Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“There is no closure. There are models, and there are questions. But all models are provisional, and anybody who says they have answers is highly, highly suspect. Too many people claim answers. What’s being claimed here [in the psychedelic experience] is a technique, and then you figure out your own questions and your own answers. And it’s different for everybody.”
“There really is no ideology associated with psychedelics. If you look at the people who’ve been involved with it they’ve said completely different and contradictory things.”
“We look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny is uncomfortable in the presence of ‘bare’ furniture. We fear it and don’t want to look at it. And to my mind, most of the techniques that come out of the New Age are based on a guarantied lack of success. That’s what they offer, because the last thing anyone wants is real change, because real change is uncontrolled change.”
“Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state. The two, I feel very strongly, are linked. Of course we can’t get control of the world because we are children in some profound way.”
“The real message, more important even than the psychedelic experience, the real message that I try to leave with people in these weekends is the primacy of direct experience.”
“Everything not within your reach is basically unconfirmed rumor.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
Well, it’s been an interesting two weeks since my last podcast.
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Have you recovered yet, or are you still in shock about the U.S. election of that Trump guy as the nation’s next president?
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Are you sure that we’re not on candid camera?
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And I have a little bit more to say about that later on but first let’s turn to some more pleasant
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thoughts and my first thought is to give a great big thank you to several salonners who made
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donations to help with the expenses that we encounter here from time to time and those Kyle M., John M., Andrew B., Aria T., Ariel A., and Charles V.
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And we also received a major donation from Par L.
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And Par, I hope I’m saying your name close to right,
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because I’m like most Americans.
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I barely even know my American version of English.
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But anyway, Par also donated earlier this year,
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and in his email to me just recently now, he said,
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hopefully you can find joy in the fact that there are awake people
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finding these matters interesting,
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and that the salon is represented even all the way in Sweden.
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And yes, over the years I really have found great joy in learning about people all over the world
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who listen to these podcasts from the salon,
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and well, that’s what’s made this little hobby of mine so gratifying.
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Also, there are some little synchronicities that keep taking place with these podcasts from time to time,
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some little synchronicities that keep taking place with these podcasts from time to time.
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And, well, you see, a couple of years ago, this old computer of mine began creaking and groaning,
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but being an old-time hacker, I’ve been able to keep it in good enough shape to continue producing these podcasts each week.
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But last week, it finally came to a halt for a day or so
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until I could get it together again to do this podcast.
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However, never fear, for synchronicity saves me once again.
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And by that I mean that Per’s large donation has enabled me to order a new computer,
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which hopefully will be up and running shortly.
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And I guess that this is also a good point to let you know that after listening to
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what our fellow salonners have been suggesting about how to morph to our 2.0 version of the
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salon next year, not much has actually been decided yet, but the group consensus seems to be
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that new programs should be selected by a rotating group of volunteer curators,
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and that I will continue to do the introductions of the podcast.
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What that means is that while I no longer will be the only person selecting programs for the salon,
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I will still be doing the introductions, but I won’t necessarily be doing my usual closing remarks.
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That still keeps me very much involved each week,
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but it will also free up a lot of my time that I’d like to spend doing a little bit more writing.
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So it looks like I’ll still be here for the indefinite future in one way or another.
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And so a new computer is going to be a significant help.
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And Per and all of our other donors, hey, thanks again for your support.
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It truly means a lot to me.
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Now, most of our fellow salonners are too young to remember this,
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but I clearly remember that in the early days of MTV,
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their critics claimed and demonstrated that almost any random series of images
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overlaid on a rock song
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would seem to acquire a new meaning, as would the song’s lyrics.
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Well, in a way, I’m beginning to see these Terrence McKenna talks in much the same way.
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Only, instead of adding a McKenna soundtrack to a series of images,
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we are instead adding Terrence’s soundtrack to the historical situation that
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we find ourselves in today. It seems that in almost every talk of his that I’ve listened to
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lately, I find some overlays with current history that approach the uncanny, but that’s probably
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just me. Anyway, in a few minutes we’re going to hear Terrence say, and I quote,
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Anyway, in a few minutes we’re going to hear Terence say, and I quote,
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Somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems has to do with this immaturity about our mental state.
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Of course we can’t get control of the world because we are children in some profound ways.
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End quote.
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And he also goes on to say that we are always presented as a member of a class and not as unique individuals.
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Now, in regards to the commentary that I’ve heard and read about the presidential election here in the States recently,
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the losing side is presenting the winning side as infantile children and members of the class of deplorables.
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And while there certainly may be some truth in that point of view that can be found here and there,
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I think the situation is considerably more complex.
