Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The thing about [ayahuasca] is that you always come out of it in great shape. Ken’s right, you feel better the day after than if you hadn’t done it. What [other] drug can you say that of?”
“I think this ayahuasca thing is the last living remnant of this kind of way of relating to nature. Because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies, these people are saturated in this stuff. As Ken says, three times a week. And it’s really changing how they look at the world.”
“Isn’t it interesting that the ‘fix’ turns out to be not a drug, but a shifting of the ratios of neurotransmitters already present in the organism, as though we’re just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune. There’s an enzyme problem that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego.”
“Psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area. The area of thought and cognition.”
“I’ve seen, really, what seemed to me amazing things on psychedelics that must bear on the problem of the genesis and stability of meaning.”
“The really important thing that can be done with psychedelics, in a generalized sense, is that they are inspiration for ideas. And when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension you are sailing out onto an ocean of ideas.”
“What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?”
“If mind were not constrained by the rules of physics we don’t know what we are. We don’t know the castles we would build in the air.”
“I think that the future of humanity must be in the imagination. The imagination is a place. It’s a world. It’s a straw being extended by the overmind to a drowning person. And we somehow have to marshal our wherewithal to march off into the imagination, because it’s the only safe haven there is.”
“What we are cannot be unleashed on the surface of a planet without destroying that planet.”
“I think, based on the Timewave and based on reading the newspaper, that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane, global agenda is religious fundamentalism.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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Well, it’s still hot here. How about where you are?
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You know, if you live in the States, well, you’re hot right now no matter where you live.
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I know when I lived in Florida and Texas, well, it didn’t seem to be much of a problem
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because everywhere I went was air-conditioned.
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But out here in Southern California, we seldom get very many hot days.
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And, well, I don’t have air-cond air conditioning here to hide the fact that global climate change is not only real,
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it’s also here to stay.
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And speaking of here to stay, one of the reasons that these podcasts from here in the salon are staying around
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is due to our fellow salonners who make donations to help offset some of our expenses.
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And to that end, I would like to thank Kaylin S., Holger W., John P., and Wes Z.,
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all of whom have made donations this month, bringing the total number of salon donors this year up to 52.
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It’s a small but very elite group of fellow salonners who are the
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backbone of these podcasts, and I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart.
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Now, I realize that some of our more dedicated Terrence McKenna fans are going to be mad at me
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again for cutting out the part of the talk that we’re about to listen to where Terrence was using
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a computer to display his ideas about what he called the time wave. But as I’ve said before, Transcription by CastingWords Also, the part that I cut out today has very little in the way of information in it, because he was talking about what was on his computer screen without any explanation of what he was looking at.
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And without the visuals that went along with his time wave presentation, it wasn’t very easy to follow.
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Now, for our newcomers here, while I do believe that there is still some merit in some of Terrence’s ideas about novelty and its ebb and
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flow, as well as with his thoughts about the nature of time. Nonetheless, in my opinion, his
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mathematical version of the time wave, with its absolute end date of December 21st, 2012, well, I can
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no longer agree with it. And yes, I have to admit that a part, maybe even a large part of Terence’s appeal back in the 80s and 90s
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was his predictions about the end of the world in 2012.
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But so as to not throw out the baby with the bathwater, I have nonetheless included here
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parts of his thinking about time and novelty that led to his time wave idea.
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Now I’m going to try something a little different
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and play two brief sound bites from the talk that we are about to listen to.
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And my reason for doing so is to make the point that
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Terence McKenna’s thoughts and opinions have not lost their shine here in the 21st century.
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Think about the current U.S. election process as you listen to this.
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I think that this perestroika thing is totally unwelcome in the Western democracies because
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we’re running a skin game. I mean, we could use free elections. Free elections are when
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you don’t have federal subsidies for parties which have to have millions of members to qualify.
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I think, based on the time wave and based on reading the newspaper,
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that the great stumbling block now in the formation of a sane global agenda
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is religious fundamentalism.
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agenda is religious fundamentalism.
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You’re going to hear that again in about 40 minutes in context of Terrence’s talk,
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but now let’s start at the beginning of this talk that was recorded in December of 1989.
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That’s right.
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Yeah, we had samples that were five years old that were absolutely terrifying to take.
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It’s like a good wine, honey.
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Yeah, well, I don’t know.
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I got into trouble.
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It was one of those situations.
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I had a curandero friend,
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Don Fidel Mosambite in Pucallpa,
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and he had given me this bottle of ayahuasca as a going-away present.
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And I had kept it for like five years.
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So in five years, you forget what the details are. And I got it out to turn myself and these two other people on.
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And I couldn’t remember whether he said,
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always shake the bottle or never shake the bottle. And there was about an inch and
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a half of sediment in the bottom of this thing. So I said, well, reasoning pharmacologically,
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it’s better to shake it than not to shake it. So I shook it furiously. And then I can’t remember
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what it was. I think I had taken it the week before, a different batch,
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so I thought maybe I’d picked up a little tolerance.
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So I said, well, maybe I picked up a little tolerance.
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Let’s just go, instead of the normal 100 milliliters,
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let’s go for 120.
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And so then I instructed these people
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that it would come on in about an hour and 20 minutes and so forth.
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Well, 15 minutes into it,
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they were both unable to speak. And, you know, it went from there. I mean, I felt like I was
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strapped on a gurney being rushed through the Egyptian afterworld. These huge colonnaded
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pillars were streaking past me. Oh, God.
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Headed for the scales.
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So you do always shake it.
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I don’t know, man.
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I don’t know.
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That one felt, that was a lip-buzzing one.
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I felt that that was coming close to overdose.
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It went on for a long, long time
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and finally, four
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hours into it or something,
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we turned on some lights
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and there were those fan-shaped
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little schmiggies. Well, I hadn’t
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seen those since I gave up
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LSD ten years ago.
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You know, those little things that with the lights
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on or on the walls going
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nye-nye-nye, nye-nye- nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, that bit.
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So it was pretty intense, I think.
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The great thing is, you know, you always come out of it in great shape.
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Ken’s right.
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You feel better the day after than if you hadn’t done it,
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which is what drug can you say that of, you know?
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That the end result is an energy plus.
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Was there like a peak point to it?
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Well, see, I think that we’re on the edge of ayahuasca
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and that what they say, if you really get down with them,
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is that the diet is everything
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and that you’re a tourist and you’re here for a few weeks
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and yes, we’ll give you ayahuasca,
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but what this is really about is controlling diet
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over a period of months, even years,
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and taking a regular regimen of this stuff
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and transforming yourself into some kind of other person
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and Ken’s very right
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these people have some kind of authenticity
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that you can absolutely feel
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it’s in the voice
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I met many ayahuasqueros
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and the good ones all had this voice thing going on that they could cast their
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voice way back in their throat and they kind of purr and they just are very realized beings and
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they have nothing you know i mean you talk about marginal but there’s real authenticity there I would like to go back
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and work with this diet
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and try to understand this
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because I think, see, this all does tie in
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with what we talked about this morning
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about the partnership society in Africa
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and that whole bit
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because I think this ayahuasca thing
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is the last living remnant
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of this kind of way of relating to nature
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because in the heavy ayahuasca-using societies,
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these people are saturated in this stuff.
