Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://freeross.org[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Democracy is this innate belief in people. It’s a psychedelic way of doing it. It’s the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy to my mind is, of course, the ideal. But anarchy has to be mediated with policy, and the way you do that is through democracy.”
“The Earth is in far worse shape than we think.”
“This notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics is, as far as I can see, the only way out.”
“The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits. They’re idealogical habits, unexamined ways of thinking about reality.”
“Besides the monotheistic thing, the really odd thing about Western religion is the persistent idea that god will come tangential to history.”
“People think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism. I don’t think so. I think it’s an invitation to a high degree of awareness.”
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Transcript
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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, you might have noticed that I haven’t posted a new podcast for a few weeks.
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And the main reason is that, well, I’ve been kind of, well, I’ve been a little under the weather, I guess I should say.
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But I’m now on the mend and am beginning to feel like my old self once again, with an emphasis on the old.
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And I’ll have a bit more to say about that after we first listen to today’s talk by Terrence McKenna.
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But first I’d like to thank some of our fellow Saloners
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who didn’t take the past three weeks off
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and instead made donations to help offset
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some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And these faithful people are
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Kira S., Joel W., Fabian R., FloatOnSNJLLC, JeanRedF, Michael Z., Jim from Venice, Robert M.,
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and a donation came in along with a nice card via snail mail from Deborah R.
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So while I was goofing off more or less,
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these wonderful salonners didn’t forget about us,
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and I thank them all from the very bottom of my heart.
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Well, at long last, I’m finally able to post the last session of the December 1989 Terrence McKenna Workshop
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that, well, we’ve been listening to for going on two months now, I guess.
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So without any further ado, let’s join him now.
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You find out it’s a long walk to the bathroom, and who needs that?
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So then you say, well, I could live anywhere, so why should I live at Versailles?
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It’s a pain in the neck.
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This would be my hope for virtual reality, that I think I’ve told you this fantasy before, and virtual reality brings it one step closer. Here’s my vision of the future Eden.
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ago, it’s absolutely, there are no cities, there’s no visible industry, there are no roads, no measurable pollution, no radiation. And when you zoom down on this world, you discover human beings
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apparently living in some kind of primitive state, naked, nomadic, tribal,
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so forth and so on,
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but at equilibrium
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and seemingly amazingly healthy.
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Well, so then you further zoom
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into this scene
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and now you’re behind the eyebrows
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of one of these naked,
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nomadic human beings
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and you discover that there are menus when you close your eyes
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and there’s an interface when you close your eyes and you can just pull down these menus
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and sit down on the beach and move off into worlds that are different from your own ecosystem or that are
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highly technically advanced, that are, you know, much more technically advanced than our own world,
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but it’s all virtual. It all exists in a completely non-invasive, non-destructive dimension.
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The entire thing is being run by a computer
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the size of a Maytag washer
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that is kept in the Potala in Huasa.
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And other than that black object,
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everything else on the earth appears completely primitive.
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But inside the minds of these people,
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there are myriad virtual worlds
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that they’re moving in and participating in and living in. This is doable.
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The question is how to avoid cultural crack-up. I mean, if we had 10 million dollars, we could
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deliver this for a hundred spoiled rich people. The trick is, how are we going to deliver it to
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five million people and navigate ourselves through the various energy locks, resource locks,
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and political mind locks that we have to get through to get to that place?
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But that’s my idea of living in the imagination.
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A realized physical body in a perfected and preserved natural environment,
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in a perfected and preserved natural environment,
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but a massive interface with the world of human culture that has been turned into light and electrons and data streams
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and nowhere comes to rest to distort matter
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or to force its imprint onto matter.
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Does that seem seem that seems several
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steps ahead
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I’m talking about the in between
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you mean getting from here
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oh how to do it
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well somebody said to me
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recently if you had
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an unlimited amount of money
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how would you use it to save the world?
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And, you know, a fighter plane, a trainer fighter, costs a hundred million dollars,
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and they order these things in lots of 500 at a time. If somebody were to give a hundred million dollars to some kind of foundation that was
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called the Save the World Foundation, a hundred million dollars will, invested, will generate
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ten million, eight to ten million dollars a year. This is a lot of money when spent in the
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information domain.
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It’s nothing when you spend it on military hardware,
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but if you spend it on TV spots, it gets you somewhere.
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I think there hasn’t been a massive investment in solutions.
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We think, you know, our, and I’m speaking for all of us,
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maybe I’m wrong, but we don’t correctly perceive the scale of the various forces working in society.
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I mean, you have the military-industrial complex and you have the New Age.
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Well, are these approximately equal or are we comparing an aphid to an elephant here?
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Well, it’s very hard to say
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because they operate in different domains.
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In the realm of ideas,
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we seem fairly powerful.
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They seem fairly exhausted.
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They control the legal machinery.
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They don’t even control the media.
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The media is a really perverse creature.
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It’s driven by an utterly amoral curiosity.
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And if you’re weird enough,
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they’ll come to you
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and put you in front of millions of people,
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no matter whether you blew up a school bus or what.
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It’s only if you’ve got somebody that’s got the bucks
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that can buy the space for you.
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That’s not true because it’s about public relations
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people they can get you on anything
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if they know what they’re doing
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this is a public relations person
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well see
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I think that
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the new age has its
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patrons but the amounts
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of money that move around
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are trivial in terms of getting anything
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done. If a foundation had five to ten million dollars a year to spend, and it spent it in a
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truly visionary way, I mean, the institution itself has to be correct. It’s just not a free
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ride for, you know, the people doing it it but there are projects that could be pushed forward
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this virtual reality thing
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when I went down to see those guys
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I assumed that it would be a shiny glass box
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and hurrying executives and this and that
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I mean it is after all a major software company
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oh my god
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it’s just a science fair project run amok.
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And everybody has hair down to their ass, and their cigarette butts stabbed out in
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styrofoam cups and waste paper everywhere.
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And the whole setup was put together and run for under $300,000, you know?