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Too complex, in fact, for me to talk about here in the introduction to this podcast.
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So I’ve begun working on an essay that will pull my thoughts together about the world that we now find ourselves in.
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And in a week or so so I’ll read it here.
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But for today, let’s just sit back and listen to a little more of what was on the mind of
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Terence McKenna back in September of 1990, which was over a quarter of a century ago.
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Well, psilocybin once encountered in the diet acts very quickly to outbreed non-psilocybin-using individuals because, like many indoles, if there’s a small amount of psilocybin in the diet, visual acuity is measurably increased.
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And Roland Fisher did work on this in the early 60s well you can see that if an animal that is living by predation
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and also it’s thought by the people who disagree with this theory
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the people who do not think that mushrooms played a major role in human evolution
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believe that the throwing arm is the unique human capability and that
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when you see a pitcher get a ball across a plate what is it how far is it from
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the pitchers man to the plate 60 feet that kind of control on an object hurled
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at that speed no other animal can do anything, even approaching that.
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And that this hand-eye coordination
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gave us our leg up, literally,
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or our arm up,
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to be able to knock out large animals at a distance.
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Well, even if you believe that theory,
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you see it too depends
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on a very close coordination of hand and eye. Well, if you bring
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into this a chemical factor in the diet, which increases visual acuity, animals that are allowing
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this item in the diet will very quickly outbreed the non-mushroom users. And I submit that this happened, then further accelerating the tendency toward
00:07:47 ►
preferential use of mushrooms is the fact that at higher doses, but still sub-psychedelic doses,
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these same mushrooms will trigger arousal, general CNS, central nervous system arousal. But this also includes then sexual arousal and erection in males.
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Well, so what does this mean?
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It means that it’s a party drug at that dose.
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It means that there is this impetus to copulation
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in a situation in which the better hunters
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have been more successful at getting food
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so this increased copulatory activity and subsequent increased number of births is
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happening in an environment with an increased food supply so you see all these factors are
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converging to outbreed the non-mushroom-using individuals.
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Well, then the final culminating factor in this is at yet higher doses,
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the mushroom ushers into the boundary-dissolving ecstasy that we call the psychedelic experience,
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and that in that kind of a social small group situation would have led, I think, to primitive religious observance,
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ritual group sexuality, food sharing, mate sharing, so forth and so on.
00:09:19 ►
And I really believe that this lifestyle, if you will, of nomadic pastoralism,
00:09:29 ►
God-disoriented religion driven by psychedelic indoles in the diet,
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that for 50,000, approaching 75,000 years, this is how people lived.
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And they were fully realized people. I mean, there was
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tremendous oral poetry, epic works of art and theater, a complete realization of human potential
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in the dynamic context of this nomadic relationship to nature. I mean, this was Eden. This was when we were at peace with our humanness.
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Well then, you know, what happened?
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Is there a search for scapegoats?
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Who’s to blame?
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And the answer is nobody is to blame.
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The very process which brought this paradise into being,
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which was the drying up of the African continent
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and the forcing of our proto-human
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ancestors onto the veldt and into the bipedal nomadic tribal language-using mode, the very
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forces which created that destroyed it, because eventually the great grasslands of the Sahara,
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the huge waterholes, the vast herds of game
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gave way to encroaching dunes, shrinking waterholes.
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The mushroom festivals, which I imagine at one point
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were probably lunar festivals,
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became then yearly festivals
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because of scarcity of the mushroom. And there
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became then anxiety about availability of mushrooms and therefore a certain cultural
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pressure to find methods of preserving them. And this need turned naturally to the preserving powers of honey.
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And so there was a transitional phase of not fresh mushroom festivals,
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but preserved mushrooms in honey.
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The problem is honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psychotropic substance.
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Through fermentation, it becomes mead.
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But the imprinting that takes place in a mead culture,
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mead cultures are cultures of male dominance,
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repression of female sexuality, hierarchy,
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warfare, wheeled chariots, the whole shtick.
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And so, you know, there there was and this all happened over thousands
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of years this very gradual transition there was never a conscious moment of tragedy but you see
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what was happening was a new psychic function was taking hold in the human animal in the situation of the monthly
00:12:28 ►
boundary dissolving group mushroom festivals
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ego was not allowed to form
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and I really view psilocybin as
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almost an inoculation
00:12:42 ►
against the formation of ego
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it is an egolitic compound.
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So notions of male dominance,
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of possession of property, children, domesticated animals, or women,
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none of this went on in this situation
00:13:02 ►
where the boundary dissolution was reinforced by frequent mushroom use.
