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524 - History Ends In Green – Part 1

Nov 08, 2016, 61 min read

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I cannot conceive of mature human beings going from the cradle to the grave without ever finding out about [the psychedelic experience]. It’s like not finding out about sex or something. It’s just too weird. It’s a part of our birthright. It’s not a cultural artifact… . This is, as far as I can tell, the dimension in which we most fully experience ourselves as ourselves.”

“We have to be very careful about the corrosive effects of culture.”

“There was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship between early human beings and plants, specifically psychedelic plants.”

“Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous, exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.”

“It’s a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barriers to the solution to our problems are intellectual barriers, barriers in our own minds.”

“There is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.”

“Then I discovered psychedelic plants, and it was like the descent of an angel into the desert of reason.”

“I’m convinced that the impulse that I feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience has to do with its potential historical impact.”

“Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious and the substitution of something else.”

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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

00:00:23 ►

salon.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And to begin today, I would like to thank fellow saloners,

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Zachary G., Palm Springs Pool Service, Haven B., Kevin T., and Kyle K., all of whom made recent donations to the salon via our forums.

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And as pleased as I am at your donations,

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I need to point out that last year when I first opened our forums,

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well, I didn’t quite understand what I was doing when I set them up.

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And as a result, for the first few people who signed up, and these five fellow salonners were among the very first to do so,

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well, I mistakenly set it up so that after the first year there was an auto-renewal feature that kicked in.

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I eventually figured out how to turn that feature off,

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but there are a number of people who might wind up making a second $12 donation without realizing it.

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So if anyone has been automatically charged by PayPal and you don’t want to make a second donation,

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I can completely understand and it will be happy for

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me to refund your payment. Just send me a note via the comments section of our psychedelicsalon.com

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website and I’ll get your money right back to you. Hopefully I’ve now figured out how to cancel the

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other auto payments, but I didn’t get it done in time for Zachary, Palm Springs Pool Service,

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get it done in time for Zachary, Palm Springs Pool Service, Haven B, Kevin T, or Kyle K.

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And so my apologies go out to you, and please let me know if you’d like a refund, and I’ll see to it right away.

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Now getting on with today’s podcast, I hope that you’ll be pleased to learn that I’m about

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to begin another series of Terrence McKenna podcasts.

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These are from a September 1990 workshop that he

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titled History Ends in Green. Now, I’m going to play this series of recordings in full just as

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they came to me, and while you may think that I should have shortened today’s talk a bit by

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cutting out his initial rap about how he came to be doing what he’s doing, well, it does have a few

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little tidbits

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that I hadn’t heard before, such as the fact that his earliest memory was from the age

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of eight months, if you can believe that.

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And so I realized that each time he gave that rap, particularly in the early 90s, as this

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is from, that each time he told it, it was in a slightly different way, adding and taking away bits and pieces.

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So my thought is that collectively, these talks actually give a pretty complete autobiography of Terrence’s early years.

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And by the way, you can also find this series of talks in a single three and a half hour recording on YouTube,

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in the event that you don’t want to wait for me to podcast all six tapes here

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in the salon.

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As often happens with these talks by Terence McKenna, even though they were given quite

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a long time ago, there are still many parts that ring true yet today.

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For example, early on in this talk he says, and I quote,

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Human culture has become, charitably, a random walk. End quote.

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And with the U.S. presidential election being held tomorrow,

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I don’t know how to better describe what is about to happen

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other than a cancerous exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.

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So now let’s listen to some of the other things that were on the mind of Terence McKenna on this

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September evening in 1990, which was just a month after Iraq announced its annexation of Kuwait

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and Bush the Elder called up the reserves, which was the start of the quagmire in Iraq that we still find ourselves in.

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You see, these unsettled times today are nothing new.

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I’ve been traveling a lot and speaking a lot to different kinds of people.

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and most recently in Europe,

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where it was a tremendous kind of bridge-building thing to get everything rhetorically lined up and squared around

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to where I could even introduce the subject of psychedelics.

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So I see that I’ve returned to the home congregation here.

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And because, you know, this seems to be the overwhelming focus of this group,

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which is interesting.

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It’s even sometimes sort of confining to me

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because I would wander maybe in other directions,

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to me, because I would wander maybe in other directions,

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but every prophet is the captive of his earliest ideological expression.

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You know, I mean, Lenin couldn’t do much about Leninism

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once it had passed a certain point.

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So in hearing what people’s interests were

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and trying to think about it in new ways,

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you know, the uniting thing in the 20th century,

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I think one of the things that sets the 20th century

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completely apart, really, from previous times,

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if not ontologically, then by degree, is the focus on the moving image

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and the role that this has had in shaping 20th century culture. And it comes really

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in three forms. It comes in the natural and available form of the dream,

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which always, to some degree,

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has shaped human culture.

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But for Freud and Jung in the early 20th century

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and their followers,

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the dream took on a whole new significance

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that it had never had before.

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It was seen as a cryptic messenger from from a hidden

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world and as these things seem to work out concomitantly a technology of the moving image was developing, which was film.

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And film and the dream then become almost the two defining poles

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of the evolution of the aesthetic

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of the 20th century

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over the first half of it, we’ll say.

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And then in 1953,

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because that’s when Gordon and Valentina Wasson

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discovered the mushroom

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or earlier

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if you want to date it

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to Hoffman’s discoveries

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in Switzerland

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or the German work

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in the 20s

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or later

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if you want to date it

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to the discovery

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in 1956

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of DMT

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by Zara

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but at any point

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at any rate

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at some point the third triad is introduced,

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which is the hallucinogenic or psychedelic experience.

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And all three of these areas of concern

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have adumbrations in the primitive,

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the stress on dreaming,

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even the magic lantern

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and prestidigitation feats of Renaissance magic

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have a relationship to early film.

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And of course, the psychedelic experience

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is absolutely archaic.

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Nevertheless, the coming together of these three concerns

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in this particular fashion in the 20th century

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set the stage, I think, for an important part

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of what I will call during this weekend

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the archaic revival.

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And the archaic revival is nothing less than a strategy

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for cultural survival

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on a global scale.

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And it’s a strategy that is taking place

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in the animal body of mankind.

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It’s not an intellectual strategy

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or a rational strategy.

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This is what happens whenever a society is slammed to the wall. It unconsciously reaches back through its

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history or its mythology for a steadying metaphor. Now, the last time this happened in the West and worked was at the time of the collapse

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of the medieval Christian eschatology, at the time of the rise of urbanization and banking

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and secular society. The model of the Christian universe was no longer serviceable.

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And very suddenly, philosophers, politicians, social planners

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reached into the past for classic models.

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And this was in the 15th and 16th century.

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And they created classicism,

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the revivification of Roman law, Greek architecture, Greek polity.

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All of this happened a thousand to fifteen hundred years after these things had been completely abandoned.