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I mean, as Ken says, three times a week,
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and it’s really changing how they look at the world,
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and they are
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in empathy, at equilibrium
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aware of the ebb and flow of appropriate
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energy in the situation
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so it’s interesting to me that in the new world
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a human group could have reestablished
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this partnership paradise
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in a situation, an environment, which
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quite closely parallels the African situation of 20,000 years ago. In other words, it’s a continent
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covered by forests. And in this extremely floristically rich environment, these people have gotten together the the fix the fix so that humanness feels good
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and isn’t it interesting that the fix turns out to be not a drug but a shifting of the ratios of
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neurotransmitters already present in the organism as though you know we’re just out of tune. We have evolved out of tune.
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There’s an enzyme problem
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that has caused us to fail to suppress the ego,
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and then this creates a spectrum of cultural effects
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that drives us all nuts.
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And so they have a kind of psycholitic therapy
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to correct that.
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Do they think of the world
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beyond the locality
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where they’re living?
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Oh yeah, they claim to know all about it.
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I mean, you’ll go way up some river
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and with these people
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they’ll say, where are you from?
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Say, I’m from San Francisco, California.
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Say, oh, I know there.
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I go there on Ayahuasca. Hills, two bridges,
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that place. Say, that’s the place. They say, listen, I know it. But they make bigger claims,
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you know. I mean, they go to the center of the Milky Way. That was the original claim that had down there to see what was going on.
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And, you know,
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they have a hidden topology,
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a shamanic world that is real.
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They’re mapping the same dimension
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that we’re punching through to on DMT.
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I mean, if that seems strange to you,
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that half the world could be
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out of sight, as it were,
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you have to remember that
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this October we
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celebrated the 500th
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anniversary of the discovery of
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America, or rather we will in
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- It means
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as recently as 500 years
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ago, this half of the planet
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was unknown to anybody.
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Well, is there any reason that precludes
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that we could be as ignorant of what’s going on?
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I don’t think so.
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It’s just that this new world is a new world in the mind.
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You have to bear in mind when you think about all this
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that nobody knows what mind is.
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None of these fancy pants academics or reductionists.
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No one can explain, for example, how you can look at your open hand,
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form the notion of closing it into a fist, and have it happen.
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This is a philosophical miracle from the point of view of
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modern science. Modern science says that mind cannot influence matter, and yet it’s clearly
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trivial to open and close your fist on decision. Yes, it’s trivial, but we have no notion of how this is possible. How will can initiate activity that is
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transduced down into the mechanical motion of moving bodies around. We don’t even know at this
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late date in the study of the brain whether thought originates in the brain.
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It’s equally plausible to suppose that the brain is some kind of antenna,
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that it no more contains the contents of the mind than that a television set contains the contents of the three major networks.
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It may not work like that.
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It may be that, you know,
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mind is some kind of generalized phenomenon
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that all life attempts to take part in
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so that the idea of my mind and your mind
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may be a basement of language.
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There may simply be a mind
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which we evolve toward an awareness of
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and then you get to use part of it the way a user uses a computer network but
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it is no more the sub that the sum total of the network is in the brain so and
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psychedelics address this entirely mysterious area,
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the area of thought and cognition.
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I mean, we don’t really have good models for what this is,
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but now we have an excellent tool for deconstructing mind,
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for watching it go through all kinds of formative flip-flops.
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I mean, I’ve seen really what seem to me
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amazing things on psychedelics
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that must bear on the problem of the genesis
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and stability of meaning.
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For instance, I’ve had experiences where,
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you know how in Times Square there’s the flasher
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that moves along the building that has the latest news?
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Well, I’ve seen English text moving along before my eyes,
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and then it will begin to informationally degrade,
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like every 20th letter will be transposed or replaced,
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and then every 10th letter, and then every 5th letter,
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until finally I’m just watching gibberish flow by.
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Well, is this a hallucination or is this an insight into the mechanics of meaning itself?
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What is this kind of stuff and can we take it seriously? The problem with studying
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hallucinogens is only the physiological parameters have been deemed worthy of interest. You know,
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what does it do to blood pressure? What does it do to your response to these five standardized
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questions? They don’t want to correlate the mass of data represented by individual tails.
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But when you get a group of people like this together you know there is fair confirmation
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of a pretty outlandish data set
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I mean how many people here have encountered
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non-human entities or what appeared
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to be non-human entities on a psychedelic
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
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you know more than half of us.
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Well, what if the other half of you think about that?
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I mean, well, something that at first, second, and third glance
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does not appear to be at all like Aunt Minnie.
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In other words, if it’s smaller than a bread box or not made of matter and it’s talking
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to you, it’s a safe bet. It’s a non-human entity of some sort, right? So those of you who haven’t
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had this experience, see, the thing to put across is there’s so much loose-headedness in the world
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and this is really a stumbling block for psychedelicos
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because we have people claiming to channel
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11,000-year-old Central Asian herders
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who have a message for mankind,
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and we have people who are in contact
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with all kinds of entities with weird names.
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And so then the people who don’t do psychedelics say, well, this is something
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that’s like channeling or all this other stuff. No, it isn’t, because we are not like those people.
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I mean, I maintain this rigorously, that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness.
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We’re willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want. We just
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believe in fairness so that it’s not ipso facto that there’s no such thing as elves. It’s that
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if you think there are elves, prove it to me. Well, then the problem is that the skeptic,
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the critic says, well, the notion that there are elves is just, you know, you’re sadly
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deluded. You’re living in your own private Idaho. But then you say, well, the proof of the pudding
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is a 15-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment,
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sir? I mean, we’re not like UFO enthusiasts. We’re not telling you to stand in cornfields
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in the dead of night and pray.
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No, no, this will work.
00:18:11 ►
This will work on you,
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you, the reductionist,
00:18:14 ►
you, the doubter,
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you, the constipated,
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egomaniacal father dominator.
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It’ll work.
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And then they just,
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and they say at that point,
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you know, you are a menace
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is what you are
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because there’s no place else
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to go with that game
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you have to say you and your ideas are illegal
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or they say well I guess I’ll have to just try it
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and that’s the point where we’ve come to, is to slowly
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try and create a consensus. One of the things that Ken said, quoting the teacher, that is very
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profound, is that words are alive and that they multiply. And at every recent workshop I’ve given,
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I’ve talked about the notion of memes.
