516 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 2

Program Notes §

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The real news is no one is in control, not the central bank, not the Jews, not the communist party, not the pope. Nobody’s in control.”

“I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models. You have to be incredibly naive about what people are to believe that a role model is in fact worthy.”

“If you want to talk to the Dali Lama close the door of your bedroom and have a dialogue with the mirror. You’re as good as the Dali Lama for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?”

“Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism. How can you possibly know anything about these modalities if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows, and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?”

“Crop circles are the con that will not die.”

The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia
By Paul Devereux

Entheogens and the Future of Religion
Edited by Robert Forte

Previous Episode §

515 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 1

Next Episode §

517 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 3

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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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And I’ll bet that you probably thought there was no podcast from here in the salon last week,

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because I was at Burning Man.

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But if that’s what you thought, well, then you’d be wrong,

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because what I did was to take the week off.

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Well, kind of anyway, and I’ll get back to that after we hear the next installment

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of the Terrence McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to.

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And anyway, while I was planning on getting this podcast out yesterday,

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instead I had a pleasant surprise in that an old friend who I hadn’t seen in many years

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stopped by on his way home from Burning Man.

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And so we spent the day catching up and hearing about this year’s burn.

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And now at last I’m ready to get a new program out to you today. and so we spent the day catching up and hearing about this year’s burn.

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And now at last I’m ready to get a new program out to you today.

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First, however, I would like to thank the following fellow salonners who during the past two weeks took some of their time and some of their money

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and sent it here to the salon to help with the expenses associated in getting these podcasts out to you. And these wonderful people are Robert A., Harley D., Bruce C., Kevin M., Joseph H.,

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and that name, of course, reminds me of my dad, who is another Joseph H.

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Also, Simon T., and way back on my birthday last month, there was also an anonymous Bitcoin donor.

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So I would like to thank you one and all very much.

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It’s your generosity that’s going to help make the Psychedelic Salon 2.0

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become an important platform for our community to use for many years to come.

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And I’ll have more to say about the future of the salon

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after we first listen to the next installment of a Terence McKenna workshop

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that was held in August of 1997.

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First of all, if you didn’t get one of these

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and you think you might be interested in this ethnobotany,

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ethnochemistry course at Uxmal in January,

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I brought extras.

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Does that tend to sell out?

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It does tend to sell out.

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So by October, November,

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you should be pretty much

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making a commitment.

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We can only take a hundred people

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in each one.

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And people sometimes say,

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well, which one should I go to

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the first one or the second one

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I don’t know it’s a hard call

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the first one everybody is pretty fresh

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and coherent

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the second one tends to be somewhat more

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thrashed

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and

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incoherent

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so

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and if

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you do

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come

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you should

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certainly

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if you’ve

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never done

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it build

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in a

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week one

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side or

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the other

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of this

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to tour

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the Mayan

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areas of Mexico

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which are immediately adjacent.

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If you haven’t done that,

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it’s one of the great archaeological experiences of the world.

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I mean, nowhere in the world

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is there so large a concentration of archaeology

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on such a scale

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and in such a state of preservation,

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not Greece, not Egypt.

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I mean, simply because the size of the Mayan world was immense

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and there were many, many city centers

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and it was extremely historically persistent.

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People compare the Maya to the Inca.

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The Inca, that was a family.

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The entire thing lasted 135 years.

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The Mayan civilization arose in the 2nd century BC

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and blew apart in the 960s AD.

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So for over a thousand years

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it was a continuously evolving culture

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with literature, theater, mathematics

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lineages, so forth and so on

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so don’t just come to Mexico for this

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Mexico is an astonishing

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and bizarre culture,

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as exotic as India,

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as potentially as undoing as Iraq.

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So be forewarned,

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but have fun down there.

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Here’s another piece of propaganda.

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I don’t think I have enough

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for everybody to have one of these. So if I don’t think I have enough for everybody to have one of these.

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So if you don’t think you might be in Hawaii in November, it would be very hard for you

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to attend this since that’s where it’s occurring. But this is an event, this is a whole bunch

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of people, a course, great diversity. This would just be me for five days. The perks

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are you get to stay in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Waimea, which is a beautiful part

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of the big island. So if you think you might be interested, take one of these, otherwise pass it on. If there are any not used, you

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can hand them back to me. Okay, and then before we start this morning, I just wanted to, it’s

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sort of become a ritual at these things, to briefly discuss relevant new publishing in

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the field, just to give people a feeling

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of what’s out there

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that they might not be aware of.

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So much is being published

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that without some kind of vetting

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it’s hard to know what’s what.

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So in no particular order,

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I guess from smallest to largest,

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here’s some interesting new publishing relevant to this

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field. First of all, this book is just out in England by Paul Devereaux, The Long Trip,

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A Prehistory of Psychedelica. And it just arrived in Paul’s mailbox a couple of days ago

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and he loaned it to me

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it looks to me like basically

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a history of psychedelic use worldwide

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before the 1960s

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Paul Devereaux is better known

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for writing on earth energies

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ley lines and that sort of thing.

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But this seems like a pretty good book.

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So few of these books come out

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that the number of books that have been written

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on the history of psychedelics are probably,

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you can count them on the finger of one hand.

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My book, Food of the the Gods is in that category.

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It’s available in the bookstore.

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So I should say

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most of my books

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I’d be happy to sign books

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at some point.

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Not after this morning because I have to

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run out of here to a meeting.

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But at other times I’ll be happy

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to sign books.

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I’m trying to think of other books besides this one and mine

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that cover this area.

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It’s mostly, strangely, the publishing seems to be coming out of England

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on this subject, which is odd

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because the English contribution to the psychedelic phenomenon

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is pretty much restricted to the musical division.

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Speaking of the 60s, in other words, who can name a great English pharmacologist?

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There’s a good book, Storming Heaven.

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Storming Heaven, that’s an oldie. That’s by J. Stevens, and that’s a very interesting history of the psychedelic movement.

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There’s also LSD, the CIA, and the cult… Acid Dreams, LSD, the CIA, and the cult of intelligence.

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Is that what it’s called?

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Anyway, that’s a more…

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If you tend toward conspiracy theory,

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I mean, I don’t.

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Everything I know, Martin Lee,

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that book is quite true.

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Generally, conspiracy theory

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is a form of epistemological cartoon making

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that comes under the heading

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of simply damned foolishness

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and a ticket to irresponsibility.

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You know, the real news is no one’s in control.

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Not the Central Bank, not the Jews,

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not the Communist Party, not the Pope.

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No, no.

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Nobody’s in control.

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This is a book that’s come out

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just in the past year edited by Bob Forte

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some of you may know Bob

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he’s a long time figure in this field

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psychedelic activist and literateur

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and this is a bunch of essays

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by some of the top folks

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the title is by some of the top folks.

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The title is Entheogens and the Future of Religion.

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And some of the contributors are Albert Hoffman,

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the discoverer of LSD and the synthesizer of psilocybin,

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Gordon Wasson, our own brother David Stendelrast,

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who’s lived and taught at Esalen many years,

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Jack Kornfeld, myself, Ann and Sasha Shulgin,

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and then some of the younger people,

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Robert Jesse and Tom Reidlinger,

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Rick Strassman.

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Very interesting book.

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Probably a good buy for the money.

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I don’t know if this is in the bookstore.

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It certainly should be. Does the book deal with the future of religion

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or is that kind of the title?

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No, it does.

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Some people discuss it more cogently

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than others, obviously.

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But it doesn’t escape notice.

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This is a book more to be read for fun

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than to be taken seriously.

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I disagree with a lot of what’s in here,

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but on the other hand,

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I’ve never seen this kind of stuff in print before.

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Again, what’s going on in England?

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I don’t know.

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While HarperCollins is chewing itself up here

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and Wired is going mad,

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English publishing seems to be getting some traction.

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The Post-Human Condition by Robert Pepperell.

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And this is sort of a parallel track

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to some of my thinking.

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If you cruise the net, you encounter people who call themselves transhumanists

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or extopians or this sort of thing.

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These are not psychedelic people.

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These are people with an enormously inflated faith in the power of human engineering.

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So these are the people who

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want to dissolve humans into machines

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build ring worlds, go nanotech

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that end of the big picture

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and Pepperell actually tries to produce

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what he calls a post-human manifesto

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which is printed in the back as a series of statements

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and actually as I read through them

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I disagree with most of them

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I don’t think that’s how it’s going at all

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but this is sort of like

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an introduction to somebody’s notion

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of the approaching chaostrophe

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so that’s that

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and then the one which gives me the greatest pleasure

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to recommend to you

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a book actually unambiguously worth buying

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reading and recommending

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is Mason and Dixon

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which is Thomas Pynchon’s

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latest novel

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potentially certainly probably

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the greatest the best novel written

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in America in the past 50

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years I mean Pynchon

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is the greatest living

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writer of American

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English I wasn’t sure

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about that till Wednesday

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but Burroughs died so

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it appears secure.

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If you’ve never read Pynchon,

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I hardly, I wonder where you’ve been.

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But his novel, I guess, was it 17 or 20 years ago,

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Gravity’s Rainbow, really codified a whole complex

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of social and aesthetic issues.

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This is a much different book.

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I mean, it’s a vintage Pynchon,

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but it’s also a celebration of America

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and of the buddy system.

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And it’s a scathing look

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at the embryonic birth

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of big science

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and big government projects.

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As you know,

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Mason and Dixon

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were an astronomer

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and a surveyor

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who accepted a royal commission

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to define the boundary

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between Pennsylvania and Delaware in the 1760s

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and cut a line due west into the unexplored North American continent.

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Later, that line, called the Mason-Dixon line,

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was the division between the Confederacy and the Union.

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This has nothing to do with the Confederacy and the Union. This has nothing to do with the Confederacy and the Union.

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This is set in the 1760s,

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when America itself was simply a caffeine-driven hallucination in Philadelphia.

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It hadn’t come into existence yet.

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But this book is about how people struggle

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with new technologies and revolutionary

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modalities in

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the evolution of society

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so enough of that

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okay

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well hopefully enough of that. Okay.

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Well, hopefully,

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some of what was said last night either was odious enough

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that someone would like to pull us

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in a different direction,

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or perhaps to somebody else

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interesting enough

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that they would like to ask a question.

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What comes for you from last night, anybody?

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As I said, these things are best driven by people’s agendas.

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What’s your agenda, Nicholas?

