general of armies,
00:28:39 ►
a master of women,
00:28:42 ►
although not of the goddess.
00:28:48 ►
The strange thing about Gilgamesh is his sexual ambivalence his obvious discomfort in the presence of women is so much a part of that myth well so
00:28:58 ►
this the reason I spend so much time on this is the idea got loose in the 60s that LSD was a miracle drug and that it was all created within the context of 20th century history.
00:29:13 ►
This isn’t what’s going on.
00:29:14 ►
I mean, we are discovering the chemical forces that created humanness in the first place, and then we’re discovering the consequences
00:29:25 ►
of having disrupted those relationships.
00:29:29 ►
I think it would do a lot to change
00:29:31 ►
the discussion about drugs in this country
00:29:36 ►
if we had this kind of model of prehistory in front of us.
00:29:41 ►
Of course, it would enrage a great deal of people in the same way that the
00:29:46 ►
19th century had to come to terms with the idea that we may be descended from apes. This theory
00:29:55 ►
would add the notion that we now have to face the fact that we’re descended from stoned apes.
00:30:10 ►
stoned apes and uh you know one further uh nail in the coffin of male pride now all over the world you know not everybody fell into history only the white european type fell into history and then eventually managed to drag
00:30:27 ►
everybody else into it by making it a global phenomenon but even as we speak you know in the
00:30:35 ►
rainforests of the amazon in the highlands of mexico in in the you know even in the slums of Lagos
00:30:47 ►
and in Zaire
00:30:49 ►
in many places a connection
00:30:53 ►
to the vegetable gnosis has been maintained
00:30:56 ►
by people whose societies didn’t opt
00:30:59 ►
whole hog for the historical model
00:31:02 ►
and I think that the centerpiece of the archaic revival
00:31:07 ►
is going back and looking at shamanism,
00:31:10 ►
both ancient and modern,
00:31:12 ►
and trying to create a bridge back to some kind of wholeness.
00:31:19 ►
We are all…
00:31:21 ►
We’re all mixed up, sick, damaged by this thing that happened in the past.
00:31:34 ►
You know, people used to say, well, the only people who need psychiatrists are people who are crazy but the fact is everybody is crazy because the cultural legacy
00:31:47 ►
of being now
00:31:49 ►
a thousand generations
00:31:51 ►
removed from anything authentic
00:31:53 ►
you know
00:31:54 ►
for most of us
00:31:56 ►
it’s quite traumatic
00:31:58 ►
and the dominator culture
00:32:00 ►
has fed upon itself
00:32:03 ►
and fed upon itself
00:32:04 ►
and now you know they can call the power that
00:32:08 ►
lights the stars down upon their enemies i mean this is like the final apotheosis of dominator
00:32:16 ►
values that they have learned enough about the structure of matter and the dynamics of energy that they can call down the stars upon their enemies.
00:32:27 ►
Well, this is a very small and fragile planet in the face of that kind of energy.
00:32:33 ►
We could lose the whole thing. I mean, we could lose it spectacularly, or we could just detoxify it out of existence. The only counterflow to that
00:32:46 ►
is some kind of reconnection with nature
00:32:50 ►
that is not casual,
00:32:53 ►
not weekend conservation.
00:32:55 ►
I heard Dave Brower,
00:32:57 ►
who some of you may know,
00:32:59 ►
who’s the head of the Sierra Club,
00:33:00 ►
or was years ago
00:33:01 ►
until he got too nutty for them,
00:33:10 ►
say, club or was years ago till he got too nutty for them uh say uh we need a jihad to save the earth a jihad a jihad is a holy war it’s where what you basically do is you tell people convert or die
00:33:18 ►
you give them that choice you say we’re going to do it this way, convert or die. He said, we need a jihad to save
00:33:26 ►
the earth because the situation is that desperate. Well, I’m not willing to call for a jihad because
00:33:33 ►
I think that in itself is a kind of dominator model. It’s saying, you see, that it depends on us.
00:33:42 ►
I don’t really believe that it depends on us
00:33:45 ►
except as we act
00:33:47 ►
to embody the collectivity
00:33:50 ►
that’s what I meant
00:33:51 ►
when I said last night
00:33:53 ►
that the major political task
00:33:55 ►
for people like ourselves
00:33:56 ►
is to be more stoned
00:33:59 ►
you know
00:34:00 ►
is to find out more
00:34:02 ►
about the dimensions
00:34:03 ►
of the psychedelic experience
00:34:06 ►
since we have apparently self-selected ourselves to be the experts on this.
00:34:12 ►
Because the experts are not the guys in the laboratories
00:34:15 ►
or the people looking at ESR output.
00:34:20 ►
It’s the people who know what it is that are the experts.
00:34:24 ►
Well, I guess,
00:34:27 ►
every point of view has a myth. And so that’s the myth of this point of view that anchors it to
00:34:34 ►
prehistory that says, you know, we are what we are because of these relationships to plants.
00:34:40 ►
We cannot go forward into who we want to be until we clear up our relationship to these
00:34:49 ►
plants and then finally you know it’s a political issue in the same way that reproductive freedom
00:35:01 ►
is a political issue i mean ever since and before the signing of the Magna Carta,
00:35:09 ►
the main socio-political debate that has been waged in Western society
00:35:15 ►
is how free shall the individual be?
00:35:20 ►
And the thought has been pretty strongly planted
00:35:23 ►
that the individual should be as free as the individual can be
00:35:28 ►
without it dissolving the minimal social constraints
00:35:32 ►
to keep society together.