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And those of you who have heard it,
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it’s okay to hear it again because this is the political baggage of this trip.
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It’s that, first of all,
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do you all know what a meme is?
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A meme is to information
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as a gene is to genetic information.
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So the way to think of a meme is it’s the smallest unit that
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an idea can be broken down into without losing its coherency. Ideas are made of memes. And memes,
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like genes, compete in an environment very much like the environment in which Darwinian natural selection goes on.
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So a new idea is a meme,
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and it immediately begins to compete with other memes in the ideological environment.
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And the psychedelic meme is such a meme.
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Now, one profound way in which memes are like genes is genes can be copied. They can be replicated. They can be passed around. So can memes. thing which you remember, I have taken the meme, and if 15 of you remember it, I have propagated
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the meme to 15 new individuals. Each one of them is capable of now passing this meme along,
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provided they replicate it with sufficient fidelity. And this is a problem of information
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degradation, that if the meme is not reinforced
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it peters out
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and someone says well what did so and so say
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and then you get a version that is unrecognizable
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I have this experience all the time
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because people come up to me and say
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you know I thought it was wonderful where you said
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and then they break out with something
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not only that I’ve never said,
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but that I never could have conceived of
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and probably don’t agree with.
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So keeping the meme straight is very important.
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And the psychedelic meme is competitive
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with the just-say-no meme, for example.
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And I believe that on a level playing field,
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the most open-ended memes will prevail. That what is a good meme? A good meme is a meme that
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doesn’t foreclose its options. Because as soon as you have a closed cycle of explanation, whether it’s Egyptian theology or Marxist-Leninism,
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there’s no way out, you know.
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It’s like Gödel’s incommensurability theorem.
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No formal system can generate all possible formal statements within the system.
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In order to keep that option open, you have to preserve a lack of
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closure. And this is one of the things about the dominator ego that makes it a little like being
00:22:13 ►
stupid to be under the influence of the dominator ego. It always searches for closure. It always wants to bring things around and close off the explanatory cycle because it interprets open-endedness as some kind of closure.
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That’s why we always hear about the unified field theory and the end of history and this and that.
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These dominator models seek finality.
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The trick is to live in the presence of the mystery,
00:22:59 ►
not as an unsolved problem,
00:23:02 ►
but as a force for personal transformation. By knowing that the mystery exists,
00:23:10 ►
we are empowered to relate to it and to nurture the mystery within ourselves. In other words,
00:23:18 ►
you don’t kill being. The theory kills, the letter kills, The real facts of the stuff of being
00:23:28 ►
are locked in the primacy of immediate experience.
00:23:33 ►
And this is why the psychedelics are so powerful
00:23:35 ►
because this is what they address.
00:23:38 ►
It’s not an idea.
00:23:39 ►
It’s not an ideology.
00:23:41 ►
It’s a transformation of the felt presence
00:23:43 ►
of immediate experience
00:23:45 ►
the other two things which do that are birth and death and then romantic
00:23:51 ►
overwhelm and has another part to play but this is the biggie the felt the the
00:23:56 ►
transformation of the felt experience of the self and by reclaiming that we dissolve hierarchical structure and we
00:24:07 ►
actually emerge into our full expression as human beings I don’t see how this can
00:24:13 ►
be done without psychedelics it’s dinnertime but we’ll take one question
00:24:21 ►
since you’ve done so much with psychedelics,
00:24:26 ►
have you been able to get to some of those states now
00:24:27 ►
without the use of psychedelics?
00:24:30 ►
The only progress
00:24:32 ►
I’ve made in that area
00:24:33 ►
is this glossolalia,
00:24:35 ►
which you heard me do this morning.
00:24:37 ►
I used to only be able to hear it
00:24:40 ►
when I was stoned.
00:24:41 ►
And then I used to only be able to do it
00:24:44 ►
when I was stoned. And now it to only be able to do it when I was stoned
00:24:45 ►
and now it’s some kind of
00:24:47 ►
creode in me
00:24:49 ►
but it doesn’t
00:24:51 ►
when I do it for you
00:24:53 ►
it doesn’t feel like it
00:24:55 ►
feels when I do it on 5 grams
00:24:57 ►
of psilocybin
00:24:58 ►
generally I resist the idea
00:25:01 ►
that there’s some other way to do it
00:25:03 ►
I think it’s just a waste of time if there is some other way to do it. I think it’s just a waste of time. If there is
00:25:07 ►
some other way to do it, you may be sure it takes a long time and is excruciating. And I would be
00:25:14 ►
alarmed if psychedelic phenomena began to intrude into my normal waking existence, Because it isn’t a state of enlightenment
00:25:25 ►
or at-one-ment or clarity.
00:25:28 ►
Those are lower levels of it.
00:25:30 ►
But the full-on thing is so intense
00:25:33 ►
that it’s very reassuring to know
00:25:35 ►
that a substance is doing this
00:25:37 ►
and that when the substance goes away,
00:25:40 ►
the phenomenon will go away.
00:25:43 ►
It’s so radically different
00:25:45 ►
from ordinary reality
00:25:47 ►
I marvel that we sit in rooms like this
00:25:53 ►
and talk about this
00:25:55 ►
just close your eyes for a moment
00:25:57 ►
and imagine what it’s like to be smashed
00:26:00 ►
and it’s so different from this
00:26:04 ►
and yet we’re operating here at a pretty high level of
00:26:07 ►
efficiency everybody’s focused half of us at least are awake but it’s completely different
00:26:15 ►
and i don’t know if you can understand being stoned by talking about it you can create a
00:26:22 ►
communal empowerment that is permission.
00:26:32 ►
But Plotinus called the mystical experience the flight of the alone to the alone.
00:26:35 ►
And there’s something to that.
00:26:41 ►
Well, I think we bring back maps of the foothills, and that’s very useful. But the private Mount Everest and and jungfraus that we scale there’s no
00:26:48 ►
words for it i mean there are no words for it every single person who has delved into these regions
00:26:56 ►
has gazed upon vistas that no human being had ever seen before or will ever see again
00:27:03 ►
i mean the universe is that huge
00:27:06 ►
that that’s possible
00:27:08 ►
okay well I’ll just start
00:27:13 ►
while we get this thing up and running
00:27:15 ►
and I’ll try to make it
00:27:19 ►
succinct if I can
00:27:23 ►
the notion here is
00:27:25 ►
how this relates to the rest of the workshop
00:27:29 ►
has to do with my belief
00:27:32 ►
that the really important thing
00:27:34 ►
that can be done with psychedelics
00:27:37 ►
in a generalized sense
00:27:38 ►
is that they are
00:27:41 ►
inspiration
00:27:44 ►
for ideas
00:27:46 ►
and that when you sail out into the psychedelic dimension,
00:27:51 ►
you’re sailing out onto an ocean of ideas
00:27:54 ►
and you can lower your nets
00:27:58 ►
and there are many minnows and few whales,
00:28:02 ►
but the goal is to bring up something middle-sized
00:28:06 ►
that is both astonishing but non-lethal,
00:28:10 ►
that you can wrestle into your intellectual life.