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thousand dollars you know so for pennies they create electronic slingshots with which to fell the global dominator goliath and i said i thought i’d have to stand in line down here where’s disney
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where’s everybody aren’t you guys going to glory and they said oh no it’s kind of you know people
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don’t take us seriously and they
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say we need to prove this and that and the other thing i don’t know yeah i just kind of feeling
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like all these enormous humanitarian projects that require a lot of money seem like they would
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somehow have to come after people started talking to each other stopping being afraid of life afraid
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of their feelings afraid of their feelings, afraid of their fellows.
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I remember hearing you once say something like, what was it, ordinary people talking to ordinary people.
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From my experience, I really remember that, because from my experience, that’s really difficult.
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And I think that’s why my, you know, the psychedelic experience was difficult for me,
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because there was a lot of emotions. was I think ordinary me communicating with ordinary me
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I found it really scary and difficult
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I wonder why we’re so afraid of each other
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at least speaking for myself
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why that’s so scary
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and afraid of the feelings
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and how that could be changed
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that’s where the tension is
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between the individual and the group
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well, you know, this is the ego thing
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and the need to dissolve
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but the need to be safe
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and it’s very hard to learn surrender
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I mean, often after these groups
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people come up to me sometimes
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and say, you know, I thought I was crazy
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until I heard you speak. And, you know,
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that means that the meme, the bridge is the strength, because this is an entirely legitimate
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idea. I don’t care how peculiar it is. I know where I’m coming from, and I’m not easily led down the primrose path.
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I’m puzzled that I have such a weird life.
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You know, that, I mean, I thought I would end up
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teaching French poetry in a decent girls’ school somewhere.
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That was, at one point, my goal.
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But it’s what happened to me
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is what makes me say what I have to say.
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I have no proclivity for this stuff at all.
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I’m a tougher nut to crack than most people.
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If it works for me, it will work for anybody.
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It’s a very generalized kind of thing.
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There’s all these moving fronts of change have to move simultaneously and there’s work on our
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relations to other people there’s work on our relation to the psychedelic experience
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then there’s our acting as a meme transmitter and political force to the larger world outside and you know always
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carried on in the light of how ordinary we are I mean this is not an elitist
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thing at all it’s it belongs to if you can see lightning and hear thunder you
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can have the psychedelic experience of Of course, what you make of it
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is your own business, but it’s in the bones. It’s more basic than the philosophies that
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have claimed human attention through history. And I’m hopeful.
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In fact, in a way, there is a level in me where this is all a charade
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because I figure it’s settled.
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You know, it’s settled.
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And I don’t know why we have to go through this period
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where we worry about it and struggle and tear our hair
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because I really, at a very profound level,
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think we are now so close to this huge attractor into novelty, there’s no way out of here.
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I mean, it’s coming. We dropped in the 16th century. Now it’s beginning to come on,
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now it’s beginning to come on and there’s no getting away from it
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you can rave and rant all you want
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but you know
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so we just then you know
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have to sort of reassure each other
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and hang together
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this boat will make it
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and my god what’s coming
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is as to nothing what has been God, what’s coming is as to nothing what has been. I mean, what’s coming is
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turmoil and turbulence that will tax the faith of a saint in reasonable conclusions, because
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the whole world is going to undergo deconstruction. I mean, Gorbachev has it right, but he’s so far the only guy saying, we did it wrong, 100% wrong. I mean, I apologize, but having said that, what do you want me to do? We did it wrong, and now we’re going to pull it apart. playing pick-up sticks. You know that game where the idea is to take the pile of sticks apart without the pile
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of sticks cascading and shifting?
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This is what has to be done.
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I mean, we’ve got nuclear arsenals, we’ve got bacteriological warfare, you’ve got racism,
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sexism, moneyism, all this stuff stacked up to the ceiling and we just have to take hold
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I think it’s happening
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I think that this democracy stuff
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is not the conversion of Marxism
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to another 18th century political system
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but that democracy is the biological way to organize society, that people
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power is not a political appeal, it’s a biological appeal. I mean, of course, it’s what ants have.
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They do it the way the genes want it done. They don’t have an intellectual construct
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which then either a leading party
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or a military clique or a royal family
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or a bunch of gangsters get together
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and tell everybody how it’s going to be.
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I think democracy is really in the name for pragmatism,
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for do what works,
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free the people,
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channel the creativity of every individual into the social life of society,
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not leaders and followers,
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not elites and masses,
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but a channeling of creativity
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into the places where it needs to go.
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And I think that this is now unstoppable.
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The glitch is China, but I’m very optimistic there.
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I think, you know, watch the anniversary.
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Watch May and June.
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I don’t think they can go through the anniversary. Watch May and June. I don’t think they can go through the anniversary. I mean,
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the Chinese have learned from what’s happened in Western Europe. And in fact, really, what
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happened in Tiananmen Square freed Eastern Europe, because had they not had that horrendous example
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to guide them, you can bet they would have stumbled into some kind of effort to suppress it.
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So, you know, democracy is this innate belief in people. It’s a psychedelic way of doing it. It’s
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the closest we can get to anarchy. Anarchy, to my mind, is of course the ideal, but anarchy has to be mediated
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with polity, and the way you do that is through democracy.
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What about, can you imagine a symposium of some kind, possibly even around Esalen, with
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some thinkers, like you’re saying, the world. I’ve been thinking about a foundation and actually thinking about getting,
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trying to pursue getting a grant
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and getting with people
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for a Save the Human Foundation,
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which is similar to the Save the World.
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So much energy and money
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is put into saving various things around us.
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And it would at least start a dialogue
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about these solutions.
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I mean, I don’t see that it would be very difficult
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to get the money from foundations.
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No, this kind of thing is worth doing.
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I mean, you know, when we founded our botanical dimensions,
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our little plant survival thing,
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we assumed, because you hear so much about it,
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that the rainforest conservation field
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would be crowded with megabuck institutions.
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And even though it is so hot
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and even though it’s in all the newspapers,
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you’d be amazed what a small party it is.
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It’s about 50 people worldwide
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who really care,
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who run these organizations,
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and they know how to get good PR,
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but 50 people out of 5 billion
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are giving full-time their effort
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to try and save the rainforest.
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There’s tremendous disparity
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between where resources are put
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and where they need to be put.
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Hopefully, you know, awareness spread by whatever means would be followed on by a redesigning of the flow charts of where energy and attention goes.
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Opening up the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is going to reveal unbelievable toxic wastelands
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created by their military-industrial complex.