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But then they became the basis for modern secular civilization,

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and our laws are Greco-Roman and our architecture and our

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aesthetic and so forth and so on. Well, the way this is happening in the 20th century

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is, number one, at a much more deep and profound level because it’s a global reflex. The entirety of modern civilization has shot its wad in some sense. You know, from the

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perspective of 500 years, a society that cannot put bread on its grocery shelves, such as the

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Soviet Union, and a society such as our own that is three trillion dollars in debt, the difference is

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negligible. I mean, both of these societies are functionally bankrupt. So we’re living through

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and have been living through throughout the 20th century an experience of the dissolution

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of boundary and form.

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Everything has been in a state of flux

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throughout the 20th century.

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I mean, it opens with the concept

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of the Edwardian gentleman and lady

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firmly in place.

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Class structure, class privilege,

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race privilege, sex privilege, the entire structure of the assumptions of the post-medieval world are in place. And to my mind,

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the major factor working to achieve this end has not been the two world wars

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or the exploration of the unconscious

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by Dada and surrealism

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or the breakdown of classical design mores or any of this stuff. It’s

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been the psychedelic experience. The

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psychedelic experience is a genuine

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paradigm shattering phenomenon. We claim

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that we want this. This is what lies

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behind the love of flying saucers

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and, you know, the Loch Ness Monster

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and all of this is we want a paradigm-shattering object,

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piece of evidence, body of testimony,

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something like that.

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But what we don’t realize is we have it

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we have it

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but as somebody over here on this side of the room said

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it’s a matter of courage

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and this places it in a special

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in a special mode

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it’s not something where we can just validate it

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and then you, found an institute

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and appoint experts and expect them to issue a report.

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It’s something actually at the center of our being.

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And my motivation for talking to audiences like this is simply that I cannot conceive

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of mature human beings

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going from the cradle to the grave

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without ever finding out about this.

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I mean, it’s not like not finding out about sex or something.

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You know?

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It’s just too weird.

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It’s a part of our birthright.

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It’s not a cultural artifact.

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It’s not like being able to ride a bicycle

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or something like that,

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where you can imagine that pygmies or Amazonian Indians

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go from birth to grave,

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and they never ride a bicycle,

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and they never miss it.

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But this is a little more existentially

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front and center than that i mean this is as far as i can tell the dimension in which we most

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fully experience ourselves as ourselves well you culture, we have to be very careful

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about the corrosive effects of culture.

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Some of you may know about these,

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it was reported in Time magazine

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a month or two ago,

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about these forms of salamanders

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that never,

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if the conditions of alkalinity in the lakes are at a certain level,

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they never mature into the adult form.

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They actually can reproduce in a juvenile form.

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So there can be generations of these salamanders

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that don’t even suspect the existence of an adult form

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that lies beyond the sexually mature functional adult form.

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And this is how I sort of think of what the effect of human culture has been on us.

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Starting about 15 or 20,000 years ago,

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for reasons that we’ll discuss tomorrow, ego began to emerge as a

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factor in human societies. For the moment, let’s just say it had to do with the concern for tracing

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male lines of paternity. In other words, once men had it enough together to understand the role that sexuality was playing in childbearing,

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then there became this concern to trace male lines of descent.

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And suddenly, sexuality had to be very carefully controlled

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and the concept, my children, my women, my food, my territory came into being. Before that

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there was a kind of orgiastic polymorphic sexuality that did not promote this kind of

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boundary formation at the edge of the body’s effectiveness.

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You know, in other words,

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the ego was not a concept as rooted as it is in us.

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And I think that the shift

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from this boundaryless,

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group-oriented consciousness,

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which was psychedelic,

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to the egocentric, materialistic consciousness that typifies Western society, clear back to Sumer, that this is the neurotic wrong-turning.

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back into the causes of it,

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we can see and argue fairly persuasively that it has to do with an abandonment

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of this relationship of ecstasy

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induced by plants.

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That there was almost a kind of symbiotic relationship

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between early human beings and plants,

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specifically psychedelic plants,

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and that this relationship is not something airy-fairy

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or unclear or operationally undefined for its participants.

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You get yourself lined up with and arranged correctly in relation to this thing

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by taking psychoactive plants and that this is how human societies were regulated over let’s say

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a million years and there was nothing magical or untoward about it. It was simply that these evolving primates

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had a population regulatory mechanism

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that integrated them into the larger body of nature.

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And this is what has been lost in the historical process

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so that human culture has become, you know, charitably

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a random walk, uncharitably a kind of cancerous exponential cascade of unstoppable effects.

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Now, the thing is that we are in a position to understand this now, if not actually do something about it. H.G. Wells said, world is set on a course of catastrophe.

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The emotional constipation and rigidity

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of the past thousand years

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that has set us up as territorial apes

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with thermonuclear arsenals,

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all of that is just set to go critical.

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Nevertheless, we are minded creatures

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in the presence of an evolving

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and rapidly shifting landscape of problems.

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And I think that it’s a very hopeful sign to look around and notice that the only barrier to the solution of

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our problems are intellectual barriers barriers in our own mind we have the money the technology

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the mass communications the the scientific expertise,

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the remote sensing telemetry.

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What we don’t have is the will

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to self-direct all of this technical apparatus

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toward a rational solution of our problems.

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But that means that the solution to our problems

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lies almost entirely in the human domain. And the human domain is the area where we observe the highest rate of unpredictable perturbation.

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see the situation as terminal or desperate at all. The mushroom’s take on the chaos at the end of history is, this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. It is

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chaotic, but it is not disordered. It is more like a birth than anything else. I mean there is rending of tissue, there is

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a sense of crisis, of unstoppable forward motion, but it turns out all according to plan, all to

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good end. The trick is to somehow attain this vision of the ordered correctness of what is

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happening when it seems so chaotic, and then to template it, communicate it as a meme,

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because there is no percentage in paralysis here at the brink.

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The only possibility is of some kind of forward escape.

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You know, a forward escape is when you attain the goal

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by simply rushing through the gauntlet.

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And I think that this history that is a race between education and catastrophe

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is going to turn out to be a forward escape.

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There will be a moment of complete abandonment to the irrational.

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And we will look tomorrow at the time wave

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and look at Saddam Hussein and his role in all of this.

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But he is not the final act.

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This is somewhere late in Act I,

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all this malarkey that we’re having to put up with.

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But apniyant, which in this case means

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downstream in time,

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we will sprout all our worth

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and woof our wings.

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But we have a lot of shit to fly through

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before we get there.

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I guess I should say just a little bit

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about how I got into this. And I think

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curiosity is probably the ultimate value in my cosmology. It’s what’s gotten me anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s the only impulse that I trust completely. And it’s alive in most people as children, but it gets somehow squelched or misdirected or something.

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or misdirected or something.

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And so when I look back through my own life,

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I see this psychedelic impulse before there was ever a word or a name for what it was.