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But as soon as the mushrooms become less available, not have this embeddedness in the vegetable matrix of
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gaia then anxiety arises a lot of it uh sexual and related to self-identity and i don’t have
00:13:37 ►
to discuss this with you just refer you to freud and the whole gang, everybody understands how bent we are. The question is why, and I think this is why,
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because we have been in a permanent state of neurotic disequilibrium
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for 15,000 years,
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and every move to attempt to correct this
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has pushed us further away from the goal that we want to have.
00:14:03 ►
So now we arrive at the late 20th century,
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nuclear arsenals fully in hand.
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We have made since the 15th century a demonic pact with matter
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that has allowed us great insight into the destructive properties of matter,
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made us handmaiden to the devil. And yet we are
00:14:27 ►
still completely dark about our own motivations, how to educate our children, how to put in place
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a set of values that don’t loot the future. And all of these problems appear to be getting worse.
00:14:42 ►
appear to be getting worse.
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So, you know, I don’t know.
00:14:52 ►
Well, my response to this is to advocate the only thing that I think will work,
00:14:56 ►
but it’s not a political position,
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because a political position always implies
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willingness to compromise and negotiate with the other side. And there
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really is no willingness to negotiate on the part of the psychedelic position because it’s
00:15:15 ►
pretty non-negotiable. We’re at the end of a process, call it 2000,000, you know, choose your date, but a long process of denial of human nature first
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and then war against human nature.
00:15:33 ►
And it goes so deep into our culture
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that we don’t even know where the basement level is.
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I mean, for instance, to my mind, monotheism, which is the great intellectual
00:15:49 ►
edifice of the West, it touches the three major religions of the West that have developed in a
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continuous strain since Abraham. Monotheism is the institutionalizing of this egocentric model.
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And it has a certain philosophical appeal
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in one god, you know,
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everything, all roads lead to Rome.
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You can trace everything back to the Ur-source,
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the Ur-Kvella.
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But that anal retentive appeal in itself
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takes place within a context of values of male dominance,
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print-created linearity, uniformity, so forth and so on.
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And I think what we have to get into
00:16:42 ►
is real permission for sloppiness,
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for loose-endedness, for the abandonment of any myth of closure,
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that there is no closure.
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There are models and there are questions, but all models are provisional.
00:17:02 ►
And anybody who says they have answers
00:17:05 ►
is highly, highly suspect.
00:17:09 ►
Too many people claim answers.
00:17:13 ►
What’s being claimed here
00:17:14 ►
is a technique.
00:17:16 ►
And then you figure out
00:17:17 ►
your own questions
00:17:18 ►
and your own answers.
00:17:20 ►
And it’s different for everybody.
00:17:22 ►
There really is no ideology
00:17:24 ►
associated with psychedelics.
00:17:27 ►
I mean, if you look at the people who’ve been involved with it,
00:17:30 ►
they’ve said completely different things and contradictory.
00:17:35 ►
And some are rationalists and behaviorists to this day
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and others are, you know, spiritual visionaries,
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hierarchical, shamanic types.
00:17:47 ►
The main thing is to reclaim the experience
00:17:53 ►
as the first step toward being politically empowered in order to act.
00:18:01 ►
In other words, we’re in, and I indicated this last night, although more gently,
00:18:07 ►
that we’re in a state of enforced infantilism about the capacity of our minds, that the culture
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we are living in is an infantile culture. Now, we look back at the Victorians putting pants on the piano legs,
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and we just shake our heads and say, you know, those poor misguided people.
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Well, but that’s only four generations ago.
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We have similar weirdness going on in our own culture, but about the mind.
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but about the mind.
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I mean, we look askance at the mind the same way that a Victorian nanny
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is uncomfortable in the presence of bare furniture.
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We fear it.
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We don’t want to look at it.
00:18:58 ►
And to my mind,
00:18:59 ►
most of the techniques that come out of the New Age
00:19:03 ►
are based on a guaranteed lack of success.
00:19:07 ►
That’s what they offer.
00:19:09 ►
Because the last thing anybody wants is real change.
00:19:13 ►
Because real change is uncontrolled change.
00:19:18 ►
The issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience, it was mentioned last night. It’s strong in my life.
00:19:25 ►
I haven’t found any real solution
00:19:28 ►
other than hold your nose and jump.
00:19:30 ►
But the issue is surrender.
00:19:33 ►
This is something real.
00:19:35 ►
You don’t find people going into the ashram
00:19:38 ►
in the morning to meditate
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with their knees knocking in fear
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because of how terrifying and profound
00:19:45 ►
they know that meditation is going to be.