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And the earth is in far worse shape than we think.
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That’s why this forward escape notion,
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this notion of intensifying change by changing behavior through psychedelics
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is as far as i can see the only way out see i really think that if you’re trying to change
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someone’s psychology uh you have to change their behavior
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it’s more important than any other thing about them
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I mean I’m sure maybe some of you are analysts
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and this is known to be just malarkey
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but if I were a therapist
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and someone came to me and said
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I’m severely depressed
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I’m a manic depressive person
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I would not attempt to unravel their relationship to their father or their mother.
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I would say, how do you spend your day?
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How do you spend your life?
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And when they told me that they had a humdrum job
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and that they always go home at 6 o’clock
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and they watch a little TV and drink a beer and go to bed,
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I would say, okay, here is your prescription.
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and drink a beer and go to bed.
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I’d say, okay, here is your prescription.
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As your therapist, I tell you,
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you must go on Friday nights for at least two hours
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to the following singles bar.
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And you don’t have to do anything.
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You don’t have to talk to anybody.
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You don’t have to order a drink.
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But you must sit there.
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And this change in behavior
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is an opening for all kinds of things to
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happen. I mean, they will meet someone, not necessarily a lover, but maybe a business
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opportunity, or someone in that bar will tell them that they have a place in Antigua. If they
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ever want to go there, they can use it, and then they will. And that will… So the important thing, you see, is to bust them out of their behavioral pattern. And the great thing about psychedelics is that they will do this, that we can self-treat ourselves to break down habitual patterns of behavior.
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to break down habitual patterns of behavior.
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Habit is the thing which is running us over the edge.
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I mean, there’s all the yipping and yapping about drug habits,
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and I agree.
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I mean, I’m not into hard drugs at all. I find them detractors, lead you off the track.
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But habituation to substances
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is only one part of the picture
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I mean we habituate to furniture styles
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to colors, to people
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to flavors, to television shows
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to automobile brands
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we are like the addictive creature
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and this involvement of psyche in things external to the body
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makes it very difficult for us to discipline ourselves.
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The most dangerous habits in the world today are not drug habits.
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They’re ideological habits.
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day are not drug habits. They’re ideological habits, ways, unexamined ways of thinking about reality. You know, racism is an unexamined way of thinking about reality. Sexism,
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all forms of fascism, unexamined ways of thinking about reality. Busting up habitual behavior patterns is what will do it.
00:22:28 ►
That’s why these historical changes, you know, the most constipated person in East Germany has had
00:22:36 ►
their patterns busted up in the last six months, whether they wanted it or not. Everybody is more flexible. I found this in Europe, that everybody is more
00:22:46 ►
flexible and more tolerant than people in America. And the reason is, twice in this century, Europe
00:22:54 ►
has been leveled by world war. If you don’t think that gives you a kind of cool and an openness and
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a little more tolerance that we don’t have.
00:23:06 ►
We’re rigid.
00:23:06 ►
We’re bomb them into the Stone Age people.
00:23:10 ►
That’s how we deal with our problems.
00:23:12 ►
So I think, you know, in ourselves, in society,
00:23:17 ►
this habit thing has to be very much in our awareness.
00:23:23 ►
The guy who founded general systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
00:23:28 ►
had a wonderful statement. He said, people are not machines, but in every circumstance where
00:23:37 ►
they are given the opportunity to behave like machines, they will do it. They will do it. It’s something about how the engine of life seeks
00:23:48 ►
to economize energy by using familiar patterns. And if you don’t keep turning this and perturbing
00:23:57 ►
it and putting new factors into the mix, well, then you run down and consciousness contracts and you become, you know, much more
00:24:09 ►
a statistic than a living, breathing human being. Well, that’s the ongoing, the continuing carrot
00:24:18 ►
of my career. People always ask me, what will you do if nothing happens and the answer is
00:24:26 ►
my 65th birthday will have occurred
00:24:29 ►
a month in front of this
00:24:31 ►
I’ll simply retire
00:24:32 ►
shuffle off the stage
00:24:37 ►
and turn it over to young blood
00:24:42 ►
well it’s very hard to imagine what will happen.
00:24:48 ►
I have, perhaps the name of this religion is
00:24:53 ►
let’s try to imagine what will happen.
00:24:55 ►
And then there are many scenarios.
00:24:57 ►
A kind of nice scenario that I like
00:25:00 ►
is that everyone will behave appropriately.
00:25:07 ►
That there will just be this moment it will sweep around the world
00:25:09 ►
where people staring at themselves in the mirror
00:25:12 ►
shaving in the morning and so forth
00:25:14 ►
will just say all resistance has fallen from the circuits
00:25:19 ►
I now am able to behave appropriately
00:25:23 ►
we don’t know what that means. The vision I have is of
00:25:30 ►
people leaving their factories and homes with tears of joy streaming down their faces
00:25:37 ►
and staring into the sky as a great radiance settles over them and they are lost to the view of those of us
00:25:46 ►
who are not privy to the transformation.
00:25:49 ►
It’s very much, I mean, just to show you how weird life is,
00:25:53 ►
it’s very much like the Christian notion of the glory.
00:25:58 ►
You know, it’s just this,
00:26:00 ►
and it sweeps over the world.
00:26:03 ►
And it takes everybody.
00:26:07 ►
I was very much affected as a child
00:26:10 ►
by a terrible B movie,
00:26:12 ►
which I’ve not seen or heard of in 25 years.
00:26:16 ►
It was called The 27th Day.
00:26:19 ►
And there was this wonderful scene in this movie
00:26:22 ►
where it showed people wearing those flat pointed hats and
00:26:28 ►
planting rice somewhere in Asia. And then it showed them stopping and looking at the sky
00:26:35 ►
with tears streaming down their faces. And then you saw a bunch of black Africans herding cattle and then this guy putting a spear in the ground
00:26:47 ►
and looking up and his eyes filling with tears and then about six of these shots around the world and
00:26:55 ►
this probably is what launched me on my career actually is the the wish to see this happen. How many people ever saw that movie?
00:27:09 ►
Amazing.
00:27:12 ►
Yeah, well.
00:27:13 ►
I saw it actually this last year.
00:27:16 ►
Oh, really?
