Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://mattlamkin.bandcamp.com[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A nature trip is an eyes wide open trip.”
“I think LSD is abrasively psychoanalytic.”
“I don’t see an intellect outside of space and time guiding things, and certainly not watching with baited breath the machinations of the human monkeys. I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.”
“The universe is a self-creating mystery of some sort.”
“Maybe reality is a far more perishable concept than we ever dared or feared to suppose.”
What Are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization?
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
And after we first listened to the continuation of the Terrence McKenna workshop that I’ve been, well, I’ve been playing it for the past several weeks.
00:00:36 ►
Anyway, after that, I’ve got a few announcements that I think you might be interested in.
00:00:39 ►
But first, we’ve got a talk to listen to.
00:00:47 ►
And before that, I want to pass along my sincere thanks to some of our fellow salonners who have made donations during this past week.
00:00:56 ►
And these kind souls are Gary M., Ryan J., and a generous donation from Swan and B-Will.
00:01:05 ►
And I thank you all for your continuing support of the salon, both now and once we move to our 2.0 version next spring.
00:01:11 ►
Now, since this series of McKenna Talks that I’ve been playing lately hasn’t appeared elsewhere on the net, at least as far as I can tell, I haven’t cut anything out.
00:01:16 ►
In fact, even when the comments of others in the room weren’t very clear, I amplified
00:01:21 ►
them as best as I could so that we could keep these recordings intact.
00:01:26 ►
And from time to time you’ll hear Terrence say something,
00:01:29 ►
then there’s going to be a slight gap, and then he’ll start speaking again,
00:01:33 ►
but only with a few words left out.
00:01:36 ►
However, that isn’t my doing.
00:01:38 ►
What happened at those points is that the tape obviously ran out
00:01:43 ►
and had to be turned over to continue recording
00:01:45 ►
but those instances are few and don’t really seriously impact the overall flow of Terrence’s
00:01:52 ►
raps so here now is part four of an August 1997 Terrence McKenna workshop which he titled
00:02:00 ►
our cyber spiritual future LSD does all kinds of strange things to your mind and perception,
00:02:10 ►
but it is somewhat reluctant to produce what I call true hallucinations.
00:02:16 ►
It will do that if you smoke a lot of cannabis on top of it
00:02:19 ►
or lace a little mescaline on top of it. But pure LSD is somewhat reluctant to do what I’m after.
00:02:31 ►
And what I’m after are visions.
00:02:35 ►
These unfolding, visually beheld, incredibly complex,
00:02:41 ►
beautiful, meaning-laden scenarios.
00:02:46 ►
I didn’t feel satisfaction in my pursuit of that
00:02:50 ►
until I got to psilocybin.
00:02:53 ►
So that’s why I do it at night.
00:02:56 ►
You mentioned music.
00:02:59 ►
Music, good point.
00:03:00 ►
And again, I take a harder line than most people I listen to music on ayahuasca
00:03:10 ►
especially because often it’s being generated by human beings and because ayahuasca has a tradition
00:03:17 ►
of music being visibly beheld but when I take psilocybin or anything else like that I don’t play music because it’s
00:03:29 ►
complete sensory overload it absolutely dominates the experience now if I were to take mushrooms and at the two-hour mark, nothing whatsoever has happened.
00:03:46 ►
I might put on some music to try and coax it out of the woodwork,
00:03:53 ►
but at the two-hour mark, it should already be raging.
00:03:57 ►
Something has happened.
00:03:58 ►
Either you’re full of food or the dose went off or something. So I find, see, what I’m interested in is the thing in itself,
00:04:10 ►
the ding-on-sea-shove-it.
00:04:12 ►
What is it without music, without nature,
00:04:16 ►
without input from other people?
00:04:19 ►
What is it in silent darkness?
00:04:22 ►
And people say, well, especially people who’ve meditated,
00:04:26 ►
say, well, that sounds hideously boring.
00:04:29 ►
Not at all, my friend.
00:04:31 ►
You will have your hands so full in absolutely silent darkness,
00:04:36 ►
if it turns, if it works,
00:04:39 ►
that one iota more of input would be unbearable.
00:04:44 ►
So I tend to advise against music. one iota more of input would be unbearable.
00:04:47 ►
So I tend to advise against music.
00:04:49 ►
Also, know your music.
00:04:55 ►
I have had experiences where my goal in life became to survive to the end of the cut.
00:05:00 ►
You know?
00:05:02 ►
Music is a magical art.
00:05:06 ►
And, you know, you just drop something on the turntable
00:05:08 ►
and God knows
00:05:10 ►
what the motivation of this was
00:05:12 ►
yeah
00:05:13 ►
well and the art of music is to work
00:05:24 ►
on emotional modes
00:05:26 ►
so here’s a guy
00:05:28 ►
who wrote a piece of music
00:05:29 ►
and his intent was for it to
00:05:31 ►
emotionally take people to pieces
00:05:34 ►
well maybe you didn’t know
00:05:36 ►
that was his intent
00:05:37 ►
but you drop it on the turntable
00:05:39 ►
well now
00:05:40 ►
that’s the advantage of a companion
00:05:42 ►
because if you’re under it
00:05:45 ►
you don’t want to be changing CDs
00:05:46 ►
no if you’re going to listen to music
00:05:49 ►
you definitely need somebody
00:05:51 ►
to run the machinery
00:05:52 ►
I think
00:05:53 ►
Barry
00:05:55 ►
the other thing with music
00:05:58 ►
on the other side of it
00:06:00 ►
music tends to
00:06:01 ►
maybe because I grew up in the 60s,
00:06:05 ►
but it brings back memories of the past.
00:06:08 ►
There’s associations,
00:06:10 ►
there’s emotional entanglements,
00:06:11 ►
associations,
00:06:12 ►
and you’re there again.
00:06:14 ►
You may not want to be in the past.
00:06:16 ►
You may want to be free
00:06:17 ►
of those kinds of associations.
00:06:18 ►
That’s one of the problems I’ve found.
00:06:20 ►
The other thing is,
00:06:23 ►
I was talking to a friend of mine
00:06:25 ►
who wants to purge a tape
00:06:26 ►
and a new found friend
00:06:28 ►
said that they wanted to
00:06:31 ►
try the mushroom
00:06:32 ►
but she said
00:06:33 ►
and I’ve heard this before from people on the radio
00:06:36 ►
they don’t like
00:06:41 ►
they think it’s going to be like LSD
00:06:44 ►
and they don’t want to go inside
00:06:46 ►
and go through all this introspection
00:06:48 ►
where kind of LSD has that psychoanalytic edge to it
00:06:52 ►
and go into their heads.
00:06:55 ►
And especially if they may be in a depression
00:06:58 ►
or things are not going well,
00:07:00 ►
they don’t want to take it.
00:07:01 ►
They feel like they have to be sort of liberated from all their problems
00:07:06 ►
before they can take it
00:07:08 ►
because they don’t want to get into any dark, deep places.
00:07:12 ►
When you say you’re after hallucinations,
00:07:14 ►
is it more external
00:07:15 ►
and it doesn’t matter what your psychic state is inside?
00:07:19 ►
No, we’ve dealt with setting.
00:07:21 ►
Now let’s move, following your question, to set.
00:07:25 ►
No, that is the question.
00:07:28 ►
What should you be like before you take it?
00:07:33 ►
And again, opinions differ.
00:07:36 ►
In my opinion, you should be in a state of reasonable psychic equilibrium.
00:07:44 ►
You should…
00:07:47 ►
It’s the ace world. I I know it ain’t easy it’s you know how many
00:07:50 ►
seconds a year are you
00:07:52 ►
do you qualify
00:07:53 ►
but nevertheless
00:07:56 ►
like for instance
00:07:58 ►
I would never take it
00:08:00 ►
in the middle of some incredible
00:08:01 ►
emotional upheaval with my
00:08:04 ►
partner or something like that
00:08:06 ►
because it’s just crazy making.
00:08:09 ►
So you sort of have to have things a little calmed down.
00:08:14 ►
And then what I always do, and this is just my preference,
00:08:18 ►
and I don’t, it’s just my preference,
00:08:20 ►
is I always throw the Qing.
00:08:24 ►
And I, because it’s saying,
00:08:26 ►
okay, I think I’m ready.
00:08:28 ►
I think the set is okay.
00:08:30 ►
I think the setting is okay.
00:08:33 ►
Now let’s get some input.
00:08:36 ►
And the yi qing,
00:08:39 ►
a very surprising number of times,
00:08:43 ►
I’ve thrown the hex hexagram I can’t remember
00:08:47 ►
which one it is that’s it’s the only one
00:08:49 ►
that says inquire again of the Oracle if
00:08:54 ►
you possess constancy and some something
00:08:58 ►
else so in other words if it’s if it’s
00:09:01 ►
in if the indicate if the auguries are negative,
00:09:05 ►
I don’t proceed with it.