00:19:48 ►
But if they were going in there to smoke DMT,
00:19:51 ►
you know, they would be fully riveted
00:19:53 ►
on the modalities of what was about to happen.
00:19:57 ►
I mean, we can tell shit from Shinola.
00:20:00 ►
It’s just that we don’t always prefer Shinola.
00:20:09 ►
shinola it’s just that we don’t always prefer shinola uh and and i’m not like ad i don’t advocate it you know people like sometimes there are people who are disappointed because they say
00:20:14 ►
well how often do you do it well the answer is not very often i mean if i can get it in a couple
00:20:21 ►
or three times a year i feel like i’m hitting it pretty hard. And the more
00:20:26 ►
successful it is, the less often you have to do it. I mean, I know people who say DMT is their
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most favorite drug. And when you say, well, when was the last time you did it? They say, well,
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- It only lasted four minutes. They’re still processing it. And they’re still processing it and they are still processing it
00:20:46 ►
they’re not just whistling Dixie
00:20:48 ►
I mean it is to my mind
00:20:51 ►
just the most
00:20:53 ►
well I mentioned this earlier
00:20:56 ►
the question how do they keep the lid on this stuff
00:21:00 ►
and I suppose here I’m preaching to the converted
00:21:03 ►
because many people last night said they had an interest in this kind of thing
00:21:08 ►
but they don’t keep the lid on sexuality
00:21:14 ►
no society has ever had it so under control
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that people didn’t have sex
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I mean they may have had sex under weird conditions
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and under, you know, ritual
00:21:27 ►
strictures and this and that, but we are like this salamander that has the option of never
00:21:34 ►
developing into its mature form. And to my mind, that’s a tragedy because this is our birthright, and somehow our inability to get a grip on our global problems
00:21:48 ►
has to do with this immaturity about our mental state.
00:21:54 ►
The two, I feel, very strongly are linked,
00:21:59 ►
and that of course we can’t get control of the world,
00:22:03 ►
because we are children in some profound way and we don’t like
00:22:09 ►
being children it’s but the culture has reinforced a form of infantilism and the way i explain it to
00:22:18 ►
myself is it’s a kind of unwillingness to go it alone on a certain level I don’t know how many of
00:22:26 ►
you remember in Brave New World
00:22:28 ►
Huxley’s brilliant dystopia but there’s
00:22:32 ►
a scene in there where Bernard who is
00:22:36 ►
the guy who’s out of it in the novel
00:22:39 ►
because in his fetal fluid they got an
00:22:42 ►
alcohol contaminant and so he’s different from
00:22:45 ►
everybody else in this society and he occasionally has original thoughts and
00:22:50 ►
he and his assigned girlfriend for the evening or whatever she is are in a
00:22:57 ►
helicopter and they sweep out past the crematorium that where they’re
00:23:02 ►
recollecting elements for reuse
00:23:05 ►
and he suspends the helicopter
00:23:07 ►
over the black bay
00:23:09 ►
and
00:23:11 ►
she immediately
00:23:13 ►
becomes very agitated
00:23:16 ►
restless, anxious
00:23:18 ►
and pleads with him
00:23:19 ►
to return to the city
00:23:21 ►
and what it is, is it’s her anxiety
00:23:24 ►
over being alone in the presence of nature.
00:23:27 ►
She literally can’t take it.
00:23:30 ►
And I think there are a lot of people in our society,
00:23:34 ►
and each of us in our own way at different times,
00:23:38 ►
who have within us this neurotic and infantile creature
00:23:44 ►
that can’t face it alone.
00:23:48 ►
And that this going it alone thing is very important.
00:23:54 ►
You know, Plotinus, the great Neoplatonic philosopher,
00:23:58 ►
he spoke of the mystical experience as the flight of the alone to the alone.
