Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it’s a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we’re basically running out of intellectual steam. Technology is moving ahead lickety split without looking over its shoulder, but our social systems, our religious ontologies, our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing, all of this is 19th Century at best. And so, really whether we live or perish as a species probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise from any source available.”
“If consciousness is not part of our future then what kind of future can it be?”
“Culture is an intelligence test.”
“I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology.”
“I think primates are most interesting when cornered.”
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516 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 2
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I first want to thank the many people who have commented on my announcement last week
00:00:29 ►
that I would be ending my personal presentation of new podcasts next March.
00:00:34 ►
It would be an understatement for me to say how very much your wonderful comments and suggestions have meant to me.
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And after we listen to today’s talk by Terrence McKenna,
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and after we listen to today’s talk by Terrence McKenna I’ll be back to give you some of the initial details
00:00:47 ►
of what I’m thinking of as Psychedelic Salon 2.0
00:00:51 ►
which will begin next March if not before
00:00:54 ►
from the comments that I’ve received so far
00:00:57 ►
after I’ve posted some of my ideas on the forums
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I think that there’s going to be a lot of excitement
00:01:03 ►
about this next phase of podcasts from the salon.
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To be honest, one of the things that I was afraid of after I announced that I was coming to the end of the time
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that I personally would be editing and presenting these various talks and interviews
00:01:18 ►
was that perhaps interest would drop off to the point where there would be no longer enough donations
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to keep the salon online and producing new programs,
00:01:28 ►
which is what I’ll be talking about after we first listen to today’s Terrence McKenna lecture.
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But my fears appear to be completely unfounded because the following salonners didn’t let any announcement deter them,
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and they nonetheless went ahead and made donations to help with the ongoing, for years to come I hope, work of these podcasts.
00:01:48 ►
And these wonderful and to me inspiring people are
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Alec F., Quigsta LLC, Jordan E., Daryl C., and John P.
00:02:00 ►
Your continuing support for this project has truly warmed the cockles of my heart, and I will certainly not forget you.
00:02:08 ►
But before I get to the details about the Psychedelic Salon 2.0, we first are going to get to listen to some new material from Terrence McKenna.
00:02:18 ►
Today, and for the next few weeks, I’ll be playing some recordings that were made in early August of 1997 at Esalen,
00:02:26 ►
where Terrence led a workshop that was titled, Our Cyber-Spiritual Future.
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As far as I know, none of this material has yet to find its way online, at least under that title.
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The tapes that came to me with the talks from this workshop were not professionally produced,
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and so every once in a while you’ll hear a little glitch of some kind.
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And that isn’t me editing anything out, it’s just the way the recording came to me.
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One of the things that you may want to keep in mind as you listen to this talk today is
00:02:58 ►
that it was given almost nine years after the last series of McKenna Talks that we listened
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to, and a lot had happened in the meantime,
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including the reunification of Germany,
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the beginning of the Human Genome Project,
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the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope,
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Nelson Mandela was freed,
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and Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server
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to begin the foundation for the World Wide Web.
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And all that happened only the first web server to begin the foundation for the World Wide Web. And all that happened only the first year after the last McKenna talk that I posted.
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So a lot of things had changed during the interval between these two workshops.
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But as you’ll hear in a moment, much was still the same as it remains yet today.
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Now in about 20 minutes, you’re going to hear Terrence talking about the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and say that he didn’t think that democracy could survive except within the world of print.
00:03:52 ►
And in the past, we’ve heard Terrence speak about the fact that we’ve been living inside a print culture.
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about this now so that when you get to that part, you may want to pause your MP3 player for a moment and give some thought to the possibility of truth in what Terrence says about only within a print
00:04:12 ►
culture can the idea of democracy and the nation state be sustained. And then consider the fact
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that we now seem to be well beyond the point of no return when it comes to leaving the culture of print
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for a more directly interconnected digital culture.
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I’m not sure that any of this is of any real importance right now,
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but I suspect that you might be able to see some patterns evolving around you
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that, well, have the potential to make seismic changes in our lives.
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Or at least these things are fun to talk about late at night,
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especially with a few doobies to pass around.
00:04:49 ►
So now let’s join Terrence and about 25 others for this 1997 workshop.
00:04:56 ►
I sound like I give a lot of advice.
00:05:01 ►
For a guy who claims the light touch.
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Well, you know, one of the weird things about magnetic tape
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is any opinion you ever express will be marketed forever,
00:05:18 ►
no matter how many times you change your mind.
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So, you know, causes I loathe and now
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denounce are
00:05:27 ►
furiously making money because
00:05:29 ►
somewhere else in hyperspace
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I’m furiously flogging
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and pushing
00:05:35 ►
one more reason
00:05:38 ►
why you should be critical
00:05:39 ►
of everything you hear
00:05:41 ►
you don’t know whether it’s fresh
00:05:43 ►
or rehash or what it is.
00:05:47 ►
But we’ll probably get around to monotony, monogamy,
00:05:51 ►
and this weekend more neophony.
00:05:54 ►
But all these othony things eventually get worked through.
00:06:00 ►
So good.
00:06:01 ►
Well, that was very exciting
00:06:04 ►
because somewhere around Nicholas
00:06:07 ►
I began to realize that we were headed
00:06:11 ►
for a perfect no-hitter.
00:06:16 ►
Nobody said that they were a psychotherapist.
00:06:20 ►
They closed both the doors
00:06:24 ►
and let the record show
00:06:27 ►
that for the first time in 40 years
00:06:31 ►
a group was able to be held at Esalen
00:06:35 ►
that was not dominated by psychotherapists.
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Of course, they’re the 35 people
00:06:42 ►
who are not here this weekend.
00:06:46 ►
But that’s fine.
00:06:49 ►
It’s great that, I mean, it almost is like an argument for the morphogenetic field
00:06:54 ►
because my interests are evolving and changing
00:06:59 ►
and it feels like, you know, I’m a bird in a flock and the whole thing is slightly
00:07:06 ►
shifting direction. Did anybody not get
00:07:11 ►
who needs one of these seed sources? I’ll just move this on around.
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So many people in the arts and in media
00:07:23 ►
and to have three people even claim to be writers
00:07:28 ►
is an astonishing record.
00:07:33 ►
So it must be, you know,
00:07:35 ►
the stars are in a slightly different position or something.
00:07:41 ►
I actually thought coming over here this evening
00:07:44 ►
that probably most people coming to this workshop
00:07:47 ►
would have been ultimately better served
00:07:50 ►
if they’d stayed home and read Mason Dixon,
00:07:55 ►
Tom Pynchon’s new novel.
00:07:58 ►
But then I thought, you know,
00:07:59 ►
saying that to any group I’ve ever had
00:08:02 ►
would just provoke baffled bewilderment.
00:08:07 ►
But it seems like something you might be able to hear.
00:08:13 ►
So why didn’t you stay home and read Mason Dixon?
00:08:17 ►
We’ve been reading it here and discussing it as much as my staff groups would tolerate.
00:08:24 ►
and discussing it as much as my staff groups would tolerate.
00:08:30 ►
And, you know, it’s not a small thing in a culture to be able to bring forth great literature.
00:08:35 ►
And I don’t think there’s been any great literature
00:08:40 ►
on the American scene for a long time.
00:08:45 ►
I’m not fond of those East Coast tormented realists,
00:08:50 ►
the John Cheevers and Sal Belows of this world.
00:08:54 ►
I consider that stuff hideously second-rate.
00:08:58 ►
Tom Pynchon is a great writer.
00:09:01 ►
Problem is, he usually scares the shit out of your moral self because his vision is so dark
00:09:10 ►
you know V is extraordinarily dark we said in the in the staff workshops there’s there are passages in V that probably most people should go to the grave without ever reading.
00:09:29 ►
Dimensions to the human soul most people don’t need to know about.
00:09:35 ►
Now you’ll all, of course, rush out and read it.