00:09:10 ►
Then another issue we haven’t dealt with,
00:09:12 ►
sort of back on the other side,
00:09:14 ►
is inside or outside.
00:09:18 ►
And people say to me,
00:09:20 ►
you don’t do it outside, you don’t do it in nature.
00:09:25 ►
Well, you know, at the quantum mechanical level,
00:09:28 ►
there’s even nature inside my apartment.
00:09:32 ►
Nature is everywhere. It’s space, time, and energy.
00:09:37 ►
It would be nice, I agree, and when I take it in nature,
00:09:42 ►
I take lower doses for two reasons.
00:09:45 ►
First of all, I’m going to work largely with my eyes open.
00:09:49 ►
I’m going to be looking at things.
00:09:51 ►
A nature trip is a looking at things trip.
00:09:55 ►
And the other reason I take low doses in nature
00:09:57 ►
is because sure as hell some wild hair thing is going to happen.
00:10:08 ►
You’re going to be taken prisoner by naked people or a ranger is going to ride up
00:10:12 ►
and demand what is going on
00:10:15 ►
or just the crazy things that go on
00:10:17 ►
unless you happen to own several hundred acres of nature
00:10:21 ►
that’s well patrolled
00:10:23 ►
and then you can maybe have
00:10:25 ►
some confidence you won’t be bothered I know somebody who took LSD and was in
00:10:36 ►
nature somewhere in the hunt country of Virginia and found themselves being booted off the property by Jackie O.
00:10:46 ►
I couldn’t have stood that myself.
00:10:50 ►
So, you know, and so I do it inside.
00:10:56 ►
And then the other thing I do, and again, it’s just years of experience,
00:11:00 ►
but my preference and relates to my other drug habits,
00:11:03 ►
but my preference and relates to my other drug habits is I always have cannabis
00:11:08 ►
and ready, rolled and ready
00:11:12 ►
and it’s navigational aids
00:11:18 ►
if the
00:11:20 ►
I use it in two situations
00:11:23 ►
if the state is reluctant to appear,
00:11:29 ►
usually a large hit or two of cannabis will carry it through.
00:11:35 ►
Or if you get into some place that is completely intolerable,
00:11:41 ►
you can do a number of things to shift your physiological equilibrium
00:11:45 ►
but the least obtrusive and disruptive is to just smoke cannabis
00:11:51 ►
and then the third application of cannabis in that situation is
00:11:55 ►
if you have come over the peak and are started down
00:12:00 ►
and you still want to stay up there, cannabis will usually somewhat extend the situation.
00:12:10 ►
So again, what would you say to people who say,
00:12:13 ►
LSD drives me crazy.
00:12:16 ►
I go through these incredible moral dilemmas.
00:12:19 ►
They say don’t take it.
00:12:20 ►
Yeah, don’t take it.
00:12:23 ►
I’m tearing my psyche out with my fingernails
00:12:26 ►
I don’t want that
00:12:27 ►
I don’t want to have to go inside
00:12:30 ►
like that
00:12:30 ►
I think LSD is abrasively
00:12:34 ►
psychoanalytic
00:12:36 ►
mushroom DMT
00:12:38 ►
could be more outer directed
00:12:40 ►
to hallucinations
00:12:41 ►
no it seems like this to me
00:12:44 ►
that somehow LSD talks about who you are,
00:12:51 ►
and maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad.
00:12:56 ►
Psilocybin doesn’t care who you are.
00:12:59 ►
It has a message.
00:13:01 ►
It will deliver to any human being
00:13:03 ►
who shows up with their handout. And
00:13:07 ►
it doesn’t care who you are. And DMT, it’s so brief. The idea of formulating and dealing
00:13:17 ►
with a personal dilemma in DMT, it would have to be some really overwhelming dilemma, because
00:13:24 ►
it would have to be some really overwhelming dilemma because it’s just saying, you know,
00:13:26 ►
look at the view, you know,
00:13:29 ►
this is about the Grand Canyon,
00:13:31 ►
not the tourist who’s visiting the Grand Canyon.
00:13:34 ►
There’s another aspect to the assignment.
00:13:36 ►
I find almost every time I do it,
00:13:38 ►
I get incredibly telepathic.
00:13:40 ►
I start having conversations with people
00:13:43 ►
about what’s going on there.
00:13:45 ►
Or if they are physically there,
00:13:47 ►
you can hear them in your mind.
00:13:50 ►
And then it’s almost like there are times
00:13:53 ►
when it feels like we’re on the same energy wave
00:13:56 ►
and both lighting it simultaneously.
00:14:01 ►
Yeah, all of these things go on.
00:14:10 ►
And, you know, simple rules that should be obvious like don’t you know clean your apartment before you get loaded i mean it’s a symbolic gesture
00:14:18 ►
oh for cleaning it we’ll take them clean it come down then trip
00:14:25 ►
I don’t mean clean it
00:14:27 ►
while you’re loaded
00:14:28 ►
no no
00:14:28 ►
that would be
00:14:29 ►
that would be
00:14:30 ►
if you smoke marijuana
00:14:31 ►
like you say
00:14:32 ►
it’s a booze
00:14:33 ►
you’re going to want to clean
00:14:35 ►
and you’ll end up
00:14:36 ►
remodeling the whole house
00:14:38 ►
before the day’s over
00:14:39 ►
well it may be
00:14:41 ►
the only creative thing
00:14:42 ►
you’ve done that month
00:14:43 ►
so
00:14:44 ►
basically I think you can
00:14:48 ►
tell from this conversation it’s something you learn your way into it’s very complicated you
00:14:54 ►
have many drugs many sets many settings many dosages conceivably even some combinations,
00:15:05 ►
although I’m not big on combinations.
00:15:08 ►
I was going to say that alcohol is not a very good ally
00:15:12 ►
with psychedelic substances in my eyes.
00:15:14 ►
I mean, people do that, but, you know,
00:15:17 ►
later coming down at the end of the trip having a beer or something,
00:15:21 ►
or light alcohol is a different thing,
00:15:24 ►
but people, they get drunk and they and basically yeah i would never do that twisted uncomfortable situation what about
00:15:31 ►
uh that’s a controversial thing a number of people do it uh one of the hardest evenings i ever spent
00:15:42 ►
was that combination and i will never do that again.
00:15:46 ►
But I haven’t been able to line up too much support.
00:15:49 ►
The question is, what about combining pagamon harmala with mushrooms,
00:15:55 ►
with Strophara cubensis?
00:15:57 ►
Now, what happened to me was I took half a dose of mushrooms,
00:16:06 ►
which for me would be two and a half grams.
00:16:09 ►
I took two and a half grams of mushrooms
00:16:11 ►
with half a dose of ayahuasca.
00:16:15 ►
And it was…
00:16:20 ►
seemed crazy-making to me.
00:16:24 ►
Very, very very very unpleasant state
00:16:29 ►
I think what was happening as I analyzed it later
00:16:33 ►
was that short term memory
00:16:36 ►
absolutely would not transcript
00:16:38 ►
and so I got into this strange loop
00:16:42 ►
which went like this
00:16:43 ►
something’s wrong what’s wrong? So I got into this strange loop which went like this.
00:16:46 ►
Something’s wrong.
00:16:48 ►
What’s wrong?
00:16:51 ►
Nothing’s wrong.
00:16:52 ►
Okay.
00:16:56 ►
Something’s wrong.
00:16:58 ►
What’s wrong?
00:17:01 ►
Nothing’s wrong.
00:17:02 ►
Okay. Okay.
00:17:04 ►
And it was serious.
00:17:07 ►
And it went on for about an hour.
00:17:09 ►
And I just did not know what to do.
00:17:12 ►
I had the image from 2001 of the guy outside the ship saying,
00:17:18 ►
Open the pod doors, Hal.
00:17:21 ►
I’m saying, I can’t do that, Dave.