00:35:35 ►
And yet, you know, as recently as a hundred years ago,
00:35:39 ►
people were putting pants on piano legs because the Victorian mind
00:35:46 ►
felt that the unclad piano leg
00:35:50 ►
might lead young men
00:35:52 ►
to acts of self-abuse.
00:35:54 ►
Well, I’m sure it did.
00:35:57 ►
I’m sure it did.
00:36:00 ►
But a truly creative young man
00:36:05 ►
a truly creative young man
00:36:09 ►
will then evolve a fetish
00:36:11 ►
to the pants of piano legs
00:36:13 ►
so the party can go on
00:36:20 ►
women were given the vote in 1920
00:36:24 ►
slaves were freed in this country less
00:36:28 ►
than a hundred and thirty years ago one
00:36:30 ►
of the last places to free slaves by the
00:36:33 ►
way and about that the United States was
00:36:40 ►
one of the last places to outlaw slavery
00:36:43 ►
I mean it had been anathema in Europe
00:36:44 ►
since 1820.
00:36:47 ►
Slavery is an interesting thing
00:36:50 ►
because the Romans had slavery on a massive scale
00:36:59 ►
and Roman society ran on slavery.
00:37:03 ►
And then when the Roman Empire fell,
00:37:07 ►
slavery fell into disrepute.
00:37:10 ►
If you had a slave in the Middle Ages,
00:37:14 ►
you had one slave.
00:37:17 ►
And it meant that you were some heavy honcho.
00:37:21 ►
I mean, it was the equivalent of owning a Rembrandt.
00:37:24 ►
A slave was a luxury item beyond all
00:37:27 ►
imagining, and slaves played no role in society whatsoever in the medieval period. It was all
00:37:35 ►
serfs, landed serfs, who could not be bought and sold. Only as the land was bought and sold
00:37:42 ►
could they be, and they couldn’t be moved off the land either.
00:37:46 ►
It had no relationship to slavery. Well, so then if slavery died at the close of the Roman Empire,
00:37:53 ►
how come the whole history of the Enlightenment is the history of getting entangled with slavery?
00:38:02 ►
Well, the answer is, strangely enough, a drug.
00:38:06 ►
The reason that slavery was brought back
00:38:09 ►
after being for a thousand years in disgrace
00:38:12 ►
was for the production of sugar.
00:38:16 ►
For no other reason.
00:38:18 ►
Sugar, at that time, was produced under conditions
00:38:22 ►
of about 130 degrees of temperature, these boiling
00:38:26 ►
vats and crystallizing processes. No one would work sugar unless they were shackled and under
00:38:34 ►
the lash. And sugar is absolutely unnecessary. It’s a complete luxury. nobody needs sugar at all
00:38:45 ►
in the year 1800
00:38:47 ►
every ton of sugar
00:38:50 ►
entering England
00:38:52 ►
was being produced by slave labor
00:38:54 ►
so here was a situation
00:38:56 ►
it began with the Portuguese
00:38:58 ►
they even before the discovery of America
00:39:01 ►
they had islands in the East Atlantic
00:39:04 ►
the island of Madeira and they had islands in the East Atlantic, the island of Madera,
00:39:06 ►
and they had sugar holdings there, but they produced very minimal amounts of sugar. And then
00:39:12 ►
in a confrontation at sea, they captured a bunch of Arabs, pirates, basically, and they were about
00:39:22 ►
to have these guys walk the plank when they said listen there are all
00:39:27 ►
these black people in the center of africa who would make wonderful bonded labor instead of
00:39:34 ►
offing us why don’t you set us up and we’ll uh bring human beings out of the interior for the sugar industry. And this was done. And it became an
00:39:47 ►
overnight success. And the prices paid for sugar were so high that popes and kings were caught up
00:39:54 ►
in this corruption. It wasn’t that people didn’t think it was bad. It wasn’t that people had never
00:40:00 ►
asked themselves these questions. Not at all. This had all been settled in 600 AD. It was that they
00:40:06 ►
were rapacious. It was the first time a single race has been singled out for servitude. One thing
00:40:15 ►
about Roman slavery, it was marvelously democratic. You know, everybody was this, potentially could be a slave. People talk about the scourge of cocaine.
00:40:27 ►
It’s as to nothing what was done to the values of Western Europe
00:40:31 ►
in the pursuit of sugar.
00:40:33 ►
I mean, nobody is suggesting that we bring back slavery
00:40:36 ►
with the Pope’s approval in order to produce more blow,
00:40:41 ►
but this was an entirely reasonable proposition
00:40:44 ►
to these entrepreneurial types
00:40:46 ►
in the 16th century so it’s just a little historical aside i have all this stuff at my
00:40:54 ►
fingertips because i’ve the book that i’m writing for bantam is called plants drugs and history
00:40:59 ►
and i want to show that stemming from this breakdown of the psychedelic relationship,
00:41:08 ►
then all the addictions and substance obsessions that come out of that
00:41:13 ►
are an effort to get back to this primal equilibrium.
00:41:18 ►
Well, now I think I’ll just stop there and hope that there are questions out of this,
00:41:24 ►
since this was a first thick hit of all this stuff.
00:41:26 ►
Yeah, I can.
00:41:28 ►
I missed your comment on what the snake meant.
00:41:32 ►
Well, it passed through my mind to talk about it.