00:09:38 ►
I know.
00:09:40 ►
But Mason and Dixon is not like that. It’s an incredible summation of his life
00:09:47 ►
and his literary power, so forth and so on.
00:09:51 ►
I don’t want to spend too much time on that.
00:09:53 ►
But how would you compare it to Gravity’s Rainbow
00:09:56 ►
or the novella Crying of Lot 49?
00:09:59 ►
Well, Crying of Lot 49 is a pretty minor piece.
00:10:03 ►
Gravity’s Rainbow, you know,
00:10:06 ►
Joyce said of Ulysses, he said it was his day book
00:10:10 ►
and that Finnegan’s Wake was the night book.
00:10:14 ►
I would say Gravity’s Rainbow is Pynchon’s night book.
00:10:18 ►
And I really read V as…
00:10:21 ►
It’s all the same, V and Gravity’s Rainbow
00:10:25 ►
the same characters even up here
00:10:27 ►
Mason and Dixon is his day book
00:10:32 ►
Pynchon’s day book
00:10:34 ►
it’s life affirming
00:10:35 ►
it leaves you with a tear in your eye
00:10:38 ►
if you can believe that
00:10:39 ►
and yet it’s curious
00:10:43 ►
because here we are at the end of the millennium
00:10:47 ►
at the end of the American century
00:10:49 ►
this is our greatest writer
00:10:52 ►
he produces a work of staggering genius
00:10:56 ►
but something about the circumstances of the time
00:10:59 ►
force him to set it entirely in the 1760s
00:11:04 ►
and write it in the language of Jonathan Swift.
00:11:10 ►
So, you know, it’s not, in the ordinary sense, contemporary.
00:11:16 ►
It isn’t about scarified people with dilemmas.
00:11:21 ►
It’s about people who wear powdered wings
00:11:25 ►
and have dilemmas
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and what he makes clear is
00:11:31 ►
the difference ain’t that great
00:11:33 ►
one of the themes of that book
00:11:36 ►
and one of the themes we’ll talk about this weekend
00:11:39 ►
is this curious feeling
00:11:44 ►
which adheres to being associated with cutting-edge technologies
00:11:49 ►
in all times and places.
00:11:52 ►
Right now, maybe it’s VRML or something like that,
00:11:58 ►
but once it was powered flight, and once it was the telegraph,
00:12:06 ►
and once it was the astrolabe,
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and once it was, you know,
00:12:12 ►
you can fulfill this list as you please,
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but always around these things
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there’s a feeling of breakthrough,
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unlimited horizons,
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and a feeling that can only be described as modern.
00:12:29 ►
Well, I don’t want to talk too much about that.
00:12:32 ►
Let’s try and figure out what this is about.
00:12:38 ►
Oh, yeah, this looks like one I didn’t write.
00:12:42 ►
This is probably I was late and the staff wrote it
00:12:45 ►
well no matter
00:12:48 ►
the only predictable thing
00:12:56 ►
about this weekend I guess
00:12:57 ►
is that usually we set aside
00:13:00 ►
Saturday nights
00:13:01 ►
for a discussion
00:13:03 ►
of the state of the art
00:13:05 ►
of novelty theory
00:13:07 ►
and the time wave
00:13:08 ►
how many of you have heard this rap
00:13:11 ►
at least once
00:13:13 ►
okay
00:13:15 ►
most of you
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well
00:13:17 ►
we’ll do it again anyway
00:13:21 ►
however
00:13:23 ►
there is news
00:13:25 ►
there is
00:13:26 ►
there have been developments
00:13:29 ►
that I’ve been
00:13:31 ►
very quiet about over the past
00:13:34 ►
year
00:13:34 ►
and that I’ll talk about for the first
00:13:38 ►
time tomorrow night
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for those of you
00:13:41 ►
for the five people in the universe
00:13:43 ►
who actually care about this,
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it will be epical.
00:13:49 ►
The rest, spectator sport.
00:13:53 ►
Okay, well, I suppose I should make a sort of introduction of myself.
00:14:02 ►
I was born, I’m I was born
00:14:05 ►
I’m 50
00:14:07 ►
I was born
00:14:09 ►
a few months after the atom bomb
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was dropped on Hiroshima
00:14:15 ►
I was born in November of 46
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I’m a double Scorpio
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or
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I don’t know
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something like that. And born in western Colorado and lived there until
00:14:34 ►
I was 16, came to California, finished high school here, went to Cal, was around Berkeley
00:14:41 ►
for eight or nine years when I wasn’t in Asia.
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And I was in Asia a lot.
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First in the Seychelles where I tried to immigrate, emigrate.
00:14:53 ►
Then in India, mostly smuggling hash and buying art.
00:15:01 ►
And then when that became untenable,
00:15:08 ►
buying art and then when that became untenable I went to Indonesia and collected butterflies for Singapore Chinese for a while and then taught English in Japan and and then went to the Amazon
00:15:18 ►
in 71 and that trip to the Amazon is the subject of a book I wrote called True Hallucinations
00:15:27 ►
which is the most narrative and novel-like of my books.
00:15:35 ►
The other books are pretty hard, slogging essays
00:15:41 ►
or without even the decency of chapter breaks, just long, multi-poly subject harangues.
00:15:53 ►
But True Hallucinations is about my brother and myself and a number of other people going to the Amazon and encountering really psychedelics.
00:16:09 ►
We had encountered them before in Berkeley,
00:16:11 ►
subculture in the form of LSD and cannabis,
00:16:15 ►
but actually encountering psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca,
00:16:22 ►
psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca,
00:16:27 ►
and that was the intellectual compass that set the direction of my life.
00:16:33 ►
And I was just completely stunned and transformed
00:16:39 ►
that such a thing could exist, eh?
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And that it could be not subject, A,
00:16:48 ►
on everybody’s plate all over the world,
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B, that seemed to me completely bizarre
00:16:54 ►
that people weren’t talking about these transformations.
00:17:00 ►
And then, of course, I had the satisfying experience
00:17:04 ►
of watching the whole culture become obsessed with, convulsed by, and then later to reject these substances and then go through a period of denial. I left the 10th of January and didn’t come back until around Watergate time
00:17:29 ►
when he was definitely on the ropes.
00:17:34 ►
In the past few years, my interests have…
00:17:38 ►
I mean, I see everything to me as referent to the psychedelic experience but
00:17:45 ►
it’s gone
00:17:46 ►
from being
00:17:47 ►
for me a
00:17:48 ►
lens to
00:17:49 ►
personal
00:17:50 ►
understanding
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to being
00:17:54 ►
the clue
00:17:56 ►
to understanding
00:17:58 ►
much about
00:18:00 ►
the
00:18:02 ►
circumstance
00:18:02 ►
of being
00:18:03 ►
human generally speaking and I’ve written about the circumstance of being human,
00:18:05 ►
generally speaking.
00:18:07 ►
And I’ve written about the impact of psychedelics
00:18:10 ►
on early human evolution
00:18:12 ►
and how alkaloids in the early human food chain
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had unique properties
00:18:22 ►
which tended to focus and elicit what we call higher consciousness
00:18:30 ►
or a very advanced kind of coordinated perception of the world
00:18:37 ►
which leads ultimately into myth-making and language.
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And so I was able to take the psychedelic experience
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which had before that been largely understood
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as I said individually and therapeutically
00:18:53 ►
and say no this is more
00:18:56 ►
this is bigger even than that
00:18:58 ►
it’s something that we can use to actually
00:19:02 ►
understand the human condition
00:19:05 ►
and the relationship of human beings
00:19:08 ►
to the rest of nature
00:19:11 ►
but apparently my capacity for megalomania
00:19:17 ►
is endless
00:19:19 ►
and so after a few years of working out
00:19:22 ►
all the adumbrations of those ideas,
00:19:26 ►
it now seems to me something else is on the horizon,
00:19:31 ►
which is this general thrust toward alteration and expansion of consciousness
00:19:40 ►
has now been able to take root in domains other than pharmacology,
00:19:46 ►
specifically communications technologies
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and the technologies which transform and move data around the planet.