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And I’ve tried to think back, as far back as I can,

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and I have very early memories, like to the eighth month,

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but they don’t seem to relate to this.

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But I remember in, it must have been, I was born in 46,

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it must have been in late 48,

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I found a magazine of my father’s, which I now must have been the October 1948 issue of Weird Tales.

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And it had these illustrations in it,

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and one of the illustrations was of a hooded figure

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gazing into a cradle.

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gazing into a cradle.

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And this, I got this somehow as an image of the strange,

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the other, the outre.

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And I think this is the other thing

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that for me was the hook into the psychedelic

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was a kind of deep Irish love of the weird from the very get-go.

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So curiosity and a love of the weird, the edgy, the bizarre.

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And this led me into, and I guess maybe a certain degree of obsessive character.

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I mean, I’m spending time on this because I’m trying to understand

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the psychedelic personality generally.

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But I did have a tendency to really focus in on whatever I was into.

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And I think the first thing was rocks.

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And this was, you know,

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it was for me an introduction

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into the size of time

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because it wasn’t just any rocks

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that interested me.

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It quickly became clear

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that it was fossils.

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And I lived in western Colorado

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and I could go out into these dry arroyos

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and bring back datable objects,

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170 million years old, you know,

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and stack them up and look at them.

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So then I got this dizzying sense

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of the depth of time.

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And, you know, there are those little museum pamphlets

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where it shows a billion years,

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and then the last million years is up here,

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and then it goes down here and spreads out,

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and then the last 10,000 years.

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I got that.

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I assimilated this notion of deep, deep time.

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And then, you know know it was almost like an intellectual ontogeny

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recapitulating phylogeny because the rocks the inanimate mineral world soon

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couldn’t confine this restless imagination so then it became about

00:27:01 ►

insects butterflies specifically moths especially, as an excuse

00:27:06 ►

to be alone in the middle of the night around bright lights, you know, with cyanide. And,

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you know, I don’t know if any of you have ever been touched by this particular obsession, but because we’re insectivores, because our food-getting habits

00:27:28 ►

are wired into a brain 50 million years old in the insect-gathering habit, you know, this is a very

00:27:35 ►

deep, almost orgasmic response that you can touch in the human organism. And I pursued it again and again in life to the point where

00:27:46 ►

I did it as a professional in the jungles of Indonesia and the Amazon. And, you know,

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it’s horrifying to tell in Buddhist company, but when you come upon one of these long-winged iridescent ornithopterids

00:28:05 ►

of the sort that Baron Guy de Rothschild

00:28:08 ►

sent his collectors out for in the late 19th century,

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and you come upon one of these things

00:28:15 ►

hanging under a leaf,

00:28:17 ►

looking for all the world like it weighs at least half a pound,

00:28:21 ►

and, you know, wrestle it into your net. It’s as close to having a heart attack as I ever

00:28:29 ►

want to get. And then this thing, at some point, I did a lot of reading and at some

00:28:37 ►

point I discovered that I had defined myself narrowly and that I was turning into a scientist. And I was reading people like Henry

00:28:47 ►

James and Aldous Huxley, and they were sneering at what I was becoming and talking about a

00:28:56 ►

mysterious realm of human thought called the humanities, which I had no notion of what this

00:29:03 ►

was. I couldn’t even figure out what it possibly could be.

00:29:06 ►

Well, then I discovered it meant music, painting, architecture, dance, philosophy, design.

00:29:16 ►

In short, the human world.

00:29:18 ►

The human world as opposed to the natural world.

00:29:22 ►

So then, you know, I just turned upon that with a vengeance,

00:29:26 ►

left off the bugs and the minerals, and it became about Henry James and Fragonard and

00:29:35 ►

Mannerism and all of this stuff. But the transition, because I was hitting adolescence at that point, was rocketry and the pineal joy of launching

00:29:51 ►

potentially semi-fatal projectiles into space

00:29:57 ►

at twice the speed of sound,

00:29:59 ►

a whole gravity’s rainbow cycle

00:30:03 ►

that I was very consciously aware

00:30:05 ►

was about the thrill of liftoff

00:30:09 ►

all this tormenting of mice

00:30:11 ►

and cutting up of aluminum chaff

00:30:14 ►

into stuff to be dumped out at the top of the trajectory

00:30:18 ►

was just to satisfy physics teachers

00:30:21 ►

and anxious parents and all that

00:30:23 ►

and the real thing was this amazing moment of launch

00:30:28 ►

when this potassium perchlorate and sugar fuels

00:30:33 ►

would just propel these things with ear-splitting intensity.

00:30:40 ►

And then, at that point, you know, all this curiosity,

00:30:48 ►

And then, at that point, you know, all this curiosity, all this edge work led me, because I fancied myself also developing as a novelist, to read all of Aldous Huxley.

00:30:56 ►

Well, as you know, it moves from a spectrum of these polite novels of English society,

00:31:02 ►

light novels of English society,

00:31:05 ►

like after, well,

00:31:08 ►

Chrome Yellow and Antique Hay,

00:31:09 ►

and through works like After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,

00:31:11 ►

to then the sexual dystopia

00:31:16 ►

of Brave New World,

00:31:18 ►

and then finally to

00:31:20 ►

The Doors of Perception.

00:31:22 ►

And when I read

00:31:23 ►

The Doors of Perception, I knew then to the doors of perception. And when I read the doors of perception,

00:31:25 ►

I knew then that this was something huge

00:31:32 ►

because he was claiming, you see,

00:31:34 ►

what was happening to me as an intellectual,

00:31:37 ►

and I think it happens to most people,

00:31:39 ►

is exploration of reality was leading to the conclusion

00:31:43 ►

that it was a no-exit situation.

00:31:49 ►

It was some kind of rational labyrinth from which there was no exit.

00:31:56 ►

No exit meaning no magic, no possibility of a miracle. That, you know, there weren’t 25,000-year-old cities

00:32:08 ►

under the sands of Arabia.

00:32:10 ►

There weren’t flying saucers underneath the Greenland ice cap.

00:32:14 ►

It didn’t work for me.

00:32:16 ►

For me, rationalism was more powerful

00:32:19 ►

than, you know, sort of menopausal fantasy as it’s currently practiced.

00:32:27 ►

And so there was drying up.

00:32:30 ►

The miraculous was just turning into ordinary reality.

00:32:36 ►

And then I discovered psychedelic plants.

00:32:41 ►

And it was like the descent of an angel into a desert of reason because

00:32:51 ►

which that’s an interesting sort of metaphor the descent of an angel into

00:32:56 ►

the desert of reason as you probably know when Descartes was 21 years old, he shipped out in a Habsburgian army to kick

00:33:08 ►

some ass in Eastern Europe and learn some manly soldiering skills. And he was in Ulm

00:33:16 ►

in southern Germany in August of 1620, Ulm later to be the birthplace of Einstein.