00:28:15 ►
And so over the years, especially since 1971,
00:28:19 ►
I have been sort of the victim of an obsessive idea
00:28:24 ►
that I have developed to great lengths.
00:28:27 ►
And the inspiration for this idea is all this time spent in the psychedelic dimension.
00:28:35 ►
Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have to say that.
00:28:37 ►
I could just claim to be a kind of incipient or, you know, idiot savant who had dreamed up this thing.
00:28:49 ►
But I tell you, it springs from an attempt to understand the psychedelic vision.
00:28:56 ►
Generally, the idea is this.
00:29:00 ►
It hypothesizes a quality to reality that science has never recognized or discussed.
00:29:09 ►
And the quality is called novelty.
00:29:23 ►
and creates new emergent properties out of the densification of previous states of existence.
00:29:31 ►
Novelty is the force which caused stars to condense
00:29:36 ►
out of a primal cloud of energy,
00:29:39 ►
caused planets or this planet to evolve life,
00:29:44 ►
caused life to leave the oceans,
00:29:46 ►
caused humanity to emerge out of animal organization,
00:29:51 ►
high culture out of previous culture,
00:29:55 ►
so forth and so on.
00:29:56 ►
And it’s a morally neutral force.
00:29:59 ►
It isn’t good.
00:30:00 ►
It isn’t bad.
00:30:01 ►
It just is a tendency in the universe to conserve complexity
00:30:06 ►
and to build ever more complex phenomena
00:30:11 ►
by incorporating
00:30:12 ►
lower levels of complexity
00:30:17 ►
into higher levels of organization
00:30:20 ►
and this is how biology works
00:30:22 ►
and it’s how the physical sciences work.
00:30:25 ►
And I noticed that if you think about
00:30:28 ►
the career of novelty
00:30:30 ►
as the life of the universe
00:30:33 ►
and you see, you know,
00:30:35 ►
the primal explosion,
00:30:38 ►
its condensation into the primitive galaxies,
00:30:43 ►
the condense at lower and lower temperatures
00:30:46 ►
what is happening is
00:30:48 ►
more and more complex phenomena
00:30:50 ►
become possible
00:30:51 ►
because at very high temperatures
00:30:54 ►
atomic particles
00:30:56 ►
can’t even settle in
00:30:57 ►
to stable orbits
00:30:59 ►
around the nucleus
00:31:02 ►
and form atoms
00:31:03 ►
then eventually atomic chemistry does become possible.
00:31:07 ►
At still lower temperatures, the molecular bond can form
00:31:12 ►
and life can emerge.
00:31:15 ►
And then within the regime of temperatures and pressures
00:31:17 ►
that life operates, complexity proliferates very rapidly
00:31:23 ►
and always conserving itself, always building on the previous levels.
00:31:30 ►
So I thought that this was very interesting and that it could be mathematically modeled.
00:31:44 ►
into deeper novelty takes place ever more rapidly so that novelty in the career of novelty in the world
00:31:49 ►
can be said to be speeding up.
00:31:53 ►
And this, I take 20th century culture then
00:31:57 ►
to be not epiphenomenal but proof of this theorem
00:32:01 ►
that the world is getting spun at a higher and higher rate,
00:32:07 ►
that novel phenomena,
00:32:09 ►
novel effects are proliferating
00:32:11 ►
ever more rapidly.
00:32:14 ►
Okay, so that’s the general notion.
00:32:18 ►
Well, you know, a fantasy about
00:32:21 ►
how can we imagine any way
00:32:24 ►
to save the world and just without regard to the rules of reason particularly, an obvious solution is why not make everybody an inch and a half high? ludicrous idea can be pursued slightly further because the creatures in the DMT place are small.
00:32:49 ►
That’s one of the main features about them. They’re small, and when we talked about them,
00:32:55 ►
we said it would be parsimonious to suppose that they might be from the future. Well, is it possible that the destiny of the human race is to become an extremely
00:33:09 ►
diminutive species that lives in a solid state matrix inside hills, and that this is where we’re
00:33:16 ►
going? We’re just going into the mountains, sinking away from the surface into the kind of solid state crystalline matrix
00:33:26 ►
that we know the earth to be
00:33:28 ►
I mean I don’t have a lot attached to this
00:33:32 ►
it’s sort of charming
00:33:34 ►
sort of bananas
00:33:36 ►
but the weird feeling of recognition
00:33:41 ►
and wonderment that you have in the presence
00:33:44 ►
of these DMT creatures
00:33:45 ►
may mean that they are a future state of humanity.
00:33:50 ►
And this peculiar aura that goes with the experience where you can tell you’re underground,
00:33:55 ►
you’re way, way underground.
00:33:59 ►
It’s a gnome, a gnomic existence.
00:34:04 ►
It’s a gnome, a gnomic existence.
00:34:10 ►
And these jeweled machines and toys which they offer you,
00:34:15 ►
the mythology of gnomes is that they are master tinkerers.
00:34:19 ►
You know, they build wonderful objects.
00:34:25 ►
So, you know, maybe when the world really becomes alarmed,
00:34:31 ►
all kinds of possibilities can be found for a sane human future.
00:34:39 ►
This is maybe a good thing to leave you with or to talk about in the final meeting.
00:34:43 ►
You know, we generally pretty much strive for agreement, but there are certain key points where I haven’t seen how you can have it both ways. And one is this whole issue the human world and the natural world
00:35:06 ►
when there are so many
00:35:08 ►
of us
00:35:08 ►
I mean
00:35:09 ►
turning everybody into the size of a
00:35:14 ►
fruit fly is one possibility
00:35:16 ►
but we don’t
00:35:17 ►
haven’t been making a lot of progress
00:35:19 ►
along this line of research
00:35:21 ►
recently
00:35:22 ►
so it doesn’t look like it’s a near term thing
00:35:26 ►
well then the more sophisticated version
00:35:29 ►
of that is can the human
00:35:32 ►
entelechy be downloaded into circuitry
00:35:36 ►
can we somehow have
00:35:38 ►
an existence that we would recognize
00:35:41 ►
as an existence without a body
00:35:44 ►
and do we want that? And what is that like?
00:35:47 ►
And what does it say about our souls if we choose that?
00:35:51 ►
You know, these are pretty strange questions.
00:35:54 ►
What is human nature in the absolute absence of nature?