00:24:09 ►
And in the psychedelic experience, there is this issue of surrender, because a lot of people want to diddle with it. They want to
00:24:18 ►
be able to say they did it, but they don’t ever want to face an actual moment where they put it all on the line and yet
00:24:28 ►
the whole issue with this stuff is to let it lead to let it show what it wants to show so somehow individually we have to reclaim our experience
00:24:46 ►
the real message
00:24:50 ►
more important even than the psychedelic
00:24:53 ►
experience
00:24:54 ►
the real message that I try to leave with people
00:24:57 ►
in these weekends
00:24:58 ►
is the primacy of direct experience
00:25:02 ►
that as people
00:25:04 ►
the real universe
00:25:06 ►
is
00:25:07 ►
within your reach
00:25:10 ►
always
00:25:12 ►
everything not within your reach
00:25:14 ►
is basically unconfirmed
00:25:16 ►
rumor
00:25:17 ►
and we insert ourselves
00:25:20 ►
like ants or honeybees
00:25:22 ►
into hierarchies
00:25:24 ►
of knowledge so we say well what’s going on in
00:25:28 ►
the world well turn on cnn you know and then somehow we’re ordered then we say aha okay it’s
00:25:37 ►
85 degrees in baghdad and the wind is out of the northeast at 15 miles an hour and we feel somehow better now
00:25:45 ►
because we’re getting the information
00:25:48 ►
but what we have done is sold out
00:25:52 ►
direct experience and all institutions
00:25:55 ►
require this of us
00:25:57 ►
that we somehow redefine ourselves
00:26:01 ►
for the convenience of the institution
00:26:04 ►
and this redefinition always involves a narrowing, a denial,
00:26:12 ►
so that, you know, if you want to be in Marxist society,
00:26:15 ►
if you want to function in Marxist society,
00:26:17 ►
you have to define yourself as a Marxist human being.
00:26:21 ►
Well, it turns out in a Marxist society there are no homosexuals
00:26:26 ►
because that just happens in decadent societies. So then, you know, if you happen to notice any tendency like
00:26:32 ►
this in yourself, you have to deny its existence because this just doesn’t happen in a Marxist
00:26:38 ►
society. And similarly, every society has this. In our society, if you hear voices we have mental hospitals for you
00:26:46 ►
if you have vast visions of the future
00:26:52 ►
we have drugs that can help you
00:26:55 ►
and make this go away
00:26:58 ►
so then somehow
00:27:03 ►
in modern society,
00:27:05 ►
the discovery of psychedelics
00:27:08 ►
is the discovery that all of this cultural machinery
00:27:12 ►
is just Wizard of Oz stuff.
00:27:16 ►
You remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz
00:27:19 ►
where the curtain is swept back
00:27:21 ►
and they see the little guy there
00:27:23 ►
and he says, booming out over the loudspeaker,
00:27:26 ►
ignore the little man pulling the levers. Ignore the little man pulling the levers. Well, the little
00:27:34 ►
man pulling the levers is what sweeps into view with psychedelics and you discover, aha, culture
00:27:42 ►
is provisional. You know, whether we have nine wives or three,
00:27:46 ►
whether we tattoo ourselves blue,
00:27:49 ►
whether we eat insects or not,
00:27:51 ►
all of these things are just decisions that we make.
00:27:54 ►
And then we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom
00:27:57 ►
and we live within that and we hunt down and kill
00:28:00 ►
all the people who disagree with us.
00:28:02 ►
And that’s called having a culture,
00:28:04 ►
having a way of life
00:28:05 ►
being somebody
00:28:08 ►
but
00:28:08 ►
with, you know, I don’t see
00:28:12 ►
history as a wrong turning
00:28:14 ►
I see it, the metaphor that I
00:28:16 ►
like is that of the prodigal
00:28:18 ►
son, that there was
00:28:20 ►
a reason for this long
00:28:23 ►
descent into matter
00:28:24 ►
this peregrination it was a reason for this long descent into matter,
00:28:26 ►
this peregrination. It was a shamanic journey of some sort.
00:28:30 ►
You know, the shaman goes into the world pool
00:28:36 ►
or ascends the world tree
00:28:38 ►
to go to the center of the axis of the cosmos
00:28:43 ►
to recover the pearl, the pearl or the cosmos to recover the pearl,
00:28:45 ►
the pearl or the gift or the lost soul,
00:28:49 ►
and then return with it.
00:28:51 ►
And this is what history was, I think.
00:28:54 ►
It was a descent into the hell worlds of matter,
00:28:58 ►
energy, space, and time
00:29:00 ►
for the purpose of recovering something that was lost. It wasn’t lost by us. It was lost by
00:29:09 ►
the breathing, the disostal of the planet. Just climax of climate moved us into paradise
00:29:20 ►
and then moved us out of paradise. I mean, you must have noticed that the story of Eden
00:29:27 ►
is the story of history’s first drug bust.
00:29:31 ►
I mean, it’s the story of a whole lot of tension
00:29:34 ►
over who’s going to take or not take a certain plant
00:29:38 ►
which confers knowledge.
00:29:40 ►
And Yahweh, wandering in the garden, says to himself,
00:29:44 ►
if the man and the woman eat of the fruit, they will become as we are. The issue was co-equality, co-knowledge with the creator. Well, where do we stand in man’s existential march? How does that work? Can we always accept the subservient infantile position? I mean,
00:30:09 ►
is knowledge to be dispensed by gods, and if not gods, then the institutions that appoint
00:30:17 ►
themselves as gods over us? Or is it actually that maturity begins with somehow claiming this birthright?