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What I thought about,

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or one of the things that made me think for a while after I left

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and as I went in and out of sleep,

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was the idea of artificial intelligence

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and what

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determines what is artificial

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what is not artificial intelligence

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what kind of definition

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would define

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that

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because my understanding

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of intelligence and

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consciousness being kind of a similar thing,

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depending upon how one defines intelligence,

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what is artificial?

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If it’s conscious and intelligent,

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isn’t it as real as anything else?

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Well, I’m sure as some of you may know,

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this issue arose early in AI.

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How do you know an artificial intelligence when you’re talking to one?

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And Alan Turing, who was a theorist of cybernetics in the 40s,

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developed what he called the Turing test, T-U-R-I-N-G, the Turing test. The Turing test is, if it walks like a duck, if it talks

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like a duck, it probably is a duck. And the Turing test is always imagined as a telephone

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conversation. I tell you to dial a number. You dial a number. A voice on the other end says, hello, now the Turing

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test begins. Your job is to determine whether you are talking to a machine or a human being.

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If you can’t determine it, and it is an AI, then it’s passed the Turing test.

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And this was in the 40s and 50s a theoretical proposition.

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Now these tests, these things are actually done,

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and every year there are competitions

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where this is precisely how the game is played.

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And now it turns out that the more you restrict the subject matter,

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the harder it is to tell

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whether you’re talking to a human being or a machine.

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If it’s no-holds-barred general knowledge,

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most people can, within a few minutes,

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make a pretty good call.

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But intelligence is the art in the eye of the beholder.

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I mean, how do you know that I am not a cyborg?

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How do I know that you are not a cyborg?

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The answer is, well, we touring test each other unconsciously

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at sufficient depth to satisfy ourselves.

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It becomes moot,

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or it is becoming moot.

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Big Blue is an example.

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In terms of playing chess,

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it can pass any Turing test you can imagine, but it can’t even formulate

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an answer to a non-chess question. So it’s a very domain-specific AI and really not an

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AI because it’s simply the world of chess. Chess is not like reality.

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Chess is a very high variable game system,

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but it doesn’t have the open-endedness that reality has.

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You see, in really interesting games,

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the most interesting rule is that the rules can be changed,

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and chess doesn’t have a rule like that.

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Did you want to say something?

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Did you both hear about the cloning and the new York Times?

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Yeah, I read in the New York Times yesterday

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they’ve got some embryos about to be birthed in the Midwest, 10 types of Holstein cattle. Cloning

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is one of those things. See, there’s a whole bunch of revolutions all crowding onto the

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stage. The one that holds center stage at the moment is the cybernetic internet thing but somewhat completely

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independent of all that is the biotech

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possibility which is cloning gene

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sequencing getting a tremendous grip on

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curing hereditary diseases that sort of

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thing and then another area, not entirely connected or related,

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is nanotechnology, which is proceeding at breakneck speed.

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And the public relations machinery for telling the public what this is

00:20:40 ► §

isn’t even in place.

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You meet people who are fairly established in their professions or

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whatever who don’t know what nanotechnology is who in fact have never heard of it i don’t know

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if there’s anybody in this room in that situation uh and after what i said it would take courage to admit it. But nanotechnology is simply the idea

00:21:09 ► §

that one could conceivably, theoretically,

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build the physical superstructure of our world

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in a completely different way from the atoms up. This is how

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nature does it through processes of

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transcription of protein through ribosome or

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crystallization or this sort of thing.

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Nanotechnology envisions

00:21:44 ► §

the possibility of abandoning agriculture on this planet within 20 years.

00:21:51 ► §

Agriculture is, after all, an incredibly land-destructive process for the production of food.

00:22:01 ► §

What we want is the food the food could be produced directly

00:22:06 ► §

out of

00:22:08 ► §

available

00:22:11 ► §

and extremely inexpensive elements

00:22:15 ► §

seafloor sludge is the usual

00:22:18 ► §

notion of how this is done

00:22:22 ► §

the holy grail of nanotechnology

00:22:26 ► §

is what’s called a matter compiler

00:22:28 ► §

a matter compiler does to matter

00:22:32 ► §

what an SGI graphics system

00:22:35 ► §

does to images

00:22:36 ► §

in other words anything you can imagine

00:22:40 ► §

out of matter compilers come

00:22:43 ► §

in the case of agriculture, in Neil

00:22:47 ► §

Stephenson’s book, The Diamond Age, all of China is being fed out of

00:22:59 ► §

matter compilers that are producing rice. People say, well, this is hundreds of years away,

00:23:07 ► §

thousands of years away.

00:23:08 ► §

It’s pure science fiction.

00:23:10 ► §

No, it isn’t.

00:23:11 ► §

It’s happening right now.

00:23:14 ► §

And producing rice is a simple trick.

00:23:17 ► §

What’s imagined is that all kinds of machines

00:23:23 ► §

of whatever complexity

00:23:25 ► §

could become nearly invisible in size and nearly costless.

00:23:32 ► §

Most things would be made of diamond.

00:23:36 ► §

This is the trash material of nanotechnology.

00:23:41 ► §

It’s just simpler to build things out of diamond than anything else.

00:23:46 ► §

Cheaper, faster, cleaner. And the huge amounts of R&D funding and enthusiasm are going into

00:23:59 ► §

nanotechnology. And an interesting thing about it is it is not, it’s not really being driven by

00:24:07 ► §

managerial decisions. The reason nanotech is moving so fast is because all the best people

00:24:16 ► §

think it’s so cool to do it. You know, I mean, electric dynamos where you can fit 60 of them inside a human hair.

00:24:30 ► §

A few years ago, this is how far nanotechnology has developed,

00:24:36 ► §

like three or four years ago on the cover of Science News,

00:24:39 ► §

there was a one centimeter by one centimeter chip that had 10,000 steam engines on it. It had more steam engines

00:24:49 ► §

operating on it in this one centimeter by one centimeter space than were operating in all of

00:24:56 ► §

England in 1850 at the height of the age of steam. Now each of these steam engines produced one ten thousandth of a millinewton

00:25:07 ► §

of torque. That’s not a lot of torque, but on the other hand it depends on what kind

00:25:14 ► §

of work you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to kick atoms around, that’s plenty of force to return to the cloning thing

00:25:25 ► §

I’m sort of thinking of

00:25:28 ► §

novels these days or short stories

00:25:32 ► §

or plots and

00:25:33 ► §

I thought it would be fun to imagine

00:25:37 ► §

a joint project between

00:25:41 ► §

Esalen Institute and

00:25:43 ► §

SRI let’s say, that would reach for, and this was to be the name of the novel, cloning Buddha. I thought that would be interesting. I mean, why should the next Dalai Lama be anyone less than Gautama. After all, we have the tooth,

00:26:10 ► §

so there is presumably sufficient tissue there.

00:26:13 ► §

And we’re not talking pterosaurs here. I mean, this is only 500 BC.

00:26:17 ► §

And the interesting objections to cloning

00:26:20 ► §

are some of them are removed in the case of Buddha

00:26:24 ► §

because people say well you know even

00:26:27 ► §

if you cloned Napoleon it wouldn’t be Napoleon because Napoleon was a product of a unique

00:26:33 ► §

environmental and social system and he was the product of the experiences of his lifetime, but presumably Buddha was born Buddha.

00:26:46 ► §

And so it would be very interesting to clone Buddha

00:26:51 ► §

and to see what this child was like.

00:26:58 ► §

This is not a practical suggestion.

00:27:00 ► §

This is to horrify and amuse you

00:27:04 ► §

and to make you think

00:27:05 ► §

about the implications. I mean, we could

00:27:08 ► §

there are other historical

00:27:09 ► §

personages. I love the

00:27:11 ► §

theological mess

00:27:13 ► §

it raises, you know.

00:27:15 ► §

Maybe that’s what the second coming is.

00:27:17 ► §

The cloning of Buddha? I think it’s called

00:27:20 ► §

Matreya. Well, no, no.

00:27:21 ► §

The Christians covered their

00:27:24 ► §

bets on this one by having

00:27:26 ► §

the body rise incarnate

00:27:28 ► §

into the next dimension

00:27:30 ► §

presumably there are no

00:27:33 ► §

tissue

00:27:34 ► §

remains around

00:27:36 ► §

although you know in a good

00:27:38 ► §

Jesuit theology

00:27:40 ► §

class I’m sure you could get argument

00:27:42 ► §

on this you know one of

00:27:44 ► §

the great puzzles

00:27:45 ► §

of Islamic theology

00:27:47 ► §

is

00:27:50 ► §

the fact that when

00:27:51 ► §

Muhammad ascended into heaven

00:27:54 ► §

he did it on horseback.

00:27:57 ► §

And

00:27:57 ► §

the status of this

00:28:00 ► §

horse, his beloved

00:28:02 ► §

horse, who he loved

00:28:04 ► §

very much,

00:28:10 ► §

it has been maddening for Islamic theologians ever since. I mean, you know, if you think the immaculate conception is a problem,

00:28:16 ► §

try taking a horse into heaven and see what problems you leave for your exegetes.

00:28:23 ► §

There were problems with the pounded in the 60s

00:28:25 ► §

when Trigger went up there.

00:28:28 ► §

Yes.

00:28:32 ► §

Actually, there are a number of tribes

00:28:34 ► §

that claim to have part of Christ’s foreskin.

00:28:37 ► §

Oh, yeah, the Christ’s foreskin thing.

00:28:40 ► §

It didn’t go, you know, it was circumcised.

00:28:43 ► §

It didn’t go.

00:28:44 ► §

Well, this is material for a Tom Robbins

00:28:48 ► §

novel definitely I would yield to Tom on

00:28:53 ► §

that one but cloning all of these things

00:28:59 ► §

I mean I will happen are happening I

00:29:03 ► §

don’t think they’re think the implications of them

00:29:07 ► §

seem overblown in popular media.

00:29:10 ► §

For instance, I’m old enough to remember,

00:29:13 ► §

I don’t know if it was the very first,

00:29:15 ► §

but the very first publicly discussed

00:29:18 ► §

and acclaimed sex change operations.

00:29:23 ► §

Christina Jorgensen, wasn’t that the person’s name

00:29:26 ► §

I can’t remember whether they went from man to woman

00:29:29 ► §

or woman to man

00:29:30 ► §

but anyway

00:29:30 ► §

this was at what early 50s

00:29:34 ► §

and people just

00:29:35 ► §

well now it’s just so what

00:29:39 ► §

it’s a dime a dozen

00:29:41 ► §

it’s a medical procedure

00:29:43 ► §

you want it you have it

00:29:44 ► §

who cares we don’t convene medical ethics committees or philosophers to discuss what it means.