00:41:37 ►
If you look at the history of snakes in mythology,
00:41:43 ►
they almost always have good information about
00:41:47 ►
immortality snakes can be relied upon for that there’s a very interesting myth some of you have
00:41:56 ►
heard me tell it it’s an old Minoan myth from the Cretan civilization that was the last outpost of this uh uh partnership thing
00:42:08 ►
some of you may remember pasiphae because she was a really interesting figure in greek mythology
00:42:16 ►
because she was so fascinated by the sexual energy of bulls that she had Daedalus the same guy who would later attempt to
00:42:30 ►
fly home to the mainland she had Daedalus construct an artificial cow that
00:42:37 ►
she could get inside of so that she could have sex with these bulls and you
00:42:44 ►
know don’t ask me what was going on,
00:42:47 ►
except that these Cretan women are not to be messed with, obviously.
00:42:52 ►
But there’s an obscure myth that relates to her son
00:42:59 ►
that casts light on the Genesis myth.
00:43:03 ►
It’s the myth of the story of Glaucos and Polyidos.
00:43:09 ►
Glaucos was the son of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae.
00:43:14 ►
And when he was a young child,
00:43:16 ►
he was playing in the pantry of the palace one day
00:43:20 ►
and he fell into a jar, a huge vat of honey. Well, now, you may or may not know that
00:43:28 ►
across the Middle East, the dead were buried in these kinds of jars, and sometimes kings were
00:43:36 ►
buried in honey. But anyway, Glaucus, this little kid, he fell into this honeypot and drowned,
00:43:43 ►
and no one could find him. No one knew
00:43:45 ►
where he was. No one thought to look in this particular honeypot in the pantry. And the king
00:43:50 ►
and the queen were frantic. And they went to their diviners and they said, you know,
00:43:58 ►
help us find our son. And the diviners said, well, we can’t find your son but we know who can and the king said
00:44:06 ►
well so who he said it will be the man who can compose the most apt simile regarding a three
00:44:13 ►
colored cow in your herd now what this means is not clear obviously the story may be garbled at
00:44:20 ►
this point but anyway the man it a man of language was what they were saying, a man who
00:44:26 ►
can compose this simile. So then the king called everybody together and asked people to compose a
00:44:32 ►
simile on the three-colored cow. And lo and behold, this guy, Polyidos, which means man of many ideas,
00:44:40 ►
Polyidos produced a brilliant simile on the three-colored cow
00:44:45 ►
and so the king said
00:44:46 ►
this is great
00:44:47 ►
you will be the person
00:44:49 ►
who can find my son
00:44:50 ►
so Polyidos went into trance
00:44:53 ►
and saw young Glaucus
00:44:57 ►
pickled in the honeypot
00:44:58 ►
in the basement
00:44:59 ►
so he said to the king and queen
00:45:02 ►
well I’ve located your son
00:45:04 ►
you’re not going to like this
00:45:05 ►
he’s dead
00:45:07 ►
and they went and they got him
00:45:08 ►
and he was dead
00:45:09 ►
and the king said
00:45:11 ►
well you seem to be the smartest guy around
00:45:14 ►
Polyidos
00:45:15 ►
you found the boy
00:45:17 ►
I want you to bring him back to life
00:45:20 ►
and Polyidos said
00:45:22 ►
no way
00:45:23 ►
that’s not my
00:45:24 ►
I’m not that kind of a magician the king waxed
00:45:28 ►
Roth as kings do and put him in a imprisoned him with the body and said you’re not coming
00:45:39 ►
out until my son lives so Poly Polyidos was completely freaked out
00:45:45 ►
by this situation,
00:45:46 ►
didn’t have a clue on what to do
00:45:48 ►
and was just basically wailing
00:45:51 ►
and tearing his hair in this cell
00:45:53 ►
and he noticed a snake come in,
00:45:57 ►
a little hole in the wall
00:45:58 ►
and he thought that the snake
00:46:00 ►
was going to do something
00:46:02 ►
to the corpse of the boy
00:46:04 ►
and that he would get into even worse
00:46:06 ►
trouble. So he took a stone and threw it at the snake and killed it. And it was lying there dead
00:46:14 ►
on the floor. Then he went back to freaking out about his predicament and a while passed and
00:46:21 ►
another snake came. And the snake came and it took one look at the first snake
00:46:27 ►
and before polyidos could make a move it backed out and was gone and some time passed and the
00:46:35 ►
second snake came again and this time it had some leaves in its mouth and it went over to the dead snake and
00:46:45 ►
did something and the snake lived and
00:46:49 ►
Polyidos rushed forward and seized a little fragment of the plant and saw what it was
00:46:58 ►
rang his jailers and asked that quantities of this plant be brought and
00:47:07 ►
jailers and asked the quantities of this plant to be brought and with it he revived Glaucus and brought him back to life and everybody was delighted and Polyidos thought that now he would
00:47:14 ►
be allowed to go back to Syracuse which was his home and the king said, you’re too valuable a man to me. I can’t let you go.
00:47:26 ►
I’ll only let you go once you teach my son everything you know.
00:47:31 ►
So Palaidos said, oh, yeah.
00:47:35 ►
So he did.
00:47:36 ►
He settled down and he took on young Glaucus as his student
00:47:40 ►
and he taught him everything he knew.
00:47:42 ►
And then years later
00:47:45 ►
Glaucus is a young man
00:47:46 ►
the king has given Polyidos
00:47:48 ►
permission to return to his homeland
00:47:51 ►
they all walk down to the boat together
00:47:54 ►
and at the very last moment
00:47:56 ►
Polyidos says to Glaucus
00:47:59 ►
your old teacher has just one request of you
00:48:03 ►
and he says what is it?