00:17:24 ►
Open the pod doors, Hal. I can’t do that Dave open the pod
00:17:26 ►
doors Hal
00:17:27 ►
I’m sorry Dave
00:17:29 ►
and it really seemed
00:17:31 ►
to me I could almost see
00:17:33 ►
an enzymatic I almost had
00:17:35 ►
like a nano engineers
00:17:37 ►
view of the problem I could see
00:17:39 ►
at the synaptic level
00:17:41 ►
that the molecular machinery
00:17:43 ►
was lodged in some peculiar configuration
00:17:48 ►
and I was just
00:17:50 ►
broke into a sweat
00:17:53 ►
and I just said
00:17:54 ►
okay, I’m going to sit here
00:17:59 ►
till this goes away
00:18:01 ►
I’m not going to start screaming
00:18:03 ►
I’m not going to call for. I’m not going to call for help. I’m not going to
00:18:06 ►
do anything. I’m just going to wait until this goes away. And then I started deep breathing
00:18:15 ►
as a strategy for metabolizing. And after 45 minutes or so, it kind of jiggled loose and then it was like
00:18:25 ►
oh wow
00:18:28 ►
what a bummer that was
00:18:30 ►
yeah that’s
00:18:38 ►
what it’s like it’s a nightmare
00:18:40 ►
Kathleen
00:18:41 ►
I think that mixing
00:18:44 ►
is an effort to
00:18:46 ►
force a certain kind of
00:18:47 ►
content that we get addicted
00:18:49 ►
to. And I’ve come
00:18:51 ►
to believe that
00:18:53 ►
the visions and the
00:18:55 ►
content are not as important
00:18:58 ►
as how the neocortex
00:19:00 ►
is touched
00:19:01 ►
neurochemically.
00:19:04 ►
And that the way that’s touched,
00:19:07 ►
I can carry that into my everyday life.
00:19:10 ►
And that’s more important to me
00:19:12 ►
than a certain experience
00:19:15 ►
set at a certain time frame.
00:19:20 ►
Yeah, although I think the experience
00:19:22 ►
is the signifier of that state that you’re talking about.
00:19:27 ►
I mean, you do want to come out of it with a sense of relief and accomplishment.
00:19:34 ►
I mean, it’s sort of like orgasm, you know.
00:19:37 ►
There must be release of some sort and a sense of we did well we came through we learned something we’re back we’re
00:19:49 ►
ready to go forward with ordinary life we won’t forget we affirm we we praise and offer Thanksgiving that kind of thing to the universe
00:20:05 ►
in all its diversity
00:20:07 ►
and
00:20:08 ►
complexity
00:20:10 ►
that such a confluence
00:20:13 ►
of fortuitous elements
00:20:15 ►
could occur
00:20:16 ►
that such a synergy
00:20:18 ►
to higher consciousness
00:20:20 ►
could even be possible
00:20:22 ►
you know Aldous Huxley
00:20:23 ►
called the psychedelic experience,
00:20:25 ►
he called it a gratuitous grace.
00:20:29 ►
He said it is neither necessary
00:20:31 ►
nor sufficient for salvation.
00:20:36 ►
Neither necessary nor sufficient.
00:20:40 ►
But it certainly makes it easier.
00:20:44 ►
So it’s like a gift.
00:20:46 ►
It’s like the universe is giving you 20 points
00:20:51 ►
at the beginning of the game just to help you along.
00:20:56 ►
If that’s too highfalutin,
00:20:58 ►
then you just praise Bugs Bunny and Patrick Swayze.
00:21:02 ►
The reason I ask…
00:21:04 ►
You mentioned 2001, Swayze. The reason I ask you mentioned
00:21:06 ►
2001 and Arthur C.
00:21:08 ►
Clarke has completed
00:21:09 ►
3001 about six months ago
00:21:11 ►
and I bought it and it’s
00:21:14 ►
kind of, he writes extremely
00:21:15 ►
dull.
00:21:17 ►
He indicates
00:21:19 ►
that by 3001
00:21:21 ►
man has
00:21:24 ►
come to the understanding
00:21:25 ►
that many thoughts
00:21:28 ►
of a creator was just
00:21:30 ►
superstition. And I found that very
00:21:32 ►
refreshing, because that’s how I felt
00:21:33 ►
for a long time.
00:21:35 ►
A creator.
00:21:38 ►
Yeah. Well,
00:21:39 ►
you know, I don’t…
00:21:42 ►
The universe
00:21:43 ►
is its own creator.
00:21:47 ►
I mean, the universe is some kind of autopoetic…
00:21:49 ►
It’s an autopoetic process.
00:21:55 ►
If there is a goal in the universe,
00:22:00 ►
it’s built into every move it makes.
00:22:03 ►
I don’t see an intellect outside of space and time
00:22:07 ►
guiding things,
00:22:09 ►
and certainly not watching with bated breath
00:22:13 ►
the machinations of the human monkeys.
00:22:15 ►
I mean, nobody has time for that kind of thing.
00:22:21 ►
So the universe is a self-creating mystery
00:22:26 ►
of some sort
00:22:27 ►
and mystery should not be heard as unsolved problem
00:22:32 ►
it’s not an unsolved problem
00:22:34 ►
it’s a mystery
00:22:35 ►
it’s completely ever-renewing itself
00:22:39 ►
right in front of you
00:22:40 ►
life teaches this
00:22:43 ►
if you’re paying attention, psychedelics almost rub
00:22:47 ►
your nose in it. Yeah.
00:22:50 ►
Terrence, I wanted to talk a little bit about the relationship between the psychedelic state
00:22:56 ►
at hallucination and rationality, because you say you’re a rationalist. This is an interesting
00:23:03 ►
question for me, especially in terms of bringing, as you said before,
00:23:06 ►
the object is to bring something back.
00:23:08 ►
Well, you can have the visions,
00:23:11 ►
but if you’re going to bring it back,
00:23:12 ►
then you have to go through some sort of thought process
00:23:16 ►
that is closer to left brain thinking.
00:23:22 ►
I’m sorry, right brain.
00:23:23 ►
Yeah, left brain thinking I’m sorry right brain yeah left brain thinking than the
00:23:26 ►
full blown
00:23:28 ►
you know consciousness
00:23:31 ►
you mean you have to
00:23:33 ►
reduce it to its elements
00:23:35 ►
yeah so
00:23:36 ►
when you say you’re a rationalist
00:23:41 ►
it’s an odd
00:23:43 ►
kind of rationality
00:23:44 ►
I wonder if you could talk about that, because I think I see what you mean.
00:23:49 ►
But your rationality, your reason, is more like a supercharged thought process.
00:24:01 ►
The syntax of its logic is closer to poesis and a poetic process like Plato would have, his kind of thoughts, than it is, you know, so would you talk about the relationship where rationality kicks in and what that’s all about?
00:24:22 ►
well when I say I’m a rationalist
00:24:25 ►
I mean that I
00:24:27 ►
I guess I trust but verify
00:24:29 ►
everything is to be tested
00:24:32 ►
nothing is to be taken at face value
00:24:36 ►
certainly nothing is to be believed in
00:24:40 ►
the reason I even found psychedelics
00:24:44 ►
was because I was following rumors
00:24:47 ►
of an effective force
00:24:52 ►
for spiritual breakthrough
00:24:54 ►
and when I followed it to its source
00:24:58 ►
there was spiritual breakthrough
00:25:00 ►
at other times I followed other rumors
00:25:04 ►
of spiritual breakthrough
00:25:05 ►
and when I got to the source I found a public relations agent and a con artist
00:25:11 ►
or something like that reason is simply the desire that things have some kind of
00:25:21 ►
local logic adhering to them.
00:25:25 ►
I mean, if the universe is not rational,
00:25:27 ►
it’s also not discussable.
00:25:31 ►
And, you know, maybe the universe isn’t rational,
00:25:34 ►
but in that case, this discussion and all others
00:25:37 ►
have been completely superfluous.
00:25:40 ►
Reason is not to be confused with scientific method.
00:25:44 ►
Scientific method is a very locally generated reason is not to be confused with scientific method.
00:25:50 ►
Scientific method is a very locally generated cultural artifact with a very limited intent.
00:25:54 ►
But reason is the idea that A is not B, here is not there.
00:26:04 ►
A is not B, here is not there.
00:26:06 ►
Now, of course, you can say,
00:26:10 ►
well, this kind of reason breaks down in quantum physics.
00:26:15 ►
Yes, but then there’s much dancing around the campfire about that.
00:26:18 ►
And still somehow reason remains a player even in the presence of non-reason
00:26:21 ►
because it’s measured back against the standard of reason.
00:26:25 ►
When you’re in this full-blown experience,
00:26:28 ►
is there some element, however vestigial,
00:26:33 ►
present, or is it just totally gone?
00:26:37 ►
And then how do you translate
00:26:38 ►
from that non-speakable state
00:26:41 ►
to being a scholar, being able to communicate it rationally.
00:26:46 ►
How does that work?
00:26:47 ►
Well, I think you have to have a lot of metaphors
00:26:52 ►
gathered on this side of the frontier.