00:30:28 ►
And it is a birthright.
00:30:29 ►
And I don’t know if a society can survive the claiming of this birthright by a large number of people.
00:30:40 ►
Certainly in the 1960s when this was attempted, everybody got very agitated and then it was frozen out.
00:30:50 ►
In so-called primitive or preliterate societies,
00:30:54 ►
there is the office of the shaman.
00:30:57 ►
And the shaman is deputized to act for all of us
00:31:04 ►
in the same way that we have
00:31:05 ►
airplane mechanics to fix jet
00:31:08 ►
engines, we have shamans
00:31:10 ►
to explore these hidden
00:31:12 ►
and fairly terrifying
00:31:13 ►
other dimensions
00:31:15 ►
the people who self-select
00:31:17 ►
themselves into a group like this
00:31:20 ►
in a society like that
00:31:22 ►
would be the candidates
00:31:24 ►
for this kind of shamanic
00:31:26 ►
voyaging
00:31:27 ►
well so then what is it finally
00:31:32 ►
all for
00:31:33 ►
or is it for anything
00:31:36 ►
is it just maybe
00:31:38 ►
my problem
00:31:39 ►
that I think it’s for
00:31:41 ►
something
00:31:42 ►
well it is and it isn’t
00:31:44 ►
I mean see we have real problems.
00:31:46 ►
We could perish from this planet
00:31:48 ►
in some kind of radioactive petroleum war
00:31:53 ►
or what have you,
00:31:55 ►
and it wouldn’t change the fact
00:31:57 ►
that shamanism did exist,
00:31:59 ►
that these dimensions were there
00:32:02 ►
and were explored by courageous,
00:32:07 ►
high-minded people for thousands of years. But I think that the scientific mind and maybe even the American mind can
00:32:18 ►
bring something special to it that somehow technology has a role to play. And I think maybe what this has to do with
00:32:28 ►
is, I’ve talked a bit in the past, a lot in the past, about what I call visible language.
00:32:39 ►
Visible language is something that I encountered in psychedelic states, could never have dreamed it up by myself,
00:32:48 ►
encountered it as an existential fact,
00:32:51 ►
then had to sort of reason backward from it to what would it be good for.
00:32:57 ►
Well, what is it? What is visible language?
00:32:59 ►
Well, it’s very simply, it’s language which you look at rather than hear.
00:33:05 ►
And don’t ask me how this can happen.
00:33:08 ►
It obviously has something to do with synesthesias in the brain,
00:33:13 ►
with swapping neural processing units
00:33:19 ►
and somehow shunting a stream of data
00:33:22 ►
which would normally be audially interpreted.
00:33:25 ►
Instead, it goes to the visual cortex.
00:33:28 ►
And this occurs often
00:33:32 ►
in DMT intoxication.
00:33:36 ►
And it has a long and noble history
00:33:39 ►
in the Amazon
00:33:40 ►
in ayahuasca shamanism.
00:33:44 ►
Ayahuasca, as you probably know,
00:33:46 ►
is a combinatory drug made of a vine
00:33:48 ►
combined with the leaves of another plant,
00:33:51 ►
and it makes DMT orally active.
00:33:55 ►
Normally DMT is destroyed in the gut,
00:33:58 ►
but you take it in combo with this other thing,
00:34:03 ►
beta-carboline, and then it’s active.
00:34:06 ►
Well, in the Amazon, these people sing what they call Icaros, magical songs.
00:34:13 ►
And these magical songs are given to them by the spirits, whatever those are, invisible entities.
00:34:19 ►
But the magical songs are invariably criticized pictorially and sculpturally rather than musically.
00:34:29 ►
Nobody ever talks about how these things sound.
00:34:32 ►
People only talk about how they look.
00:34:35 ►
And I had read about this and heard about it and went down there and spent time.
00:34:42 ►
Again, curiosity is the only method,
00:34:45 ►
poking around, finally got somebody who knew how to brew this stuff
00:34:49 ►
to make this happen.
00:34:51 ►
And, you know, I had seen it before on DMT,
00:34:55 ►
but on DMT it’s somewhat out of control.
00:34:57 ►
It’s as though your entire syntactical engine has sprung out of your chest
00:35:03 ►
and is rattling around on the floor in front of you.
00:35:08 ►
Well, first of all, notice language, ordinary language, what a weird thing it is, and yet
00:35:15 ►
we do it with such facility.