00:48:05 ►
And he says, I want you to spit in my mouth.
00:48:10 ►
He says, okay.
00:48:13 ►
So he does, he spits in his mouth.
00:48:15 ►
And at that moment, all of the magical teaching and understanding
00:48:20 ►
returns to Polyidos and he walks up the gangplank and sails away.
00:48:26 ►
Now, this is an interesting myth for several reasons. Your question about Eden, you see the snake knew the secret of
00:48:34 ►
immortality in both stories. The snake had information about the tree of life, and the snake
00:48:42 ►
had information about the plant of immortality what’s interesting also
00:48:48 ►
about this story is glaucus means blue gray and blue gray is the color that psilocybin containing
00:48:57 ►
mushrooms turn when bruised and preserving mushrooms in honey was a well-known maneuver in those areas.
00:49:07 ►
So what this may be is a death and resurrection myth
00:49:12 ►
connected with the mushroom
00:49:14 ►
as both the thing raised from the dead
00:49:18 ►
and the thing then which is somehow caught up
00:49:21 ►
in this heros gamos of transformation.
00:49:28 ►
So that’s the Eden angle on the snake
00:49:29 ►
yeah
00:49:30 ►
that’s right
00:49:34 ►
he wrote a book
00:49:37 ►
called
00:49:38 ►
The Breakdown of Consciousness
00:49:42 ►
and the Bicameral Mind
00:49:43 ►
this guy Julian Janes his idea, and it’s an interesting idea, the whole thing was somewhat
00:49:50 ►
frustrating because he wrote a very big book on the role of hallucinations in shaping culture.
00:49:58 ►
And aside from one piddling mention of mescaline, you would never know that there are plants which cause hallucination
00:50:06 ►
but james wanted to say that until very recently the mental life of human beings was very different
00:50:16 ►
than it is for us he wanted to say that as recently as homeric time which is a thousand BC, people didn’t have egos.
00:50:27 ►
People were sort of robot-like.
00:50:30 ►
And then if they got into
00:50:32 ►
a very tight spot
00:50:33 ►
and were about to be offed
00:50:35 ►
or something,
00:50:37 ►
a god would speak.
00:50:39 ►
It wouldn’t appear,
00:50:41 ►
but this god would speak
00:50:42 ►
and tell them what to do.
00:50:45 ►
Say like, get out of there.
00:50:47 ►
You know, do this, do that.
00:50:49 ►
And that this psychic function, previously perceived as the voice of God,
00:50:56 ►
eventually was integrated into the structure of the psyche and became the ego.
00:51:02 ►
Much in the same way that the mitochondria of the cell
00:51:07 ►
of the animal cell
00:51:09 ►
were once free-swimming bacteria
00:51:11 ►
you know, 300, 400 million years ago
00:51:15 ►
and they became embedded and entangled
00:51:18 ►
in a larger cellular matrix
00:51:21 ►
so Jaynes is trying to say
00:51:23 ►
that this godlike ego became incorporated as an
00:51:29 ►
ordinary psychic function. What caused this to happen was traders going from one widely separated
00:51:37 ►
human group to another would bring the news that God was not saying the same things in all places. And this started philosophical
00:51:48 ►
disputation on its noble road. And then people realized, well, if the gods aren’t saying the
00:51:55 ►
same things, then it’s not really God. And so then what is it? And slowly integrated it.
00:52:01 ►
I don’t believe his theory. I like, I think it’s a good theory for academia.
00:52:08 ►
It forces them to look at some of their premises a little more carefully. I don’t think it’s about
00:52:15 ►
opening a channel to the non-dominant sphere of the brain. I think that’s a way of, it’s a metaphor for this boundary dissolution.
00:52:28 ►
Maybe if you have an open channel to the non-dominant side of your brain, it’s like a
00:52:33 ►
psychedelic experience, but I suspect that’s too good to be true, and that probably you need the
00:52:42 ►
psychedelic experience, but clearly we are cut off from something,
00:52:47 ►
either the other half of our brain
00:52:49 ►
or the vegetable matrix of life
00:52:52 ►
or something like that.
00:52:54 ►
We are cut off.
00:52:56 ►
I mean, history is a very unbalanced situation.
00:53:02 ►
That’s why it’s temporary,
00:53:04 ►
because it’s a high state of disequilibrium
00:53:06 ►
well sugar
00:53:11 ►
I consider sugar
00:53:14 ►
definitely a drug
00:53:16 ►
and one of the most
00:53:18 ►
heavily addicted drugs
00:53:20 ►
on a world scale that there is
00:53:22 ►
there have been numerous episodes
00:53:24 ►
over the past
00:53:25 ►
few hundred years. I mean, I maintain all culture is, is styles of relating to chemicals,
00:53:34 ►
you know, alcohol culture, the way in which it imprints early sexual experiences, that sort of thing. When Napoleon invaded Egypt,
00:53:47 ►
he took a huge number of scholars with him
00:53:50 ►
and everything from furniture styles to cuisine
00:53:55 ►
was imported back into France and so was hashish.
00:53:59 ►
And hashish and laudanum, tincture of opium,
00:54:03 ►
had a tremendous influence on the romantic imagination,
00:54:08 ►
both its fecundity and its morbidity.