00:29:55 ► §

Some technologies are more challenging, the ones that directly impact our consciousness. I think that’s why the drugs

00:30:05 ► §

and the communication technologies,

00:30:08 ► §

cloning is something you will talk about with your friends.

00:30:12 ► §

It will probably never come near you

00:30:15 ► §

or you will probably have very little to do with it

00:30:18 ► §

in your lifetime.

00:30:20 ► §

But these communication technologies

00:30:22 ► §

and these drugs are in your face, on your plate.

00:30:27 ► §

You know, you are going to have to come to terms with them even if you reject them.

00:30:32 ► §

Even that is an enormous decision.

00:30:34 ► §

I mean, I meet people who are rejecting the Internet and computer connectivity and this sort of thing.

00:30:46 ► §

And it’s like a vow of abstinence or something.

00:30:50 ► §

I mean, that’s very quirky.

00:30:54 ► §

It’s like going orthodox or something.

00:30:57 ► §

It’s just bizarre.

00:30:59 ► §

And it will affect their lives for the duration of their lives.

00:31:04 ► §

And it’s not easy to correct that decision

00:31:07 ► §

because it’s a decision made in a historical context.

00:31:11 ► §

If you ignore computers for 10 years,

00:31:13 ► §

you will probably never be able to get back online.

00:31:18 ► §

Middle-aged people seem to have the feeling

00:31:21 ► §

that there is no obligation upon them to self-educate and keep up.

00:31:27 ► §

This is completely wrong. You just stamp yourself to utter irrelevance. Your rejection of these

00:31:36 ► §

things will impact on no one’s life but your own. So if you’re doing it to be a politically correct example,

00:31:45 ► §

you’re pissing into the wind, I fear.

00:31:48 ► §

People aren’t interested in that.

00:31:50 ► §

A point of clarification on something,

00:31:53 ► §

a topic you brought up last night.

00:31:56 ► §

Before I get into that, I’d just like to say that

00:31:58 ► §

I thought that was interesting about cloning Buddha.

00:32:01 ► §

Maybe this time the Buddha won’t make ignorant statements

00:32:06 ► §

about what Americans can do in their bedroom,

00:32:09 ► §

about masturbation,

00:32:10 ► §

and about homosexuality,

00:32:12 ► §

like the Dalai Lama did,

00:32:14 ► §

very ignorant and uncompassionate

00:32:16 ► §

since he said it in San Francisco.

00:32:18 ► §

When was this?

00:32:20 ► §

A couple, three,

00:32:22 ► §

I guess it was a month ago

00:32:24 ► §

there was a conference in San Francisco

00:32:25 ► §

and he had added against homosexualities

00:32:28 ► §

and what was sexual misconduct

00:32:31 ► §

and what wasn’t masturbation

00:32:33 ► §

was sexual misconduct.

00:32:34 ► §

And he went into what holes you can put it in

00:32:36 ► §

and what holes you can’t.

00:32:38 ► §

And he didn’t qualify it.

00:32:40 ► §

That wasn’t Buddha.

00:32:41 ► §

Well, wait a minute.

00:32:42 ► §

Is this past the vetting

00:32:46 ► §

of consensus reality

00:32:48 ► §

or has Barry been sniffing angel dust

00:32:52 ► §

did this happen

00:32:53 ► §

I’m just surprised there hasn’t been

00:32:58 ► §

more discussion in the dining room here

00:33:01 ► §

this is the first time hearing it

00:33:03 ► §

this is real time, folks.

00:33:06 ► §

There was a lot of discussion

00:33:08 ► §

and I

00:33:08 ► §

think some ACT UP people

00:33:11 ► §

and other people met with him after, his spokesman,

00:33:14 ► §

and he kind of tried to

00:33:15 ► §

back off and said, well, oh no, I

00:33:18 ► §

would never say anything against gay rights.

00:33:20 ► §

But he had it

00:33:21 ► §

pointed out to him that it was a rather

00:33:24 ► §

uncompassionate thing

00:33:25 ► §

to say about homosexuality

00:33:27 ► §

given the climate of fear

00:33:28 ► §

and homophobia in this country right now.

00:33:32 ► §

Well, I like the Dalai Lama.

00:33:36 ► §

I’m friendly to Mahayana Buddhism

00:33:38 ► §

but I think it’s preposterous

00:33:40 ► §

for anybody to assume

00:33:42 ► §

anybody else possesses greater moral superiority

00:33:46 ► §

or intellectual depth than they do.

00:33:51 ► §

The Dalai Lama has been remarkable for his ability to not put his foot in his mouth.

00:33:57 ► §

It’s interesting that it comes in this form and that we don’t, you know,

00:34:01 ► §

it’s not the usual case of philandering and whatever that seems to haunt these communities.

00:34:09 ► §

I mean, I think religion in its public manifestations

00:34:12 ► §

always presents a cautionary spectacle.

00:34:16 ► §

I do not understand why people transfer loyalty to role models.

00:34:25 ► §

You have to be incredibly naive about what people are

00:34:29 ► §

to believe that a role model is in fact worthy

00:34:33 ► §

because, you know, people are just people.

00:34:38 ► §

And there’s no…

00:34:41 ► §

I don’t see great differences in spiritual elevation

00:34:47 ► §

among people

00:34:48 ► §

that’s why lineages and all that

00:34:52 ► §

seem to me just another form of foolishness

00:34:56 ► §

the mushroom spoke to me

00:34:59 ► §

once on this subject many years ago

00:35:03 ► §

and said for one human being to seek enlightenment from another

00:35:08 ► §

is like one grain of sand on the beach

00:35:12 ► §

to seek enlightenment from another.

00:35:16 ► §

It’s a wonderful statement about our commonality.

00:35:19 ► §

If you want to talk to the Dalai Lama,

00:35:22 ► §

close the door of your bedroom

00:35:24 ► §

and have a dialogue with

00:35:25 ► §

the mirror. You’re as good as the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud. Who could suppose otherwise?

00:35:34 ► §

Well, in his particular case, it seems to me he’s the representative for a Middle Ages

00:35:41 ► §

serfdom where a third of the population of this country walk around in saffron robes

00:35:46 ► §

being fed by another half of the people of this country.

00:35:52 ► §

And it’s…

00:35:53 ► §

Goodness, you lock out the psychotherapists

00:35:58 ► §

and heresy after heresy pours out.

00:36:05 ► §

Congratulations. Congratulations.

00:36:06 ► §

No.

00:36:08 ► §

No, I mean, I think Tibet should not be ruled by China.

00:36:13 ► §

I also think that god kings are a thing of the past.

00:36:19 ► §

I’m against religious theogonies.

00:36:22 ► §

I don’t want to see Israel ruled by a bunch of mumbling

00:36:25 ► §

Hasids either.

00:36:27 ► §

It’s fine, Hasidism,

00:36:30 ► §

Mahayan Abuzid, these are fine things,

00:36:32 ► §

but not to aspire

00:36:34 ► §

to temporal power, good

00:36:36 ► §

grief. So,

00:36:38 ► §

you know, the Dalai Lama’s reluctance

00:36:40 ► §

to envision a democratic

00:36:42 ► §

Tibet has caused

00:36:44 ► §

me to not feel a lot of wind at my back

00:36:48 ► §

to try and sort out that particular political catfight which has been going on for centuries and centuries.

00:36:59 ► §

I’m a Jeffersonian democrat of some sort

00:37:06 ► §

I really believe that

00:37:09 ► §

if it doesn’t liberate and serve

00:37:12 ► §

the individual no matter how

00:37:14 ► §

attractive it is, no matter how traditional

00:37:18 ► §

it is, no matter how majestic its pageants

00:37:21 ► §

how high flown its philosophy

00:37:24 ► §

it’s probably a foot on

00:37:26 ► §

somebody’s neck in the real world, and

00:37:30 ► §

I’m not interested in that. Well, this is

00:37:35 ► §

very interesting. I don’t want to, I don’t,

00:37:37 ► §

I’m not informed in it, but I’ll bet it’s

00:37:39 ► §

really rolling the apple cart in all

00:37:42 ► §

kinds of places. Some of you may have seen in Tricycle a few months ago,

00:37:49 ► §

there was Alan Bediner, who just lives down on the cliffs here,

00:37:54 ► §

in fact, who I’m having lunch with,

00:37:56 ► §

is a very sincere Buddhist and a good journalist,

00:38:00 ► §

and he took on the editing of a psychedelic issue of Tricycle.

00:38:06 ► §

What did you think of that issue in some ways?

00:38:09 ► §

Well, let me lay it out.

00:38:11 ► §

It was, it’s well known that many of the movers and shakers in American Buddhism

00:38:17 ► §

had their roots in psychedelics in the 60s.

00:38:21 ► §

And so he wanted to sort of reprise that,

00:38:25 ► §

and I did an essay,

00:38:27 ► §

and some other people did essays.

00:38:29 ► §

And I really looked forward to it

00:38:31 ► §

and thought it would be a warm community building.

00:38:36 ► §

This shows you how naive,

00:38:37 ► §

even at the depth of my cynicism,

00:38:40 ► §

there is still a grain of naivete.

00:38:43 ► §

I thought it would be a good thing.

00:38:48 ► §

Well, it was just dissed completely just dumped on by all these people

00:38:50 ► §

and people wrote in who I have seen loaded out of their minds

00:38:55 ► §

and said you know this is terrible

00:38:57 ► §

and this shouldn’t be there

00:38:59 ► §

I said Buddhism without psychedelics is armchair Buddhism

00:39:03 ► §

how can you possibly know anything about these modalities

00:39:07 ► §

if you sit there, shastras to the eyebrows,

00:39:11 ► §

and never actually push off into the ocean of mind?

00:39:16 ► §

That’s what it’s about.

00:39:16 ► §

That’s how I’ve always seen it.

00:39:18 ► §

Turned out people thought that was just benighted as a viewpoint.

00:39:23 ► §

Shouldn’t have even been allowed.

00:39:26 ► §

Why do you let Terrence McKenna have a public forum in the pages of this magazine?

00:39:30 ► §

On and on and on.

00:39:31 ► §

So then I realized, well, okay,

00:39:34 ► §

this was a community just won over from our community

00:39:37 ► §

that I thought we could surely build bridges to.