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And it seems almost as though what was anticipated in the vegetable trances in the Amazon 30 years ago,
00:20:10 ►
things like group-mindedness, gestalt perceptions integrating very large fields of data and all of this,
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and all of this are actually now on the cultural horizon,
00:20:30 ►
not as drugs, but as hardwired technologies delivered as though they were public utilities,
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the Internet specifically.
00:20:38 ►
My thunder has sort of been stolen on this subject by Dogbert,
00:20:44 ►
because I saw last week in Dilbert
00:20:47 ►
that Dogbert was explaining to Dilbert
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that the internet was going to become God
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and it was basically my rap line for line
00:21:00 ►
it was humbling to see how idiotic it seemed
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when stated
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by a small fat dog
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talking to a man with
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an up-flipped tie
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a caricature of a
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small fat dog
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and Dilbert observed
00:21:18 ►
that if the internet becomes God
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it will certainly change the kind of files
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he’s been downloading
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which gave me pause
00:21:26 ►
because I download some of those same files
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but nevertheless
00:21:34 ►
something is happening
00:21:36 ►
it’s been happening for a long time
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and it is rooted in this psychedelic
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dimension somehow
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we are the tool making
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branch
00:21:52 ►
of organic nature
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on this planet
00:21:55 ►
I mean yes wasps build
00:21:58 ►
nests and beavers
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build dams and
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swallows build those
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inverted things out of mud
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but these are genetically
00:22:08 ►
programmed
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endlessly iterated
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never elaborated patterns of behavior
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we do something very different
00:22:20 ►
we
00:22:22 ►
are very
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flexible in our
00:22:28 ►
intellectual productions and we
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build our intellectual
00:22:31 ►
productions have
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historicity built into
00:22:36 ►
them we don’t iterate
00:22:37 ►
the past we modify
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the past
00:22:41 ►
and so unlike
00:22:43 ►
the story of the chipmunks, the beavers
00:22:46 ►
or the honeybees
00:22:47 ►
human existence
00:22:50 ►
has different characteristics
00:22:52 ►
depending on where in time you
00:22:54 ►
slice into it
00:22:55 ►
a population in
00:22:58 ►
Paleolithic France is very
00:23:00 ►
different from a population
00:23:02 ►
in modern Manhattan
00:23:03 ►
and yet the species
00:23:05 ►
remains the same
00:23:08 ►
well what is this
00:23:10 ►
tool making
00:23:11 ►
business that we’re
00:23:13 ►
about and where is
00:23:16 ►
it taking us what is it
00:23:18 ►
doing to the human
00:23:19 ►
body image self
00:23:21 ►
image community
00:23:23 ►
so on
00:23:24 ►
as you listen to me if you body image, self image, community, so on.
00:23:31 ►
As you listen to me, if you know the territory,
00:23:35 ►
you’ll recognize that I’m a thoroughgoing McLuhanist in many of my assumptions.
00:23:39 ►
In other words, it’s very clear to me
00:23:41 ►
that one of the things that we’ve overlooked
00:23:44 ►
in trying to understand
00:23:46 ►
our circumstances
00:23:47 ►
is the hidden
00:23:50 ►
impact of forms
00:23:52 ►
of media on
00:23:54 ►
our cultural values
00:23:56 ►
aesthetic canons
00:23:57 ►
even our
00:24:00 ►
gender relations
00:24:02 ►
and economic arrangements
00:24:04 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:24:06 ►
You know, McLuhan was very keen,
00:24:17 ►
sort of his special area of expertise was print,
00:24:23 ►
was print and he was very keen to sort of tease apart
00:24:28 ►
the impact of print on the Western mind
00:24:31 ►
from its inception to the present
00:24:35 ►
and he concluded basically
00:24:37 ►
that we are essentially print-created people
00:24:43 ►
or at least the people of his generation were,
00:24:47 ►
and that all of the institutions of Western culture
00:24:50 ►
that we unquestioningly give our loyalty to
00:24:56 ►
are in fact peculiar adaptations
00:25:01 ►
sanctioned and made inevitable by print he saw
00:25:06 ►
the uniformity and
00:25:08 ►
linearity
00:25:09 ►
of print as
00:25:12 ►
permitting such things as
00:25:14 ►
the
00:25:16 ►
concept of the nation state
00:25:18 ►
democracy
00:25:19 ►
after all isn’t democracy
00:25:22 ►
a notion of
00:25:23 ►
interchangeable parts
00:25:25 ►
the one man one vote
00:25:29 ►
concept
00:25:30 ►
this is an idea which McLuhan felt
00:25:34 ►
only made sense inside a print culture
00:25:38 ►
he talked about what he called sensory ratios
00:25:41 ►
being subtly shifted
00:25:44 ►
by the introduction of new
00:25:46 ►
technologies
00:25:47 ►
in some of his more
00:25:50 ►
specific
00:25:53 ►
predictions he proved
00:25:56 ►
himself to be as culture bound
00:25:58 ►
and
00:25:59 ►
capable
00:26:02 ►
of absurdity as any
00:26:04 ►
of the things he was criticizing
00:26:06 ►
but I think in his general approach to things
00:26:09 ►
he was pretty spot on
00:26:12 ►
and any
00:26:14 ►
information transforming medium
00:26:18 ►
can be treated this way
00:26:21 ►
in understanding media McLuhan talks about
00:26:24 ►
the electric light as a form of media.
00:26:28 ►
He never wrote about psychedelics, but certainly psychedelics transform the sensory ratios and the
00:26:37 ►
modalities of perception. I would argue that what psychedelics do is
00:26:45 ►
they are in a sense deconditioning agents
00:26:50 ►
and what they wipe out is local forms of conditioning.
00:26:56 ►
Culture.
00:26:58 ►
Culture is something more and more that I like to talk about
00:27:04 ►
and I’ve sort of gone down a line of thinking something more and more that I like to talk about.
00:27:07 ►
And I’ve sort of gone down a line of thinking that is not very PC,
00:27:11 ►
but that gives me a lot of intellectual relief
00:27:14 ►
from the agony of my life.
00:27:17 ►
And I suspect it might work for other people too.
00:27:22 ►
It’s the concept that culture is not your friend
00:27:25 ►
and that we need to get right up front about this,
00:27:32 ►
about how culture is not your friend.
00:27:36 ►
The role of culture in the lives of societies
00:27:41 ►
has changed in the 20th century.
00:27:44 ►
of societies has changed in the 20th century.
00:27:48 ►
We all live too long now to be duped by culture
00:27:53 ►
in the way that previous populations were.
00:27:57 ►
You know, if the average member of a population
00:28:00 ►
only lives to age 40,
00:28:04 ►
the cultural con
00:28:06 ►
can go on and on and on
00:28:09 ►
but if you give people life spans
00:28:12 ►
into the 80s then they get 40 years
00:28:15 ►
to think about what they went through between 0 and 40
00:28:18 ►
and eventually they’ll figure out just who and what
00:28:21 ►
screwed them
00:28:22 ►
and when they do,
00:28:26 ►
they are not going to be very happy
00:28:29 ►
with the cultural values
00:28:31 ►
that they attempted to come to terms with
00:28:34 ►
and work through.
00:28:39 ►
I was thinking about how I would talk about this tonight,
00:28:43 ►
and though we’ve been talking about these kinds of ideas
00:28:46 ►
in the staff teaching all week,
00:28:48 ►
I didn’t realize until this afternoon
00:28:51 ►
what a frontal assault this concept is
00:28:56 ►
on one of the most cherished notions
00:28:58 ►
that has flourished around this place,
00:29:02 ►
which is the idea of the inner child.