00:54:12 ►
I mean, that’s typical opium, reverie, all that stuff.
00:54:17 ►
So, you know, drugs are like cultural styles or languages.
00:54:23 ►
They’re invisible to us.
00:54:24 ►
Very few people don’t have drug dependencies
00:54:28 ►
I mean most of what life is
00:54:30 ►
is regulating yourself through the waking part of the day
00:54:34 ►
either making decisions to do or not do
00:54:38 ►
certain kinds of things
00:54:40 ►
I mean isn’t that most people’s story
00:54:43 ►
I mean I consider myself a moderate drug user
00:54:48 ►
and I get up in the morning
00:54:50 ►
and then the first thing I do is I make tea
00:54:53 ►
and that’s a low hit of caffeine
00:54:55 ►
that lasts until about 10.30
00:54:58 ►
then I get serious and make a huge pot of coffee
00:55:02 ►
and then that allows me to work until like 2 in the afternoon.
00:55:07 ►
Then I have to have another cup of coffee,
00:55:09 ►
but with a J in order to be, you know, keep it going.
00:55:15 ►
And, you know, then there’s sugar regulation on the side of this.
00:55:19 ►
And then when you add into it, you know, non-invasive drugs like television i mean tell the average
00:55:27 ►
american watches four and a half hours of tv a day imagine if there was a drug that made that
00:55:34 ►
kind of claim on people’s time my god we’d regard western civilization as going to hell in a handbasket. But, you know, the drugs of the future
00:55:45 ►
are likely to be
00:55:46 ►
these non-invasive
00:55:48 ►
electronic drugs.
00:55:51 ►
I just finished writing
00:55:52 ►
an article on virtual reality
00:55:54 ►
for Magical Blend magazine.
00:55:57 ►
Do you all know
00:55:58 ►
what virtual reality is?
00:56:00 ►
Virtual reality is a technology
00:56:02 ►
being very, very rapidly
00:56:04 ►
perfected and brought to market where you put on a silk glove with sensors at every joint and you put on a hood with television screens very close to your eyes or fiber optic screens very close to your eyes and you’re in a reality.
00:56:24 ►
You’re in another world it’s a world that you
00:56:27 ►
can touch you can feel but it’s a different kind of world than this world because in that world
00:56:34 ►
if you want to go somewhere if i wanted to see the tv set over there you point and it comes to you
00:56:41 ►
you open your hand it stops moving toward you.
00:56:46 ►
Close your hand into a fist,
00:56:47 ►
it rotates you 180 degrees in the face space.
00:56:52 ►
It’s called virtual reality.
00:56:56 ►
Oh, well, Mattel has already begun to market,
00:57:01 ►
you’ve probably seen ads for it,
00:57:02 ►
and just closed your mind.
00:57:03 ►
The Glove of Power, have you seen these ads? The Glove of Power. begun to market you’ve probably seen ads for it and just closed your mind the glove of power have
00:57:05 ►
you seen these ads the glove of power and that’s just a nintendo system and what it does is it
00:57:12 ►
images the glove on the screen you put on this glove there’s a glove on the screen you wiggle
00:57:18 ►
your thumb it wiggles there’s a lever and a machine in the game you reach out and you pull it
00:57:26 ►
and the lever reacts
00:57:28 ►
and this is with Cradola equipment
00:57:31 ►
I couldn’t believe the primitiveness of this scene
00:57:35 ►
I felt like it was like a science fair project
00:57:37 ►
gone apeshit
00:57:39 ►
but what they’re talking about
00:57:42 ►
is very fast processing of images at extremely great depth.
00:57:48 ►
They’re going to do this.
00:57:50 ►
The entertainment potential of it is clear.
00:57:54 ►
This has to do with some of the scenarios of the future
00:57:58 ►
that we’ll talk about this afternoon
00:58:01 ►
because virtual reality is very important
00:58:04 ►
to creating a sane human future.
00:58:07 ►
Are you saying it’s me?
00:58:09 ►
No, that’s something else.
00:58:11 ►
That’s brain stimulation technology
00:58:14 ►
to cause…
00:58:17 ►
Yeah, that’s a different thing.
00:58:19 ►
I will talk about it a little.
00:58:21 ►
It’s the idea that there are machines
00:58:23 ►
that can duplicate drug experiences or create
00:58:27 ►
equally interesting neurological experiences. And it’s done with goggles, with flashing lights
00:58:35 ►
around the perimeter, and then a sound. By varying the frequency and amplitude of the flashing light
00:58:41 ►
as it beats against the incoming sound, you can create very interesting neurological states.
00:58:50 ►
They’re not, well, they are and they aren’t like psychedelics.
00:58:55 ►
Nothing is very much like a really breakaway psychedelic experience.
00:59:01 ►
But it is interesting that with these machines so much imagery and so much color can be
00:59:08 ►
coaxed out of these setups just a few weeks ago i was at a place called in berlin called relax
00:59:15 ►
berlin and it was it’s a place designed for yuppies on their uh dinner you know, office breaks
00:59:26 ►
to come and spend 40 minutes under these machines.
00:59:31 ►
And so far I haven’t seen any that have really impressed me.
00:59:36 ►
They all work much better if you smoke some dope,
00:59:38 ►
which probably is going to be the last word on them for a while.
00:59:43 ►
The virtual reality is much different.
00:59:47 ►
The virtual reality is not a neurological chaos.
00:59:51 ►
It’s a programmed reality of some sort.