00:33:27 ►

And Descartes,

00:33:28 ►

who was completely wet behind the ears,

00:33:31 ►

didn’t know anything,

00:33:32 ►

had a dream.

00:33:34 ►

And in the dream, an angel,

00:33:36 ►

this is apropos of the metaphor,

00:33:38 ►

an angel appeared to him

00:33:40 ►

and said,

00:33:41 ►

the mastery of nature

00:33:44 ►

is to be achieved through measure and number.

00:33:49 ►

So what’s interesting about that then

00:33:52 ►

is that he went on to found modern science,

00:33:55 ►

which was to be the very temple of rationalism and reason,

00:34:00 ►

but it was based on the revelation of an angelic being who spoke to him from another

00:34:07 ►

dimension. Well, this was the kind of impact that the psychedelic experience had for me.

00:34:14 ►

It was as though there was a doorway, a literal doorway, out of the completely otherwise flawless set of cultural assumptions

00:34:28 ►

that kept me, you know, a Catholic altar boy in a small Colorado town

00:34:34 ►

in a Western democracy in a context of anti-communism,

00:34:41 ►

religious fundamentalism, consumer capitalism, so forth and so on,

00:34:46 ►

the whole bag of tricks and illusions were suddenly exposed for that.

00:34:55 ►

And beyond that, you see, like that traveler sticking their head out through the world system

00:35:03 ►

and seeing a whole different set of rotations and revolutions,

00:35:10 ►

you see another dimension of some sort.

00:35:17 ►

And then, for me, the question became, you know, of what sort?

00:35:21 ►

What is this?

00:35:23 ►

Number one, what is it?

00:35:25 ►

Number two, how did they manage to keep the lid on it?

00:35:29 ►

And number three, what can you do with it?

00:35:33 ►

Well, coincidentally upon all this,

00:35:39 ►

or let’s call it coincidentally,

00:35:42 ►

society was just going bananas

00:35:45 ►

around somewhat similar issues

00:35:49 ►

because I was born in 1946,

00:35:53 ►

so that means in 1966 I was 20 years old,

00:35:57 ►

and somehow fate had conspired

00:35:59 ►

to put me in Berkeley, California.

00:36:03 ►

So I happened to be at like the ground zero

00:36:06 ►

of the cultural explosion.

00:36:10 ►

But I had been following all this stuff for years.

00:36:13 ►

It just seemed to me a weird parallelism

00:36:17 ►

that my internal growth and obsessions

00:36:20 ►

were now somehow becoming the obsessions of society generally. Being 20 years old, I just

00:36:27 ►

thought it was a kind of vindication. You know, I knew I’d been right since I was 16, so here was

00:36:34 ►

the payoff. But then, you know, it didn’t exactly work out like that. These concerns moved through society like a wave, and then other stronger, what the I Ching calls prepotent systems of arrangement, reasserted themselves and instead of a kind of psychedelic utopia there was a kind of

00:37:06 ►

anti-psychedelic dystopia and everything that psychedelics had tended to call into question

00:37:13 ►

which were the you know the great sins of the 20th century the misuse of propaganda, the abuse of imagery, the distortion of information. I mean, these are all uniquely

00:37:30 ►

modern new sins, if you will. And I talked last night a little bit about the connection

00:37:39 ►

between dreams, the unique province of 20th century psychological theory,

00:37:47 ►

film, and the psychedelics.

00:37:51 ►

All of these things, and I see it also active in art,

00:37:55 ►

that as soon as you move beyond impressionism,

00:37:58 ►

the whole history of art in the 20th century is about the dissolution,

00:38:02 ►

deconstruction, and attempt to reconstruct the image

00:38:07 ►

so that movements as different as analytical cubism

00:38:13 ►

and abstract expressionism

00:38:15 ►

all are seen to be struggling with the dissolution

00:38:19 ►

and reemergence of the image.

00:38:26 ►

Well, what it means is,

00:38:31 ►

what all this constellation of cultural effects is saying,

00:38:38 ►

is that the previously assumed to be,

00:38:43 ►

oh, I don’t know how to say it,

00:38:47 ►

existentially prepotent order of society,

00:38:48 ►

of linear society,

00:38:50 ►

is actually an illusion.

00:38:54 ►

And that we can move beyond it.

00:38:56 ►

We can dissolve it.

00:38:57 ►

Not only we can,

00:39:00 ►

we cannot not do this.

00:39:03 ►

So then the goal becomes, and this is where McLuhan is important, to try and raise

00:39:07 ►

into consciousness the process that we are undergoing before it is a fita compli,

00:39:15 ►

before we are in the act of looking back then at a historical event. Because I now now I’m convinced that the the impulse that I

00:39:32 ►

feel in myself and that I see in other people toward the psychedelic experience

00:39:38 ►

is has to do with its potential historical impact. Even though, God knows, we’re all aware

00:39:47 ►

this is how religion has always been practiced.

00:39:52 ►

Yet somehow this million-year-old sociological phenomenon,

00:39:58 ►

orgiastic, group-minded shamanism

00:40:03 ►

in a context of nomadic pastoralism.

00:40:05 ►

This phenomenon was only interrupted 10 or 15,000 years ago

00:40:12 ►

and is apparently the state of dynamic equilibrium

00:40:19 ►

where we function at our best,

00:40:22 ►

where we feel at our most human.

00:40:29 ►

function at our best, where we feel at our most human. What has happened to us is a kind of false bottom in our social dynamic. It’s a series of self-reinforcing

00:40:40 ►

situations of disease. It begins with what I talked about

00:40:45 ►

last night about concern

00:40:46 ►

for male paternity

00:40:48 ►

but once men wanted

00:40:50 ►

to trace the descent line

00:40:53 ►

of the male genes

00:40:54 ►

previously

00:40:56 ►

self-expressive

00:40:59 ►

orgiastic group-minded

00:41:01 ►

sexuality became

00:41:03 ►

compartmentalized

00:41:04 ►

into concerns of territoriality,

00:41:08 ►

ownership, so forth and so on.

00:41:10 ►

But then that wasn’t the end of it.

00:41:13 ►

There are then

00:41:14 ►

the rise of hierarchical kingship,

00:41:19 ►

the amazing…

00:41:20 ►

You see, the problem with human beings

00:41:24 ►

is that we ride very close to a kind of bifurcation point

00:41:31 ►

in terms of whether our loyalty is transferred to the group or to the individual.

00:41:40 ►

And this can be sent either way.

00:41:43 ►

I mean, if there were to be landslides at both ends of Highway 1

00:41:47 ►

and a food shortage,

00:41:49 ►

we would coalesce marvelously into a survival machine

00:41:54 ►

where we would all place group values higher than our own needs.

00:41:59 ►

And nobly so, this would happen.