00:39:41 ► §

We’re all transcendentalists.

00:39:43 ► §

We’re all, you know, all these things.

00:39:45 ► §

Not.

00:39:47 ► §

So once again, it was handed back to me on a plate

00:39:50 ► §

how unwelcome the psychedelic viewpoint is

00:39:54 ► §

and how uptight people get.

00:39:57 ► §

And all those people who came to spirituality

00:40:00 ► §

through psychedelics

00:40:02 ► §

essentially turned it into well-paying careers

00:40:05 ► §

as abbesses and monks and publishers

00:40:09 ► §

and purveyors then of something which,

00:40:14 ► §

you know, having been raised Catholic,

00:40:17 ► §

the smell of the incense, the heavy velvet,

00:40:20 ► §

the tinkling of the brass,

00:40:22 ► §

I didn’t feel I’d moved far at all.

00:40:27 ► §

I’m sorry I interrupted you.

00:40:29 ► §

It’s an interesting topic,

00:40:31 ► §

and isn’t it true that there has been,

00:40:33 ► §

with the coming of Buddhism into it,

00:40:36 ► §

even the Vajrayana model,

00:40:37 ► §

which is pretty radical

00:40:39 ► §

as far as teachings go in that mid-year,

00:40:44 ► §

there was a suppression of the shamanistic religion

00:40:48 ► §

and its psychedelic use.

00:40:50 ► §

That’s what I understood.

00:40:52 ► §

It wasn’t a heavy suppression,

00:40:53 ► §

but it was pretty much frowned on and tried to be…

00:40:55 ► §

Well, we don’t really know, but it’s certainly true.

00:40:59 ► §

There was an autothonous shamanism across the Himalayas.

00:41:04 ► §

Buddhism didn’t enter Tibet

00:41:05 ► §

until Padmasambhava brought it from Uddiyana in 741.

00:41:11 ► §

So before that it was all shamanism.

00:41:16 ► §

But all cultures overlay.

00:41:20 ► §

I mean, I don’t think Tibetan Buddhism

00:41:23 ► §

has been more or less brutal than any other.

00:41:27 ► §

If you read the secular history of Tibet,

00:41:32 ► §

they were using artillery, these monasteries, against each other

00:41:36 ► §

to settle doctrinal disputes as early as the 1720s.

00:41:42 ► §

In other words, as early as they could get artillery there,

00:41:47 ► §

as soon as they could get it,

00:41:48 ► §

they used it against each other.

00:41:51 ► §

And not only that,

00:41:54 ► §

the followers of the Dalai Lama,

00:41:56 ► §

I think you make a good point

00:41:57 ► §

about blind worship of people

00:42:01 ► §

like the Dalai Lama

00:42:03 ► §

where no one ever asks

00:42:05 ► §

any hard questions.

00:42:07 ► §

It’s not him.

00:42:08 ► §

It’s the kind of mentality

00:42:10 ► §

you get in the followers.

00:42:11 ► §

And none of them will tell you.

00:42:13 ► §

I don’t even think they know.

00:42:15 ► §

But if they know,

00:42:16 ► §

they won’t tell you.

00:42:17 ► §

If you ask,

00:42:18 ► §

how did the Dalai Lama,

00:42:19 ► §

was the Dalai Lama always

00:42:21 ► §

the religious, the spiritual,

00:42:23 ► §

and the secular or political head of his nation?

00:42:27 ► §

Oh, I don’t know.

00:42:28 ► §

Well, as a matter of fact, he wasn’t.

00:42:29 ► §

Well, how did he get that way?

00:42:31 ► §

Oh, we don’t know.

00:42:32 ► §

Well, the way he got that way was the fifth Dalai Lama got the Mongol troops on his side and took over at Gungun.

00:42:39 ► §

Well, this is what I’m saying.

00:42:41 ► §

The secular history of Tibet does not exhibit compassion,

00:42:46 ► §

enlightenment, or anything else.

00:42:47 ► §

I found a way to go to the other side

00:42:49 ► §

and get help and bring in and heal people

00:42:52 ► §

with some kind of supernatural ability

00:42:54 ► §

or ability beyond me

00:42:57 ► §

with the bag of mushrooms and the mirror.

00:43:00 ► §

You mean do people do it without recourse to drugs?

00:43:03 ► §

No.

00:43:03 ► §

No. What do you mean?

00:43:04 ► §

Don’t they use drugs or don’t they? You mean are there people it without recourse to drugs? No. What do you mean? Don’t use drugs or don’t use drugs.

00:43:06 ► §

You mean are there people of special talent and ability?

00:43:10 ► §

Well, yeah, but I mean, when I say special, I’m talking special.

00:43:15 ► §

Do you mean are there people who violate the laws of known physics?

00:43:20 ► §

Okay, to heal. I’ll take that one.

00:43:22 ► §

To heal, is that?

00:43:23 ► §

Yeah, yeah.

00:43:26 ► §

Well, maybe you don’t have to violate the laws of known physics to heal

00:43:28 ► §

this was really the question that drove

00:43:33 ► §

my intellectual quest

00:43:35 ► §

I have always been interested

00:43:39 ► §

in these things and had a great

00:43:42 ► §

thirst for spiritual transcendence. But I don’t know why it never made

00:43:49 ► §

sense to me to believe these things. In other words, though I was raised Catholic and as a tiny

00:43:57 ► §

little kid introduced to the transubstantiation, the resurrection, these completely mind-befuddling notions.

00:44:09 ► §

Still, I was also exposed to secular science,

00:44:13 ► §

and so my method was always to ask hard questions.

00:44:17 ► §

What can you show me?

00:44:20 ► §

And I, as an 11 to 14-year-old,

00:44:23 ► §

practiced ceremonial magic to no great avail, I might add.

00:44:30 ► §

I had stories by Robert Block and H.P. Lovecraft to make me hope I might get somewhere,

00:44:38 ► §

but all I ever did was incinerate a lot of rosemary and to alarm my parents.

00:44:47 ► §

But I think that this question is hard to answer

00:44:55 ► §

because we’re not all living in the same world.

00:45:02 ► §

I’ve seen confounding things, but very rarely. But truly they were real. They were so real that I believed them to be real. And I’m the toughest nut to crack I’ve ever met. But these breakthroughs into the super real

00:45:28 ► §

seem to have certain qualities about them

00:45:32 ► §

that make it very hard to do much with it.

00:45:35 ► §

First of all, it’s always unexpected.

00:45:39 ► §

No matter how much you expect it, it’s unexpected.

00:45:42 ► §

No matter how hard you’re scanning,

00:45:47 ► §

it can come from behind the other thing is

00:45:50 ► §

and I don’t quite understand how this works

00:45:54 ► §

but it only happens when your guard is down

00:45:59 ► §

in other words

00:46:01 ► §

it always has a quality of,

00:46:07 ► §

it always requires a certain quality of unconsciousness

00:46:10 ► §

on the part of the experienced.

00:46:13 ► §

This is why I think beginners get so far.

00:46:16 ► §

There really is something called beginner’s luck.

00:46:22 ► §

My daughter, who I haven’t seen for a while

00:46:25 ► §

is coming today

00:46:27 ► §

and it caused me to think

00:46:30 ► §

of an incident that happened to

00:46:33 ► §

she and I years ago here at Esalen

00:46:36 ► §

and it’s a story which makes no sense

00:46:39 ► §

whatsoever

00:46:40 ► §

but it really truly happened

00:46:44 ► §

as far as I can tell. But it has all the qualities

00:46:50 ► §

that bedevil this kind of thing. And what it was, was I was, as I am now, scholar in residence. It

00:46:58 ► §

must have been some 10 years or so, eight years or so ago. So Cleo would have been like nine,

00:47:06 ► §

and I would have been 40.

00:47:08 ► §

So we were both younger and more naive.

00:47:12 ► §

And it was dinner time at the lodge,

00:47:18 ► §

and it was this time of year and this time of weather,

00:47:21 ► §

and the fog had been coming all day in and out in the garden

00:47:26 ► §

and it was

00:47:29 ► §

and we genuflect here

00:47:31 ► §

God love him to Carlos Castaneda

00:47:33 ► §

it was that very strange time of day

00:47:38 ► §

which only lasts a few minutes

00:47:41 ► §

between daytime and

00:47:45 ► §

nighttime, the crack between

00:47:47 ► §

the world, I believe.

00:47:49 ► §

It’s interesting in

00:47:51 ► §

South America and also

00:47:53 ► §

in Hawaii, at precisely

00:47:56 ► §

that moment

00:47:57 ► §

every day there are

00:47:59 ► §

certain species of Lepidoptera

00:48:02 ► §

that rearrange

00:48:03 ► §

themselves. In other words, that come out from wherever they’ve been hiding for 24 hours,

00:48:09 ► §

fly around furiously for five minutes,

00:48:12 ► §

and then disappear again for 24 hours.

00:48:15 ► §

But anyway, it was precisely that time of day,

00:48:18 ► §

and the fog was coming in and out of the garden,

00:48:22 ► §

and we were not in a mood for anything peculiar.

00:48:28 ► §

We were intent on dinner,

00:48:31 ► §

and we were walking the path through the garden,

00:48:35 ► §

and suddenly, as this fog moved and cleared,

00:48:40 ► §

coming down one of the rows was a bunny, a small rabbit, except that it had

00:48:56 ► §

very small, short horns. Now, some of you may know the creature called the jackalope

00:49:06 ► §

the jackalope is a large jackrabbit with a pair of antelope horns

00:49:13 ► §

and it is a creature known only to exist above certain low-class bars

00:49:22 ► §

scattered across California and Oregon.

00:49:26 ► §

It’s up on the wall, the jackalope.

00:49:28 ► §

It’s something you kid tourists with.

00:49:32 ► §

As far as I could see, this was a baby jackalope about this high,

00:49:40 ► §

and it crossed the trail no more than five feet in front of us.

00:49:45 ► §

We both saw it.

00:49:48 ► §

And our attitude was not amazement

00:49:54 ► §

or an awareness that we were entering into a paranormal dimension.

00:50:00 ► §

Both of us, I think our reaction was, come on.

00:50:06 ► §

And then immediately behind it was a man,

00:50:11 ► §

a very thin, not particularly healthy-looking man

00:50:16 ► §

with a shaved head wearing something like a gray running suit.