00:27:17 ►
Well, if you ever tape it, send it to me.
00:27:21 ►
It’s a crazy movie.
00:27:23 ►
I won’t tell the plot.
00:27:24 ►
The plot is not at all like that moment that moment is
00:27:28 ►
is the high point but just this idea that there is resistance and if this resistance would fall away
00:27:38 ►
there is an inner nature in us that is seeking to unfold itself. And I don’t know whether it’s done
00:27:46 ►
through technology or drugs or God’s love or what it is, but it’s a coaxing into being
00:27:56 ►
of a higher state of understanding. Life in the imagination, I think.
00:28:07 ►
You know, going off into the domain
00:28:11 ►
of our hopes and dreams.
00:28:14 ►
I mean, we are such a peculiar animal
00:28:16 ►
and so delicately poised
00:28:19 ►
between the bestial and the angelic.
00:28:22 ►
I used to have an old professor who said, you know, if you look at this
00:28:27 ►
world and you think of us as descended from the angels, then it’s a mess. But if you see us as a
00:28:37 ►
near relative of the chimpanzee, then what a peculiar accomplishment, you know. And this is where we hover in this intermediate zone.
00:28:49 ►
You had this image when you were talking about the looking up
00:28:52 ►
about a massive global MDMA experience.
00:28:56 ►
Well, MDMA leading into DMT, leading into the lesser lights.
00:29:04 ►
Yeah, it’s interesting.
00:29:07 ►
I mean, why is Western ontology
00:29:09 ►
haunted by this notion
00:29:11 ►
of the end of the world?
00:29:13 ►
You know, the Muslims are into it.
00:29:15 ►
The Christians are into it.
00:29:17 ►
Everybody’s into this,
00:29:18 ►
to appointing a moment
00:29:20 ►
when God comes tangential to history.
00:29:23 ►
This is really the thing that is unique
00:29:27 ►
besides the monotheistic thing.
00:29:30 ►
The really odd thing about Western religion
00:29:33 ►
is the persistent idea
00:29:35 ►
that God will come tangential to history,
00:29:39 ►
that there will come a moment
00:29:41 ►
where the two things cross paths.
00:29:50 ►
And, you know, for Christianity, Christ is that moment.
00:29:58 ►
And theologians like Karl Barth have described Christ as the axis time.
00:30:04 ►
They say, you know, the time leading in to the resurrection was one thing.
00:30:07 ►
The time after the resurrection was something else. And Christian historiography is based around the axis point of the resurrection.
00:30:16 ►
And yet, you know, from the point of view of a Roman empiricist skeptic standing there,
00:30:23 ►
this just looks like a small potatoes religious uprising
00:30:27 ►
where you drag this guy off and execute him
00:30:29 ►
and get things under control again.
00:30:33 ►
Then in Christian hermeneutics,
00:30:36 ►
the end of the world becomes like a secondary axis time.
00:30:41 ►
And then the time between the resurrection
00:30:44 ►
and the end of the world
00:30:45 ►
you know before the resurrection
00:30:48 ►
the gates of paradise
00:30:50 ►
were closed according to
00:30:52 ►
Christian hermeneutics
00:30:53 ►
and all the souls
00:30:55 ►
they were unable to get in to heaven
00:30:58 ►
they were held in a
00:30:59 ►
holding area for several
00:31:02 ►
thousand years
00:31:03 ►
from the sin of Adam to the resurrection of Christ,
00:31:08 ►
then Christ’s entry into heaven, all those souls accompanied him, and the pipeline was open,
00:31:16 ►
and it is open unto the last judgment. But the Christian apocalypse is a vision of a world destroyed,
00:31:25 ►
not transformed.
00:31:27 ►
And my interpretation of that is
00:31:30 ►
this is the nightmare
00:31:32 ►
of the dominator culture coming true.
00:31:36 ►
I mean, the world,
00:31:37 ►
that world is going to be destroyed.
00:31:40 ►
And this, you know, this,
00:31:42 ►
I can’t, this idiotic riff about how because he has a strawberry spot,
00:31:51 ►
Gorbachev fulfills the prediction of Revelation and is the beast 666.
00:31:58 ►
This is the kind of stuff that just drives me straight up the wall.
00:32:02 ►
I mean, everybody has been hailed as the beast of revelations. I think
00:32:06 ►
Frederick Barbarossa got it first. Otto the Great of Germany, he was the first one. Then Frederick
00:32:13 ►
Barbarossa. Muammar Gaddafi briefly held the title. And it just sort of moves around. I have put you know this is all malarkey
00:32:27 ►
as far as
00:32:28 ►
I’m concerned
00:32:29 ►
I think
00:32:30 ►
that
00:32:31 ►
Christianity’s
00:32:32 ►
myth is
00:32:33 ►
of its own
00:32:33 ►
overwhelmment
00:32:35 ►
you know
00:32:36 ►
and even
00:32:37 ►
in Revelation
00:32:38 ►
the
00:32:38 ►
the
00:32:39 ►
mater
00:32:40 ►
magister
00:32:41 ►
comes and
00:32:42 ►
destroys the
00:32:43 ►
serpent
00:32:44 ►
at the end of the world.
00:32:46 ►
Definitely ideological struggles, choices are going to have to be made.
00:32:51 ►
It’s not going to be possible to be a mugwump through the next 40 years.
00:32:57 ►
You know, a mugwump is somebody who sits on the fence
00:33:00 ►
with their mug on one side and their wump on the other.
00:33:04 ►
And they don’t make a decision.
00:33:07 ►
They try to be a liberal
00:33:09 ►
and somehow finesse it through
00:33:12 ►
and make everybody happy.
00:33:13 ►
I don’t know if that’s going to be possible.
00:33:17 ►
Yeah.
00:33:19 ►
Talking about these tangential experiences with God
00:33:27 ►
as signifying this acceleration or ending event,
00:33:35 ►
it seems like the UFO experience would be like that.
00:33:40 ►
Since we’re polling, I want to see if there are a number of people.
00:33:43 ►
Most people here said they had seen or experienced the elves.
00:33:50 ►
A couple, several had experienced the end of time.
00:33:52 ►
Has anybody here ever had an encounter with that, being stoned?
00:33:58 ►
With a UFO?
00:34:01 ►
Seen a UFO and taken away?