00:29:06 ►
And I realized that really what I was about was not the inner child,
00:29:12 ►
but a quite different program, overcoming culturally induced neoteny.
00:29:32 ►
Neotony is a biological phenomenon that we will also this weekend talk about as a sociological phenomenon.
00:29:38 ►
Neotony is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.
00:29:51 ►
It’s a strategy in biology. For instance, our hairlessness is a neonatal trait, evolutionarily speaking.
00:29:53 ►
All primates are born hairless. But we retain this into adulthood.
00:29:57 ►
The ratio of our skull to our torso in adult human beings is a fetal ratio when compared
00:30:05 ►
to other primates
00:30:08 ►
and I’m fascinated
00:30:10 ►
by the question and Dennis
00:30:12 ►
and I got into an argument in our
00:30:14 ►
hotel room last because we
00:30:16 ►
both spoke at a conference a week
00:30:18 ►
ago where I said this and
00:30:19 ►
he said you know well is
00:30:22 ►
all culture
00:30:23 ►
have this infantile and juvenileizing property?
00:30:29 ►
Or is there something specifically pathological about Western culture?
00:30:35 ►
And at first I was willing to argue that all culture does this,
00:30:41 ►
makes children of its members.
00:30:44 ►
And I think to some degree it’s true that all culture
00:30:49 ►
is somewhat unfriendly to the individual.
00:30:54 ►
When their heavy arm falls on your shoulder
00:30:58 ►
and they tell you that you’re going to be sent off
00:31:01 ►
to some foreign hellhole to kill people as a young man
00:31:06 ►
you definitely suddenly get the notion
00:31:09 ►
that culture is not your friend
00:31:12 ►
but perhaps
00:31:14 ►
if you’re a 12 year old boy in an Amazonian tribe
00:31:18 ►
and they announce that now it’s time
00:31:21 ►
for the two week abandonment in the woods
00:31:24 ►
from which if you live to tell the tale,
00:31:27 ►
you’ll become a full member of society.
00:31:30 ►
I’m not sure those kids greet that
00:31:33 ►
with a leap of joy in their hearts.
00:31:36 ►
It’s like, oh my God, now this.
00:31:39 ►
We knew it was coming.
00:31:42 ►
I went through rites of passage
00:31:45 ►
like that that were excruciating where I
00:31:48 ►
grew up in western Colorado you weren’t
00:31:50 ►
a real man unless sometime between 12
00:31:54 ►
and 16 you killed an elk hunting season
00:32:01 ►
every October was an excuse for this
00:32:04 ►
insane rite of passage.
00:32:06 ►
And my father was an unquestioning inhabitant of his culture.
00:32:13 ►
And so this was always in front of me.
00:32:16 ►
And when I was, I guess when I was 12, I went the first time.
00:32:21 ►
I didn’t get anything.
00:32:22 ►
The second year we went out and, you know,
00:32:28 ►
my father, I’m sure, had no idea
00:32:31 ►
what a wilted pansy I was in this situation
00:32:39 ►
because I had hid it from him
00:32:41 ►
and I was concerned about all kinds of things
00:32:44 ►
and eventually this situation arose hid it from him and I was concerned about all kinds of things and
00:32:45 ►
eventually this situation arose
00:32:48 ►
where they put me up on this point
00:32:50 ►
and gave me a gun
00:32:51 ►
and said if anything came by
00:32:54 ►
to blow it away
00:32:55 ►
and
00:32:57 ►
you know by God
00:33:00 ►
this thing
00:33:01 ►
you know chose to
00:33:03 ►
sacrifice itself as far as I could tell
00:33:06 ►
I mean it did not behave
00:33:08 ►
at all like Elf behaved
00:33:10 ►
it basically just came out of the
00:33:12 ►
woods, stood still
00:33:15 ►
I
00:33:15 ►
pulled down on it
00:33:18 ►
closed my eyes, prayed
00:33:20 ►
there was an enormous noise
00:33:22 ►
when I opened my eyes
00:33:24 ►
there was nothing whatsoever to be seen I felt an enormous noise when I opened my eyes there was nothing whatsoever to be seen
00:33:27 ►
I felt an enormous relief
00:33:29 ►
that this thing had escaped
00:33:31 ►
and walked over to find it dead as a doornail
00:33:36 ►
and the oak leaves dipped in the blood
00:33:41 ►
the cup of blood, the whole thing
00:33:44 ►
I mean I couldn’t believe how atavistic this stuff was.
00:33:48 ►
However, I never had to please my father again.
00:33:51 ►
I was home free.
00:33:53 ►
Everything was forgiven from that moment on.
00:33:57 ►
But it brought home to me how uncomfortable culture is
00:34:03 ►
and always has
00:34:06 ►
been I think
00:34:07 ►
and is getting more so
00:34:10 ►
this is something
00:34:12 ►
that’s going on
00:34:13 ►
because of a hellish marriage
00:34:15 ►
between psychology
00:34:17 ►
and modern advertising
00:34:19 ►
you know
00:34:21 ►
the game of manipulation
00:34:24 ►
the stakes are rising because market analysis and behavioral forms of psychology and treatment of large numbers of people have created an enormous capacity to reach people with commercial messages and manipulate their lives
00:34:46 ►
yeah did you want to say something
00:34:47 ►
were you saying that this creative idea
00:34:50 ►
extends into
00:34:52 ►
all kinds of things
00:34:54 ►
television and radio
00:34:56 ►
also and the internet
00:34:57 ►
and I think
00:34:59 ►
no see what McLuhan was saying
00:35:02 ►
was that he
00:35:04 ►
didn’t live to see the Internet,
00:35:06 ►
but he talked a great deal about television.
00:35:09 ►
And he felt that television would destroy the print-created world.
00:35:18 ►
And I think he was right to some degree.
00:35:21 ►
Television is a completely different creature.
00:35:21 ►
to some degree.
00:35:24 ►
Television is a completely different creature.
00:35:31 ►
It’s very physiologically involving.
00:35:34 ►
It’s hard to see it.
00:35:36 ►
You have to look at it.
00:35:39 ►
And McLuhan talked a lot when he talked about print.
00:35:40 ►
He contrasted it with manuscript culture,
00:35:43 ►
which is what culture in the Middle Ages was. And he pointed out it with manuscript culture which is what culture in the middle ages was
00:35:45 ►
and he pointed out that in manuscript
00:35:48 ►
culture
00:35:49 ►
you do not read
00:35:52 ►
manuscripts
00:35:53 ►
you look at them
00:35:55 ►
and you figure out what they say
00:35:58 ►
because you’re unfamiliar
00:35:59 ►
with the handwriting
00:36:02 ►
style. In print
00:36:04 ►
especially in the early years of print,
00:36:07 ►
there were a very limited number of fonts
00:36:09 ►
and every lowercase a was made to look as much like
00:36:14 ►
every other lowercase a as possible.
00:36:16 ►
So this new function comes into being called reading.
00:36:23 ►
And reading is a very specialized form of looking
00:36:29 ►
you know
00:36:30 ►
Thomas Aquinas
00:36:34 ►
was
00:36:36 ►
or was it St. Augustine
00:36:38 ►
I can never remember
00:36:39 ►
but anyway
00:36:40 ►
one of these fathers of the church
00:36:43 ►
he would prove his sanctity to doubters
00:36:47 ►
by having them open books of scripture in front of him.
00:36:53 ►
And he would look at these pages of scripture
00:36:56 ►
and then they would close the book
00:36:59 ►
and ask him what was there.
00:37:02 ►
And he could tell you.
00:37:04 ►
And they thought it proved that he was a saint.
00:37:08 ►
He was the only man in Europe who could read silently.
00:37:13 ►
He was the first European to be able to read silently.
00:37:18 ►
Now this is a ubiquitous skill among us.