00:42:02 ►

But in situations of abundance and non-scarcity,

00:42:07 ►

then it’s like a slime mold without the formality of coherency.

00:42:12 ►

We just then dissolve into this sort of every-man-for-himself,

00:42:19 ►

egocentric style.

00:42:22 ►

And then another bad break along the way

00:42:26 ►

that may or may not have been fated

00:42:29 ►

may have just been a bad break

00:42:32 ►

is the evolution of the phonetic alphabet

00:42:34 ►

which creates a tremendous distancing

00:42:38 ►

between cognition

00:42:41 ►

and the objects of linguistic intentionality.

00:42:45 ►

And this gives permission then for all kinds of forms of brutalization.

00:42:49 ►

It actually gives permission for ideology.

00:42:53 ►

Ideology, to my mind, is the denial of the obvious

00:42:57 ►

and the substitution for something else,

00:43:00 ►

where you say, you know, no, that’s not how people are we have a Marxist

00:43:06 ►

model or we have a Freudian model or we have you know John Stuart Mill’s model

00:43:11 ►

who knows but somebody’s model so ideology someone said language was

00:43:18 ►

invented in order that people could lie and And in large measure,

00:43:26 ►

this is true,

00:43:28 ►

that we proceed by deception.

00:43:32 ►

I’ll defend this at some point in this weekend because another word for it is modeling.

00:43:36 ►

You know, we model,

00:43:38 ►

but we also fall in love with these models.

00:43:42 ►

And it’s the falling in love with the model that then

00:43:46 ►

turns it into an agenda where it was it was not a free-form projection of a flow

00:43:53 ►

of facts toward the conclusion but then it becomes instead an agenda a synthetic

00:43:59 ►

creode high walls down which you expect to see a process poured and confined.

00:44:08 ►

So in spite of the fact that this phenomena has been around for a long time,

00:44:13 ►

why then does it appear so important?

00:44:17 ►

Well, it’s because this small group,

00:44:22 ►

group-minded, sexually amorphous psychology,

00:44:30 ►

the psychology, not the model itself,

00:44:33 ►

is what we have to recover, I think, in order to survive.

00:44:40 ►

And, you know, I’m not so interested in talking about

00:44:47 ►

the odds of making it

00:44:49 ►

it’s just this is the only thing that will work

00:44:52 ►

and I said last night you know the good news is

00:44:55 ►

that the domain in which we must operate

00:44:58 ►

is all within our own minds

00:45:00 ►

if we can change our minds we can take hold

00:45:04 ►

of this process and halt it. a kind of informational symbiosis between human beings

00:45:26 ►

with highly evolved information processing capacity

00:45:30 ►

and the biosphere generally

00:45:33 ►

and that we have no word for this

00:45:36 ►

that we’re comfortable with.

00:45:38 ►

The closest word we have for it

00:45:41 ►

is somehow tied up with the concept of religion,

00:45:44 ►

religio. But for us, religion is some

00:45:48 ►

kind of abstract dialogue carried on with a philosophical principle. That’s not what it is.

00:45:56 ►

Religion originally was the dimension of the self that directly interfaced nature or the overself.

00:46:07 ►

And this happened through the use of psychedelics.

00:46:12 ►

So the reason the weekend is called History Ends in Green

00:46:16 ►

and what this whole Gaian awareness thing is to my mind is it’s not a nary-fairy attempt

00:46:28 ►

to recast a new image

00:46:31 ►

for religious ontology.

00:46:34 ►

It’s the actual discovery

00:46:36 ►

of the minded presence of the planet

00:46:41 ►

which has always been here,

00:46:43 ►

which is real.

00:46:44 ►

It’s an existential fact, like chlorophyll or, you know, the moons of Saturn. The planet has a biological mind of some sort.

00:47:48 ►

It doesn’t seem that unlikely. After all, the planet is clearly a boundary-ome of the planet. We see that biology and water chemistry has been very active. or electron transfer have also been the invisible alchemies of,

00:47:53 ►

call it spirit, call it mind, call it the morphogenetic field, whatever it is, and that that is the frontier of our awareness.

00:48:00 ►

Every society in history has had the erroneous belief that it just required six more months and 5% more data and then they would have a full picture of reality.

00:48:22 ►

present state of sophistication we have

00:48:23 ►

the only science we have

00:48:25 ►

that can be given

00:48:27 ►

any serious creditability

00:48:30 ►

at all is physics

00:48:31 ►

the most primitive

00:48:33 ►

of all sciences

00:48:34 ►

the science of momentum

00:48:36 ►

and moving bodies in three

00:48:39 ►

dimensional space

00:48:40 ►

when you move on to biology

00:48:43 ►

essentially what we have are a series of

00:48:48 ►

interlocking fables and a few bright spots of light

00:48:52 ►

in certain areas. When you move on to psychology,

00:48:57 ►

what you have are shouting charlatans.

00:49:01 ►

Each claiming domain over their own

00:49:04 ►

special area

00:49:05 ►

I mean it’s like a medieval fair

00:49:08 ►

so

00:49:09 ►

the belief

00:49:13 ►

that our intellectual maps

00:49:17 ►

are somehow adequate

00:49:19 ►

is just whistling past the graveyard

00:49:22 ►

and the way we have achieved this illusion of good maps

00:49:28 ►

is by tossing out all the disturbing and unintegratable phenomena.

00:49:36 ►

For instance, dreams were trivialized and ignored for centuries.

00:49:43 ►

Madness was something that you can find a way, like

00:49:47 ►

criminality, was not to be looked at. Sexuality, I don’t have to remind you that as recently as

00:49:54 ►

120 years ago, people were putting bloomers on piano legs to preserve youth from impure thoughts. I mean, you talk about a rejectionist style toward reality.

00:50:08 ►

I mean, we have just begun to open our eyes

00:50:12 ►

to what is around us.

00:50:13 ►

So then front and center, when we begin to explore,

00:50:18 ►

let’s take a conservative position

00:50:22 ►

toward exploring the universe.

00:50:24 ►

Let’s explore from the center outward. Well, that means

00:50:28 ►

from within the confines of the mind-body system. Before we generalize about tectonic plates or the

00:50:36 ►

motion of the rings of Uranus or something like that, just start from the body out. Well, immediately you discover total terra incognito.

00:50:49 ►

Psychology gives us a flickering model of ordinary consciousness under ordinary circumstances,

00:50:57 ►

and everything else is up for grabs. And then we discover, at the center of human concerns is this weird trigger these non-ordinary states of consciousness,

00:51:27 ►

with all our sophistication,

00:51:29 ►

we have no better grip on what this is

00:51:33 ►

than people in the late Neolithic.

00:51:37 ►

They knew more than we did

00:51:39 ►

because they’d logged more time on in the real modality.