00:34:05 ►
I didn’t consider myself stoned.
00:34:13 ►
Well, I hadn’t slept for 10 days.
00:34:15 ►
That’s why there’s a qualifier.
00:34:18 ►
Well, I think that the UFO is the Ur myth of the concrescence
00:34:26 ►
that’s what I call this thing that happens
00:34:28 ►
in 2012, the concrescence
00:34:30 ►
it’s the compression of all complexity
00:34:32 ►
into a single
00:34:34 ►
spinning object
00:34:36 ►
that when you look into this
00:34:38 ►
spinning object even though it’s
00:34:40 ►
the size of a hardball
00:34:42 ►
there are stars inside of it
00:34:44 ►
and you realize that it is a holographic
00:34:48 ►
matrix. It isn’t the matter of this world. It’s made out of holographic translinguistic matter.
00:34:55 ►
It’s somehow a doorway into the imagination. We used to imagine this stuff which could do anything, which was the precursor to the flying saucer.
00:35:09 ►
And, you know, you could eat this stuff, and it was food.
00:35:14 ►
You could stretch it out like silly putty and stand under it,
00:35:18 ►
and you could take a shower under it.
00:35:21 ►
Or you could stretch it out bigger and sit on it and it would fly you around places it
00:35:28 ►
also would become you know a telephone an automobile whatever it’s just a localized
00:35:35 ►
part of space under the complete control of your own imagination the flying so I I I don’t know what to think about whether there are friendly entities on the way.
00:35:50 ►
It sort of depends on how stoned I am. I mean, there’s one way of looking at the local universe
00:35:56 ►
where you just can’t believe that this stuff goes unmonitored, that probably as we unravel the early history of the earth it’s beginning to look
00:36:09 ►
like the forces which created this situation are pretty statistically improbable i mean you not
00:36:15 ►
only have to have a planet around the right kind of star but you need to have a moon around that
00:36:22 ►
planet of a mass very you know unusually large mass for the
00:36:27 ►
satellite and so forth and so on so it may be that life is pretty rare well the rarer it is
00:36:35 ►
you may bet the more intensely it will f it will make the effort to monitor and locate other examples of itself.
00:36:50 ►
So, you know, it may be that the great attractor that drew humanness out of animal organization
00:36:54 ►
is the product of some kind of interaction with an intelligence,
00:36:59 ►
but it may not deal on the level of individuals.
00:37:02 ►
I find it hard to believe that they will come down in little
00:37:06 ►
ships and tromp out and redis our Miranda rights. I doubt that it works like that, but there may be
00:37:13 ►
extraterrestrial tugs on the development. Seeing something totally unexplainable will provide a tug
00:37:21 ►
on the lot. Well, one of the interesting things about UFOs
00:37:27 ►
from the new way of analyzing them,
00:37:29 ►
the old style was to say,
00:37:31 ►
what are they and where do they come from?
00:37:34 ►
Since that got us nowhere for 30 years,
00:37:38 ►
the new style of UFO analysis is to say,
00:37:41 ►
what are they doing to human populations?
00:37:48 ►
Suddenly then, you can use polling and statistics and interview techniques and all kinds of stuff to if if they have a purpose then we
00:37:56 ►
should be able to figure out the purpose not by asking them the purpose but by analyzing the
00:38:02 ►
implementation of their the changes they’ve set in motion. Well,
00:38:07 ►
the only thing everybody can agree about what the flying saucers have accomplished is
00:38:12 ►
they’ve shaken people’s faith in science. Isn’t that interesting? They’re like a compensatory
00:38:19 ►
image from the unconscious that’s saying to the dominator ego, your model doesn’t work.
00:38:28 ►
There are parts of reality that are completely outside the domain of your description. And
00:38:35 ►
I think flying saucers are pretty upsetting to scientists. That seems to be where their
00:38:42 ►
major impact is, is on very straight people and then of course in the trailer courts
00:38:47 ►
but
00:38:48 ►
I don’t know if there is an extraterrestrial influence
00:38:54 ►
I don’t know if it will ever tip its hat or not
00:38:57 ►
to me really the strangest thing
00:39:00 ►
about all this and that I can’t generate enough
00:39:03 ►
excitement about are the beings. The beings
00:39:08 ►
are confounding. I mean, you can imagine a psychedelic experience entirely without beings.
00:39:16 ►
There’s wonderful insights, beautiful colors, architectural vistas, visions, but the beings just tip the scales to where you say, hey, what’s going on?
00:39:30 ►
The world isn’t supposed to be organized like this. I mean, psychological insights I can handle,
00:39:36 ►
but elves bearing gifts? What’s that about? And I suppose this position of straight people
00:39:46 ►
is that it doesn’t happen.
00:39:48 ►
And why do so many people experience that same phenomena?
00:39:51 ►
Well, they’re insane.
00:39:53 ►
They’ve been deluded by Terence McKenna
00:39:56 ►
who has launched a kind of hysteria
00:39:59 ►
where then people think they see elves.
00:40:03 ►
You’re hypnotized. Yes.
00:40:05 ►
So then this is the magic wand that is waved over any unpleasant evidence.
00:40:12 ►
I mean, look, for example, at dowsing.
00:40:15 ►
I mean, I don’t give a hoot about dowsing.
00:40:18 ►
But people do it year after year, make money at it, get paid,
00:40:24 ►
demonstrate their ability. and science says, you
00:40:27 ►
know, it’s nonsense, it’s garbage, nothing is happening. Well, and it just goes on and on. It’s just been
00:40:34 ►
ruled out of bounds. Certain things are so troubling, and they seem so trivial, because they’re saying,
00:40:42 ►
well, look here, we’ve got science. It’s telling us
00:40:45 ►
about distant galaxies, the heart of the atom, DNA. It’s really working. And you want the evidence
00:40:52 ►
of the psychedelic experience to overthrow this explanatory tool? No way. It’s too operationally
00:41:02 ►
useful. Well, that’s a bit of candid rhetoric there.
00:41:07 ►
Yes, it is operationally useful,
00:41:09 ►
but this means we’ve moved entirely away
00:41:11 ►
from the notion of the facts of the matter.
00:41:15 ►
Now it means we just use what’s operationally useful.