00:59:54 ►
I mean, the one I was in was, you know,
00:59:57 ►
so banal it brought tears to your eyes,
00:59:59 ►
but what it was was it was an office.
01:00:03 ►
It was a reception area.
01:00:08 ►
A reception area, and then you walk through a door,
01:00:11 ►
and then there was a large desk with a telephone on it
01:00:15 ►
and a bookcase with a couple of books in it.
01:00:20 ►
But I discovered something immediately.
01:00:22 ►
I mean, it was not an intended discovery
01:00:25 ►
I forgot that if you point at something
01:00:27 ►
it moves toward you
01:00:29 ►
or you appear to move away from it
01:00:32 ►
and I would just let my pointing hand drift downward
01:00:36 ►
and when I would do that
01:00:38 ►
I would burst through the ceiling of the office
01:00:41 ►
and then if I didn’t change my position
01:00:44 ►
the office and the if I didn’t change my position the office and the attached
01:00:47 ►
antechamber just were shrinking smaller and smaller in a kind of olive drab space that I
01:00:54 ►
was clearly you know flying into infinity and there was nothing else in this reality well so
01:01:01 ►
then I did the fist thing it turned me around 180 degrees and then i could get
01:01:06 ►
back down to the office hanging in this olive drab space but uh
01:01:14 ►
it’s a freaky technology because the human visual apparatus is unbelievably forgiving of error in fact the human visual apparatus is
01:01:28 ►
set up to suppress error so even though you have this fairly mickey mouse technology your eye and
01:01:36 ►
your brain are just working like dogs to make it all into a real world and to paper over all the weird stuff about it you know well so if the technology can
01:01:48 ►
come closer the brain is waiting to fill in all the chinks and and make it very nice
01:01:55 ►
it’s manufactured it’s just very costly it’s at the level now where the only reason you would
01:02:01 ►
buy one is if you wanted to experiment with it.
01:02:05 ►
You were a company or so filthy rich
01:02:08 ►
that it just didn’t matter.
01:02:10 ►
$50,000.
01:02:13 ►
Oh, it’s coming down.
01:02:15 ►
The way they envision it, you see,
01:02:17 ►
what it requires is it requires
01:02:19 ►
very large and fast parallel processing computers.
01:02:24 ►
It is not something that’s going to be
01:02:26 ►
stand-alone in the home.
01:02:29 ►
It’s going to be sold over cable
01:02:31 ►
so that the really powerful computers to do this
01:02:35 ►
will be accessed over the phone lines.
01:02:38 ►
What the end consumer will have
01:02:41 ►
is simply the helmet and the glove, and then they want to do a full body
01:02:46 ►
stocking so that your whole body will be in there and then they have the big research project
01:02:53 ►
they’re working on now is called rt for two reality for two and the and you can see the implications. If you can get one other person in there with you,
01:03:08 ►
you can get everybody.
01:03:10 ►
If you can get one, you can have 50,000.
01:03:12 ►
And the whole review of the same issue
01:03:15 ►
is that…
01:03:17 ►
Jared Lanier’s thoughts on the matter.
01:03:20 ►
Yeah.
01:03:20 ►
…an electronic state of reality.
01:03:22 ►
But also Gibson’s…
01:03:24 ►
Yes, well, Gibson, who knew nothing about computers, yeah but also Gibson’s yes well Gibson
01:03:26 ►
who knew nothing about computers
01:03:29 ►
was the first person to come up with this concept
01:03:31 ►
he called it cyberspace
01:03:33 ►
he just thought that
01:03:35 ►
large, very large databases
01:03:38 ►
should be configured to be like physical objects
01:03:43 ►
so that you know your way around so that you know you jack
01:03:48 ►
into cyberspace this enormous red rectangle the size of the empire state building that is the
01:03:57 ►
wells fargo database further on down the boulevard that turquoise trapezoid, that is Defense Department data.
01:04:10 ►
And then on the other side of the street and two blocks over is the National Medical Index.
01:04:18 ►
In other words, he said these databases should be thought of as places
01:04:21 ►
and will create a world, a virtual world
01:04:25 ►
where you travel from place to place
01:04:28 ►
to get data.
01:04:29 ►
You see, the interesting thing,
01:04:31 ►
if any of you are familiar
01:04:32 ►
with the Macintosh computer interface,
01:04:35 ►
what makes it so user-friendly
01:04:37 ►
is that it treats everything
01:04:40 ►
like ordinary objects
01:04:41 ►
so that as monkeys
01:04:43 ►
we understand perfectly
01:04:45 ►
how to do this.
01:04:47 ►
I mean, when you’re in a program
01:04:48 ►
like Full Paint
01:04:49 ►
and you want a paintbrush,
01:04:51 ►
you must go and get
01:04:53 ►
your paintbrush.
01:04:54 ►
And when you’re done using it,
01:04:55 ►
you must put it back
01:04:56 ►
in your toolbox.
01:04:58 ►
Now, there is no toolbox
01:04:59 ►
and there is no paintbrush.
01:05:01 ►
They’re virtual.
01:05:02 ►
But nevertheless,
01:05:03 ►
you treat them
01:05:04 ►
the same way you treat non-virtual
01:05:07 ►
objects as they’re coming to be called this kind of equipment should not be in the hands of people
01:05:13 ►
well you know tim leary said years ago lsd is a substance which can cause psychotic reactions
01:05:27 ►
in people who don’t take it.
01:05:32 ►
And, you know, I’ve seen a lot of psychosis caused by drugs that people didn’t take.