00:36:01 ►
You know, a very interesting fantasy
00:36:03 ►
that you can undertake as a lifetime project
00:36:07 ►
I do this all the time
00:36:09 ►
is to imagine what you would make the world be like
00:36:14 ►
if it could be any way you wanted
00:36:17 ►
and you know in the first half hour
00:36:21 ►
of exercising this fantasy
00:36:23 ►
you realize that all our imaginings are conditioned
00:36:28 ►
by the constraints of matter. I mean, so you start out and you say, well, if the world,
00:36:33 ►
if I could have anything, oh, I don’t know, I guess I’d live in the Frank Lloyd Wright
00:36:39 ►
waterfall house and have my Testa Rosa parked outside outside and then you realize you know that this is a
00:36:47 ►
stupid fantasy and that you could live in the leningrad library if you wanted and have your
00:36:53 ►
space shuttle parked outside and then you realize that’s a stupid fantasy and you and and then you
00:36:59 ►
realize you know that there are no limits that if mind were not constrained
00:37:05 ►
by the rules of physics,
00:37:07 ►
we don’t know what we are.
00:37:09 ►
We don’t know the castles
00:37:10 ►
that we would build in the air.
00:37:13 ►
One of the interesting things
00:37:14 ►
about virtual reality
00:37:15 ►
is the idea that
00:37:17 ►
we’re going to be able to
00:37:19 ►
wander among
00:37:21 ►
the three-dimensional constructions
00:37:23 ►
of the imagination
00:37:24 ►
with no concern whatsoever for cost-effective use of materials
00:37:29 ►
because materials are electrons and light and computer commands.
00:37:34 ►
It costs no more to have a gothic cathedral than to have a stucco duplex.
00:37:42 ►
So, you know, it’s…
00:37:45 ►
Maybe we could live there.
00:37:47 ►
Well, I think that the future of humanity
00:37:50 ►
must be in the imagination.
00:37:53 ►
That somehow the imagination is a place.
00:37:58 ►
It’s a world.
00:37:59 ►
It’s a straw being extended by the overmind
00:38:03 ►
to a drowning person
00:38:05 ►
and we have to somehow
00:38:07 ►
marshal our wherewithal
00:38:10 ►
to march off
00:38:12 ►
into the imagination
00:38:13 ►
because it’s the only safe haven
00:38:15 ►
there is
00:38:17 ►
what we are cannot be unleashed
00:38:20 ►
on the surface of a planet
00:38:21 ►
without destroying that planet
00:38:23 ►
I mean we’ve only possessed serious technology for a hundred years.
00:38:29 ►
You know, before that, nobody had nothing.
00:38:32 ►
I mean, it was a big chore to melt metal and stuff like that.
00:38:35 ►
The big guns of being able to push matter and energy around
00:38:40 ►
on any significant scale have only been in our hands since 1945.
00:38:45 ►
And look, the planet is a complete mess.
00:38:49 ►
So if we envision an existence of hundreds of years
00:38:54 ►
and any kind of future for ourselves,
00:38:57 ►
we’re going to have to make some major choices.
00:39:00 ►
Are we the stewards of the earth
00:39:02 ►
to become kind of toged gardeners of a world reborn? Or is it our Viking plunder genes? Do we want to build starships the size of Rhode Island and set out for Alpha Centauri with plans to strike deeper into the nearby galaxy? What is it going to be?
00:39:25 ►
Or are these fantasies based on driving the future car
00:39:31 ►
using only the rear-view mirror?
00:39:33 ►
Are there sideways options?
00:39:36 ►
What about these elf, fairy, other dimensions?
00:39:40 ►
How seriously can we take that?
00:39:43 ►
What about getting into the imagination
00:39:46 ►
through a kind of perfection of yoga
00:39:48 ►
can all these things that have always been reserved
00:39:51 ►
for BDI’d holy people be democratized
00:39:55 ►
so they have impact in everybody’s everyday life
00:39:58 ►
is that a possibility
00:40:00 ►
you know
00:40:02 ►
what has to happen
00:40:05 ►
is an abandonment of the idea
00:40:08 ►
that only certain classes of solutions
00:40:11 ►
will be considered
00:40:13 ►
like currently in the world
00:40:15 ►
the only class of solutions that can be considered
00:40:19 ►
for any problem are solutions which make a buck
00:40:22 ►
that’s the main idea
00:40:24 ►
and I already hear that the defense industrial complex
00:40:29 ►
is going to transform itself into the industrial detoxification complex.
00:40:35 ►
And they will just take those huge military budgets
00:40:39 ►
and use all that money now to clean up the mess they made
00:40:43 ►
creating the weapons that now have to be destroyed
00:40:47 ►
in order to make a sane world.
00:40:50 ►
Is this nutty or what?
00:40:51 ►
I mean, it’s like putting Nazis in charge of a Jewish resettlement program.
00:40:55 ►
You can’t understand the thinking at all, you know.
00:41:04 ►
So, you know,
00:41:05 ►
the bad news for people
00:41:07 ►
who like to just roll a bomber
00:41:09 ►
and put their feet up,
00:41:10 ►
which I certainly number myself
00:41:13 ►
among them,
00:41:14 ►
is that, you know,
00:41:16 ►
there’s political shit
00:41:18 ►
to be shoveled
00:41:20 ►
because,
00:41:22 ►
and it’s mostly informational.
00:41:25 ►
It’s mostly public relations.
00:41:28 ►
This is why, in a way, there’s hope
00:41:30 ►
because, you know,
00:41:32 ►
you may be the general of the Grand Army.
00:41:37 ►
You may have your finger on the thermonuclear button,
00:41:39 ►
but you can’t get respect at the breakfast table.
00:41:43 ►
This is a universal phenomenon
00:41:45 ►
I’m sure Stalin had to hear terrible things
00:41:50 ►
at the breakfast table from his children
00:41:52 ►
and every other dominator
00:41:55 ►
is in this position
00:41:57 ►
there’s no peace because you have to have women around
00:42:01 ►
to bury your children and then half of these children are women
00:42:04 ►
and there’s just no escape
00:42:06 ►
from it
00:42:06 ►
so
00:42:07 ►
you just lost a group
00:42:14 ►
well I think this is the great
00:42:19 ►
principle which makes change
00:42:21 ►
possible that information
00:42:24 ►
travels everywhere and the best
00:42:27 ►
ideas will win. If we can level the ideological playing field, as the stakes are raised higher
00:42:34 ►
and higher, more and more desperate options will be considered and eventually they will even come
00:42:40 ►
to such mad fringes as ourselves and say, you know,
00:42:46 ►
well, everything else has failed.
00:42:49 ►
What do you people have in mind?
00:42:51 ►
Yeah.
00:42:52 ►
It seems to me that
00:42:54 ►
the problems that are happening
00:42:55 ►
are happening more frequently
00:42:56 ►
is that when a mass of people
00:42:58 ►
change their mind,
00:42:59 ►
is what’s happening in Europe right now,
00:43:01 ►
the major changes just happen overnight.