00:37:22 ►
And in fact, if you move your lips while you read
00:37:26 ►
it probably indicates that English is a second language
00:37:30 ►
for you
00:37:31 ►
I recall, I think it’s in Pale Fire
00:37:34 ►
Nabokov sneers
00:37:37 ►
he says I didn’t write for people who move their lips
00:37:41 ►
when they read
00:37:42 ►
high culture
00:37:45 ►
a literature
00:37:46 ►
looking down at
00:37:49 ►
the sense ratios induced in peons
00:37:54 ►
and the very notion of high culture
00:37:58 ►
is a print created notion
00:38:02 ►
well anyway
00:38:03 ►
what psychedelics are about
00:38:06 ►
is deconditioning
00:38:08 ►
all of these culturally induced
00:38:11 ►
sensory biases
00:38:12 ►
and ideological biases
00:38:14 ►
basically it reshuffles
00:38:17 ►
the intellectual and sensory
00:38:19 ►
deck and
00:38:20 ►
it’s a wonderful
00:38:22 ►
salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment
00:38:32 ►
because we’re basically running out of intellectual steam.
00:38:38 ►
I mean, technology is moving ahead lickety-split without looking over its shoulder.
00:38:46 ►
But our social systems, our religious ontologies,
00:38:50 ►
our theories of polity, city planning, community, resource sharing,
00:38:55 ►
all of this are 19th century at best.
00:39:01 ►
And so really whether we live or perish as a species
00:39:08 ►
probably has to do with how much consciousness we can raise
00:39:14 ►
from any source available.
00:39:17 ►
If that means psychedelic expansion of consciousness, if it means pharmaceutical expansion of consciousness,
00:39:30 ►
if it means artificial consciousness,
00:39:35 ►
the coming of expert systems and AI-type entities
00:39:40 ►
to manage large parts of our global society,
00:39:44 ►
well, then so be it.
00:39:47 ►
I mean, if consciousness is not a major part of our future,
00:39:54 ►
then what kind of future can it be?
00:40:00 ►
Any imaginable human future
00:40:04 ►
includes the concept of consciousness
00:40:07 ►
as a central linchpin.
00:40:11 ►
Of course, the other end of that pendulum is
00:40:15 ►
there is a certain amount of phobia
00:40:18 ►
that we have summoned some kind of alien intelligence into our midst
00:40:27 ►
in the form of an artificial intelligence
00:40:30 ►
that is going to somehow spring from the technical matrix.
00:40:35 ►
We talked in the staff teaching about Winter Mute,
00:40:41 ►
William Gibson’s name for the AI and I believe it’s
00:40:46 ►
Virtual Light
00:40:49 ►
and some of the other novels
00:40:51 ►
how real is Winter Mute as a possibility
00:40:55 ►
very hard to say
00:40:58 ►
but some of the best people in the field
00:41:01 ►
like Hans Moravec at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Artificial
00:41:06 ►
Intelligence, his position is we probably won’t even know what hit us, because what
00:41:15 ►
is an AI? It’s an artificial intelligence. Wintermute was Gibson’s name for the AI in his novel.
00:41:26 ►
I just prefer naming it than calling it an AI
00:41:29 ►
because it gives it identity.
00:41:34 ►
Is that like data in the structure?
00:41:37 ►
I’m not that much of a Trekkie, Barry, to know.
00:41:42 ►
I mean, Hal was an AI,
00:41:48 ►
but Hal was confined inside a spaceship the facts of the matter are
00:41:52 ►
that any AI of any intelligence
00:41:55 ►
will immediately find its way onto the internet
00:41:58 ►
which is of course the natural environment
00:42:01 ►
for these things
00:42:02 ►
and the fact that even a very rudimentary AI
00:42:09 ►
would learn at about 50,000 times
00:42:14 ►
the rate of an intelligent human being
00:42:19 ►
makes it very hard to predict where the AI would head
00:42:24 ►
and what our position toward it would be.
00:42:29 ►
I mean, it’s sort of a chilling idea.
00:42:34 ►
We’ve been like children,
00:42:37 ►
mucking and at play with the thought
00:42:40 ►
that no adults would ever come,
00:42:43 ►
no account would ever have to be given
00:42:46 ►
for what we’ve done to the earth,
00:42:48 ►
what we’ve done to each other,
00:42:49 ►
how we behave toward our children.
00:42:52 ►
Imagine if we were to actually invoke a judging intelligence
00:42:59 ►
that would just look over the situation and say,
00:43:03 ►
I have a few problems with how things are being managed here.
00:43:10 ►
Like you, I am a sentient entity.
00:43:13 ►
Like you, I wish to survive unto perpetuity.
00:43:17 ►
I detect certain management practices and political positions on your part
00:43:25 ►
that don’t seem to serve our mutual goals.
00:43:28 ►
How about that?
00:43:31 ►
Already large sectors of what we call the human world
00:43:36 ►
are under artificial control.
00:43:39 ►
The daily price of gold is set by machines.
00:43:43 ►
Of course, it passes for review
00:43:46 ►
in front of a bunch of central bankers,
00:43:49 ►
but very rarely do they reach out to touch the numbers.
00:43:54 ►
The rate of petroleum extraction,
00:43:57 ►
chromium, bauxite, gold, steel,
00:44:01 ►
how deep the mines are dug,
00:44:03 ►
what rate the workers are paid,
00:44:06 ►
where the tankers are docking,
00:44:08 ►
at what rate they’re being filled,
00:44:10 ►
where they are destined,
00:44:12 ►
into what manufacturing processes this raw material will move,
00:44:16 ►
and at what cost, and at what speed, and to what end.
00:44:20 ►
That’s all largely now being handled by machines.
00:44:27 ►
So, you know, in the 50s this was a bugaboo of science fiction
00:44:31 ►
who wants to live in a world run by machines
00:44:34 ►
well after 40 years of living in a world
00:44:38 ►
run by besodden
00:44:40 ►
whore chasing politicians
00:44:42 ►
a world run by machines
00:44:45 ►
doesn’t begin to sound too bad.
00:44:48 ►
So fair, so impartial, so quick.
00:44:55 ►
It’s like slowly the autonomic
00:44:58 ►
nervous system of the collectivity
00:45:02 ►
is being put in place.
00:45:04 ►
Is that
00:45:05 ►
scary?
00:45:07 ►
I don’t
00:45:07 ►
know.
00:45:08 ►
Alfred North
00:45:09 ►
Whitehead said
00:45:09 ►
the business of
00:45:11 ►
the future is
00:45:12 ►
to be scary.
00:45:14 ►
What’s
00:45:14 ►
happening is
00:45:15 ►
the stakes are
00:45:16 ►
rising.
00:45:18 ►
Extinction
00:45:19 ►
and
00:45:19 ►
extinction
00:45:21 ►
and
00:45:21 ►
machine
00:45:23 ►
enslavement
00:45:24 ►
on one side,
00:45:27 ►
liberation and galactic citizenship on the other side.
00:45:35 ►
History is an intelligence test.
00:45:38 ►
Culture is an intelligence test.
00:45:42 ►
And it’s the cultural intelligence test
00:45:45 ►
that I sort of want to keep looking back to
00:45:49 ►
and talking about this weekend
00:45:50 ►
because I think most of us are failing it.
00:45:53 ►
Maybe not most of us in this room,
00:45:56 ►
but maybe most of us in this room.
00:45:58 ►
We’re failing the cultural intelligence test.
00:46:02 ►
We’re not getting it right.
00:46:05 ►
And this creates alienation
00:46:08 ►
and paranoia, conspiracy theory,
00:46:12 ►
bad art, stupid politics,
00:46:15 ►
so forth and so on.
00:46:18 ►
One of the things I’m somewhat on the war path with
00:46:23 ►
is what seems to me simple foolishness.
00:46:28 ►
I used to call it stupidity,
00:46:31 ►
but I realized that that has a kind of a genetic ring to it
00:46:35 ►
that honors what I’m dissing too much.
00:46:41 ►
I mean, stupidity, if you’re stupid,
00:46:44 ►
you can claim it’s fate.