00:50:21 ► §

And he was running, crouched was with his arm hands out like this he was trying

00:50:29 ► §

to catch the the jack-o’-bunny and when he saw us he appeared very confused and stood up and turned and walked the other way. And I just took her by the elbow and I said,

00:50:48 ► §

let’s get out of here.

00:50:52 ► §

And then we went to dinner

00:50:54 ► §

and we’ve talked about it immediately after and since.

00:51:00 ► §

And as far as anybody can reasonably and decently tell,

00:51:06 ► §

this is the straight story on what happened.

00:51:10 ► §

Well, it doesn’t make any sense.

00:51:15 ► §

First of all, the earth doesn’t move from its pinions.

00:51:21 ► §

But what does it say?

00:51:30 ► §

opinions, but what does it say? It says that attention falling into a certain place of non-attention is set up for something like this to happen. And I can’t explain it. I don’t think

00:51:39 ► §

it’s explainable. It’s sort of like, you know, when you study quantum physics and they tell you that

00:51:46 ► §

a black hole mostly puts out electrons, but the theory allows that it could eject

00:51:53 ► §

Miatas and grand pianos, except that it would be very rare for it to eject a grand piano.

00:52:01 ► §

But the theory does not preclude the ejection of grand pianos

00:52:06 ► §

so it’s something like that

00:52:09 ► §

or it’s a group hallucination

00:52:10 ► §

or it’s a bewitchment

00:52:12 ► §

or, or, or

00:52:14 ► §

and it begins to proliferate

00:52:16 ► §

I was thinking about it

00:52:17 ► §

last night or this morning

00:52:19 ► §

because I was in that place

00:52:21 ► §

where I saw it happen

00:52:22 ► §

I was thinking

00:52:23 ► §

maybe

00:52:24 ► §

maybe Esalen lasts a really long time.

00:52:32 ► §

Like maybe it’s sort of like the Piazza San Marco in Venice

00:52:38 ► §

or the Central Area in Stonehenge.

00:52:42 ► §

Maybe we’re actually starting something here

00:52:44 ► §

that will last so long

00:52:46 ► §

that for the next 5,000 years

00:52:49 ► §

people will relate to the Esalen Garden

00:52:53 ► §

and that somehow it’s a nexus

00:52:58 ► §

for others on strange missions.

00:53:03 ► §

Now, the other thing about that story

00:53:06 ► §

that I like, or that relieved me,

00:53:09 ► §

as I guess the way to put it,

00:53:11 ► §

is notice that it’s absurd.

00:53:15 ► §

And by being absurd, it’s self-canceling.

00:53:20 ► §

Suppose instead of a jackalope,

00:53:23 ► §

which is an absurd creature to begin with,

00:53:27 ► §

suppose it had been a grey of the wraparound eye type

00:53:32 ► §

that are apparently trading high technology to the government

00:53:37 ► §

for human fetal tissue, those people.

00:53:42 ► §

Then you would have had a real dilemma on your hands

00:53:45 ► §

because greys are objects of cultural fascination.

00:53:51 ► §

In other words, if you see a grey,

00:53:55 ► §

you just become part of a statistical body of people who’ve seen one.

00:54:00 ► §

And so it’s like more problematic.

00:54:04 ► §

It’s not that it’s a non-reality

00:54:06 ► §

it’s that it’s a sort of a non-reality

00:54:09 ► §

this is I think

00:54:13 ► §

part of the clue to

00:54:14 ► §

understanding alien abductions and the way we

00:54:18 ► §

generate information

00:54:20 ► §

if I tell you that I was up late last night

00:54:24 ► §

and couldn’t sleep

00:54:26 ► §

and walked along the cliffs over Esalen

00:54:29 ► §

and that I encountered a shining disk

00:54:33 ► §

and that I then had

00:54:35 ► §

my navel lint was removed

00:54:39 ► §

by a team of extraterrestrial cosmetologists

00:54:42 ► §

this is evidence for an already existing body of data.

00:54:49 ► §

If you say, well, you should call MUFON,

00:54:52 ► §

they’d be very interested in this,

00:54:53 ► §

or you should call somebody else.

00:54:55 ► §

If I tell you I was restless last night

00:54:57 ► §

and walked the cliffs of Esalen

00:55:00 ► §

and that I encountered Bugs Bunny

00:55:04 ► §

in the company of Patrick Swayze,

00:55:07 ► §

people would just say,

00:55:08 ► §

you’re nuts.

00:55:12 ► §

It’s not sanctioned.

00:55:14 ► §

It’s not allowed.

00:55:16 ► §

And nobody gives a hoot

00:55:18 ► §

or takes it seriously for a moment

00:55:21 ► §

because it serves no one’s agenda.

00:55:24 ► §

It’s just insane data and should be

00:55:27 ► §

immediately tossed out. This shows us, you know, that the objects in the unconscious are given

00:55:33 ► §

different weights. And you can tell a crazy story and join a self-help group. But if your story is too crazy they won’t have a group for you they’ll have a cell

00:55:46 ► §

for you so it’s worth bearing in mind let’s be generous here Someone had prepared a bunny with horns

00:56:07 ► §

to surprise someone else

00:56:10 ► §

with whom they’d had a lifelong running joke

00:56:14 ► §

about jackalopes.

00:56:17 ► §

And they had arrived at Esalen

00:56:20 ► §

for the surprise birthday party of this person

00:56:24 ► §

and realized that the bunny was frantic

00:56:27 ► §

because it hadn’t eaten on the long trip. So they took the jack-o’-bunny in its cage down to the

00:56:35 ► §

garden to steal some lettuce for it. And in the fog and in the effort not to be seen, the bunny escaped with its horns in place.

00:56:48 ► §

And this person, who probably didn’t have a gate pass anyway,

00:56:54 ► §

could see the whole situation getting out of hand

00:56:56 ► §

and was frantically trying to capture the horned bunny

00:57:00 ► §

and get it back in its…

00:57:03 ► §

See, people say, gee, what a party pooper this guy is

00:57:06 ► §

well yeah but we’re trying to save

00:57:08 ► §

the laws of physics and

00:57:09 ► §

reason here for crying

00:57:11 ► §

out loud

00:57:12 ► §

but I have to tell

00:57:16 ► §

you that doesn’t feel

00:57:18 ► §

right to what it is

00:57:20 ► §

it felt

00:57:22 ► §

to me like

00:57:23 ► §

I don’t know

00:57:25 ► §

we all live in private Idaho’s

00:57:28 ► §

and somehow I was in somebody else’s private Idaho

00:57:33 ► §

for a moment against my will

00:57:36 ► §

but I think we should always prefer

00:57:39 ► §

the simplest explanation

00:57:41 ► §

sometimes the simple explanation

00:57:43 ► §

like in a case like that is maddeningly complex in itself the simplest explanation. Sometimes the simple explanation,

00:57:46 ► §

like in a case like that,

00:57:49 ► §

is maddeningly complex in itself.

00:57:52 ► §

But if you don’t believe that’s what’s happened,

00:57:54 ► §

well then what do you believe?

00:57:57 ► §

Do you believe that mythological animals are a potential infestation problem

00:58:00 ► §

in the Esalen Gardens?

00:58:02 ► §

Or just where do you draw the line

00:58:06 ► §

you know if if you

00:58:10 ► §

want to know like

00:58:12 ► §

if you have a simple

00:58:13 ► §

scientific question

00:58:14 ► §

that you want to

00:58:15 ► §

answer like let’s say

00:58:17 ► §

here you have a wire

00:58:18 ► §

and you want to know

00:58:20 ► §

how much current is

00:58:21 ► §

flowing through the

00:58:22 ► §

wire so you measure

00:58:24 ► §

it with a voltage

00:58:25 ► §

meter and if you’re doing it scientifically you’ll measure it a

00:58:30 ► §

thousand times then you’ll add those numbers together then you’ll divide by a

00:58:37 ► §

thousand then you get the voltage running through the line. Well now, it’s not uncommon when you carry out this procedure

00:58:46 ► §

that 998 of your measurements will tell you that between four and a half and six volts

00:58:56 ► §

are running through the line. But two of your thousand observations will tell you that 75 watts in one case

00:59:07 ► §

and in another 240 watts

00:59:10 ► §

are running through the line.

00:59:12 ► §

When a scientist looks at this series of measurements,

00:59:17 ► §

the first thing they do is say,

00:59:19 ► §

well, look, there are two anomalous measurements.

00:59:25 ► §

Everything else was fluctuating

00:59:27 ► §

between four and a half and six.

00:59:29 ► §

These were way out of scale.

00:59:31 ► §

Throw them out.

00:59:33 ► §

Get rid of that.

00:59:34 ► §

There’s something wrong.

00:59:35 ► §

That’s bogus.

00:59:36 ► §

Can’t be.

00:59:38 ► §

And then you get the voltage running through the line.

00:59:40 ► §

Now, we do it in the sociological domain

00:59:44 ► §

in the completely opposite fashion. Tonight, a thousand people or more, just I’m picking a number, will stare at the night sky and see what has always been there. We’ll see mile-long spacecraft with violet running lights

01:00:05 ► §

and accompanied by strange music and a message for mankind.

01:00:11 ► §

Now what should we do with these two out of a thousand people?

01:00:15 ► §

Should we put them on au pre?

01:00:17 ► §

Should we rush their story to the cover of every tabloid outlet on earth?

01:00:23 ► §

Or that’s what actually happens.

01:00:26 ► §

In other words, in the sociological world

01:00:28 ► §

we seek to amplify novelty

01:00:31 ► §

because we’re fascinated by it

01:00:34 ► §

but then we get false readings of reality

01:00:38 ► §

because we’ve raised the,

01:00:42 ► §

you know, we’ve made the novelty stand out too much.

01:00:47 ► §

The fact is that information is a degradable medium

01:00:51 ► §

and it collapses into contradiction and absurdity often.

01:00:58 ► §

If you analyze your own conversation over a course of a day,

01:01:04 ► §

it’s largely grunts and nods.

01:01:08 ► §

We don’t really engage for verbal communication

01:01:13 ► §

all that much of our waking time,

01:01:16 ► §

and yet we assume that we’re doing it constantly.

01:01:22 ► §

And so I think reality is very slippery, very malleable. I think we’re very naive about what information is and how it works.

01:01:43 ► §

for this phenomena in crop circles.

01:01:49 ► §

Crop circles are the con that will not die.

01:01:50 ► §

You know?