00:26:56 ►
In other words, someone who’s never been anywhere,
00:27:00 ►
never read anything, never done anything,
00:27:02 ►
is going to have a much harder time with DMT
00:27:05 ►
than someone who can command
00:27:09 ►
the complete canon of Western art
00:27:12 ►
can refer to certain mathematical objects
00:27:15 ►
knows certain musical forms
00:27:17 ►
is familiar with structural linguistics
00:27:20 ►
has a working knowledge of geology
00:27:22 ►
in other words words your intellectual toolkit
00:27:25 ►
needs to be full
00:27:27 ►
of adjectives, metaphors
00:27:30 ►
models
00:27:31 ►
and possibilities
00:27:33 ►
and then you can say of DMT
00:27:35 ►
well it was
00:27:37 ►
like the Sistine
00:27:40 ►
Chapel
00:27:41 ►
altar
00:27:43 ►
except that instead of the kind of light
00:27:47 ►
you get in Caravaggio or somebody like that
00:27:50 ►
there was a kind of
00:27:52 ►
oh you know the sort of thing Matthias Grunwald
00:27:55 ►
is doing in his resurrection
00:27:58 ►
where he and well if somebody
00:28:01 ►
doesn’t know what any of this is
00:28:04 ►
they’re having a kind of DMT experience of their own,
00:28:08 ►
just listening to you.
00:28:10 ►
Because they say, what did he say?
00:28:12 ►
What does he say?
00:28:13 ►
What? What?
00:28:14 ►
But if you know what you mean and speak precisely,
00:28:19 ►
I mean, all these words have meaning.
00:28:21 ►
You know, Sistine Chapel altar,
00:28:23 ►
light like Caravaggio modified
00:28:26 ►
as the way Gruenwald did it and so forth and so on.
00:28:30 ►
So somehow by…
00:28:33 ►
And it’s still an incredible flattening.
00:28:37 ►
I don’t mean that this is an adequate tool.
00:28:41 ►
I mean it’s a tool.
00:28:51 ►
adequate tool I mean it’s a tool I am perfectly aware that the most high-flown and hysteria provoking descriptions of DMT I’ve ever been able to summon up in front of a group were complete the real thing so not what it was
00:29:06 ►
that the word lie
00:29:07 ►
is almost applicable
00:29:10 ►
but it’s the best I can do
00:29:14 ►
and that’s why I said this morning
00:29:17 ►
this idea of building the internet
00:29:21 ►
as a net for capturing
00:29:23 ►
the alien mind if we go into the internet as a net for capturing the alien mind.
00:29:26 ►
If we go into the internet and I build the weirdest and most mind-boggling virtual reality
00:29:34 ►
I can imagine, and then turn it over to you, and you come in and add your filigrees, adumbrations,
00:29:43 ►
cupolas, and what have you,
00:29:45 ►
and then we hand it over to you
00:29:47 ►
and you do the same.
00:29:49 ►
By now this thing has gotten pretty weird.
00:29:52 ►
Just this intensification of weirdness,
00:29:56 ►
slowly we can build up an image of it.
00:30:00 ►
But I don’t think a single person
00:30:03 ►
could possibly have the breadth and depth of experience to do it alone.
00:30:09 ►
I mean, maybe a Thomas Pynchon or someone like that.
00:30:13 ►
But we’re involved in a communication struggle here.
00:30:20 ►
We’re trying to describe the unspeakable.
00:30:23 ►
We’re trying to describe the unspeakable.
00:30:28 ►
We’re trying to literally move the boundaries of what can be said and what can’t be said.
00:30:32 ►
We’re trying to push the frontiers of what can be said
00:30:38 ►
deeper into the domain of the unspeakable.
00:30:44 ►
And are we succeeding or failing?
00:30:46 ►
Well, that’s for each one of us to judge.
00:30:50 ►
I know every time I smoke DMT,
00:30:54 ►
the first emotion I have
00:30:56 ►
as it fully establishes itself in my sensorium
00:31:03 ►
is that I have the sense of remembering what it really is
00:31:09 ►
and having this sort of guilt slash embarrassment
00:31:15 ►
about realizing how hideously unfaithful I am to the truth of it.
00:31:22 ►
This truth can’t be told told or at least not by me
00:31:25 ►
I’ve been trying for 20 years
00:31:27 ►
and I have created
00:31:29 ►
an object in discourse
00:31:31 ►
that fascinates people
00:31:34 ►
but is it DMT?
00:31:37 ►
no
00:31:38 ►
it’s me
00:31:40 ►
doing the best I can
00:31:42 ►
with DMT
00:31:44 ►
but I have the faith doing the best I can with DMT.
00:31:49 ►
But I have the faith that this is not an intrinsic quality of it.
00:31:54 ►
It’s not in principle beyond description.
00:31:58 ►
It’s that doing it by bursting in on it,
00:32:02 ►
looking around,
00:32:04 ►
then coming down
00:32:05 ►
then raving about it
00:32:08 ►
is a very
00:32:09 ►
difficult method
00:32:11 ►
you know
00:32:12 ►
a better method would be to
00:32:16 ►
incrementally
00:32:19 ►
piece by piece try to build
00:32:21 ►
a model that you could go
00:32:24 ►
back to in various states of mind.
00:32:27 ►
I mean, for instance, here’s a frontier no one has crossed yet.
00:32:31 ►
Let’s build the best model of the DMT flash we can build.
00:32:37 ►
Then let’s smoke DMT inside that model
00:32:41 ►
and conduct a review of how we’re doing.
00:32:46 ►
By such methods as this,
00:32:49 ►
we will sooner or later
00:32:50 ►
push the thing into greater and greater,
00:32:53 ►
into the light
00:32:55 ►
where we can see it.
00:32:57 ►
Have you been able to take more back
00:32:59 ►
from your psilocybin experiences
00:33:00 ►
simply because you could stay there longer?
00:33:02 ►
Have you been able to take back
00:33:03 ►
from the DMT experience
00:33:05 ►
although the DMT experience was like
00:33:08 ►
the compass that really showed you this is where it’s at
00:33:12 ►
not only was I able to stay longer
00:33:14 ►
but the state itself is easier to describe
00:33:18 ►
it has elements of the DMT flesh
00:33:22 ►
but certain of the harder elements to describe aren’t present.
00:33:28 ►
For example, on psilocybin, you hear a voice,
00:33:33 ►
or I hear a teaching voice.
00:33:36 ►
On DMT, I see who makes that voice.
00:33:43 ►
Well, now a voice is…
00:33:46 ►
Yes, same voice.
00:33:47 ►
The voice is not hard to get used to.
00:33:51 ►
It’s saying astonishing things,
00:33:55 ►
but that’s all.
00:33:58 ►
It’s just saying astonishing things,
00:34:00 ►
but it’s speaking in English,
00:34:02 ►
and it is a voice.
00:34:04 ►
When you encounter the speaker as an image
00:34:08 ►
you can’t even think about what’s being said because your jaw hangs in air in the presence
00:34:15 ►
of who is saying it and you basically say you know I don’t want to hear what you’re saying I
00:34:20 ►
want to look at you you’re saying you don’t really get all the way there
00:34:26 ►
or as far as you can go unless you do DMT.
00:34:30 ►
Just it seems that there is some kind of synaptic saturation
00:34:34 ►
happening there or something like that.
00:34:36 ►
Yeah, I have heard, and I have no reason to believe it,
00:34:42 ►
that I’ve never overdosed on mushrooms
00:34:45 ►
or felt that I’ve overdosed.
00:34:47 ►
I’ve taken some enormous,
00:34:49 ►
unweighted,
00:34:51 ►
unweighed
00:34:52 ►
batches,
00:34:54 ►
but I’ve never felt
00:34:56 ►
that I had overdosed.
00:34:58 ►
But people have described to me
00:35:00 ►
what goes on above
00:35:02 ►
35 milligrams
00:35:04 ►
of chemical psilocybin.
00:35:07 ►
And basically what people say
00:35:09 ►
is the hallucinations condense and freeze.
00:35:14 ►
And that’s sounding very DMT-like.
00:35:19 ►
Indeed, I would suppose,
00:35:20 ►
and strange that we have no reports of this
00:35:24 ►
in the literature. I have no reports of this in the literature I have
00:35:25 ►
no idea why not but it would seem to me
00:35:28 ►
one could smoke psilocybin it’s not
00:35:32 ►
pyrolized it would work if you had
00:35:34 ►
chemical psilocybin and you smoke 35
00:35:36 ►
milligrams of it I’ll bet you it would
00:35:39 ►
be very very very much like DMT.
00:35:50 ►
And why should DMT present this benchmark?
00:35:51 ►
I don’t know.
00:35:54 ►
I suppose it’s simply here we have a series of compounds which elicit different effects.
00:35:57 ►
There’s going to be one that in the nature of things
00:36:00 ►
will be inclusive, and this is it.