00:43:06 ►
And that that’s one of the things that can be happening
00:43:07 ►
the mind itself changes sufficiently
00:43:09 ►
so that the climate
00:43:11 ►
a switch over
00:43:12 ►
yes well one of the most interesting things
00:43:15 ►
that I think is going on
00:43:17 ►
in the world with all this stuff
00:43:19 ►
in Eastern Europe and China and so forth and so on
00:43:21 ►
that’s not been commented
00:43:23 ►
upon very much and you can see why when I comment on it
00:43:27 ►
all of these changes are driven
00:43:31 ►
by huge crowds
00:43:33 ►
massive crowds
00:43:35 ►
never in history have rulers
00:43:39 ►
had to face crowds of a million people
00:43:42 ►
standing in the center square of the city
00:43:44 ►
screaming resign
00:43:46 ►
resign
00:43:46 ►
Erich Honecker when the notes
00:43:50 ►
came out of the East German
00:43:51 ►
Politburo meeting he was all
00:43:53 ►
for turning the army loose on these
00:43:55 ►
people and the Krenz
00:43:58 ►
and the people around him said
00:43:59 ►
Erich you can’t beat
00:44:02 ►
up 400,000
00:44:04 ►
people there’s no way to do it
00:44:06 ►
and
00:44:07 ►
you know somebody said
00:44:10 ►
you need 100,000 people
00:44:12 ►
to wag the tail of the
00:44:14 ►
Bolshevik dog
00:44:16 ►
you need half a million people to kick
00:44:18 ►
the Bolshevik dog out of the house
00:44:20 ►
and there are more
00:44:22 ►
than Bolshevik dogs
00:44:24 ►
needing to be moved around.
00:44:26 ►
I think that this perestroika thing
00:44:28 ►
is totally unwelcome in the Western democracies
00:44:31 ►
because we’re running a skin game.
00:44:35 ►
I mean, we could use free elections.
00:44:38 ►
Free elections are when you don’t have
00:44:41 ►
federal subsidies for parties
00:44:43 ►
which have to have millions of members
00:44:45 ►
to qualify
00:44:47 ►
we could use a renunciation
00:44:52 ►
of the leading role of the
00:44:54 ►
Repubblico Democratisti party
00:44:56 ►
which has ruled this country for 200 years
00:44:59 ►
with an iron hand
00:45:01 ►
all of this openness needs to come here
00:45:04 ►
our premises, we just live in an
00:45:07 ►
illusion. I mean, my hope for the Soviet Union is that it will become so free because, you know,
00:45:13 ►
there’s nothing like a convert to really get obsessive about the pure stuff, that they will
00:45:20 ►
get so free that they will shame this country. I mean, this country, you know,
00:45:25 ►
when you think about what’s happening with reproductive freedom
00:45:30 ►
and the notion that we’re considering turning half the population
00:45:35 ►
into second-class citizens who could be forced by law
00:45:39 ►
to face a life-threatening experience that they’re not interested in,
00:45:44 ►
I mean, this kind of thinking is very bizarre.
00:45:48 ►
Thinking about the future
00:45:51 ►
and what the challenges will be
00:45:53 ►
and where people like ourselves
00:45:55 ►
are going to have to stand in all this,
00:45:58 ►
I think, based on the time wave
00:46:00 ►
and based on reading the newspaper,
00:46:02 ►
that the great stumbling block now in the
00:46:07 ►
formation of a sane global agenda is religious fundamentalism. And all three of the monotheistic
00:46:18 ►
religions are just guilty, guilty, guilty of this malarkey. I mean, Islamic fundamentalism is going to make
00:46:27 ►
enormous gains in the next little while. I see the resonance to the gains of Islam that we looked at
00:46:34 ►
last night coming in the fact that if you combine Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan into one country, it will be the world’s largest Muslim country.
00:46:48 ►
It’s almost twice the size of Iran. This is coming. As the Soviet Union twists apart,
00:46:55 ►
the Islam is going to be the major real estate windfall is going to go in their direction.
00:47:02 ►
is going to go in their direction.
00:47:08 ►
Zionist fundamentalism in the Middle East is making it impossible
00:47:09 ►
to get a solution there
00:47:11 ►
in a situation where 4 million people
00:47:14 ►
are arrayed against 500 million people.
00:47:18 ►
From a historical perspective,
00:47:20 ►
this is not, you know,
00:47:22 ►
it’s a potential earthquake
00:47:24 ►
in the historical continuum.
00:47:27 ►
And Christian fundamentalism has completely distorted the social agenda in this country,
00:47:34 ►
not only on the issue of women’s rights and that sort of thing,
00:47:39 ►
but I believe this whole drug thing is a reworking of the themes of the Garden of Eden story,
00:47:46 ►
and that they are just so appalled at the notion,
00:47:50 ►
because somewhere in that movement there must be thinkers,
00:47:55 ►
and they see this for exactly what it is.
00:47:58 ►
It’s paganism. It’s secular humanism.
00:48:02 ►
it’s secular humanism it’s reconnecting to the earth
00:48:05 ►
by driving around the entire dominator metaphor
00:48:10 ►
I mean the peculiar thing about
00:48:12 ►
the god of the old testament
00:48:16 ►
is that of all religious ontologies on earth
00:48:19 ►
this is the most male dominated
00:48:22 ►
no mother
00:48:24 ►
no sister, no lover, no female offspring.
00:48:30 ►
I mean, yes, minor traditions if you happen to be a scholar,
00:48:34 ►
but the basic thing is so male.
00:48:37 ►
And I think the attraction of monotheism is its philosophical parsimony.
00:48:46 ►
One God makes sense, has appeal, especially if you’re into closure.
00:48:51 ►
But the problem is that we image in our very difficult position vis-a-vis the feminine, intuition, the earth, and any kind of ability to feel
00:49:29 ►
our situation. I mean, this kind of cultural collapse, if allowed to run to true Armageddon,
00:49:37 ►
is death by anesthesia. We cannot feel what is going on. I mean, the tube brings these horrendous images of, you know,
00:49:48 ►
pogrom and oppression and lies and toxification and wheedling and weaselness, and we can’t
00:49:57 ►
grip the emotional levers to become alarmed. And I don’t know, maybe this is good. Maybe alarm and panic have no place
00:50:07 ►
that we now have to get very steely-eyed and cold as we move into the real clinches of this thing.
00:50:15 ►
But it’s in our lifetime. And there’s very little talk about this. In capitalism, no planning
00:50:21 ►
extends beyond four or five years. In American democracy, no planning extends beyond four or five years. In American democracy, no planning
00:50:26 ►
extends beyond four years. Everybody has their nose right up against it, and yet they’re sailing
00:50:33 ►
along at a thousand miles an hour toward a brick wall that’s just ahead. So, you know, planning,
00:50:40 ►
not necessarily centralized control, but planning, which is what shamanism has always been.