00:41:19 ►
And you’ll remember I told you at the beginning of this thing
00:41:22 ►
that we need to find out
00:41:25 ►
what is true
00:41:26 ►
so that we can do what is right
00:41:30 ►
you know
00:41:31 ►
and then as an example
00:41:34 ►
of that
00:41:34 ►
in talking about all this apocalyptic
00:41:37 ►
speculation and so forth
00:41:39 ►
what would it be like
00:41:43 ►
or what lessons could we draw
00:41:46 ►
if we were to get all hyped up
00:41:48 ►
create a green world
00:41:51 ►
save the rainforest
00:41:53 ►
and on December 22nd 2012
00:41:57 ►
the sun explodes
00:41:59 ►
this would be a rather wry comment
00:42:04 ►
on the nature of the political and consciousness-raising enterprise.
00:42:10 ►
In other words, you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with
00:42:13 ►
for your plan to make any sense.
00:42:16 ►
You get no points for saving the rainforest.
00:42:19 ►
If the sun explodes, it means it was a stupid waste of time.
00:42:24 ►
And what you should have been doing was going all out
00:42:27 ►
in the technological direction, trying to create an arc
00:42:31 ►
to get out of here and back…
00:42:37 ►
Save everybody foundation.
00:42:39 ►
All life on earth would be pulling
00:42:43 ►
for you in fact
00:42:45 ►
as long as we’re
00:42:47 ►
on this topic
00:42:49 ►
you know there is a problem
00:42:51 ►
with stellar dynamics
00:42:53 ►
there is a problem with
00:42:56 ►
getting
00:42:57 ►
nuclear theory
00:42:59 ►
to agree with measurements
00:43:01 ►
coming off the sun
00:43:02 ►
the sun is not producing enough neutrinos.
00:43:07 ►
It should be producing a third more.
00:43:10 ►
This is a pretty serious problem for nuclear chemistry.
00:43:15 ►
Nuclear chemistry has been in place 50 years.
00:43:18 ►
It’s not accustomed to having its predictions off by 35%.
00:43:24 ►
And yet, they’re building these huge things in North Dakota,
00:43:30 ►
miles under the ground that they fill with cleaning fluid
00:43:33 ►
and observe for release of Cherenkov radiation,
00:43:37 ►
and they’re not seeing enough.
00:43:39 ►
Well, the only explanation for this
00:43:42 ►
is that the nuclear furnace of the sun has gone off the boil,
00:43:49 ►
that something has happened in the core of the sun, and it will take, they estimate, about 35,000
00:43:57 ►
years from this event’s beginning for physical processes to reflect it on the surface of the sun. In other words,
00:44:07 ►
it takes 35,000 years for it to percolate to the surface of the sun. But if it went off the
00:44:14 ►
nuclear boil, the neutrino output would have dropped instantly. And that doesn’t take 35,000
00:44:23 ►
years to reach the surface. It happens instantly because neutrinos move at the
00:44:28 ►
speed of light. So it may be that these glaciations and this cooling and all the stuff that’s been
00:44:36 ►
going on over the past million years, that the sun is in a kind of sputtering phase where it’s losing and regaining
00:44:46 ►
the ability to carry out fusion
00:44:49 ►
in its core.
00:44:53 ►
Well, if this is true,
00:44:55 ►
then it all makes sense,
00:44:58 ►
horribly enough.
00:44:59 ►
It means that biology
00:45:01 ►
is senses It means that biology senses the impending total echo crisis
00:45:10 ►
and is frantically attempting to accelerate evolution to produce a way out,
00:45:18 ►
a technological species that could create the kind of machinery that could lift a significant portion of the biota
00:45:27 ►
out of the path of disaster. We need to understand if this is what we’re supposed to be doing.
00:45:36 ►
Another possibility is, you know, when you analyze the history of the Earth, there is repeated evidence of major asteroidal impact. This thing
00:45:48 ►
65 million years ago, nothing larger than a chicken walked away from. You know, last January,
00:45:55 ►
there was what they call an Earth crosser. It crossed within a half a million miles of Earth,
00:46:03 ►
a million miles of Earth, a dumbo-shaped object five kilometers across.
00:46:05 ►
The recalculation for the return
00:46:09 ►
of this object, it’s imprecise because
00:46:11 ►
they didn’t get a perfect fix on it, but the return
00:46:14 ►
Earth-cross is predicted for late in 2012.
00:46:20 ►
What?
00:46:22 ►
It’s an asteroid.
00:46:24 ►
It’s an Earth-crossing asteroid. There are a number of these Earth-crossing asteroids, and there are a number of punctuations in the fossil record that seem to indicate that these things come down with reasonable regularity. I think we need to open ourselves to the record of nature, the
00:46:45 ►
silent witness of nature, the
00:46:48 ►
stratigraphy and the
00:46:50 ►
levels of radiation
00:46:51 ►
in the earth and we also
00:46:54 ►
need to think
00:46:55 ►
in global
00:46:57 ►
and planetary terms
00:47:00 ►
I mean let’s be frank about what
00:47:02 ►
this is about, we are a species
00:47:04 ►
we are knitted to other species. We want to live. The previous style of social dynamics has been no organizational plan at’s plunder. And then that’s what we’ve been doing. But now,
00:47:28 ►
you know, we’ve plundered enough and you raise yourself out of the gutter of plunder and say,
00:47:34 ►
you know, we’ve got to pull back. Or go somewhere else and plunder. But the problem is we’ve gotten
00:47:42 ►
so into the plunder style that we’ve lost the fine touch.
00:47:46 ►
It’s not clear that we can get it together enough to get off of here. It’s going to be a major test
00:47:52 ►
of human cooperation to survive the meltdown of global civilization. One of the things that
00:47:59 ►
completely freaks me out about, the only thing really that completely freaks me out about the only thing really that completely freaks me out about what’s going on in the Soviet Union is
00:48:08 ►
You know, I applaud perestroika. I want to get rid of the Communist Party
00:48:12 ►
I think the military needs to be kicked around and so forth and so on but don’t
00:48:18 ►
Fumble away your ability to deliver large payloads into near-earth orbit
00:48:23 ►
If they blow it and fumble away that ability,
00:48:27 ►
then there ain’t no way off this rock
00:48:29 ►
because the American space program is smoke and mirrors.