00:36:03 ►
Now, the Salvinvanorian raises different issues on one level
00:36:08 ►
almost theological issues you know is this town big enough for two forms of weirdness that are
00:36:17 ►
apparently not the same in other words it took me a long time to get used to the idea that there could be one exception to the onrushing momentum of reality
00:36:30 ►
the idea that alpha-salvanorene is a second dispensation from reality
00:36:37 ►
raises the question 3, 4, 50, 500, fifty, five hundred, ten thousand
00:36:45 ►
maybe reality is a far more perishable concept
00:36:49 ►
than we ever dared or feared to suppose
00:36:53 ►
I had an experience on the canopy
00:36:58 ►
and I was wondering
00:36:59 ►
it sort of baffled me
00:37:02 ►
I had never done it before I was at, actually I was at Timothy Leary’s house And it sort of baffled me.
00:37:06 ►
I had never done it before, and I was at,
00:37:08 ►
actually, I was at Timothy Leary’s house,
00:37:11 ►
and the lily, is that the dolphin guy?
00:37:13 ►
His assistant was there, and he asked him,
00:37:14 ►
and I thought they were snorting coke, which I thought was kind of crappy.
00:37:17 ►
And they go, no, it’s Kenry, do you want to try some?
00:37:19 ►
And I go, okay.
00:37:22 ►
They wished they had coke.
00:37:20 ►
okay.
00:37:24 ►
They wished they had code.
00:37:28 ►
Anyway, there was
00:37:30 ►
a few people there and
00:37:31 ►
what happened is I
00:37:33 ►
separated from my body
00:37:36 ►
and I was over here
00:37:37 ►
and my body was here
00:37:39 ►
but somebody
00:37:42 ►
came up to me who I
00:37:43 ►
only met once and started making conversation with my body.
00:37:48 ►
And I, over here, watched my…
00:37:52 ►
But I, over here, was in possession of my mind.
00:37:55 ►
You know, calmly, thought, thought, da-da-da.
00:37:58 ►
But I, with my mind over here,
00:38:00 ►
watched my body go through this whole rigmarole
00:38:04 ►
with this person and make
00:38:06 ►
social conversation. Hello, how are you? Why certainly also. And I watched myself and I
00:38:13 ►
couldn’t for the life of me figure out how, because I knew I had my brain over here. So
00:38:20 ►
the brain that was playing the game over here was like something else, but yet it was
00:38:26 ►
my facial muscles were smiling when it was appropriate to smile.
00:38:35 ►
My whole, my physical body did everything exactly as it was supposed to, but yet I wasn’t
00:38:42 ►
participating one dot and didn’t have any interest
00:38:45 ►
in participating
00:38:46 ►
and I don’t know that was just so interesting
00:38:49 ►
to me because my mind
00:38:52 ►
was definitely not running
00:38:53 ►
that show, the physical show
00:38:56 ►
well I think that’s why they call it
00:38:57 ►
a disassociative
00:38:59 ►
anesthetic, I mean it does
00:39:01 ►
disassociate, you literally are
00:39:03 ►
beside yourself
00:39:04 ►
you can’t get much more disassociate. You literally are beside yourself.
00:39:09 ►
You can’t get much more disassociated than that.
00:39:14 ►
Yeah?
00:39:20 ►
Have you ever audiotaped yourself on the impulse of the empty?
00:39:22 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:39:23 ►
I did that early on, did all that.
00:39:26 ►
See, I thought I had…
00:39:28 ►
I pursued this glossolalia
00:39:30 ►
that is induced by DMT,
00:39:34 ►
and I thought that if I…
00:39:36 ►
I could hear it for years
00:39:38 ►
before I could physically articulate it,
00:39:41 ►
and I thought that this glossolalia
00:39:43 ►
had some kind of magical
00:39:45 ►
property and that if I could
00:39:48 ►
articulate it in the world
00:39:50 ►
something
00:39:51 ►
definitive
00:39:53 ►
would occur or
00:39:55 ►
people would become interested in it or not
00:39:58 ►
and
00:39:58 ►
it’s that on DMT
00:40:02 ►
some people and I’m one of them
00:40:04 ►
speak in strange languages It’s that on DMT some people, and I’m one of them,
00:40:09 ►
speak in strange languages spontaneously.
00:40:13 ►
They don’t even, in some cases, know they’re doing it.
00:40:15 ►
They just seem to fall into this.
00:40:20 ►
And it’s ecstatic to do. For some reason, this is just an incredibly,
00:40:24 ►
it’s what you want to do for some reason this is just an incredibly it’s what you want
00:40:26 ►
to do it seems to be
00:40:28 ►
the obvious thing to do
00:40:29 ►
to speak in this peculiar
00:40:32 ►
way
00:40:32 ►
and at first I heard it
00:40:35 ►
for years moving so fast
00:40:38 ►
just it was like
00:40:40 ►
I called it elf chatter
00:40:41 ►
and then I don’t know why
00:40:44 ►
diligent prayer or something
00:40:46 ►
was able to slow it down.
00:40:48 ►
And I found I could do it.
00:40:50 ►
And I went out to Hawaii years ago
00:40:52 ►
and took a voice-activated tape recorder.
00:40:55 ►
And I spent a week.
00:40:57 ►
I took eight grams of mushrooms every night,
00:41:00 ►
nearly every night for a week,
00:41:02 ►
and made these recordings.
00:41:04 ►
And what I came down with
00:41:06 ►
were these recordings
00:41:07 ►
which people find extremely alarming
00:41:10 ►
to listen to
00:41:12 ►
they hear it
00:41:14 ►
and they just are convinced
00:41:16 ►
they’re not like
00:41:18 ►
it’s not like
00:41:20 ►
well it just makes people think you’re crazy
00:41:23 ►
they just say you know
00:41:24 ►
okay so you were sitting in a tent
00:41:26 ►
halfway up a mountain all by yourself
00:41:29 ►
and what you chose to do
00:41:31 ►
was shriek in Norstratic for some reason.
00:41:38 ►
Now, I still think that the secret of the psychedelics
00:41:47 ►
or the point of all this has to do with the language.
00:41:52 ►
That, first of all, language, ordinary language,
00:41:57 ►
as we are using it here,
00:42:00 ►
is a very bizarre behavioral pattern.
00:42:05 ►
I mean, when you deconstruct it and think about it,
00:42:07 ►
first of all, just notice other animals don’t do this.
00:42:11 ►
Dolphins, honeybees aside, they don’t do what we do.
00:42:15 ►
There are no Miltons among the honeybees, I think.
00:42:20 ►
So what’s happening is we have thoughts.
00:42:27 ►
We want to share these thoughts.
00:42:31 ►
We have evolved a system where the thoughts are transduced into mouth noises,
00:42:37 ►
small mouth noises,
00:42:39 ►
which are conventionally assigned meaning.
00:42:42 ►
In other words, with inside the context of a culture
00:42:45 ►
book means book
00:42:48 ►
in English, book does not
00:42:50 ►
mean this
00:42:51 ►
in some other language
00:42:53 ►
it may mean something else
00:42:55 ►
food, sex or death
00:42:57 ►
we assign
00:42:59 ►
sound signatures
00:43:02 ►
to meaning, we then make these
00:43:04 ►
sounds with our mouths
00:43:05 ►
a pressure wave moves acoustically through the air
00:43:10 ►
it enters the ear of the intended listener
00:43:14 ►
the listener also has a dictionary
00:43:19 ►
acquired through cultural convention
00:43:22 ►
the incoming acoustical signals are downloaded.
00:43:26 ►
The dictionary is looking them up.
00:43:29 ►
If the dictionaries match,
00:43:32 ►
then we say understanding is taking place.
00:43:38 ►
No two dictionaries are exact.
00:43:42 ►
And in fact, one of the uncoolest things you can do in most
00:43:45 ►
social situations is to say
00:43:48 ►
to someone would you explain
00:43:50 ►
to me what I just said
00:43:52 ►
it usually brings the party
00:43:55 ►
to a screeching halt
00:43:57 ►
because the world is really
00:44:00 ►
running on yeah uh huh
00:44:02 ►
oh yeah
00:44:03 ►
well yeah yeah
00:44:04 ►
and when you break that illusion of grunts
00:44:10 ►
and say no no i just said something quite complicated would you please iterate it for me
00:44:19 ►
with fidelity most people can’t do this at all.
00:44:25 ►
So we have a problem.
00:44:27 ►
We possess language.
00:44:29 ►
We’ve built a world out of language.
00:44:32 ►
But our language is,
00:44:34 ►
it’s like using 300 baud modems
00:44:37 ►
to try and run an internet or something.
00:44:40 ►
It’s so squeezed
00:44:42 ►
that we can barely get anything across.
00:44:45 ►
Well, then you go into the DMT space,
00:44:49 ►
and here is language which you don’t listen to,
00:44:53 ►
but which you see.
00:44:56 ►
The DMT creatures generate topologies,
00:45:02 ►
colored, moving, self-transforming surfaces
00:45:07 ►
that are laden, God knows how, with meaning.