00:35:17 ►
We almost all of us can do it.
00:35:20 ►
It’s a very severe impairment on your humanness if you are language deficient in any very serious way.
00:35:28 ►
Blindness is as nothing to being seriously language deficient, so forth and so on.
00:35:35 ►
So it’s really the defining thing for us.
00:35:41 ►
And yet, you know, it’s almost like a half miracle
00:35:46 ►
I mean you can study it
00:35:50 ►
there’s no problem with getting vast samples
00:35:53 ►
of tape recordings
00:35:54 ►
we can analyze it syntactically
00:35:56 ►
there have been many theories of syntax
00:35:59 ►
philosophies of syntax
00:36:01 ►
and yet what is it?
00:36:03 ►
how can we make meaning with such facility when the rest of nature seems totally unconcerned with this? And what is meaning, anyway? Why is it so important to us? We say if there is no meaning, if life has no meaning, it’s not worth living.
00:36:30 ►
Well, how do ants and bees and scallops stack up on that opinion?
00:36:38 ►
Do they also feel that meaning is the quintessential aspect of reality?
00:36:39 ►
And yet we make it.
00:36:41 ►
We make it out of ourselves.
00:36:45 ►
And then we get together with somebody else and we try to make meaning.
00:36:49 ►
We say, you know, you and I could have an affair or you and I could start a business.
00:36:52 ►
This will have a lot of meaning for us.
00:36:55 ►
And, you know, we’ll make money and buy more meaning.
00:37:01 ►
Well, whatever it is, and C.D. Broad wrote a book called The Meaning of Meaning,
00:37:09 ►
which deals with it in about 400 pages,
00:37:12 ►
but whatever it is, it’s very important to us,
00:37:15 ►
and it seems to have different modalities.
00:37:18 ►
For instance, dance can have meaning.
00:37:21 ►
Painting can have meaning.
00:37:24 ►
Spoken or textual words have meaning. Painting can have meaning. Spoken or textual words have meaning. But
00:37:28 ►
because of biases in ourselves as an organism, what seems to have the most meaning is what
00:37:35 ►
we can see. Our visual, we have a tremendously rich sense of visual input. Well, for some reason, under the influence of these psychedelic drugs
00:37:48 ►
and certain exercises,
00:37:50 ►
and who knows what else it takes to shake you out of your cage,
00:37:53 ►
but suddenly syntactical organization,
00:37:57 ►
which has been invisible in the background of the program of meaning,
00:38:01 ►
becomes visible,
00:38:03 ►
and you actually see the engines of syntax you actually behold the
00:38:10 ►
machinery of meaning itself and for some reason this is very satisfying it’s like an ecstasy
00:38:18 ►
it’s like an affirmation of some sort that is transcendental.
00:38:25 ►
There is a recognition in it that transcends the felt perception of ordinary meaning.
00:38:35 ►
You know, in other words, that you’re gazing somehow on the naked face of truth and beauty.
00:38:41 ►
Well, it seems to me that what all this suggests, what all this, by all this I mean
00:38:47 ►
the human capacity for the psychedelic experience, the human facility for switching these linguistic
00:38:54 ►
channels from the beheld to the seen, what all this must mean is that history is nothing more than the transition phase from felt intuition,
00:39:06 ►
the mute intuition of the animal body,
00:39:10 ►
to fully expressible three-dimensional meaning.
00:39:16 ►
And that the descent into matter that technology represents
00:39:20 ►
is because you can’t do this entirely on the natch. There has to be a certain augmentation
00:39:28 ►
of the human organism in order to do this. It may be pharmacological, it may be neurological,
00:39:35 ►
it may be nanotechnological, and then some part of the other too. But whatever it is, I think we are coming up under the underbelly of meaning, boring from beneath, digital sound, all of these techniques are this summoning of the image.
00:40:15 ►
So we are actually moving toward a kind of self-fulfilling process. It’s something that we are defining for ourselves as it approaches.
00:40:25 ►
And it is defining itself for itself as it approaches.
00:40:30 ►
You actually experience this on psychedelics sometimes.
00:40:34 ►
I mean, the way it works for me on mushrooms or sometimes DMT is there is a black space.
00:40:52 ►
is a black space and then I hear the what I call the elf music or the Irish band and it’s far away and as it comes closer I like see light and as it comes closer it both gets louder and the light fills the stage of awareness until finally the sound is subsumed
00:41:08 ►
under the visual impression of the thing and then it’s all around you and it is you know this domain
00:41:16 ►
of self-transforming language i mean i call them language elves but what they may be is nothing
00:41:23 ►
more than self-reflexive compound
00:41:25 ►
complex sentences. It’s hard to tell what they are because we’re not used to having
00:41:30 ►
our sentences stand up and embrace us. But nevertheless, the nature of reality is fractal
00:41:39 ►
and it can’t have been lost upon any of you that in a fractal universe, text is composed of characters, the characters of a given alphabet.