01:01:54 ► §

No matter how many people come forward and admit that they’ve made them

01:01:56 ► §

and fully confess,

01:01:58 ► §

the meme is launched

01:02:00 ► §

and, you know, tours go from L.A.

01:02:04 ► §

taking the cognoscente of the City of Angels to visit the crushed wheat the satisfaction of anyone interested in its deconstruction.

01:02:30 ► §

It just turns out a lot of people aren’t.

01:02:39 ► §

Extrapolating from the crop circle thing,

01:02:41 ► §

the way reality seems to work is we have a self-observing system of media,

01:02:51 ► §

newspapers, television, so forth and so on.

01:02:54 ► §

Something strange happens.

01:02:58 ► §

A block of ice falls in a field,

01:03:01 ► §

a peculiar pattern in a crop.

01:03:04 ► §

A frightened rural person has some kind of strange experience.

01:03:08 ► §

The local press prints this.

01:03:14 ► §

Then people called stringers

01:03:16 ► §

cull that local press environment for interesting stories.

01:03:23 ► §

In other words, stories that people would be interested in

01:03:26 ► §

in Argentina and Australia

01:03:28 ► §

just for their weirdness and their human interest.

01:03:32 ► §

So they carry then the flying saucer,

01:03:37 ► §

the block of ice, whatever it is,

01:03:39 ► §

goes on to the Reuters network and UPI

01:03:43 ► §

and this sort of thing well then you and I

01:03:46 ► §

reading our daily dose of media the New

01:03:50 ► §

York Times whatever it is so you’re

01:03:51 ► §

reading even the New York Times page 43

01:03:55 ► §

one inch of print you know it says

01:04:01 ► §

Hertfordshire England a block of ice was reported to have fallen

01:04:07 ► §

on the home of Herbert Surrey.

01:04:11 ► §

So you think, oh, that’s interesting.

01:04:14 ► §

Let’s see how my Adobe stock’s doing.

01:04:17 ► §

What’s Dilbert up to?

01:04:19 ► §

And you, in other words, it’s nothing to you.

01:04:23 ► §

But of the millions of people who will read the New York Times,

01:04:28 ► §

some few will say,

01:04:31 ► §

aha, this dovetails with the astrological calculations

01:04:37 ► §

I’ve been doing recently

01:04:39 ► §

and this theory I’ve had,

01:04:46 ► §

and this piece of data is important to the construction and maintenance of my worldview.

01:04:54 ► §

So they drive there, fly there, go there to this place.

01:05:02 ► §

Well, now the only other human beings who are interested in this phenomenon

01:05:08 ► §

at this point are journalists. And journalists, God bless them, have to have a story. So if

01:05:19 ► §

your editor says to you, a block of ice has fallen on a farmhouse in Cheshire, go get the story. You drive out there,

01:05:30 ► §

and of course there’s nothing. There’s now a mud puddle, the block of ice having been bottled for

01:05:37 ► §

its curative powers or whatever, and there’s nothing there. There’s no story except that the person who resonated

01:05:47 ► §

with the phenomenon

01:05:48 ► §

has also arrived at the site

01:05:51 ► §

this is where the marriage in hell takes place

01:05:55 ► §

the press meets the nut

01:05:57 ► §

over the corpus delecti

01:06:01 ► §

of the anomalous event

01:06:03 ► §

and the press guy says,

01:06:05 ► §

my God, we drove miles to get here.

01:06:08 ► §

I’m on deadline.

01:06:09 ► §

There’s no story.

01:06:10 ► §

There’s no picture.

01:06:13 ► §

Who are you?

01:06:15 ► §

To the person in residence,

01:06:18 ► §

say, well, I’m Dr. So-and-so

01:06:22 ► §

of the Advanced Institute of Auric Physics,

01:06:26 ► §

which I founded,

01:06:27 ► §

and I’ve published numerous books,

01:06:30 ► §

all of which I self-published,

01:06:33 ► §

and I’m very close friends with Terence McKenna

01:06:38 ► §

and the Dalai Lama,

01:06:40 ► §

and I know what’s going on here.

01:06:45 ► §

And say, okay, what’s going on?

01:06:46 ► §

Say, well, this is cosmic retribution

01:06:51 ► §

for our polluting of telluric energies,

01:06:56 ► §

which are under the keeping of the elf kingdoms.

01:06:59 ► §

And until we begin to retract our emissions of sulfur.

01:07:05 ► §

And the guy is writing furiously.

01:07:09 ► §

And then the story is amplified and circulated again

01:07:14 ► §

and again and again.

01:07:17 ► §

And it begins to have implications for more and more people

01:07:23 ► §

who are seeking evidence

01:07:25 ► §

for some squirrely or peculiar viewpoint.

01:07:29 ► §

In other words, it becomes a body of evidence.

01:07:32 ► §

And then there’s no end to it.

01:07:36 ► §

It sounds like an explanation for all organized religions.

01:07:40 ► §

I don’t distinguish.

01:07:43 ► §

I think, you know, I was… When the Heaven’s Gate people exited excuse me, I have to get dressed

01:08:07 ► §

for Easter Midnight Mass.

01:08:12 ► §

You know?

01:08:13 ► §

We’re celebrating

01:08:15 ► §

the resurrection of the Savior.

01:08:20 ► §

A minor Galilean politician

01:08:23 ► §

who became God focuses my attention

01:08:29 ► §

and I barely have time to cluck over the foolishness of the Heaven’s Gate people.

01:08:36 ► §

People are not playing by the same rules in all these areas.

01:08:41 ► §

I mean, what is it?

01:08:43 ► §

Or with the same decks.

01:08:44 ► §

Or with the same decks, that’s right.

01:08:49 ► §

And so people say, you know, well, that’s tried and true Christianity. What does that mean? A

01:08:56 ► §

delusion grows more real over time? That’s a peculiar notion. You know, Pliny the Younger, there’s a fascinating book published in the last couple

01:09:08 ► §

of years called The Christians as the Romans Saw Them. Fascinating book, which translates the early

01:09:17 ► §

texts of the Roman Imperium as it slowly became aware that this strange phenomenon was in its midst.

01:09:27 ► §

And Pliny the Younger, not the naturalist who was the elder,

01:09:31 ► §

but Pliny the Younger was appointed governor of Armenia.

01:09:37 ► §

And his job was to go out there and administer Roman law and so forth.

01:09:42 ► §

And he wrote extensive letters to the emperor,

01:09:45 ► §

who was his very good personal friend,

01:09:48 ► §

about the problems of administering this area.

01:09:52 ► §

And his letters back to the Roman administration

01:09:57 ► §

are the first records we have of Christianity.

01:10:02 ► §

They were being oppressed.

01:10:04 ► §

They were on some piece of land

01:10:06 ► §

and some townspeople,

01:10:08 ► §

they were like gypsies, I guess,

01:10:10 ► §

and some townspeople

01:10:11 ► §

had moved them off

01:10:13 ► §

this piece of land

01:10:15 ► §

and they had petitioned

01:10:16 ► §

to the governor

01:10:17 ► §

for redress of grievances.

01:10:19 ► §

And in the course of settling this,

01:10:21 ► §

he had inquired of their beliefs

01:10:23 ► §

and then he wrote a letter to the emperor,

01:10:29 ► §

and the emperor was quite interested and wrote back

01:10:31 ► §

and said, tell me more.

01:10:33 ► §

And he said, is this a new religion?

01:10:36 ► §

And Pliny the Younger wrote, and he said,

01:10:39 ► §

no, this is not a religion.

01:10:43 ► §

Religions are concerned with the great issues

01:10:46 ► §

of cosmic fate and cosmic destiny.

01:10:50 ► §

This is a cult of Christ.

01:10:53 ► §

It’s a cult of personality.

01:10:57 ► §

And this was actually the earliest take on Christianity

01:11:00 ► §

by non-Christians.

01:11:02 ► §

And I think, you I think examined fairly.

01:11:05 ► §

I don’t hear cult as the hammer word

01:11:08 ► §

some people hear,

01:11:11 ► §

but it is a clear distinction between religion.

01:11:15 ► §

Religion is sort of the moral,

01:11:17 ► §

the imperative branch of philosophy.

01:11:21 ► §

How you should live based on

01:11:23 ► §

the nature of being and the world

01:11:26 ► §

a cult is just a squirrely bunch of ideas

01:11:30 ► §

based on the power of some personality

01:11:35 ► §

or some revelation

01:11:38 ► §

I don’t know how we got off on to all of this

01:11:42 ► §

probably Barry’s evil

01:11:44 ► §

and manipulating

01:11:46 ► §

influence in the background somewhere

01:11:49 ► §

well what I yes thank you for asking

01:11:55 ► §

see I don’t carry on this kind of

01:11:58 ► §

debunking stance from a point of view of

01:12:01 ► §

somebody who’s never had these

01:12:02 ► §

experiences I have had these experiences.

01:12:07 ► §

I mean, in my book, The Invisible Landscape,

01:12:11 ► §

I describe encountering a flying saucer

01:12:14 ► §

right down to the point where I could see the rivets.

01:12:19 ► §

But in a way, I saw too much,

01:12:23 ► §

or I kept my head

01:12:25 ► §

because I went through

01:12:29 ► §

all the emotions of the standard

01:12:32 ► §

UFO encounter

01:12:33 ► §

in other words awe, paralysis

01:12:38 ► §

acceptance that it was going to take me

01:12:42 ► §

but as it kept coming closer and closer

01:12:46 ► §

and I saw more and more of it,

01:12:48 ► §

I could finally see that it was in fact

01:12:52 ► §

the end cap of a 1937 Hoover vacuum cleaner

01:12:58 ► §

that was about 45 feet across.

01:13:03 ► §

And if you’re a flying saucer enthusiast,

01:13:08 ► §

you know the famous George Adamski photograph

01:13:12 ► §

of the debunked photograph

01:13:16 ► §

that shows the end cap of a 1937 Hoover vacuum cleaner

01:13:21 ► §

which he suspended on monofilament line in his garage and then shot

01:13:27 ► §

with his brownie it’s the famous flying saucer with the three half circles on the underside

01:13:32 ► §

the little round portholes and the twiddle on top I saw it I saw it flying through the skies of the Amazon, going, whee, whee, whee, whee.

01:13:46 ► §

And as I saw it,

01:13:47 ► §

I knew what it was.

01:13:49 ► §

I knew that it was the phony saucer.

01:13:54 ► §

Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance,

01:13:58 ► §

what it is.