00:51:44 ►

I mean, we have models. We say

00:51:46 ►

the drug molecule is

00:51:47 ►

translocating to the synapse and displacing

00:51:50 ►

ordinary neurotransmitters and

00:51:51 ►

raising, therefore, the endogenous level

00:51:54 ►

of electron spin resonance. This is

00:51:56 ►

not any kind of

00:51:57 ►

explanation about what’s going on.

00:51:59 ►

This is just the chant,

00:52:01 ►

the incantation.

00:52:04 ►

But the people who are logging time in there,

00:52:08 ►

they come back with maps of reality that fit very uneasily

00:52:14 ►

with our cheerful, Cartesian, democracy, anatomistic, causal, entropic models.

00:52:24 ►

And they say no no

00:52:25 ►

the universe

00:52:25 ►

is an infinite

00:52:26 ►

honeycomb

00:52:27 ►

each honeycomb

00:52:29 ►

ruled over

00:52:30 ►

by different

00:52:30 ►

spiritual forces

00:52:32 ►

each commanded

00:52:33 ►

through different

00:52:34 ►

languages

00:52:35 ►

magical techniques

00:52:37 ►

gestural repertoire

00:52:38 ►

everything is

00:52:40 ►

language

00:52:40 ►

everything holds

00:52:42 ►

information

00:52:43 ►

for man

00:52:44 ►

everything is somehow constellated on the

00:52:47 ►

presence of observing mind. Well, in the West, we thought we got rid of these kind of cosmogonic

00:52:54 ►

myths with the Ptolemaic universe, you know, even before Copernicus. But now it turns out that the centrality of mind gets reintroduced, not only by the evidence of the psychedelic experience, but for instance, the school of scientific philosophy of science around L.L. White and people like that have pointed out that if you

00:53:28 ►

use as your index complexity, then you suddenly discover that human beings have moved back to the

00:53:36 ►

very center of the universe, that the most complex physical material in the universe in terms of density of connectedness

00:53:45 ►

is the human cerebral cortex.

00:53:48 ►

That if novelty and density of connectedness

00:53:52 ►

is what is being conserved,

00:53:54 ►

then somehow we are central.

00:53:58 ►

Well, so then, you know,

00:53:59 ►

other issues are raised.

00:54:01 ►

If we are central,

00:54:03 ►

then the modern model of history,

00:54:08 ►

which is, I don’t know if it’s ever been

00:54:10 ►

explicitly stated for you,

00:54:12 ►

but the modern model of history

00:54:14 ►

is that it is trendlessly fluctuating.

00:54:17 ►

This is the largest structure

00:54:19 ►

in which we find ourselves embedded,

00:54:22 ►

call it the last 10,000 years,

00:54:24 ►

and the best guess of the people

00:54:26 ►

who spend the most time looking at it

00:54:28 ►

is that it trendlessly fluctuates.

00:54:31 ►

That means it’s like a drunk

00:54:33 ►

on a Wandom rock walk.

00:54:36 ►

You see that processes are channeled

00:54:39 ►

toward conclusions.

00:54:42 ►

That in the evolutionary,

00:54:44 ►

well, leave that aside for a minute,

00:54:46 ►

in the realm of physical chemistry,

00:54:49 ►

you see that the progressive cooling of the universe

00:54:52 ►

allowed more and more complex chemistry.

00:54:55 ►

First, electrons could settle down into stable orbits

00:54:59 ►

around atomic nuclei.

00:55:01 ►

Then, molecular bonds could form.

00:55:04 ►

At still lower temperatures, polymerization could

00:55:07 ►

form, and therefore templating-type molecules like DNA. The universe seems to be an engine

00:55:16 ►

for the conservation of complexity until we reach the social sciences, where they want to tell us

00:55:25 ►

that history is just dropped into this process

00:55:28 ►

willy-nilly,

00:55:30 ►

is not fractally modeled on anything that precedes it,

00:55:34 ►

does not express an internal coherence,

00:55:37 ►

and is a completely trendless process.

00:55:41 ►

Yet notice that this completely trendless process

00:55:44 ►

is atomically composed of the most complex matter

00:55:49 ►

material organization in the universe,

00:55:53 ►

the human cerebral cortex.

00:55:55 ►

Well, I mention this because part of what I’m interested in

00:55:59 ►

with this weekend is trying to get a handle on,

00:56:03 ►

you know, what is history history what does it mean it began only

00:56:10 ►

1500 generations ago which if we were fruit flies would be three weeks ago so you know it’s it’s not

00:56:21 ►

something really basic to human beings,

00:56:25 ►

but it’s a process that got started about 1,500 generations ago,

00:56:30 ►

and it’s clearly a cumulative runaway process.

00:56:35 ►

It’s going on outside the realm of ordinary genetics.

00:56:39 ►

Ordinary genetic change is very conservative and slow.

00:56:44 ►

This is a cancerous type process, but in the cultural domain,

00:56:50 ►

it’s an epigenetic process, meaning it’s not scripted in the genes, but like writing and TV

00:56:57 ►

and painting, it goes on outside of the genes. Well, where does it go on? Well, it goes on in the domain of language.

00:57:07 ►

And to my mind,

00:57:08 ►

language is the critical area to focus on

00:57:13 ►

in terms of where the psychedelics are operating

00:57:17 ►

and how, if our interest is to trap them

00:57:22 ►

doing their elfin work

00:57:25 ►

then the place to look is in the domain of language

00:57:29 ►

why? well first of all

00:57:32 ►

look at what language is

00:57:34 ►

it’s a weird kind of ancillary

00:57:37 ►

add-on process to the human organism

00:57:40 ►

no other monkeys do it

00:57:44 ►

in quite the same way and I don’t argue that there is not

00:57:48 ►

linguistic and grammatical activity in monkeys, dolphins, termites, what have you. But it’s very

00:57:55 ►

different from what goes on in human beings. Obviously, for instance, you probably know that the soft palate

00:58:05 ►

of the human being

00:58:06 ►

drops lower in the fetal form

00:58:09 ►

than in any other primate

00:58:11 ►

by 40% or something

00:58:15 ►

the embryological interpretation of this

00:58:18 ►

is that the human animal

00:58:20 ►

is hardwired for language

00:58:23 ►

and if you notice what it is,

00:58:28 ►

it’s small mouth noises,

00:58:30 ►

rapidly modulated small mouth noises.

00:58:35 ►

And it’s a conventionalized,

00:58:38 ►

it’s a highly conventionalized style of behavior

00:58:41 ►

which allows transduction of thought

00:58:45 ►

it’s a form of telepathy, a striving

00:58:48 ►

toward a crude telepathy

00:58:50 ►

because if you analyze what’s happening in the linguistic act

00:58:54 ►

it’s that we’ve all gotten together

00:58:57 ►

and we agree that there are these

00:59:00 ►

small mouth noises and we agree

00:59:03 ►

that a given set of small mouth noises

00:59:06 ►

means a certain thing,

00:59:09 ►

and we’ve spent so much time together

00:59:12 ►

and so conventionalized our responses to each other

00:59:16 ►

that your dictionary of small mouth noises

00:59:20 ►

is theoretically supposed to match my dictionary

00:59:24 ►

of small mouth noises. So the words

00:59:28 ►

going through the air impinge upon your ear, you make a rapid search of your dictionary,

00:59:35 ►

and you come up with what you assume is a one-to-one match. And we rarely get together to check out just exactly how good a match it was.