00:48:33 ►
You can forget it.
00:48:34 ►
Only the Russians have boosters large enough.
00:48:37 ►
And if you let one of these design team,
00:48:40 ►
engineering, assembly line configurations fall to pieces
00:48:45 ►
it would take 15 to 20 years
00:48:47 ►
you know they can’t even find the
00:48:49 ►
blueprints for the Saturn 5
00:48:51 ►
rocket
00:48:52 ►
somebody misplaced them
00:48:54 ►
they don’t know they found part of it
00:48:57 ►
they’re looking
00:48:58 ►
so
00:48:59 ►
you know
00:49:02 ►
people think psychedelic consciousness is a permission to escapism.
00:49:09 ►
I don’t think so.
00:49:10 ►
I think it’s an invitation to a high degree of awareness,
00:49:16 ►
the real options, the real nature of the predicament,
00:49:20 ►
not as it’s culturally defined, but as it is defined by reality
00:49:27 ►
you become aware of all this
00:49:30 ►
you feel into the facts
00:49:32 ►
you are connected to the rhythm of flux
00:49:38 ►
and this leaves no room for unconsciousness
00:49:42 ►
unconsciousness is what is destroying us as a species. It’s a luxury
00:49:48 ►
of hunter-gatherers. It’s absolutely fatal to thermonuclear high techies like ourselves. I mean,
00:49:58 ►
we can’t have enrageable apes locked up inside our brains. Not when we have our fingers on thermonuclear arsenals
00:50:08 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:50:10 ►
We have to chill out, get serious about the human enterprise.
00:50:16 ►
We have come this far through unimaginable hell.
00:50:23 ►
I mean, the people, the nobility of our ancestors, what they went through
00:50:29 ►
without antibiotics, without penicillin, without wall-to-wall beige carpeting. I mean, it has been
00:50:39 ►
a long pull over the last 150,000 million years. Five times the ice has ground south from the poles
00:50:50 ►
a mile deep or more, splitting and islanding human populations and bringing, you know,
00:50:56 ►
tremendous hardship. Our people have had it very, very tough. I mean, we are not strong in tooth and claw.
00:51:06 ►
All of our adaptations
00:51:07 ►
were to preserve tiny populations.
00:51:11 ►
I mean, the estimation is that
00:51:13 ►
at the height of the Neanderthal period,
00:51:16 ►
there were less than 40,000 individuals
00:51:18 ►
in Europe.
00:51:20 ►
I mean, tiny, tiny human populations.
00:51:23 ►
And against all odds, and being smart, smart, tiny, tiny human populations. And against all odds and being smart, smart, smart,
00:51:28 ►
these people brought us to this point.
00:51:32 ►
And now, you know, it’s our turn.
00:51:35 ►
And we have it within our power to do something.
00:51:40 ►
They had it within their power only to hand on the flame of hope, of aspiration, of shamanic imaginings. of transformation that will burn away the dross of history and recover and reunite the various parts
00:52:09 ►
of the human legacy in a way that will give permission for a sane and caring world. The
00:52:17 ►
prodigal journey into history was for a purpose. The purpose was technological prowess,
00:52:27 ►
the perfection of the tool-creating impulse.
00:52:31 ►
And at the end of history comes the ultimate tool,
00:52:34 ►
the flying saucer, the omniprogrammable Macintosh,
00:52:40 ►
the machine which does anything.
00:52:43 ►
And that perfected tool is lethal then
00:52:48 ►
in the theater of its creation.
00:52:51 ►
It has to be carried back into archaic nature.
00:52:55 ►
And we have to begin to deconstruct,
00:52:58 ►
dematerialize, retreat,
00:53:02 ►
begin a feminizing of our attitude toward ourselves and nature.
00:53:08 ►
Care, encouragement, reflection, rather than dominance, utilization, destruction.
00:53:19 ►
If we don’t do this, I think that our situation is fairly precarious and the whole point of
00:53:26 ►
talking about psychedelics in this context is they make this something
00:53:32 ►
other than an inspiring after-dinner speech because you’ve heard this speech
00:53:37 ►
before this is what all good guys say but they don’t there’s no hope for it without psychedelics, because they impel you to change
00:53:49 ►
behavior, to think new thoughts, to see deeper into reality, to aspire higher, and to feel more.
00:53:58 ►
And if we can’t awaken ourselves to those things, then it’s simply not going to happen. And all the means, the tools,
00:54:10 ►
the gnosis, the shamans, they still exist at the periphery of this doomed civilization.
00:54:16 ►
They still exist to help us toward a new understanding. But we have to clarify this
00:54:24 ►
for ourselves,
00:54:25 ►
in our own minds.
00:54:26 ►
We need to try these ideas out on other people,
00:54:30 ►
even the most skeptical of people.
00:54:32 ►
This idea can stand on its own two feet.
00:54:35 ►
It can compete in the marathon of ideas.
00:54:39 ►
It’s as respectable as any of these other answers.
00:54:43 ►
It cannot be sneered into non-existence,
00:54:48 ►
which is currently the establishment approach to it.
00:54:52 ►
It’s just, you know, we’re deluded, our brains are damaged,
00:54:56 ►
we’ve taken so many drugs,
00:54:57 ►
we don’t understand the real nature of power and politics and society.
00:55:04 ►
Well, this is all coming from people who claim they do
00:55:07 ►
and look at the mess they’ve made of it. So I don’t think there’s any reason to hang our heads.
00:55:13 ►
This is religion as it was practiced the first million years. This is social responsibility as it was practiced the first million years and for us to take it up is nothing
00:55:29 ►
more than for us to return to the last moment in our own story when everything made sense and I
00:55:39 ►
maintain that last moment was in that partnership paradise in Saharan Africa.
00:55:47 ►
Now we have to go forward into the past.
00:55:51 ►
This is the way to create a unified meaning to what has happened to us.
00:55:58 ►
Because if this just ends in a toxified and ruined planet,
00:56:10 ►
ends in a toxified and ruined planet, then, you know, what a comment on the values that we hold most dear, our belief that life is for something, our belief that integrity matters, our belief
00:56:19 ►
that our transmission from generation to generation was something that was important.