01:13:59 ► §

And Jacques Vallée and other people

01:14:00 ► §

have written about this.

01:14:03 ► §

The encounter with the UFO or with the other

01:14:07 ► §

always has an element of self-canceling absurdity in it.

01:14:13 ► §

If the witness can be fully honest

01:14:17 ► §

and can give a full account of what happened,

01:14:21 ► §

the story will not make sense.

01:14:26 ► §

It never makes sense.

01:14:28 ► §

And in my case, it didn’t make sense on the spot.

01:14:32 ► §

Now, my conclusion from that and from the encounter in the Amazon,

01:14:38 ► §

and I guess this maybe goes to your question about supernormal power there is something

01:14:46 ► §

loose on this planet

01:14:50 ► §

is that what I want to say

01:14:51 ► §

or behind reality

01:14:54 ► §

something

01:14:55 ► §

we could call it

01:14:58 ► §

the unconscious

01:14:59 ► §

but that might make you feel

01:15:01 ► §

more comfortable with it

01:15:03 ► §

than you should

01:15:04 ► §

but what this power can do is it can manipulate your mind.

01:15:14 ► §

And what it has access to is the complete contents of your experience.

01:15:24 ► §

It has more access than you do.

01:15:28 ► §

You, the ego, are a fragile and forgetful creature.

01:15:34 ► §

This thing, every movie you’ve ever seen,

01:15:38 ► §

every television show you’ve ever watched,

01:15:41 ► §

every headline you’ve ever glanced at,

01:15:43 ► §

every face you’ve ever noticed in a crowd.

01:15:47 ► §

It has it all.

01:15:49 ► §

And when it sits across the board from you

01:15:52 ► §

and the pieces are displayed,

01:15:55 ► §

it absolutely surrounds and encloses your mental universe

01:16:01 ► §

and can manipulate you

01:16:05 ► §

any way it wants to

01:16:08 ► §

because it knows you far better

01:16:11 ► §

than you know yourself.

01:16:15 ► §

As an example of this,

01:16:18 ► §

because it’s very hard

01:16:19 ► §

to catch this thing in action,

01:16:21 ► §

it’s mercury sly,

01:16:33 ► §

but it’s not perfect, it’s not godlike. It’s just 99.8% able to do this trick without ever being nailed to the wall for it. Here’s an example of the 0.02% where it failed. And you, if this seems to make no sense to you,

01:16:49 ► §

you should read my book, True Hallucinations, in which the story I’m about to tell is embedded.

01:16:55 ► §

But my brother, to shorthand it catastrophically, went pretty bananas in the course of this expedition to the Amazon.

01:17:06 ► §

And at one point he announced that he was going to deliver a teaching

01:17:13 ► §

that would, I think this was the one which cured all disease.

01:17:18 ► §

You only had to do this practice and all physical disease would instantly be cured and he said and so here’s

01:17:28 ► §

the practice he said picture the number eight turn it on its side slide the two circles together

01:17:38 ► §

shrink it to a point close your eyes, and utter the mantra, please.

01:17:51 ► §

Okay?

01:17:54 ► §

Sounds like it has a 30-40 chance

01:17:57 ► §

of at least knocking back hay fever, right?

01:18:11 ► §

back hay fever right so so this was at a point in this experience in the Amazon where he had been raving for days and days and just everybody was exhausted and at their wits end and but

01:18:20 ► §

it was like a bolt of lightning to me because I remembered that three months before,

01:18:29 ► §

I had been in Canada, having come from Japan,

01:18:32 ► §

and was getting ready for this Amazon expedition.

01:18:37 ► §

And one of the things that I thought I should take care of

01:18:39 ► §

since I’d been in Asia for a couple of years

01:18:42 ► §

was I needed a dental checkup.

01:18:45 ► §

So I made an appointment with this Canadian doc dentist

01:18:48 ► §

and went for this dental cleaning

01:18:52 ► §

and arrived to find a waiting room full of people

01:18:56 ► §

and settled down to a tall stack of tattered

01:19:01 ► §

and incredibly tatty magazines,

01:19:04 ► §

of tattered and incredibly tatty magazines,

01:19:07 ► §

among which was the Journal of the Canadian Education Society,

01:19:13 ► §

something like the Parent Teacher magazine,

01:19:16 ► §

but for Canada.

01:19:17 ► §

And there was an article in there that said,

01:19:20 ► §

this was 1971,

01:19:22 ► §

shows you how things never change.

01:19:23 ► §

There was an article about how computers will soon revolutionize elementary school teaching.

01:19:30 ► §

And so, you know, in desperation, I turned to this article.

01:19:34 ► §

And here’s this article. You can imagine what it was saying.

01:19:38 ► §

But there was this little sidebar next to the article.

01:19:42 ► §

And it said, the schools of the future

01:19:46 ► §

will be nothing like we have known

01:19:49 ► §

children will learn

01:19:50 ► §

in completely different ways

01:19:52 ► §

and then it said

01:19:53 ► §

imagine little Susie

01:19:55 ► §

sitting down in front of a computer screen

01:19:59 ► §

visualizing the number 8

01:20:02 ► §

turning it on its side,

01:20:06 ► §

sliding the two circles over each other

01:20:09 ► §

and shrinking it to a point

01:20:12 ► §

in order to command an arithmetic operation

01:20:17 ► §

or something like that.

01:20:18 ► §

And it was like nailed, nailed.

01:20:23 ► §

We know where this stuff is coming from.

01:20:26 ► §

It’s coming from our own minds.

01:20:28 ► §

He, if we want to blame my brother for this,

01:20:33 ► §

had apparently a complete redoubt

01:20:36 ► §

of all this detritus flowing around in my mind

01:20:40 ► §

and could pick it up and use it at will

01:20:44 ► §

to befuddle and confuse me and lead me deeper in.

01:20:49 ► §

So when people say they have these encounters, the strangest thing about how we relate to the encounters is that we believe them. We take it at face value.

01:21:08 ► §

If you told me, if you stopped me in the dining room this morning

01:21:13 ► §

and told me that you had culminated an incredibly intense affair last night,

01:21:20 ► §

I would not take that at face value.

01:21:28 ► §

night, I would not take that at face value. I would wonder at your motivation for revealing such an intimate detail of your life to someone you hardly know in the inappropriate venue of

01:21:35 ► §

the Esalen dining room, and without us having previously discussed your erotic proclivities

01:21:41 ► §

at all, I would say to myself, what a weird thing.

01:21:45 ► §

Why is this guy telling me this?

01:21:48 ► §

In other words,

01:21:48 ► §

I would not take it at face value.

01:21:51 ► §

These encounter things,

01:21:53 ► §

people take completely at face value.

01:21:57 ► §

And yet they are the most suspect accounts

01:22:00 ► §

any of us produce.

01:22:02 ► §

The people who have these experiences take it at face value,

01:22:07 ► §

and then the people who listen to the experience take it at face value and say, well, let’s go out

01:22:13 ► §

and measure. Now, you say you were standing here and it came over the trees at this angle, so you

01:22:19 ► §

say it was the size of a football, but the tree was in front of it, so that means by the rules of optics

01:22:26 ► §

that it could have been no more than 15 feet across,

01:22:31 ► §

no less than 3 feet across.

01:22:33 ► §

In other words, they treat it like it’s science.

01:22:37 ► §

Like we’re supposed to deconstruct this

01:22:41 ► §

and find out the nature of the object.

01:22:44 ► §

You wouldn’t subject a dream to that kind of analysis.

01:22:49 ► §

That would be absurd.

01:22:51 ► §

These things are like dreams.

01:22:55 ► §

We are dreaming most of the time.

01:22:59 ► §

The idea that there is a shared reality,

01:23:02 ► §

the idea that you and I are living in the same universe, seeing the same things, walking on the same ground, is just a very high-level philosophical abstraction. It’s very hard to prove it or even to convince yourself that it’s so. live inside worlds constructed by our language, our history, our expectations.

01:23:27 ► §

And when the unconscious, for some reason,

01:23:32 ► §

becomes, as the Jungians say, activated,

01:23:34 ► §

it moves into that world

01:23:38 ► §

and it uses the entire stage of being

01:23:41 ► §

to send messages back to you about reality. And it’s an intelligence test, is what it is. It’s an intelligence test. And if you take things that face value, for sure you failed the intelligence test. It’s no game for the naive.

01:24:10 ► §

Is it based on foolishness or is it based on stupidity?

01:24:15 ► §

Sometimes one, sometimes the other. If you can’t help yourself, I guess it’s stupidity.

01:24:21 ► §

If you can help yourself and you make the mistake anyway, I guess it’s foolishness.

01:24:27 ► §

Yeah?

01:24:28 ► §

Is there any purpose to this?

01:24:31 ► §

I mean, is it a personal thing?

01:24:32 ► §

A personal practice?

01:24:33 ► §

You mean, why is it doing this?

01:24:37 ► §

For educating us?

01:24:39 ► §

It seems like it’s educating us.

01:24:42 ► §

But in a funny, funny way.

01:24:44 ► §

You know, if you read Jung on alchemy

01:24:47 ► §

alchemy is is like this it’s a paradoxical realm of of symbol structures that seem to contradict

01:24:56 ► §

themselves and myths that don’t make any sense and but what it always is about, I think, is dissolving assumptions.

01:25:07 ► §

That’s why the people who take it literally are, in a sense, victims of it,

01:25:16 ► §

because it was not to be taken literally.

01:25:21 ► §

The intelligence test is failed.

01:25:28 ► §

literally. The intelligence test is failed. You know, the flying saucer enthusiasts love to say,

01:25:35 ► §

I don’t know what the number is, they keep pushing it up, but they say 35% of the American public believe flying saucers are real. Well, now, first of all, are we being asked to believe that 35% of the American public can carry on a coherent discussion

01:25:47 ► §

of the concept real?

01:25:51 ► §

You know?

01:25:53 ► §

As real as what?

01:25:55 ► §

As real as Madonna’s talents?

01:25:59 ► §

As real as Clinton’s integrity?

01:26:02 ► §

How real are the UFOs?

01:26:06 ► §

And to my mind then,

01:26:08 ► §

if 35% of the American public

01:26:10 ► §

believe the UFOs are real

01:26:13 ► §

and they aren’t real,

01:26:16 ► §

then obviously the interesting population

01:26:19 ► §

to interview is the other people.

01:26:24 ► §

What do they think? Well, the UFO people will say, oh, well, they just think they’re weather balloons or they think that it’s a government aircraft. No, no, don’t let your opposition speak for itself.