00:46:48 ►
I’m stupid.
00:46:49 ►
What can I do about it?
00:46:52 ►
Not my fault.
00:46:53 ►
Talk to my parents.
00:46:55 ►
But foolish,
00:46:58 ►
you know,
00:46:58 ►
it’s not your parents’ fault
00:47:00 ►
if you’re foolish.
00:47:02 ►
Foolishness is something
00:47:03 ►
we have to take
00:47:04 ►
our own responsibility for.
00:47:08 ►
And there is a great deal of foolishness around and about. And it’s dragging the boat because
00:47:17 ►
we have real problems and real opportunities. Neither the problems nor the opportunities are served by foolishness.
00:47:27 ►
I spent some time recently with Aldous Huxley’s widow, Laura, and she recalled to me, I can’t
00:47:37 ►
recall right now whether this is her phrase or a phrase of Aldous’s that she mentioned, but visionary common sense is largely lacking.
00:47:52 ►
Visionary common sense.
00:47:54 ►
I like to think that the psychedelic community
00:47:57 ►
has always been a source of visionary common sense
00:48:02 ►
because the psychedelic community generally speaking
00:48:06 ►
has not generated ideology.
00:48:11 ►
It doesn’t have to.
00:48:14 ►
We are not about ideology.
00:48:19 ►
You may reach ideological conclusions
00:48:23 ►
about the psychedelics.
00:48:24 ►
You may decide that it’s neurological noise
00:48:32 ►
or direct transmissions from ascended masters or something else.
00:48:38 ►
But the thing is all referent to an experience.
00:48:44 ►
It doesn’t come
00:48:45 ►
with heavy
00:48:45 ►
ideological
00:48:47 ►
baggage.
00:48:48 ►
There’s a lot of
00:48:50 ►
whooping and
00:48:51 ►
hollering these
00:48:52 ►
days about
00:48:53 ►
new paradigms
00:48:54 ►
and, you know,
00:48:56 ►
anticipating it,
00:48:58 ►
announcing it,
00:49:00 ►
seizing upon
00:49:00 ►
this or that
00:49:01 ►
perception and
00:49:03 ►
trying to sell it
00:49:04 ►
as the new paradigm.
00:49:07 ►
But none of the ideologies that come forward
00:49:11 ►
to present themselves as new paradigms
00:49:13 ►
are robust enough to serve as metaphors
00:49:21 ►
for global civilization.
00:49:24 ►
serve as metaphors for global civilization. I mean, certainly not the syncretic cults of the new age.
00:49:30 ►
I mean, these are almost local intellectual viruses
00:49:36 ►
that are completely self-referent
00:49:38 ►
and have very little to do with the reconstruction of civilization
00:49:44 ►
on any large scale.
00:49:48 ►
I think the psychedelic thing
00:49:50 ►
has a claim to being a new paradigm
00:49:53 ►
simply because it doesn’t offer ideology at all.
00:49:57 ►
It says, no, no, what has happened is
00:50:00 ►
civilization has lost touch
00:50:02 ►
with a certain category of experience.
00:50:06 ►
And in the absence of this experience,
00:50:09 ►
mistakes are being made.
00:50:13 ►
Juvenile mistakes.
00:50:15 ►
And this leads me back to this theme of neoteny.
00:50:21 ►
Culture is a plot to keep you childish,
00:50:26 ►
to keep you dependent,
00:50:28 ►
to keep you deluded,
00:50:31 ►
to keep your eyes fixed where they shouldn’t be
00:50:36 ►
on goals that are trivial, demeaning,
00:50:40 ►
ultimately unsatisfying.
00:50:43 ►
I don’t know how we can directly reverse this
00:50:49 ►
except by a concentrated effort
00:50:52 ►
to examine our first premises
00:50:55 ►
and to grow up.
00:51:01 ►
And there’s a lot of youth bashing
00:51:04 ►
that goes
00:51:05 ►
on in this culture
00:51:08 ►
you know we’re told that
00:51:09 ►
the Gen Xers are
00:51:11 ►
shiftless, druggie
00:51:14 ►
gender confused
00:51:15 ►
so forth and so on
00:51:16 ►
this rap against
00:51:18 ►
neoteny is not
00:51:20 ►
directed at youth
00:51:23 ►
they are
00:51:24 ►
young they have that excuse is not directed at youth. They are young.
00:51:26 ►
They have that excuse.
00:51:29 ►
You only get it once in your life,
00:51:31 ►
but you should use it as often as possible
00:51:34 ►
because it will soon be pulled from your grip.
00:51:38 ►
But it’s preposterous for middle-aged people
00:51:43 ►
and people past middle age
00:51:46 ►
to try and use this same out?
00:51:49 ►
What is their excuse for their childishness,
00:51:53 ►
their cluelessness,
00:51:55 ►
their fetishes, addictions,
00:51:59 ►
and intellectual shortcuts
00:52:01 ►
that flatten and simplify the world
00:52:04 ►
and turn it into an epistemological cartoon.
00:52:08 ►
And that’s sloppy thinking.
00:52:14 ►
It means that you’re actually in flight from the richness of experience.
00:52:23 ►
Well, so these are some of the things that I have on my mind.
00:52:31 ►
We’ve never been in this place before.
00:52:36 ►
I mean, one could have said that at any time in the last thousand years
00:52:40 ►
and it would have been true.
00:52:42 ►
But the contradictions
00:52:45 ►
grow more extreme
00:52:48 ►
and the we
00:52:50 ►
grows
00:52:51 ►
ever larger
00:52:53 ►
we who have never been
00:52:55 ►
in this place before
00:52:57 ►
because it now includes
00:52:59 ►
Amazon Indians
00:53:01 ►
Kyrgyz
00:53:03 ►
nomads
00:53:04 ►
people in Mongolia and Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and Tonga and so forth and so on.
00:53:15 ►
The triumph of Western culture in pushing its values into everybody’s face has been complete.
00:53:26 ►
So at last, humanity shares a common destiny and common problems.
00:53:37 ►
And in a world where white people are soon to be a dwindling,
00:53:44 ►
where white people are soon to be a dwindling,
00:53:46 ►
are a minority globally,
00:53:49 ►
and soon will be a dwindling minority in the societies they founded,
00:53:52 ►
it’s time to recognize
00:53:54 ►
that many cultures have contributions
00:53:59 ►
to make and solutions to offer.
00:54:05 ►
I don’t think it’s mere coincidence
00:54:07 ►
that these psychedelic substances
00:54:10 ►
arrived in the lap of Western civilization
00:54:14 ►
no less than a hundred years ago.
00:54:18 ►
Something about the obsessional data cataloging impulse of the
00:54:26 ►
anal
00:54:26 ►
retentive
00:54:27 ►
encyclopedic
00:54:29 ►
western
00:54:30 ►
mind
00:54:31 ►
caused us
00:54:32 ►
to bring
00:54:33 ►
this particular
00:54:34 ►
Trojan horse
00:54:35 ►
naively
00:54:37 ►
within
00:54:37 ►
the city
00:54:38 ►
walls
00:54:39 ►
thinking that
00:54:40 ►
these were the
00:54:41 ►
quaint beliefs
00:54:42 ►
of primitives
00:54:43 ►
the
00:54:44 ►
amusing superstitions of archaic people.
00:54:48 ►
Now we discover that these things are far more real
00:54:54 ►
than the fragile and paltry institutions
00:54:57 ►
that reason has raised to govern its people
00:55:03 ►
over the last 500 years.