01:05:41 ►
I mean, see, the western mind is so quirky
01:05:45 ►
I mean
01:05:46 ►
we would accept
01:05:47 ►
a machine
01:05:48 ►
I think
01:05:49 ►
the fact that
01:05:49 ►
television has gotten
01:05:51 ►
as far as it has
01:05:52 ►
with its little criticism
01:05:53 ►
but if people
01:05:54 ►
were smoking pot
01:05:55 ►
four and a half hours
01:05:56 ►
a day
01:05:57 ►
I mean
01:05:57 ►
there’d be a national
01:05:58 ►
soul-searching
01:06:00 ►
uproar
01:06:00 ►
over it
01:06:02 ►
so we just have
01:06:03 ►
certain
01:06:04 ►
biases and certain canalized ways of thinking that are
01:06:09 ►
easier for us to move down the future isn’t very comforting for that kind of know-nothingism
01:06:17 ►
because uh electronic stimulation is very very possible possible. And the difference, you know, computers are becoming more like drugs.
01:06:29 ►
Drugs are becoming more like computers.
01:06:32 ►
The computers of the future will be taken orally.
01:06:36 ►
And the drugs of the future will probably be jacked into.
01:06:40 ►
So getting hung up on the language of it.
01:06:44 ►
The important issue is
01:06:45 ►
the alteration of consciousness
01:06:47 ►
what is it and what is it good for
01:06:50 ►
what does it say about who we are
01:06:52 ►
what can we do with it
01:06:54 ►
the reason I’m
01:06:56 ►
see the people who’ve produced virtual reality
01:06:58 ►
they have their
01:07:00 ►
the people who are in charge of trying to think of something neat to do with it
01:07:04 ►
haven’t gotten very far.
01:07:06 ►
I mean, of course it will make astonishing pornography possible.
01:07:12 ►
Of course, cleaning up radioactive waste spills will now be very easy.
01:07:21 ►
Fixing space stations, if you happen to have one,
01:07:24 ►
will be less of a problem
01:07:26 ►
with virtual reality
01:07:28 ►
because you’ll go in virtual reality
01:07:30 ►
outside, find the box
01:07:34 ►
lift the lid, turn the screw
01:07:37 ►
you’ll do it ten times in virtual reality
01:07:39 ►
before you’ll actually put on the suit
01:07:41 ►
and go out
01:07:42 ►
but what I think virtual reality is good for
01:07:46 ►
is showing each other the insides of our minds
01:07:50 ►
that we are going to be able to create art
01:07:54 ►
like nothing that has ever been seen before.
01:07:56 ►
In fact, one of the mavens of virtual reality,
01:08:01 ►
Eric Gullickson, has predicted
01:08:03 ►
that most designing
01:08:07 ►
in the 21st century
01:08:09 ►
will be virtual design
01:08:11 ►
I mean
01:08:12 ►
when you think that
01:08:14 ►
you know
01:08:15 ►
it costs nothing
01:08:18 ►
to design
01:08:19 ►
a Piranesi cathedral
01:08:22 ►
than it does to design
01:08:24 ►
a modest A-frame
01:08:26 ►
because the thing is going to be built of light.
01:08:29 ►
So everybody can live at Versailles
01:08:32 ►
if that level of ostentation
01:08:34 ►
is attractive to them.
01:08:37 ►
I look forward to this.
01:08:40 ►
I want to take the architectural perspectives
01:08:42 ►
of Bibiana
01:08:43 ►
and walk through those, you know,
01:08:47 ►
mile-long colonnaded corridors
01:08:50 ►
with reflecting pools and all that sort of thing.
01:08:56 ►
And then what interests me about virtual reality
01:08:59 ►
on another level is,
01:09:01 ►
it goes back to the DMT experiences
01:09:03 ►
that we talked about earlier this morning that
01:09:07 ►
on DMT there’s the way in which these entities communicate is with a visible language a language
01:09:17 ►
that’s beheld rather than heard with the ears well this is a higher signal it’s a better signal less degradation of intentionality
01:09:29 ►
and a visibly beheld signal you know the old rap a picture is worth a thousand words so uh i think
01:09:36 ►
we could create a new modality of communication in virtual reality modeled on the psychedelic experience. I mean, what would it be
01:09:47 ►
like to slave a voice synthesizer to a virtual reality with software instructions such that,
01:09:56 ►
for example, every time I use the connector and a fluorescent turquoise polygon would become suspended in the air.
01:10:07 ►
And every time I used a certain verb,
01:10:10 ►
a different kind of topological manifold would be plugged in to the connector.
01:10:17 ►
In other words, if we changed this stuff of language into virtual tinker toys then we could use our voice
01:10:27 ►
to drive an assembly
01:10:29 ►
of visible objects
01:10:31 ►
in the virtual reality
01:10:33 ►
do you follow what I’m talking about?
01:10:36 ►
good
01:10:37 ►
well it’s noon
01:10:39 ►
so
01:10:39 ►
time for lunch
01:10:42 ►
we’ll be back here at
01:10:46 ►
no no
01:10:48 ►
four
01:10:50 ►
four to six
01:10:52 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon
01:10:56 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:10:58 ►
one thought at a time
01:11:00 ►
so
01:11:02 ►
do all of you oculus rift
01:11:04 ►
virtual reality designers have your assignments now?
01:11:08 ►
Well, hopefully you’re already well ahead of creating worlds better than those that Terrence was thinking of 26 years ago.