01:26:43 ► §

I’m in that larger percentage and I don’t think UFOs are weather balloons

01:26:45 ► §

I don’t think they’re government aircraft

01:26:49 ► §

obviously all the interesting explanations

01:26:53 ► §

lie on the side of that

01:26:55 ► §

they are not what they appear to be

01:26:58 ► §

you’re listening to the psychedelic salon

01:27:01 ► §

where people are changing their lives

01:27:03 ► §

one thought at a time.

01:27:06 ► §

So, what do you think about Terence’s rap about the possibility of the existence of some unknown

01:27:13 ► §

power on the planet that can manipulate your mind? Well, at first I really wasn’t listening

01:27:20 ► §

all that closely, to be honest, but when he said that calling it the unconscious might make

01:27:25 ► §

you feel uncomfortable, more uncomfortable at least, with it than you should, well, that was

01:27:31 ► §

when I realized that I was in the middle of listening to one of Terrence’s poetic raps that

01:27:36 ► §

so endeared him to us. It’s a really good example of why so many of us think of him as a bard.

01:27:43 ► §

Now, one more comment about the talk that

01:27:45 ► §

we just listened to, and then I’ve got an update on the Salon 2.0, as well as a couple of other

01:27:51 ► §

announcements. Now while I’ve read and enjoyed all of the books that Terrence mentioned in this talk,

01:27:56 ► §

two of them I think shouldn’t be missed. One is The Long Trip, A Prehistory of Psychedelia

01:28:03 ► §

by Paul Devereaux,

01:28:05 ► §

and the other is In Theogens and the Future of Religion, which was edited by Robert Forte.

01:28:11 ► §

Both of those books, in my opinion, are essential for any well-balanced psychedelic library.

01:28:17 ► §

And if you’re more interested in videos than you are in books, then I’ve got a must-see documentary for you.

01:28:24 ► §

It’s the first of an episodic series titled Shamans of the Global Village,

01:28:29 ► §

and this first episode completely blew me away.

01:28:33 ► §

I just can’t say enough good things about it.

01:28:36 ► §

You know, I’ve read hundreds of books about psychedelics,

01:28:39 ► §

and I’ve seen dozens of films dealing with that topic,

01:28:42 ► §

but without any doubt in my mind,

01:28:44 ► §

Shamans of the Global Village is by far the best treatment of the psychedelic world Thank you. editing, and other production values are really top-notch. So if you go to www.shamanoftheglobalvillage.com,

01:29:11 ► §

you can learn more about it.

01:29:13 ► §

The first episode actually features Octavio Redig

01:29:16 ► §

and his work with the Sonoran Desert Toad.

01:29:19 ► §

And while I thought that I already knew quite a bit

01:29:22 ► §

about what is commonly called toad venom and about 5-MeO-DMT,

01:29:28 ► §

I have to admit that compared to what I learned from this documentary,

01:29:32 ► §

my previous information was not only quite sparse, but I think a lot of it was probably pretty incorrect as well.

01:29:39 ► §

Now, this first episode of the series is available at the official site to stream for $4andtodownloadwithnearlyanextrahourofcontentfor$10.

01:29:50 ► §

But they’re hoping to roll it out for free for a week anyhow, starting October 1st.

01:29:56 ► §

So surf on over to shamansoftheglobalvillage.com and I’m sure that you’re going to be happy that you did.

01:30:02 ► §

and I’m sure that you’re going to be happy that you did.

01:30:07 ► §

Another thing that I’d like to pass along is that this past week,

01:30:10 ► §

I had an interesting conversation with Noah Lampert,

01:30:13 ► §

who hosts the Synchronicity podcast,

01:30:17 ► §

which touches on experiences and concepts that often go overlooked.

01:30:23 ► §

And during our conversation, Noah asked me to mention any recent synchronicities in my life,

01:30:26 ► §

but at the time I didn’t really recall any.

01:30:31 ► §

However, the day before yesterday, when I listened to his introduction of our interview,

01:30:35 ► §

he mentioned the fact that Bruce Dahmer had just been on the Duncan Trussell podcast,

01:30:40 ► §

and he also mentioned a podcast by Zach Leary featuring Tony Moss.

01:30:46 ► §

Well, I don’t know if this is actually a synchronicity, but both Bruce and Tony are dear friends of mine. In fact, Bruce called me as he was driving down to Duncan’s studio for his

01:30:52 ► §

interview, and a day or so before that, I’d actually listened to Zach’s interview with Tony.

01:30:58 ► §

Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you’re already familiar with Bruce

01:31:02 ► §

Dahmer. But if you don’t already know Tony Moss,

01:31:05 ► §

then I highly recommend that you listen to his interview with Zach Leary.

01:31:09 ► §

Tony is one of my all-time favorite people, and if you’re a Unix geek, then you know what I mean

01:31:16 ► §

when I say that I’d trust Tony with my root password any day. And I’ll link to both of

01:31:22 ► §

those podcasts in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com

01:31:27 ► §

Okay, so do you want to know what I was doing with my time last week

01:31:32 ► §

instead of doing a weekly podcast?

01:31:35 ► §

Well, thanks to long-time salonner and charter subscriber to our forums, Dan M

01:31:39 ► §

I began investigating some of his suggestions for building the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

01:31:45 ► §

And after taking a look at its competition first,

01:31:48 ► §

I came back to Dan’s suggestion of experimenting with Slack.com.

01:31:53 ► §

That’s S-L-A-C-K dot com.

01:31:56 ► §

Now, I’m not going to geek out on you here today.

01:31:58 ► §

I’ll save that for the forums and on Slack.

01:32:01 ► §

But the headline is that, well, Slack appears to be able to provide me with a

01:32:05 ► §

single place to go to keep up with messages that our fellow salonners are sending to me in,

01:32:11 ► §

well, in regards to many things, but basically in regards to the evolution of the salon.

01:32:17 ► §

So once we get this all set up, messages that I get from email, Twitter messages, LinkedIn messages,

01:32:23 ► §

Skype messages, and all the rest of them

01:32:25 ► §

will not only be in a single place for me to find, but Slack also provides an archive that is

01:32:32 ► §

searchable. So then I won’t have to try and remember where I first saw something or where I filed it.

01:32:38 ► §

Plus, even though I’m not on Facebook myself, posts from there can also be incorporated into

01:32:43 ► §

our Slack team as well.

01:32:45 ► §

So if you want to become involved in this project yourself, and I’m not talking just about geeks here,

01:32:51 ► §

because our Slack team, initially at least, is going to be just brainstorming ideas about

01:32:56 ► §

how to best turn over control of the salon as a platform for the community itself.

01:33:01 ► §

And I don’t see this as necessarily a simple task. My guess is that

01:33:06 ► §

it’s going to take several years of first me and then a group of individuals making a lot of the

01:33:11 ► §

decisions, at least until we can come up with a good way to automate it as much as possible.

01:33:17 ► §

But if you want to become involved in this ongoing discussion, well, you can request an

01:33:22 ► §

invite to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 Slack team by

01:33:25 ► §

going to psychedelicsalon20, that’s all one word, lowercase, psychedelicsalon2.0.signup.team

01:33:36 ► §

and enter the information there that’s requested.

01:33:40 ► §

Over time, I expect our group to break into sub-teams that are dealing with specific topics, topics that need to be answered as we move forward.

01:33:49 ► §

For example, before we can automate our processes using blockchain technology, it seems to me that we first have to be able to know a little something about the people that we’re dealing with.

01:34:00 ► §

Because, let’s face it, while there are hundreds of thousands of fellow salonners,

01:34:09 ► §

my guess is that a few of them may not have our best interests at heart.

01:34:13 ► §

You see, I’ve been around long enough to have seen the U.S. surveillance state infiltrate just about every organization you can imagine.

01:34:17 ► §

Just search on COINTELPRO to get an idea of what can and currently is being done

01:34:22 ► §

to subvert perfectly legitimate organizations.

01:34:26 ► §

And while what we do will all be transparent and public, it could also be possible for key

01:34:31 ► §

volunteers to kind of throw a monkey wrench in the works and bring our little experiment in

01:34:36 ► §

community to a quick end. So how do we know whom we’re dealing with these days? Let’s say that

01:34:43 ► §

you’re at a festival and as a member of the Slan 2.0 community,

01:34:47 ► §

you have an app on your phone that you can use to exchange some information with a stranger you meet there.

01:34:53 ► §

And that app gives both of you a list of people that you have a common connection to.

01:34:58 ► §

Now, if that new person you meet happens to also have a connection to me,

01:35:03 ► §

well, what can that mean?

01:35:06 ► §

Well, it may mean only that this person and I have exchanged a couple of emails. But maybe that new person you

01:35:12 ► §

meet was also the guy that was with me one night when we were both high on acid and running through

01:35:17 ► §

a Mexican jungle with the Federales after us. Now, which of those two people would you trust the most?

01:35:24 ► §

Well, at first glance, you might think

01:35:25 ► §

it would be the guy in the jungle. But what if that little app also told you that I was warning

01:35:30 ► §

people to stay away from the jungle man because, well, I thought he was crazy and a danger to

01:35:35 ► §

everybody around him. Now, do you see the difficulties involved in establishing a level of trust?

01:35:42 ► §

And why, you may ask, is trust so important,

01:35:46 ► §

especially if we’re going to keep everything transparent anyway?

01:35:49 ► §

Well, in a way, trust isn’t actually as important as lack of trust, suspicion.

01:35:56 ► §

On more than one occasion, I’ve seen people shunned because they were thought to be narcs,

01:36:01 ► §

when in fact they were just shy people who were new to our events.

01:36:06 ► §

And as a result, we probably missed the opportunity to welcome someone who might have become a great friend to our community.

01:36:13 ► §

So if we can eliminate unfounded suspicions about new people we meet, I think that maybe things can move along much more smoothly.

01:36:21 ► §

Anyway, working out the mechanics of building such an app is one of the challenges that volunteers for the 2.0 version of the salon

01:36:28 ► §

are going to be solving.

01:36:30 ► §

And if you have any ideas about how to solve this

01:36:33 ► §

and other issues involved in organizing

01:36:35 ► §

a self-sustaining online community of like-minded people,

01:36:39 ► §

well, I hope that you’ll take the time to join in our organizing discussions.

01:36:43 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:36:48 ► §

Be well, my friends. © transcript Emily Beynon