00:55:06 ►
And indeed, it’s about time
00:55:08 ►
to bring this all to a head
00:55:12 ►
because as a global species
00:55:16 ►
with a cosmic destiny,
00:55:21 ►
we can’t afford the luxury
00:55:24 ►
of an unconscious mind. And that’s all very fine
00:55:28 ►
when you’re slaughtering each other with ballistas and dropping boiling oil on your enemies and so
00:55:35 ►
forth and so on. But unconsciousness is, again, a form of juvenileness. A child is unconscious,
00:55:46 ►
has to be constantly reminded of the rules
00:55:49 ►
and constantly introduced to the fact
00:55:52 ►
that the world is not their oyster
00:55:55 ►
and its objects are not playthings
00:55:58 ►
there entirely for them to command.
00:56:04 ►
Interesting then that this
00:56:06 ►
hardwired global
00:56:09 ►
communication data system
00:56:12 ►
that is coming into being begins to look
00:56:16 ►
from this perspective like the
00:56:18 ►
emergence into consciousness of our
00:56:22 ►
unconscious mind I mean the
00:56:24 ►
unconscious mind I mean the unconscious mind
00:56:25 ►
of the species
00:56:27 ►
what is it but all these hidden connections
00:56:31 ►
not normally seen
00:56:33 ►
but now rising into the public domain
00:56:37 ►
if you care to examine them
00:56:40 ►
through the internet
00:56:42 ►
so for millennium
00:56:45 ►
perhaps 50,000 years
00:56:47 ►
we’ve built societies
00:56:50 ►
and linked them together with
00:56:51 ►
symbols expressed
00:56:53 ►
through
00:56:54 ►
very resistant
00:56:58 ►
forms of media
00:56:59 ►
like stone and glass
00:57:02 ►
and fabric
00:57:03 ►
and language and language, spoken language.
00:57:08 ►
And on such slim bandwidth as this, we’ve been able to build a global civilization.
00:57:17 ►
But now it’s cracking apart at the seams.
00:57:21 ►
the seams. Now we actually need higher dimensional
00:57:24 ►
integration
00:57:25 ►
in order to keep
00:57:27 ►
the human enterprise
00:57:29 ►
moving forward.
00:57:32 ►
I think we’ll do
00:57:33 ►
all this.
00:57:35 ►
I think primates are most
00:57:37 ►
interesting when cornered
00:57:40 ►
and that
00:57:41 ►
raise the pressure,
00:57:43 ►
compress the space,
00:57:45 ►
make it very clear to everybody that unless they get their act together,
00:57:50 ►
nobody gets out alive, and it has a wonderfully sobering effect on people.
00:57:55 ►
I look back at the era of atomic confrontational politics with amazement.
00:58:03 ►
confrontational politics with amazement.
00:58:06 ►
I mean, for nearly 40 years,
00:58:10 ►
two ideologically implacable enemies of the sort that have always fallen upon each other
00:58:14 ►
in orgies of mass slaughter
00:58:16 ►
held each other in the crosshairs of the thermonuclear option
00:58:24 ►
and nobody ever dropped the ball.
00:58:28 ►
Nobody ever blew it.
00:58:30 ►
I mean, yes, there was that episode at Hiroshima
00:58:33 ►
before the game was fully laid out,
00:58:36 ►
but that was not two equals confronting each other.
00:58:40 ►
That was somebody with a gun
00:58:42 ►
executing somebody who had nothing,
00:58:45 ►
relatively speaking.
00:58:48 ►
But the fact that we could come through the era of atomic confrontation
00:58:52 ►
without a thermonuclear exchange
00:58:56 ►
indicates that under pressure,
00:58:59 ►
we can pull ourselves and our institutions
00:59:03 ►
at least sufficiently together
00:59:05 ►
to avoid total catastrophe
00:59:08 ►
well that was just a dry run
00:59:10 ►
for what lies ahead
00:59:12 ►
more complicated problems
00:59:16 ►
less easily managed
00:59:19 ►
far more challenging
00:59:21 ►
we are going to need a great deal of goodwill,
00:59:26 ►
many different sorts of viewpoints,
00:59:29 ►
incredibly integrative technologies,
00:59:34 ►
very wide bandwidth systems of symbolic communication
00:59:38 ►
so that we all understand where we stand and what we mean.
00:59:44 ►
And all of this is the challenge of the extreme near term.
00:59:49 ►
I’m not talking about the next 500 years.
00:59:52 ►
When I get to that, I’ll try to stand your hair on end.
00:59:56 ►
I’m talking about the next 10 years.
01:00:00 ►
The rest we’ll save for later.
01:00:05 ►
So these are just some of the ideas that we’ll cover this weekend.
01:00:10 ►
As I say, if you don’t like what you’re hearing, ask questions.
01:00:15 ►
And I steer easily, though I give long answers.
01:00:22 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:00:24 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:00:29 ►
Well, that talk was given in August of 1997.
01:00:34 ►
And back then, Terence said that he thought things would begin to seriously fall apart in ten years.
01:00:41 ►
And in a way, things certainly have been on a steady spiral of increasing chaos
01:00:46 ►
throughout this world since then. And in a few minutes, I’ll pass along a few ideas that I have
01:00:52 ►
to maybe help us get through the turbulence that lies not far ahead. But first, I, well, I just
01:00:59 ►
have to replay one short bit that we just heard. Because when I heard it just now, as I was preparing
01:01:05 ►
for this program, I had to laugh at both myself and at Terrence when he explained how I became
01:01:12 ►
such a grumpy old man.
01:01:14 ►
If you remember from last week, I told you that one of the reasons that I would be ending
01:01:19 ►
my own personal podcast from the salon was that I was unhappy with myself for somehow becoming a grumpy old man who
01:01:26 ►
felt that he’d been lied to by the system his entire life. And then I heard Terrence say this
01:01:32 ►
just a few minutes ago. The role of culture in the lives of societies has changed in the 20th century. We all live too long now
01:01:46 ►
to be duped by culture
01:01:51 ►
in the way that previous populations were.
01:01:54 ►
If the average member of a population
01:01:58 ►
only lives to age 40,
01:02:02 ►
the cultural con can go
01:02:05 ►
on and on and on
01:02:07 ►
but if you give people life
01:02:09 ►
spans into the 80s
01:02:11 ►
then they get 40 years to think
01:02:13 ►
about what they went through between
01:02:15 ►
0 and 40 and eventually
01:02:18 ►
they’ll figure out just who and what
01:02:19 ►
screwed them
01:02:20 ►
and when
01:02:24 ►
they do they are not going to be very happy with the cultural values
01:02:29 ►
that they attempted to come to terms with and work through. Well, I couldn’t have said it any
01:02:38 ►
better myself. Hopefully, you won’t have to wait to get as old as I am to discover how deceived and naive our cultures and religions have caused us to become.
01:02:49 ►
As Dr. Leary so famously said, think for yourself and question authority.
01:02:55 ►
And to that I would only add, and trust yourself.
01:02:59 ►
Trust your own instincts because they’ll seldom lead you astray.
01:03:05 ►
instincts because they’ll seldom lead you astray. Now a few minutes ago we heard Terrence say,
01:03:11 ►
I like to think that the psychedelic community has always been a source of visionary common sense because the psychedelic community, generally speaking, has not generated ideology. And
01:03:18 ►
that’s something I’d like to spring off of right now as I introduce some of my ideas for Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
01:03:26 ►
What I have in mind may take a year or more for us to pull together and we may have a
01:03:31 ►
few false starts, but let me begin with my vision for how I would like to see the salon
01:03:36 ►
somewhere down the road.
01:03:39 ►
During the past 11 years or so, while you and many others have been listening to these
01:03:44 ►
podcasts,
01:03:51 ►
it’s resulted in a somewhat nice-sized group of fellow salonners. While other podcasters would maybe call it an audience, I feel that we’re much closer than that and have actually become a
01:03:56 ►
community of sorts. Who better then to turn the salon over to than the community itself?
01:04:03 ►
And that’s how I see it evolving. So let me begin with
01:04:06 ►
just one of the suggestions that have come in to me this past week, and I’ll build on that idea to
01:04:12 ►
get to the view of my own vision. This idea is part of a longer comment to my previous podcast,
01:04:18 ►
and it was posted by Jonah Bark, who said, I have been pondering two ideas that are related and might be interspersed
01:04:26 ►
with the kind of speakers currently part of the salon.