00:59:47 ►

Occasionally someone will ask a question

00:59:49 ►

and we will see that they understood that the match,

00:59:53 ►

and so the match was good.

00:59:55 ►

Because I see a lot of transcripts of my talks,

00:59:59 ►

I know that typists hear the most amazing things.

01:00:04 ►

And without ever questioning what they hear,

01:00:07 ►

they type these things that when I read them,

01:00:11 ►

they’re complete malapropisms.

01:00:15 ►

But this is what was heard.

01:00:17 ►

And as the level of discourse rises

01:00:20 ►

or the density of the technical language increases,

01:00:24 ►

it becomes much, much shakier. or the density of the technical language increases,

01:00:27 ►

it becomes much, much shakier.

01:00:33 ►

I mean, I just had the experience of lecturing in Czechoslovakia,

01:00:35 ►

in Prague, to the film academy.

01:00:39 ►

And, you know, you can go a long ways on sincerity,

01:00:45 ►

but there’s a long way still to go just nodding and smiling

01:00:48 ►

doesn’t do it

01:00:50 ►

especially when the concepts are fine-tuned

01:00:53 ►

and it’s where they’re fine-tuned

01:00:56 ►

that they’re always interesting

01:00:58 ►

it’s in the nuances of it

01:01:00 ►

well, I think probably that this activity was originally stimulated by

01:01:08 ►

the use of psychedelics that in fact most of what is human about us has to do

01:01:16 ►

with our the presence of psychedelic and mutagenic compounds in our diet when we made the transition from being fruititarian,

01:01:28 ►

vegetarian, arboreal tree dwellers

01:01:32 ►

to becoming nomadic pastoralists.

01:01:40 ►

If you think about it,

01:01:42 ►

you can see how this would work quite neatly.

01:01:45 ►

The reason animals specialize their diets

01:01:50 ►

is to hold down the amount of exposure to mutagenic chemicals.

01:01:56 ►

So most animals have highly specialized diets.

01:02:00 ►

That’s because then they can develop pathways to sequester mutagens

01:02:05 ►

or to just avoid exposure to them initially.

01:02:09 ►

But if you put pressure on an animal, on its original food source,

01:02:14 ►

where it’s actually facing a situation of possible extinction

01:02:18 ►

or dietary transformation,

01:02:22 ►

it will begin experimenting, expanding its repertoire of foods.

01:02:27 ►

Well, this brings exposure to mutagens in a very steep curve, and this means, consequently, more

01:02:37 ►

expression of mutagenic genes become available for natural selection. And so this is the situation in which you might then

01:02:47 ►

see a sudden punctuated movement forward in the adaptive, evolution of adaptive traits of the

01:02:57 ►

organism. Well, how this worked in the early human situation was drying up of the African continent, forced proto-human arboreal types onto

01:03:11 ►

the grassland where they began foraging for, and insects had been part of their diet in the canopy

01:03:21 ►

situation. They began foraging. It’s also thought they began

01:03:25 ►

perhaps predating on carrion kills, killed by larger carnivores like lions. In any case,

01:03:33 ►

they began forming a relationship that had them following along behind these evolving ungulate

01:03:39 ►

herds of mammals on the African veld. And in that situation, they encountered the coprophytic mushrooms,

01:03:47 ►

the mushrooms which grow in cow dung preferentially.

01:03:51 ►

And many of these contain psilocybin.

01:03:56 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:03:59 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:04:04 ►

And in my next podcast, we’ll pick up right where we just left off.

01:04:08 ►

And if I get too depressed with the news this week,

01:04:11 ►

well, I may just put that out before next Monday.

01:04:14 ►

We’ll have to wait and see what strikes my fancy in the next few days.

01:04:18 ►

And by the way, if you’re close to San Diego’s North County,

01:04:21 ►

you can stop by our Second Sunday Salon at noon

01:04:25 ►

and find out firsthand what I think about tomorrow’s election.

01:04:29 ►

I’ve posted the location on our forums,

01:04:32 ►

and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes,

01:04:34 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.

01:04:37 ►

And getting back to today’s program,

01:04:40 ►

I did search for that weird Tales magazine cover that Terrence mentioned,

01:04:44 ►

but I couldn’t find one for October 1948.

01:04:48 ►

However, the one for March of 1948 did fit the description that he gave.

01:04:53 ►

Interestingly, one of the authors whose names were on the cover of that issue

01:04:57 ►

was Ray Bradbury, who many years later became a friend of our own Matt Palomary.

01:05:04 ►

Now, it’s not much of a connection, I guess, but I did find it interesting

01:05:08 ►

given the fact that one of the last, if not the very last, novel

01:05:11 ►

that Terrence ever read was Matt’s book, Land Without Evil.

01:05:16 ►

But get this, Terrence thought that it was an October issue

01:05:20 ►

of which there apparently wasn’t one that year, that so influenced

01:05:24 ►

his young mind.

01:05:25 ►

But in the March issue, the one with the hooded figure on the cover,

01:05:29 ►

the title of the story by Ray Bradbury was The October Game.

01:05:34 ►

Don’t our minds play such interesting games with us sometimes?

01:05:38 ►

I’ll put a copy of that magazine cover in today’s program notes in the event you want to take a look at it.

01:05:44 ►

Well, tomorrow at long

01:05:46 ►

last is the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And while I’ve done my best to keep politics out of

01:05:53 ►

these podcasts, I feel that I owe it to you to give a little update on my own thinking about

01:05:58 ►

this election. You may remember that last spring I said that this year I was going to vote for the same person for president that I voted for in 2012,

01:06:08 ►

namely Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

01:06:11 ►

Well, I changed my mind about voting for Jill after I learned that she has huge investments in big oil,

01:06:18 ►

but comparatively little invested in green companies, even though she’s the candidate of the Green Party.

01:06:24 ►

So, I guess it’s the candidate of the Green Party. So I guess it’s

01:06:26 ►

the same with all politicians. They want us to do what they say without paying very close attention

01:06:31 ►

to what they really do. So I’m not going to vote for her. In fact, I’ve decided to not vote at all,

01:06:38 ►

ever again. You see, I grew up in a poor family, and I was taught that this is my country, right or wrong,

01:06:46 ►

and that if I followed the rules for the so-called American dream,

01:06:50 ►

well, then everything would work out just fine for me.

01:06:53 ►

And so that is just what I did.