00:56:26 ►
The meaning of it all is in the hands of the living.
00:56:34 ►
Those people 100,000 years in the grave,
00:56:38 ►
their meaning is in our hands
00:56:41 ►
because the question is what shall we do with what they have given us?
00:56:48 ►
Well, that’s it.
00:56:50 ►
That’s the question that I want to leave you with.
00:56:53 ►
This was an extraordinary group,
00:56:55 ►
and thank you very much.
00:56:56 ►
It was good for me.
00:57:11 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:15 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:18 ►
Terence McKenna says,
00:57:21 ►
We have to try this idea out on other people.
00:57:25 ►
This is religion as it was practiced for the first million years.
00:57:32 ►
Well, I think he’s right about that, actually. But what do you think about Terence’s ideas about what he thought would happen in 2012? I think that he was really very honest in admitting that
00:57:38 ►
it was quite similar to the Christian notion of the glory, whatever that may be. Now, this is just
00:57:44 ►
my personal opinion,
00:57:45 ►
but I’ve noticed that people who were forced through a childhood of Catholic school and its
00:57:50 ►
so-called education, once they wise up and shed their beliefs of all that malarkey,
00:57:56 ►
well, that unfortunately they never seemed to be able to completely let go of the superstitions
00:58:01 ►
that they were force-fed as Catholic children. And so they often seem to grab a hold of some other equally ridiculous end-of-the-world fantasy.
00:58:11 ►
In Terence’s case, it was the 2012 story.
00:58:14 ►
It is never easy to break free of one’s childhood religion,
00:58:18 ►
and perhaps such a break can never be complete either.
00:58:21 ►
As I’ve often said, there should be a law that prohibits anyone under the age of 21
00:58:27 ►
from learning about any religious beliefs.
00:58:29 ►
But, hey, that’s just my opinion.
00:58:34 ►
Now, right here I had written a long rant that I was going to read
00:58:37 ►
that connected what Terrence was saying about novelty increasing
00:58:40 ►
with today’s world situation,
00:58:43 ►
particularly focusing on the presidential
00:58:45 ►
race in the U.S. But again, that would just be my opinion. And I’ve come to the conclusion that
00:58:53 ►
it’s time for me to stop being so free with my political opinions before these podcasts turn
00:58:59 ►
into rants from some grumpy old man who seems to be getting more and more pissed off with the world every day. And for what it’s worth, I’m not one of those guys who thinks that things are getting
00:59:10 ►
worse than they were back in the so-called good old days. What I’m so mad about is that things
00:59:16 ►
are exactly the same as they’ve always been. And ever since I was a child in grammar school,
00:59:22 ►
the people who control what we loosely call the system have been lying to me all along.
00:59:28 ►
I first realized this when I was serving with the Navy in Vietnam,
00:59:32 ►
but I convinced myself that the politicians who were responsible for that war were the only bad guys.
00:59:38 ►
Now I see how blind I’ve been and that the history of this nation isn’t at all what we’ve been forced to learn in school. But there I go again, just another grumpy old man rant. As I said in the beginning of this
00:59:51 ►
podcast, I’ve been kind of under the weather for the past few weeks, which meant that I had a lot
00:59:56 ►
of time to do nothing but think. I didn’t even feel like reading. And during that time, I did
01:00:03 ►
what a Texas law professor once told me should be done
01:00:06 ►
several times during one’s life, and that is to take the bull by the tail and face the situation.
01:00:13 ►
So here’s the bottom line. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m simply getting too old to
01:00:19 ►
keep doing these podcasts for much longer. So here’s what I’m going to do. Next March 17th Thank you. unheard Terrence McKenna tapes that I haven’t yet digitized. So between now and next March, you’re going to get your fill of Terrence McKenna every week.
01:00:49 ►
Now there may be a few duplicates in the box, and if I run out of McKenna between now and March,
01:00:54 ►
I’ll finish up with some of the other recordings that I’ve received recently.
01:00:59 ►
And my apologies to our fellow salonners who have sent me material that they hope to get played here in the salon,
01:01:04 ►
but I don’t want to go out on the grumpy old man note that I seem to be taking on.
01:01:10 ►
Right now, I plan on keeping the salon’s websites up and running,
01:01:13 ►
and I’ll continue to interact with our fellow salonners on the forums that you can get to from psychedelicsalon.com.
01:01:21 ►
Also, I remain open to Skyping into your local meetings, like I did last week with the Mind Travelers in Seattle.
01:01:29 ►
Also, by the way, I’ll be making a presentation to the Sci-Fi Festival in the Netherlands via Skype at the end of this month.
01:01:37 ►
So, if you still want to hear from me in the future, those options are going to remain open for now.
01:01:42 ►
But before I go today, I’d like to first say one more thing
01:01:46 ►
to our wonderful fellow salonners
01:01:48 ►
whose donations have kept us going for so long.
01:01:52 ►
You are small in number,
01:01:53 ►
but thanks to your help,
01:01:54 ►
we’ve reached a lot of people around the world
01:01:56 ►
who may not have been able to find this information before.
01:02:00 ►
Now, some things have changed for the better
01:02:02 ►
since I began these podcasts,
01:02:04 ►
and one of them is the large number of new podcasts about psychedelics that are springing up almost every month.
01:02:10 ►
In a sense, now that I feel we are better able to talk about this subject with the public at large, I feel that, for the most part, my mission has been accomplished.
01:02:20 ►
There’s still a long way to go, of course, but for now there are a lot of younger people better equipped to pick up the slack.
01:02:28 ►
I’m going to leave the donation button active on the website for a while,
01:02:31 ►
although I put up a notice there about the date these regular podcasts will be coming to an end.
01:02:37 ►
And as long as enough donations come in each year to keep the websites at break-even,
01:02:41 ►
I’ll be sure to keep them updated and online.
01:02:46 ►
And there’s always the possibility that every once in a while I won’t be able to resist it and I might put out a new
01:02:51 ►
podcast, but no promises there. This isn’t goodbye. In fact, for the next seven months, I’m going to
01:02:57 ►
load you up with a whole bunch of Terrence McKenna talks that I’ve not even heard myself. And my
01:03:03 ►
guess is that they won’t disappoint us.
01:03:05 ►
So until next week, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:03:11 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.