00:45:13 ►
Not conventional meaning,
00:45:16 ►
because conventional language can carry conventional meaning,
00:45:20 ►
but these colored modalities are like a hyper-dimensional language
00:45:25 ►
or what I call a visible language.
00:45:29 ►
And, you know, when we talk about language,
00:45:32 ►
we say things like, I see what you mean,
00:45:36 ►
or he told a really colorful story,
00:45:39 ►
or she’s such a colorful speaker.
00:45:43 ►
In other words, we reach for visual metaphors
00:45:46 ►
to indicate linguistic clarity
00:45:49 ►
and in Spanish
00:45:52 ►
same thing, claro means it’s clear
00:45:55 ►
das ist klar
00:45:57 ►
wouldn’t that refer to what the linguistic evokes
00:46:01 ►
in the hearing
00:46:02 ►
which may be colorful.
00:46:06 ►
Well, somehow we associate understanding
00:46:10 ►
with visual definition.
00:46:14 ►
And so it seems to me
00:46:16 ►
that probably language is an evolutionary process
00:46:21 ►
that is only partially complete.
00:46:29 ►
evolutionary process that is only partially complete and that uh and what put me on to this interestingly is these songs that are sung in the amazon on ayahuasca the people take ayahuasca they
00:46:38 ►
gather in darkened rooms and huts then the shamans sing then they pause for to smoke and take a leak and then you hear
00:46:49 ►
people saying stuff like commenting on the song i liked the part with the orange stripes and the
00:46:59 ►
metallic rippling but i thought the olive drab and yellow section was just too twee.
00:47:08 ►
What kind of a criticism of a song is this?
00:47:14 ►
It’s the criticism of a painting, not a song.
00:47:19 ►
And then you realize, aha, the song is a painting.
00:47:24 ►
I’m the only one in the room listening to the song.
00:47:28 ►
Everyone else…
00:47:30 ►
…that is born in the acoustical domain
00:47:35 ►
but seeks to grow and mature
00:47:39 ►
into the domain of the visually beheld.
00:47:43 ►
Now, I always thought, perhaps you did too,
00:47:46 ►
that telepathy meant you hear what I think.
00:47:54 ►
I hear what you think.
00:47:57 ►
I don’t think that’s what telepathy is.
00:47:59 ►
Telepathy is you see what I mean.
00:48:04 ►
You see what I mean. You see what I mean.
00:48:06 ►
And a great communicator can make you see what they mean.
00:48:12 ►
And what’s happening is your evolutionary ability to process language
00:48:17 ►
is being brought right to the edge.
00:48:20 ►
Well, then this whole thing is running on brain chemistry,
00:48:24 ►
surreptitious chemistry, chemistry not that different well then this whole thing is running on brain chemistry certainergic chemistry
00:48:26 ►
chemistry not that different from the chemistry of the psychedelic experience
00:48:30 ►
you change these brain chemicals around
00:48:33 ►
and according to McLuhan
00:48:36 ►
and other students of communication and media
00:48:39 ►
how we process language is
00:48:42 ►
actually not a biologically determined thing.
00:48:46 ►
It’s a culturally determined thing.
00:48:49 ►
We hear speech because we live inside a print-created modality.
00:48:57 ►
Before print, people’s heads were filled with very different stuff in the act of communicating. And so I don’t know how it would work, but I can see we need a special form of communication. Perhaps we can do it with drugs, modified ayahuasca of some sort, or perhaps we can do it with virtual reality. If you think about virtual
00:49:26 ►
reality for a moment, it’s a very tortuous, low-speed technology, but the end result of it is
00:49:35 ►
you see what I mean. I go away for six months, animate, you know, texture, embed all this stuff
00:49:46 ►
in VRML brackets
00:49:48 ►
and everything
00:49:48 ►
and then I say
00:49:50 ►
here’s
00:49:52 ►
you know that hallucination
00:49:53 ►
I described to you
00:49:54 ►
six months ago
00:49:55 ►
now I’d like to show it to you
00:49:58 ►
here it is
00:49:59 ►
now do you see what I mean
00:50:01 ►
and of course
00:50:04 ►
you see what I mean? And of course you see what is meant
00:50:06 ►
because unlike acoustically modulated speech
00:50:11 ►
where there is this necessity for congruent dictionaries,
00:50:16 ►
when something has a three-dimensional modality,
00:50:20 ►
no dictionary is necessary.
00:50:23 ►
In other words, when you and I, if you and I, if I read a paragraph from Proust
00:50:29 ►
then we could spend an hour
00:50:32 ►
discussing as you all have in lit class
00:50:35 ►
I’m sure
00:50:35 ►
what did the author mean
00:50:38 ►
we discuss it
00:50:39 ►
but if I show you a sculpture
00:50:42 ►
we see what the author meant.
00:50:47 ►
There may be ambiguity, but it’s at a different level.
00:50:51 ►
The intent of the artist is beheld with perfect clarity.
00:50:58 ►
The intent of the artist was to build this unambiguous object.
00:51:02 ►
was to build this unambiguous object.
00:51:05 ►
Words are always clothed in ambiguity because no two people define a word the same way.
00:51:11 ►
Where, you know, I have a certain amount of faith
00:51:16 ►
that when we look at this thing,
00:51:19 ►
you the Jew, you the Christian,
00:51:21 ►
you the smart person, you the dumb person,
00:51:24 ►
you the Buddhist, we all smart person, you the dumb person, you the Buddhist,
00:51:25 ►
we all still see the same glass. But if I were to describe it, then, you know, ideology
00:51:33 ►
would amalgamate and compromise it. Yeah.
00:51:35 ►
What about other types of meaning that aren’t conveyable through this kind of a language?
00:51:42 ►
Because you have, I’m trying to think of something other than like
00:51:47 ►
a woman having some kind of perfume
00:51:50 ►
on and that’s a meaning
00:51:51 ►
that she’s wearing that scent
00:51:53 ►
or something like this
00:51:55 ►
other senses and that’s
00:51:57 ►
conveying meaning. How do you bring that
00:52:00 ►
into this
00:52:00 ►
kind of language?
00:52:03 ►
Well we experience other meanings
00:52:06 ►
than acoustical in the present world.
00:52:10 ►
You know, works of art,
00:52:12 ►
which are static.
00:52:14 ►
I don’t think a visible language
00:52:17 ►
will replace all other forms of language,
00:52:19 ►
but I certainly think that if perfected,
00:52:24 ►
it would become the dominant modality.
00:52:27 ►
See, I think that language,
00:52:31 ►
that it’s hard for us to talk about this issue in English
00:52:35 ►
because there’s a stupid thing going on in English,
00:52:39 ►
which is the word language is used interchangeably with speech.
00:52:44 ►
Word language is used interchangeably with speech. We should have a vocabulary that always distinguishes whether we are speaking of language,
00:52:53 ►
the abstract notion of communication, or acoustical speech.
00:53:01 ►
Language is very, very old in human beings, in nature. Honeybees do it, dolphins do it, birds do it, bees do it, everybody does it. Verbal speech was invented yesterday by somebody in Africa, no less than 40,000 years ago.
00:53:25 ►
It’s as artificial as the bicycle pump or the espresso machine.
00:53:31 ►
It’s not part of the animal body.
00:53:34 ►
It’s not part of the animal heritage.
00:53:36 ►
We communicated for a million years without verbal speech.
00:53:42 ►
We grunted, we groaned, we shook each other,
00:53:45 ►
we looked in each other’s eyes,
00:53:47 ►
we pointed, we danced, we meaned,
00:53:51 ►
we did all these things.
00:53:53 ►
Granted, these are low bandwidth forms of communication.
00:53:58 ►
Well, then the evolution of media reached a point
00:54:02 ►
where some genius thought of
00:54:05 ►
coding, the key concept.
00:54:08 ►
He said, you know,
00:54:10 ►
I’ll make the sound orange
00:54:12 ►
and when I make that
00:54:14 ►
sound, you think of
00:54:16 ►
the fruit. Now let’s try
00:54:18 ►
it. Orange.
00:54:20 ►
Picture of fruit appears.
00:54:21 ►
Okay, now let’s not do it for
00:54:23 ►
24 hours. Now we’ll try it 24 hours later. Orange. The fruit appears. Okay, now let’s not do it for 24 hours.
00:54:27 ►
Now we’ll try it 24 hours later.
00:54:29 ►
Orange, the fruit appears.
00:54:31 ►
What an interesting game. And it was simply a game.
00:54:35 ►
And then once invented,
00:54:38 ►
its obvious utility caused it to spread like the growth of the Internet.
00:54:44 ►
First of all, it worked in darkness, speech.
00:54:49 ►
And there was a dark world, the Paleolithic, you know.
00:54:53 ►
Suddenly people didn’t have to go to bed at nighttime.