00:50:48 ►
I mean, the shaman told the people where the reindeer had moved.
00:50:54 ►
He told the people where the game was going to be.
00:50:58 ►
He told the people how they should move.
00:51:01 ►
He was a futurist, a forecaster, a planner. And this is what we need, this kind of
00:51:07 ►
intuition with integrity that isn’t depending on statistical models, which are always wrong.
00:51:15 ►
I mean, you must have noticed, everybody here who reads Time Magazine or the New York Times or the
00:51:23 ►
London Times, you must have noticed this weird
00:51:26 ►
paradox which is you
00:51:27 ►
know more than most of the experts
00:51:30 ►
you’re
00:51:32 ►
better at predicting
00:51:33 ►
the price of gold, the movement
00:51:36 ►
of the stock market, the political situation
00:51:38 ►
in Argentina than
00:51:40 ►
the experts and have you noticed
00:51:42 ►
on NPR when they pull together
00:51:44 ►
three of these guys so and so
00:51:46 ►
Georgetown University
00:51:47 ►
Sovietologist and they’re all saying
00:51:49 ►
and you say well these guys are
00:51:51 ►
alright they seem tolerable
00:51:54 ►
well they’ve given their lives
00:51:55 ►
to understanding this stuff and what do you
00:51:58 ►
care and you’re a fully
00:51:59 ►
empowered player when you sit
00:52:01 ►
down with them in many cases
00:52:03 ►
you know more than they do. It’s because their intuition is totally dead. They can’t make sense out of the situation sense of ordinary people needs to be reflected.
00:52:29 ►
And what that means is an abandonment of ideology.
00:52:33 ►
Ideology is something imposed from above and it’s a filter.
00:52:38 ►
Then only certain solutions are allowed through.
00:52:42 ►
And, you know, I don’t have a political agenda. I praise chaos,
00:52:51 ►
because I think the main thing working to recreate a new world is the impossibility of controlling
00:52:58 ►
the old world. I love it when they say it’s moving too fast. I love it because I know it means that they cannot get a hold on it.
00:53:08 ►
I mean, can you imagine trying to be the CIA
00:53:10 ►
and trying to control the situation in East Germany?
00:53:14 ►
I mean, you just throw up your hands and walk away,
00:53:18 ►
which is what we want you to do.
00:53:19 ►
And then, lo and behold, it flowers according to its own dynamics.
00:53:24 ►
Right now, the world is moving faster
00:53:26 ►
than the meddlers can meddle and that’s why it has this wonderfully fecund and optimistic aura to it
00:53:35 ►
and you know i’m amazed at the naysayers and the people who say well the instability is increasing
00:53:42 ►
daily in eastern europe nonsense It’s not increasing daily.
00:53:47 ►
I mean, there have been some tight necks,
00:53:49 ►
but I think fundamental decisions have been made to let it unravel.
00:53:57 ►
What seems to happen when political structures dissolve?
00:54:01 ►
Well, you’re right about the East.
00:54:03 ►
I mean, my God, the appetite for mysticism of these Russians is dissolved. Well, you’re right about the East. I mean, my God, the appetite for mysticism
00:54:06 ►
of these Russians is amazing.
00:54:08 ►
And, you know, perestroikisti that I am,
00:54:12 ►
even I recoiled when he embraced the Pope.
00:54:15 ►
I thought, you know,
00:54:17 ►
Kmart, it’s okay, but the Pope,
00:54:20 ►
my God, where does it end?
00:54:24 ►
Which I suppose shows that I’m
00:54:26 ►
politically constipated
00:54:27 ►
you know I mean
00:54:28 ►
but well I just
00:54:32 ►
saw a newspaper this morning
00:54:33 ►
so I’ve cheated on you
00:54:35 ►
he who has seen the most recent
00:54:38 ►
newspaper
00:54:38 ►
will win
00:54:41 ►
apparently
00:54:44 ►
Shevardnadze has said it’s a mess
00:54:46 ►
and they’ll just chop off all
00:54:48 ►
arms shipments to everybody
00:54:50 ►
and everybody else should do the same
00:54:52 ►
and that this is the problem
00:54:54 ►
that all these governments are armed to the teeth
00:54:57 ►
and enough
00:54:58 ►
so I don’t know
00:55:01 ►
Shevardnadze, the foreign minister
00:55:03 ►
yeah
00:55:04 ►
well see this is another thing that’s interesting about virtual reality.
00:55:10 ►
You know, it costs now in California basically $200,000
00:55:15 ►
to live in the kind of home that when I was young you bought for $25,000.
00:55:24 ►
But in virtual reality, building costs drop to zero. What if we
00:55:30 ►
could wean people away from matter? I mean, what if the tackiest thing you could possibly be into
00:55:37 ►
would be a physical object, a physical object? And so people would live in white walled
00:55:45 ►
apartments and no paintings would hang on these walls
00:55:49 ►
and no knick knacks
00:55:51 ►
and six thousand dollar quartz crystals ripped out of
00:55:54 ►
Brazil and all of that stuff
00:55:57 ►
and yet everybody could be
00:56:00 ►
as hedonic and as stuff oriented
00:56:04 ►
as they wanted,
00:56:05 ►
but none of it would be real.
00:56:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:12 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:17 ►
Talk about a fantasy world.
00:56:19 ►
That $200,000 house in California that Terrence just mentioned
00:56:23 ►
is most likely going for over a million dollars today,
00:56:27 ►
which is why I don’t own a house.
00:56:29 ►
But when I lived in Texas and in Florida, I did own houses, and you know what?
00:56:34 ►
It’s a lot less stressful to be a renter, so I don’t mind at all.
00:56:40 ►
A few minutes ago, when Terrence said that he who gets hold of the first newspaper rules,
00:56:45 ►
well, what was the first thing that you thought of?
00:56:48 ►
Yeah, why didn’t he just use his phone to check the net?
00:56:52 ►
Well, the talk that we just listened to was recorded 18 years before the iPhone was even invented.
00:56:59 ►
In fact, this talk even came three years before the World Wide Web came into being.
00:57:05 ►
this talk even came three years before the World Wide Web came into being. To tell the truth,
00:57:11 ►
I still miss those lazy Sunday mornings when it took hours to get through the morning paper.
00:57:16 ►
Coming from a Chicago area family, Sunday mornings always included three papers,
00:57:22 ►
the Daily News, the Sun Times, and the Tribune. And even as an adult, it was the Sunday morning comic strips that I always read first.
00:57:27 ►
Well, that’s a world that is no longer available to us.
00:57:31 ►
We now live in a completely different time, and to make our way,
00:57:35 ►
we most definitely need completely different attitudes than we had back then.