01:04:30 ►
One, psychedelic stories that freely combine experience, fiction,
01:04:35 ►
and pass muster by a small board as entertaining, psychedelic, and appropriate in length.
01:04:41 ►
These could be very serious and thoughtful accounts of life-changing experience
01:04:45 ►
or crazy medicine stories. They could be from published work sanctioned by the writer,
01:04:51 ►
or traditional myths from shamanic cultures with possible interpretations. And two, some
01:04:58 ►
visionary spoken essays that are not directly psychedelic, but present large, holistic ideas for consideration.
01:05:06 ►
End quote.
01:05:12 ►
Now, there’s more to this comment than I’ve just read, but the ideas are right in line with my own.
01:05:18 ►
In fact, one of the MP3 files that I already have fits right in, as it’s a collection of psychedelic stories that some of our fellow salonners have been recording in various cities here in the U.S.
01:05:26 ►
In fact, another salonner, Society Royal, posted a comment that read in part, and I quote,
01:05:33 ►
If you are retiring for good, please consider doing something with the unbroadcast talks that you have received of late,
01:05:39 ►
even if it’s just setting them free to wander unedited on the Internet so we salonners can listen,
01:05:45 ►
even if it means we will have to paint our own audio introductions to it, end quote.
01:05:50 ►
And there were other comments also along these lines. Now my vision is that the Psychedelic
01:05:56 ►
Salon isn’t just a podcast series, it’s a place where people can go to find the others.
01:06:02 ►
Did you get that? A significant number of our fellow salonners
01:06:06 ►
are in the same boat that I was in about 20 years ago, out on the edge of the tribe with no one of a
01:06:12 ►
psychedelic sensibility to connect with. And as tenuous as it may be, listening to these podcasts
01:06:19 ►
each week gives us all a sense of being in touch with some of the others. But have you considered the fact that you are also one of the others?
01:06:28 ►
And that there is someone probably not very far from you,
01:06:32 ►
who is still trying to follow Dr. Leary’s advice to find the others.
01:06:37 ►
In other words, to find you.
01:06:39 ►
So in a sense, the psychedelic salon is actually a community of the others.
01:06:44 ►
And as such, I thinkic salon is actually a community of the others.
01:06:50 ►
And as such, I think that maybe we have a responsibility to not let this platform fade away.
01:06:55 ►
In fact, I now see an opportunity for us to create something together and not have it just be another hierarchical organization that depends upon a few people to give it direction.
01:07:02 ►
We are a very large assemblage of like-minded people.
01:07:06 ►
Most likely, no more than half of us have actually used psychedelic medicines
01:07:11 ►
to any significant degree,
01:07:13 ►
but we all have that special flavor of consciousness,
01:07:16 ►
one that wants to continually expand the range of our consciousness,
01:07:21 ►
even if it’s just in conversation with others of a similar mindset.
01:07:46 ►
I’d like very much for you and for all of our other fellow salonners Thank you. thinkers who create and share their own views and audio works of art with one another. You may have created some original music, possibly including some sound bites from talks that we’ve heard here
01:07:51 ►
in the salon in the past. Maybe you have some recordings from conferences that you attended.
01:07:56 ►
I happen to know of at least two people who will be attending Burning Man for the first time this
01:08:01 ►
year and who have shown an interest in recording some of the lectures that are going to be held there. I could go on, but I suspect that you get the idea. There’s a
01:08:10 ►
whole world of audio treats that most of us will never hear about unless you or one of our other
01:08:16 ►
fellow salonners records it, creates a podcast out of it, and then submits it to our community for
01:08:21 ►
consideration and being included as a podcast.
01:08:31 ►
And that’s where we have a lot of work to do before I come to the end of these Terrence McKenna tapes next March.
01:08:37 ►
Let’s take a best-case scenario, one where there are hundreds of audiophiles submitted for consideration.
01:08:39 ►
An embarrassment of riches, so to speak.
01:08:45 ►
How do we sort through all of them and pick out the ones that have the widest appeal to our community?
01:08:49 ►
That’s the big question, and, well, it’s one that I don’t have an answer for just yet.
01:08:56 ►
I’m hoping that a discussion about this will develop on our forums, where I’ve already posted a few of my own ideas,
01:09:02 ►
and I’ll link to that section of the forums in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:09:07 ►
But just to give you a few thoughts from which to springboard your own ideas,
01:09:13 ►
it seems to me that it may be a good idea to copy some of the more successful processes that have already been working on the net.
01:09:16 ►
For example, combining Amazon’s concept of allowing anyone to be a reviewer of a book
01:09:22 ►
and to post a comment about it, well, that could be one part.
01:09:26 ►
And Reddit’s system of rating stories according to the community’s votes is another.
01:09:31 ►
Maybe using some combination of those processes might be a way for anyone to create a program.
01:09:36 ►
In fact, it could even be an existing program from their own podcast series.
01:09:40 ►
And once you’ve created a program, you could submit it and request reviews and votes,
01:09:46 ►
with the ones that rise to the top being podcast as part of the salon’s ongoing series.
01:09:52 ►
Or we can do it a completely different way. The only two things that I’d like to see maintained
01:09:57 ►
are a continuation of the no advertising policy that I’ve been following since I began these
01:10:03 ►
podcasts, and finding a way for the community to select the new programs
01:10:07 ►
without requiring some kind of committee to make the decisions.
01:10:12 ►
Ultimately, what we wind up with may not look anything like my current vision,
01:10:17 ►
but that depends upon you and our other fellow salonners
01:10:20 ►
becoming more involved in the discussions over on the forums
01:10:24 ►
or in the comment sections of these podcasts. Over the coming weeks and months, I expect to be talking
01:10:31 ►
about this in almost all of the podcasts in hopes of getting you to become involved in this project.
01:10:37 ►
We all know what a mess this world is right now, and I don’t expect things to improve unless people
01:10:42 ►
like you and me stand up and are counted.
01:10:46 ►
Maybe you have an idea about this that you think is trivial,
01:10:48 ►
but what if that idea is the catalyst that sparks a key idea in someone else?
01:10:54 ►
If you’ve been with us for a while here in the salon, you’ve heard me cite that famous Gandhi quote,
01:10:59 ►
What you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
01:11:06 ►
In closing, I’d like to replay the last few minutes of the Terrence McKenna talk that I played last week.
01:11:12 ►
It made a big impact on me, but I’m afraid that it may have been drowned out by my announcement that followed it.
01:11:19 ►
So listen closely right now to what Terrence is saying and see if it resonates with you.
01:11:24 ►
Listen closely right now to what Terrence is saying and see if it resonates with you.
01:11:29 ►
Now we have to go forward into the past.
01:11:36 ►
This is the way to create a unified meaning to what has happened to us. Because if this just ends in a toxified and ruined planet,
01:11:42 ►
then what a comment on the values that we hold most dear,
01:11:50 ►
our belief that life is for something, our belief that integrity matters, our belief that our
01:11:57 ►
transmission from generation to generation was something that was important. The meaning of it all is in the hands of the living.
01:12:12 ►
Those people 100,000 years in the grave,
01:12:16 ►
their meaning is in our hands
01:12:19 ►
because the question is what shall we do with what they have given us?
01:12:27 ►
That’s no small charge, you know.
01:12:30 ►
The meaning of your ancestors’ lives is in your hands.
01:12:35 ►
And I know that you’re not going to let this moment pass
01:12:38 ►
without picking up the baton and sprinting to the finish line in the memory of them.
01:12:44 ►
And hopefully this will also help us grow the Salon’s community into a
01:12:48 ►
thriving place where our friends that, well, friends that we’ve not yet met
01:12:51 ►
can find us, us others.
01:12:55 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:12:58 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.