00:54:56 ►
They could talk.
00:54:57 ►
They could tell stories.
00:54:59 ►
It also is the first one-to-many form of media.
00:55:06 ►
Politics is born.
00:55:08 ►
Speeches can now be given.
00:55:11 ►
And people can, large collective enterprises can be undertaken.
00:55:19 ►
But it’s a tool.
00:55:21 ►
It’s a technology.
00:55:23 ►
Perhaps the most successful technology ever put in place. I mean, what a tool. It’s a technology, perhaps the most successful technology
00:55:26 ►
ever put in place.
00:55:27 ►
I mean, what a trick.
00:55:29 ►
You just use your throat muscles
00:55:31 ►
and the ambient air
00:55:32 ►
and then a lot of coding.
00:55:35 ►
There’s a huge amount of code behind it.
00:55:38 ►
Not only the definitions of all these words,
00:55:40 ►
but the syntactical connections,
00:55:43 ►
the grammar,
00:55:44 ►
all of that
00:55:45 ►
makes it work
00:55:47 ►
and with the invention of language
00:55:50 ►
somehow we cross out
00:55:52 ►
of the animal mind
00:55:53 ►
the invention of speech
00:55:55 ►
I’m sorry, my own error
00:55:56 ►
as I stated
00:55:58 ►
with the invention of speech
00:56:00 ►
then somehow we cross out
00:56:02 ►
of the domain of the animal mind
00:56:05 ►
and speech accelerates all other forms of cultural change.
00:56:11 ►
I mean, it’s like supercharging the cultural system
00:56:17 ►
and it leads instantly in geological time
00:56:21 ►
to religion, science, philosophy, and further adumbrations of the communication enterprise,
00:56:30 ►
the next great leap being writing and reading.
00:56:34 ►
And if you analyze writing and reading,
00:56:37 ►
they are not the same thing as speaking,
00:56:41 ►
but they are hellaciously complicated
00:56:45 ►
behaviors
00:56:47 ►
which human beings can be
00:56:50 ►
taught to do and you know
00:56:52 ►
people say dolphins
00:56:53 ►
communicate and dolphins have speech
00:56:56 ►
and honeybees and this and that
00:56:57 ►
but no one has been nuts enough
00:57:00 ►
to dare to claim that they read
00:57:02 ►
and write
00:57:02 ►
in that domain we stand preeminent
00:57:07 ►
on this planet
00:57:08 ►
dolphins do not read or write
00:57:11 ►
and so what is writing?
00:57:17 ►
well, writing is the symbolic downloading
00:57:21 ►
of sound
00:57:23 ►
into a visible domain
00:57:27 ►
so suddenly again
00:57:29 ►
the program of visible language
00:57:32 ►
writing is an intermediate phase
00:57:35 ►
between VR by thought
00:57:40 ►
and simple animal
00:57:42 ►
or primitive human speech.
00:57:46 ►
But again, the path forward is clearly
00:57:50 ►
by pushing the communication process toward the visible.
00:57:53 ►
Once we can write things down, history becomes possible.
00:57:59 ►
The database of the species can be expanded
00:58:03 ►
beyond the memory capacity of single individuals.
00:58:07 ►
And again, an enormous kick in the rear end for progress, variability, so forth and so on.
00:58:15 ►
So when you analyze the acceleration into history and the technological forces that have driven it,
00:58:24 ►
and the technological forces that have driven it,
00:58:28 ►
it’s always been about accelerating the communication process and making it more visually immediate.
00:58:34 ►
And now with the ability to understand this,
00:58:39 ►
we’re also potentially able to do something about it by actually directing the evolution of
00:58:48 ►
communication technology in this direction.
00:58:51 ►
Yeah?
00:58:51 ►
Can I just get one question before we break?
00:58:54 ►
I’ve always been confused about this.
00:58:56 ►
When you say that we better communicate without language, what about art forms like poetry
00:59:02 ►
or, I mean, Shakespeare,
00:59:05 ►
where the point is what’s about is the words,
00:59:10 ►
and they get to a point where you can say they’re words,
00:59:13 ►
but they’re not words in the same sense as a laundry list.
00:59:15 ►
It’s because they’re infused with grace.
00:59:18 ►
What about, it seems like language can do some things
00:59:21 ►
and some things that a picture couldn’t do.
00:59:23 ►
Oh, yeah. I think, yes, that art, it will be an art, you know.
00:59:30 ►
It always has been an art, but art flourishes under limitation.
00:59:38 ►
I mean, sort of like, take black and white photography.
00:59:42 ►
Given that it’s tremendously limited as a medium,
00:59:46 ►
black and white and two-dimensional,
00:59:49 ►
still black and white photography can move us to tears,
00:59:53 ►
can be as deeply and enriching and communicating
00:59:58 ►
as any imaginable experience of communication,
01:00:02 ►
but only in the hands of a master.
01:00:06 ►
For most of us, I think it’s better to move up
01:00:09 ►
the ladder of fidelity and bandwidth
01:00:12 ►
simply because we need all the help we can get.
01:00:18 ►
Well, we blew through two hours at the speed of light.
01:00:23 ►
I hope this was useful to you.
01:00:26 ►
We’ll get together this evening at 8 o’clock right here,
01:00:30 ►
and it will be completely different.
01:00:34 ►
Thank you.
01:00:35 ►
Thank you.
01:00:40 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:00:43 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:00:48 ►
Now, before I say anything else, I want to let our fellow salonners who have, well, they’ve been kind of unhappy with me cutting out many of Terrence’s Saturday night sessions about the time wave.
01:00:59 ►
Well, I want them to know that my next podcast is going to pick up right where we just now left off,
01:01:08 ►
and I’ll be playing his entire Saturday night session.
01:01:12 ►
I haven’t heard it yet myself, and it may be a little boring if he spends a lot of time talking about what’s on his computer screen,
01:01:15 ►
but you’re going to get the full recording of what he had to say, and that will come next week.
01:01:21 ►
Now, at the beginning of today’s talk, Terrence said that pure LSD, at least in lower
01:01:26 ►
doses, didn’t produce what he called pure visions. Well, as far as low dose LSD is concerned, I agree.
01:01:34 ►
Even at 500 mics, I didn’t have any visions. However, there was this one experience that I
01:01:40 ►
had many years ago when I ingested a somewhat larger dose.
01:01:45 ►
It was over 1,000 mics.
01:01:47 ►
And on that particular dose, well, I’m here to tell you that significant visions are most definitely possible.
01:01:55 ►
At least they were for me.
01:01:57 ►
And what is more, they are below that plus 5 level,
01:02:01 ►
because even yet today, I can still recall very much of the detail of the visions that I had that night.
01:02:08 ►
And, by the way, they were very benign visions,
01:02:11 ►
visions of a fancy-dress ball,
01:02:13 ►
sort of along the lines of what takes place at one of the big Mardi Gras balls in New Orleans.
01:02:19 ►
However, instead of people at the ball, they were all very large beings,
01:02:26 ►
However, instead of people at the ball, they were all very large beings, human in all respects,
01:02:33 ►
except for the fact that their heads were the heads of horses, you know, like the ones you see in a chess game.
01:02:39 ►
And it was such a pronounced experience that I can still remember most of it really clearly.
01:02:46 ►
But I found that, well, once was enough for me, and after that I went back down to the normal 500 mic range.
01:02:53 ►
Now, in regards to music, that’s one place that I depart from Terrence’s opinion.
01:02:58 ►
For me, I find that music definitely enhances a psychedelic experience, but I always provide a wide variety of music pre-selected and ready to go
01:03:04 ►
so that I can change it whenever the
01:03:06 ►
vibe of the experience changes. Now back in the 50s and 60s, at least with the elders from that
01:03:13 ►
time that I got to know, they almost all used music with every experience. Interestingly,
01:03:19 ►
well at least to me, when I first did LSD with Myron Stolaroff, he put on the music that he said he
01:03:26 ►
usually used, and it was all classical and orchestral. And I have to admit that while
01:03:32 ►
that never would have been my first choice, it did create a space that was really quite lovely.
01:03:38 ►
Now after Myron and I became more comfortable with one another, I finally got him to listen
01:03:44 ►
to some Pink Floyd during a trip.
01:03:46 ►
And while he said that it wasn’t something that he would do on his own,
01:03:49 ►
he did admit to the beauty of the music in a way that he had never experienced from rock music before.
01:03:56 ►
So when it comes to music and psychedelics,
01:03:58 ►
well, it seems to me that we should each follow our own instincts
01:04:02 ►
without getting hooked into playing the same music every time
01:04:06 ►
or just never playing it at all because Terrence said so.
01:04:10 ►
I did have to smile, however, at the fact that while Terrence avoided music for his psychedelic journeys
01:04:17 ►
and he rejected the use of a guide, he nonetheless said he threw the I Ching before his trips.