01:11:16 ►
But nonetheless, did you enjoy Terrence’s description of virtual reality just now?
01:11:22 ►
I guess that it’s safe to say that he wasn’t probably the best oracle
01:11:26 ►
for future tech, but to be fair, back in 1989, I don’t think anyone is even predicting the iPhone
01:11:33 ►
age. Actually, even though that description of virtual reality that Terrence made was over 25
01:11:40 ►
years ago, his concept of it sadly isn’t that far off the mark yet today.
01:11:45 ►
The main change Terrence would probably make today is that he wouldn’t feel the need to explain what virtual reality is all about.
01:11:53 ►
Of course, VR in the laboratory today is probably far, far ahead of what’s available for the consumers.
01:12:00 ►
But hopefully those things will catch up fast.
01:12:03 ►
But, hopefully those things will catch up fast.
01:12:11 ►
And, you know what? My guess is that there is more than likely, more than one of our fellow salonners listening right now,
01:12:16 ►
who once owned one of Mattel’s power gloves that Terrence was talking about.
01:12:18 ►
Do you still have it? Does it still work?
01:12:23 ►
You know, when I was listening to Terrence’s talk with you just now, I was drawn back to the times when I was fortunate to have been able to listen to some of his raps in person.
01:12:30 ►
But to watch Terrence go on in great detail about either plants and chemicals or prehistoric civilizations,
01:12:37 ►
well, it just amazed me at how these talks of his were all given ad lib.
01:12:42 ►
I never saw him use notes or references of any kinds when he riffed like he did here just now. He was truly one of a kind.
01:12:51 ►
Now before I go today, I thought that it’s about time to once again read a few titles from articles that I’ve posted on my Flipboard magazine, which you can get to via the link in the Saloners section of our psychedelicsalon.com website. Thank you. particularly if you’re interested in the latest news about what’s going on in the world of cannabis.
01:13:26 ►
So here are a few of the more recent stories, and these are all titles of articles I’ve posted.
01:13:33 ►
It’s a psychedelic renaissance as scientists identify medicinal qualities of hardcore drugs.
01:13:40 ►
180 marijuana plants found at a 77-year-old congressional candidate’s home.
01:13:47 ►
By the way, this 77-year-old grower is actually a grandmother on top of that.
01:13:53 ►
Here’s the next title.
01:13:54 ►
Marijuana millionaires cashing in on cannabis legalization.
01:13:59 ►
An American Automobile Association study finds no scientific basis for drug driving laws based on THC levels.
01:14:09 ►
A new marijuana convenience is headed to the United States.
01:14:13 ►
And that’s a story about Alaska that I think you’ll be interested in.
01:14:17 ►
Next story is Big Pharma seeks to capitalize on pain-reducing compound derived from cannabis.
01:14:24 ►
No surprise there, huh?
01:14:27 ►
U.S. House of Representatives votes to open access to medical marijuana for veterans.
01:14:33 ►
And I guess that comes under the heading of It’s About Time.
01:14:37 ►
And finally, pot and yoga go together like cookies and milk, practitioners say.
01:14:43 ►
Actually, I found that pot goes together with almost anything.
01:14:48 ►
Oh, finally, here’s one more article.
01:14:51 ►
DEA could reclassify marijuana, allowing doctors to conduct more research.
01:14:57 ►
You know, it’s still hard for me to get my head around the fact that, yet today,
01:15:03 ►
cannabis is still listed as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin.
01:15:07 ►
No wonder that young people have no respect for the American drug laws.
01:15:12 ►
Even middle school kids can see how crazy the drug schedule is.
01:15:17 ►
Now we have parts of our government telling military veterans that cannabis is good for them,
01:15:22 ►
and another part of the government saying that
01:15:25 ►
cannabis has no medicinal value.
01:15:28 ►
What a fucked up country this is, huh?
01:15:31 ►
But moving on to something more positive, since posting copies of the Salon’s podcast
01:15:37 ►
on SoundCloud, I’ve enjoyed watching the stats there to see where some of our newer fellow
01:15:42 ►
Saloners are coming from.
01:15:43 ►
stats there to see where some of our newer fellow salonners are coming from.
01:15:50 ►
And here’s a list of the countries in the past seven days where most of our new salonners live.
01:15:56 ►
Now, the United States still accounts for about half of this past week’s listeners on SoundCloud, but here are the countries with the next highest number of listeners.
01:16:01 ►
The United Kingdom, Sweden, number four is Indonesia, followed by France, Canada,
01:16:09 ►
Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, Germany, Finland, India, Spain, Brazil, South Africa,
01:16:18 ►
Mexico, Colombia, Togo, Portugal, Singapore, Italy, Malaysia, and New Zealand.
01:16:34 ►
And my reason for reading that list to you just now is to let you know that this is only a seven-day window and only for SoundCloud slaughters.
01:16:39 ►
In other words, it’s just a very small segment of where your fellow slaughters and psychonauts come from.
01:16:45 ►
As your connections to the psychedelic community continue to grow over the next few years,
01:16:49 ►
I suspect that you’re going to find that not only are you not alone with your interest in the psychedelic experience,
01:16:52 ►
but you are part of an immensely large group of like-minded people
01:16:56 ►
who are living all over this planet.
01:16:59 ►
Our numbers are growing and our day is coming.
01:17:03 ►
So press on, my coming so press on my friends press on and for now this
01:17:08 ►
is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends Thank you.