01:06:55 ►

I was a Boy Scout, a Boy Scout leader, an altar boy, a military officer, a lawyer, a businessman,

01:07:02 ►

and I raised three children who are now self-sufficient.

01:07:04 ►

a lawyer, a businessman, and I raised three children who are now self-sufficient.

01:07:11 ►

I did everything that the people in charge said I should do in order to achieve the great American dream.

01:07:15 ►

But what has this country done for me in return?

01:07:23 ►

In election after election, the political establishment of this nation has given me a choice between two equally bad people.

01:07:27 ►

In every election, I’ve had to hold my nose and vote for the lesser evil,

01:07:29 ►

just like everybody else does.

01:07:32 ►

But this year, the stench is so great that even holding my nose won’t keep me from puking

01:07:36 ►

when I look at the top two names on the ballot.

01:07:38 ►

In a true democracy, there is no way that the two most despicable people in politics

01:07:43 ►

are the only real choices for president.

01:07:47 ►

Now, Trump has only one thing going for him.

01:07:50 ►

He’s not Clinton.

01:07:51 ►

But that Clinton woman has two things going for her.

01:07:55 ►

One, she’s not Trump.

01:07:56 ►

And two, she doesn’t have a penis.

01:07:58 ►

That’s it.

01:07:59 ►

There is no other reason to vote for either one of these scumbags.

01:08:03 ►

But those are the only two choices that our political masters are giving us, and so I’m no longer going to play

01:08:09 ►

their wicked game. Our electoral system is dominated by big money and big business. In

01:08:16 ►

fact, the USA is no longer a nation, it’s simply an exceedingly large company. You know,

01:08:21 ►

I quit saying the Pledge of Allegiance after I returned from the war in Vietnam,

01:08:25 ►

where I saw firsthand how crooked and deceitful our military-industrial complex actually was,

01:08:32 ►

and now we’ve added the prison industry to that complex of anti-American forces,

01:08:36 ►

and the only choices we are given to lead us are the two most hated people in this country.

01:08:42 ►

Now, you may still think that you’re living in a democracy,

01:08:45 ►

but if so, you are seriously deluded.

01:08:49 ►

So vote if you want,

01:08:50 ►

but don’t think for an instant that you are participating in a democracy.

01:08:55 ►

You are just encouraging the political class to keep screwing us over.

01:08:59 ►

What is it going to take for we the people

01:09:01 ►

to realize that we are being had,

01:09:04 ►

year after year, election after

01:09:06 ►

election. I can’t predict the future any better than you can, but my hunch is that we are about

01:09:11 ►

to begin a long, low-intensity civil war. There has simply been too much vitriol flying about this

01:09:18 ►

past year for people to pretend that it didn’t happen. You can say that it’s all Trump’s fault,

01:09:24 ►

but if you’ve been paying

01:09:25 ►

attention, you know that Bernie Sanders said equally hateful things about that Clinton woman.

01:09:30 ►

Then old Bernie sold us out and is pretending that Clinton is a best thing since sliced bread.

01:09:35 ►

Like all politicians, Bernie is a sellout. So we now have the disenchanted Bernie supporters,

01:09:42 ►

of which I am one, and we have the Trump supporters, and we

01:09:45 ►

have the criminal elements supporting that Clinton woman, and then there’s Black Lives Matter, not to

01:09:51 ►

mention the Tea Party crazies. If this isn’t a recipe for a civil disaster, I don’t know what is.

01:09:57 ►

It’s going to get messy, my friends, which I have to admit can be a good thing for us anarchists,

01:10:04 ►

which, I have to admit, can be a good thing for us anarchists,

01:10:10 ►

because ultimately it is only chaos that will take us out of this horrible status quo that the political elites are pushing down our throats.

01:10:13 ►

So I’m quitting this game of the American dream.

01:10:17 ►

It’s a fucking nightmare if you ask me.

01:10:19 ►

As Billy Connolly so famously said,

01:10:22 ►

don’t vote, it only encourages them.

01:10:27 ►

That really felt good to get off my chest.

01:10:30 ►

And even though I am sad to think that this little rant will cause some of our fellow Saloners to go away,

01:10:36 ►

I do think that it is important for us from time to time to be very clear about what we believe.

01:10:42 ►

As you know, in last week’s podcast,

01:10:45 ►

I played this year’s Palenque Norte lecture by Grover Norquist.

01:10:49 ►

And this is the third year in a row that Grover has spoken to our group at Burning Man.

01:10:54 ►

And you also know that he is one of the most conservative men

01:10:57 ►

currently active in the political arena here in the States.

01:11:01 ►

Definitely not a very psychedelic person.

01:11:04 ►

But one of our fellow slauners posted this

01:11:06 ►

comment about that podcast, and I quote, unusual guest for a psychedelic podcast, to say the least.

01:11:14 ►

One was enough for me, and the printed quotes didn’t persuade me to listen to this guy again.

01:11:19 ►

Sorry, Lorenzo. While it may be unfair of me to post a comment without listening, I’ll be skipping this episode.

01:11:27 ►

End quote.

01:11:29 ►

Well, as far as being a psychedelic podcast goes, it may be hard to see any significance here,

01:11:35 ►

but it seems to me that psychedelic people everywhere should be interested in prison reform.

01:11:41 ►

After all, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are there for drug-related

01:11:45 ►

offenses. And that was one of the topics that Grover Norquist touched on. But to be honest,

01:11:53 ►

I do understand where this solaner is coming from, because I thought very much the same way

01:11:58 ►

just a few years ago. But isn’t this the reason that we’ve come to such a sad point in this

01:12:04 ►

nation’s political dialogue?

01:12:06 ►

We’ve stopped listening to anyone with whom we don’t agree.

01:12:10 ►

I’m not saying that we have to agree with Norquist or Trump or that Clinton woman,

01:12:14 ►

or anyone else for that matter.

01:12:15 ►

But I am suggesting that listening to our adversaries

01:12:19 ►

may be a better route for us to take than to simply tune them out.

01:12:23 ►

Had our fellow salonner actually

01:12:25 ►

listened to the podcast that he was complaining about, he would have learned that Grover Norquist,

01:12:30 ►

coming from the far right, and Ralph Nader, coming from the far left, found some common ground and

01:12:36 ►

together they’ve made some real progress in reforming the out-of-control prison system that

01:12:42 ►

sees this country putting more of our fellow citizens in

01:12:45 ►

cages than does any other nation on earth. There are many important differences between the

01:12:51 ►

political philosophies of these two men, yet they were able to overcome them and do something that

01:12:56 ►

we’re all going to benefit from. So, while I’m no longer going to vote, I am going to continue

01:13:03 ►

working with those who are trying to change things in ways other than through some phony election process.

01:13:09 ►

But, hey, that’s just me.

01:13:12 ►

And for now, I’m signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:13:15 ►

Be well, my friends.

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