01:04:24 ►
And since I realize that there are a lot of believers in the I Ching among us
01:04:28 ►
I’m not going to add my personal opinion here
01:04:31 ►
but I do sense some inconsistency in Terence’s approach to psychedelic voyaging here
01:04:36 ►
however you’re going to have to be the judge of that for yourself
01:04:40 ►
I realize that today’s podcast is running on a bit
01:04:44 ►
and I still have a couple announcements to make, but I just wanted to plant one more little thought here.
01:04:51 ►
Do you remember when Terrence was talking about us living in a print-based culture and how something visual like virtual reality, which really was really quite primitive back in 1997, and well, it still is today in many ways.
01:05:07 ►
However, Terence’s thoughts about communications between us humans would change
01:05:12 ►
if we’d leave the world of print for something more visual.
01:05:16 ►
And that caused me to think about the fact that maybe the rise of 3D printing
01:05:21 ►
could be one of the tools that will have a larger impact on us than we can now foresee.
01:05:27 ►
Probably not, but it’s fun to think about.
01:05:30 ►
You know, what if somebody asked you what it’s like to smoke DMT,
01:05:34 ►
and you were able to pull out a 3D something or other from your backpack and show them what it’s like?
01:05:41 ►
Now, wouldn’t that be the cat’s meow?
01:05:44 ►
Oh no, is that an expression still being used?
01:05:47 ►
The cat’s meow?
01:05:49 ►
My guess is it’s just another sign that my range of expressions is getting kind of old.
01:05:55 ►
Anyway, I think you know what I mean.
01:05:58 ►
Now, from time to time I’ve mentioned my flipboard magazines,
01:06:02 ►
particularly the one titled Psychedelic Salon.
01:06:05 ►
And while there are now over 2,000 articles that I’ve posted there,
01:06:09 ►
one of them is something that I hope you will take a close look at.
01:06:13 ►
It’s titled, What are the Benefits and Boiling Points of Cannabis Vaporization?
01:06:19 ►
And I’ll link to it in today’s program notes.
01:06:22 ►
It’s by Zoe Wilder and has some really excellent information
01:06:26 ►
that I suggest you take a close look at
01:06:28 ►
in the event that you haven’t yet begun vaporizing
01:06:32 ►
instead of using a pipe or rolling a joint.
01:06:35 ►
In addition to providing the vaporizing temperatures
01:06:38 ►
for some of the various components of cannabis,
01:06:41 ►
that article also has some really good information about oils and dabbing.
01:06:46 ►
But the part that really caught my eye was, and I quote, while some people claim the effect from
01:06:52 ►
smoking cannabis is stronger, nearly 90% of combusted cannabis contains no recognizable
01:07:01 ►
cannabinoid and terpene component at all. It’s mostly unidentifiable harsh tasting tars that Now, I’ve been using a vaporizer for over 15 years now,
01:07:20 ►
and whenever one of my friends comes over and tells me that he or she doesn’t get as high vaporizing as they do smoking,
01:07:27 ►
well, I just give them my vaporizer and tell them to take a couple of really deep hits.
01:07:33 ►
Almost without exception, they’re really blown away with both the strength of the hit,
01:07:38 ►
as well as the fact that they can actually taste the various flavors of the different strains.
01:07:43 ►
Now, as far as vaporizers go, I still think that the volcano is at the top of the list but
01:07:48 ►
unfortunately well my volcano burned out several years ago it’s really dormant
01:07:55 ►
but since then I’ve gone through a number of different vaporizers each with
01:08:00 ►
their own good points and their bad points. But all in all, in my opinion, you really can’t beat the PAX 2.
01:08:07 ►
I’ve had the PAX 1 and there were some issues with it, but the PAX 2, well, I think it’ll
01:08:13 ►
pay for itself in a few months just by getting a lot more out of a gram of grass than you
01:08:18 ►
get if you just burn it.
01:08:20 ►
Now, let’s see.
01:08:22 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:08:22 ►
Another thing I’d like to mention here is that I’ve now received recordings of this year’s Palenque Norte lectures from fellow salonner Frank Nuccio.
01:08:32 ►
And the quality of this year’s recordings is the best yet.
01:08:35 ►
So what I plan on doing in the months ahead is to play a series of Terrence McKenna talks, one after the other, but when I get to the end of a workshop, I’ll play a couple of the Planque Norte lectures
01:08:47 ►
before picking up with another set of McKenna talks.
01:08:50 ►
So the first of these talks is going to be coming out
01:08:53 ►
in, well, in about two weeks.
01:08:56 ►
And while our conversation about the Salon 2.0
01:08:59 ►
is continuing with our team,
01:09:01 ►
we can still use many, many more voices
01:09:04 ►
adding their thoughts as to how best to move ahead next year.
01:09:08 ►
And if you’d like to join in our conversations,
01:09:10 ►
just go to psychedelicsalon20, that’s all one word, lowercase,
01:09:15 ►
psychedelicsalon with the number 2, the number 0,
01:09:19 ►
.signup.team and register and become involved.
01:09:24 ►
But right now, since I’m still the benevolent dictator in charge of this lash up, I’m going
01:09:31 ►
to exercise my privilege to play the music of one of my friends, Matt Lampkin.
01:09:36 ►
I first met Matt about 17 years ago when I moved back out here to California.
01:09:42 ►
He was living just two doors down from us, and well,
01:09:45 ►
he happens to be my stepchildren’s half-brother. My parents would call him a shirttail relative.
01:09:51 ►
However, even though there’s a big difference in age between us, we quickly found that we
01:09:57 ►
were both big fans of Pink Floyd, and talking about rock music is how we became friends.
01:10:03 ►
Now, Matt was only in high school at the time,
01:10:05 ►
and I can still remember the day when he called me over to see his first guitar.
01:10:10 ►
Well, since then, Matt has never let go of his music.
01:10:13 ►
Years ago, I played a cut from a Softpack album where Matt was the lead singer and lead guitar.
01:10:20 ►
Well, after doing a lot of touring, Matt and his friends decided to move on to other pursuits.
01:10:25 ►
In Matt’s case, that still involves music.
01:10:28 ►
He’s living in Mexico now, but comes up to L.A. for various odd jobs and to record from time to time.
01:10:35 ►
And so for me, it was an interesting coincidence last Tuesday
01:10:39 ►
when Matt had stopped by his sister’s house to spend the night before heading home.
01:10:43 ►
And so he and I happened to be visiting just not long after I’d posted the week’s podcast,
01:10:49 ►
in which I mentioned Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa,
01:10:53 ►
which meant that those guys were still in the back of my mind.
01:10:56 ►
So I asked Matt what he thought of them, and well, as it turns out,
01:11:01 ►
he had just finished recording some new songs that he wrote,
01:11:03 ►
and he told me that in some of them he’d actually begun experimenting with progressive rock.
01:11:09 ►
Long story short, I took that little coincidence as a clue
01:11:12 ►
that I should play one of Matt’s tracks here in the salon this week,
01:11:16 ►
and, well, maybe this will be the first time any of his new material is widely heard.
01:11:21 ►
You can find all of his new material on his Bandcamp site, which you can
01:11:25 ►
find at mattlampkin.bandcamp.com. But the one I’m going to play for you right now is titled
01:11:36 ►
Here I Am, and if you go to today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com, you’ll find a link to
01:11:42 ►
both Matt’s Bandcamp site, as well as a link that provides
01:11:46 ►
the liner notes for these songs as if they’d been on a cd so for now this is lorenzo signing off
01:11:53 ►
from cyberdelic space be well my friends guitar solo Everybody looks at me kind of strange
01:12:32 ►
Looking at me like there’s nothing here in my brain
01:12:41 ►
Well, I can’t blame them with the way I talk
01:12:46 ►
I don’t say much at all
01:12:48 ►
I can’t blame them for the way I am
01:12:53 ►
It’s all my fault
01:12:56 ►
Here I am
01:13:00 ►
I make the bed I’ll make myself sleep
01:13:05 ►
Here I am
01:13:15 ►
The same idiot
01:13:18 ►
That I’ve always been Go take a hold
01:13:43 ►
And reach into the dirt
01:13:47 ►
Take a big handful
01:13:51 ►
And see what it’s worth
01:13:55 ►
Cause I ain’t got nothing to give back to this world
01:14:03 ►
And I’m getting my fill
01:14:06 ►
of being a fool
01:14:08 ►
for hire
01:14:10 ►
Here I am
01:14:15 ►
I make the bed
01:14:17 ►
I make myself sleep
01:14:19 ►
Yeah
01:14:20 ►
Yes, here I am
01:14:30 ►
The same idiot that I’ve always been
01:14:35 ►
And say it again Thank you. Thank you.