00:57:40 ►
At least I do. So, what do you think about Terrence’s analysis that the opinions of our political experts are flawed
00:57:44 ►
because their intuition is dead.
00:57:47 ►
Well, I think that a perfect example of this is the fact that not one, not a single political
00:57:53 ►
expert one year ago predicted the rise of Donald Trump. And as we listen to political experts from
00:57:59 ►
the two main parties debating the future, we all can tell that they simply don’t have a clue.
00:58:06 ►
They keep arguing about ways that the members of their two parties
00:58:09 ►
are going to swing in November,
00:58:10 ►
but they completely ignore the fact that the two main parties combined
00:58:14 ►
don’t even number one half of the eligible voters.
00:58:18 ►
And the reason for this is that the majority of people in this country
00:58:22 ►
are totally fed up with both of their parties.
00:58:24 ►
So something new is that the majority of people in this country are totally fed up with both of their parties, so something new is in the wind, and current analysis isn’t worth a hoot anymore.
00:58:30 ►
Actually, it doesn’t really matter who wins the U.S. presidency in November in regards to the
00:58:36 ►
social upheaval that’ll follow, because I don’t think either side is going to go down gracefully
00:58:41 ►
this time. I’m really afraid it’s going to get messy.
00:58:48 ►
Now, did you notice that around 38 minutes into this talk,
00:58:52 ►
a woman asked a question after first referring to what was then the fact that in Europe,
00:58:54 ►
a lot of people were changing their minds.
00:58:57 ►
Now, keep in mind that this talk was recorded in 1989,
00:59:01 ►
which was when the Berlin Wall was finally opened.
00:59:05 ►
Now, today, it seems that a lot of people are changing their minds about the European Union.
00:59:11 ►
How long do you think it will be before people in the states begin to change their mind about
00:59:16 ►
this union of 50 somewhat independent states that all have varying degrees of antagonism
00:59:22 ►
between one another?
00:59:23 ►
I don’t think that anyone knows the answer to that question.
00:59:26 ►
However, I also don’t know any historian who is willing to say that
00:59:30 ►
the United States of America is a union that will continue on for another 500 years.
00:59:37 ►
Something’s got to give eventually.
00:59:39 ►
So what did you think about Terence’s speculation that we may be going into the mountain,
00:59:44 ►
So what did you think about Terence’s speculation that we may be going into the mountain,
00:59:50 ►
as he described the possibility of becoming a little person in a solid-state matrix after we die?
00:59:54 ►
Well, I think that he was just throwing this out there as food for thought.
01:00:00 ►
But just this morning I read an interesting news account that may shed some new light on it.
01:00:06 ►
Apparently, archaeologists have discovered that the Great Pyramid at Palenque is built over a spring and has a tunnel leading underground. The article also said that new
01:00:12 ►
interpretations of the inscriptions on the sarcophagus in the temple indicate that the
01:00:18 ►
dead king was to make his way into the underground, which of course brings to mind the Greek myths of
01:00:24 ►
Persephone.
01:00:25 ►
So it looks like there may still be a lot that we don’t yet know about the Mayans, so
01:00:30 ►
stay tuned, as the old radio guys used to say.
01:00:34 ►
We also just heard Terence say that each descent into novelty takes place with increasing frequency.
01:00:41 ►
So I wonder what he would say about today’s world conditions, not to mention the very
01:00:45 ►
novel politics taking place in the States. These plunges into new and ever more complex forms of
01:00:52 ►
novelty, well they seem to me to be following the trajectory of a rapidly dribbling basketball.
01:00:59 ►
Now before I go, I want to report that I’ve been very remiss this year in not mentioning the fact that our
01:01:05 ►
longtime friend of the salon, Zach Leary, has his own podcast. Not knowing that, in my case,
01:01:13 ►
is a result of my dropping out of Facebook, where I often exchange messages with Zach.
01:01:18 ►
So I guess that there still is some news that the Facebook audience gets, which I seem to miss.
01:01:25 ►
some news that the Facebook audience gets and which I seem to miss. Sorry about that, Zach.
01:01:32 ►
But the fact is that Zach’s podcast is already a year old and he’s put out a podcast every week,
01:01:37 ►
which I’m here to tell you is much more difficult than you might imagine. His podcast is called It’s All Happening with Zach Leary. And now that I’ve listened to his last few podcasts,
01:01:43 ►
I plan on starting at the beginning and catching up.
01:01:46 ►
In fact, if you want to give it a listen yourself, you may want to begin with his podcast number 45,
01:01:52 ►
which features Duncan Trussell as his guest.
01:01:55 ►
Since I know that there are a lot of Joe Rogan fans here in the salon,
01:02:00 ►
I assume that also goes for Duncan Trussell fans, of which I’m one myself.
01:02:04 ►
I assume that also goes for Duncan Trussell fans, of which I’m one myself.
01:02:09 ►
Now, Zach has done a really great job of creating a very professional program,
01:02:14 ►
and he also happens to have one of the best radio voices that I’ve heard.
01:02:21 ►
As you know, we’ve featured Zach’s dad, Dr. Timothy Leary, here in the salon on quite a few occasions.
01:02:25 ►
In fact, the Leary Trust has not only allowed me to podcast Dr. Leary’s audio works, they also gave the salon a very generous donation to keep us going during one
01:02:30 ►
of our more difficult periods. During all that time, Zach has been a really good friend to us
01:02:36 ►
here in the salon, and I hope that we can repay the favor by following his podcast as well.
01:02:42 ►
And I’ll put a link to his podcast website in today’s program notes,
01:02:45 ►
which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:02:49 ►
And so in closing, I thought I’d like to read once again
01:02:53 ►
something that Dr. Leary said and which many of us have repeated over and over.
01:02:58 ►
At least we’ve repeated the last three words in this quote
01:03:01 ►
that I’m going to read for you right now.
01:03:04 ►
Timothy Leary once said,
01:03:06 ►
Admit it, you aren’t like them.
01:03:09 ►
You’re not even close.
01:03:11 ►
You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them,
01:03:14 ►
watch the same mindless television shows as they do,
01:03:18 ►
maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes.
01:03:21 ►
But it seems that the more you try to fit in,
01:03:23 ►
the more you feel like an outsider
01:03:25 ►
watching the normal people as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club
01:03:31 ►
passwords like, have a nice day and weather’s awful today, huh? You yearn inside to say forbidden
01:03:38 ►
things like, tell me something that makes you cry, or what do you think deja vu is for? Face it, you even want to talk to the girl in the elevator.
01:03:48 ►
But what if the girl in the elevator and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work are thinking the same thing?
01:03:55 ►
Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger?
01:04:01 ►
Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle.
01:04:03 ►
Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.
01:04:06 ►
Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
01:04:15 ►
from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.