00:41:52 ►
But reality is also composed of characters, the characters like you and me who live out some kind of plot. plot, well when you get characters into a text in other words characters made of
00:42:05 ►
characters, then you begin
00:42:08 ►
to feel the
00:42:10 ►
textual
00:42:12 ►
richness and the
00:42:14 ►
linguistic richness
00:42:15 ►
that seems to be not in the forefront
00:42:18 ►
of reality but actually to lie
00:42:20 ►
behind it
00:42:21 ►
I mean the final conclusion, not the final
00:42:24 ►
conclusion, that would be preposterous,
00:42:26 ►
but the most recent conclusion that I’m coming to looking at the psychedelic experience is how
00:42:33 ►
phenomenally text-like reality is. I mean, it’s more text-like than one should decently say.
00:42:42 ►
than one should decently say.
00:42:44 ►
We are much,
00:42:47 ►
this is much more like a work of art than anything recognizable
00:42:49 ►
from my physics class.
00:42:51 ►
I mean, my physics class
00:42:52 ►
was about atoms and electrons
00:42:55 ►
and momentum
00:42:56 ►
and conservation of energy.
00:42:58 ►
My literature class,
00:42:59 ►
on the other hand,
00:43:00 ►
was all about personality,
00:43:03 ►
motivation, history,
00:43:07 ►
precursive active, anticipation of action, willful suspension of disbelief.
00:43:15 ►
These are the things that I see actually going on around me.
00:43:20 ►
And so it’s strange as we decondition from the being sold from the top worldview of time
00:43:29 ►
magazine and scientific american and the wall street journal what we discover is ourselves
00:43:35 ►
active as art in a work of art this is what the reclamation of experience seems to give back to us is ourselves as very complex objects
00:43:48 ►
you see in the institutionalized world we are defined always in ways that stress our similarity
00:43:57 ►
we hear about voters and i’m a, and we hear about women,
00:44:06 ►
and many of you are women,
00:44:08 ►
and we hear about yuppies,
00:44:10 ►
and we hear about the middle class,
00:44:12 ►
and we hear about those with liquidity in their portfolios,
00:44:19 ►
but everything is presented as a member of a class.
00:44:23 ►
We are always presented to ourselves as members of some class,
00:44:27 ►
and yet we experience ourselves as unique objects.
00:44:31 ►
But there is no reinforcement for that experience of uniqueness.
00:44:37 ►
I mean, you have a lover, and they say, you know,
00:44:40 ►
I think you’re wonderful and very special.
00:44:43 ►
That’s about all the reinforcement for your uniqueness you get
00:44:47 ►
and your mother also tells you this
00:44:50 ►
but then you take
00:44:52 ►
a psychedelic plant
00:44:54 ►
and you discover
00:44:56 ►
I’m Christopher Columbus
00:45:00 ►
I’m Magellan
00:45:02 ►
I could be anybody
00:45:04 ►
I’m not defined in these narrow ways. There are
00:45:10 ►
doorways in my reality to areas of experience as large as the area of experience that Christopher
00:45:18 ►
Columbus or Magellan took as their province. But it’s all, this new freedom
00:45:26 ►
is achieved by directing attention
00:45:30 ►
back at the individual.
00:45:33 ►
So, you know, a lot of the debate
00:45:36 ►
and talk that I hear is about
00:45:40 ►
saving and restructuring institutions
00:45:43 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:45:45 ►
I’m not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions.
00:45:50 ►
I think institutions have done us about all the good we can stand at this point.
00:45:56 ►
And, you know, but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you
00:46:01 ►
and say, oh, you’re just an apostle of chaos and madness. Chaos,
00:46:07 ►
yes. Madness, maybe. But disorder, never. You know, this surrender issue, when translated
00:46:17 ►
out of the realm of the individual and into the realm of the collectivity. We all, as a society, must also surrender to what is happening to us
00:46:28 ►
because I think history is some kind of psychedelic experience.
00:46:33 ►
And it isn’t…
00:46:36 ►
There’s nobody around who has the right plan.
00:46:40 ►
So it isn’t about how we need to locate the people with the right plan
00:46:44 ►
and then give them a lot of money and get out of their way
00:46:47 ►
it doesn’t work like that
00:46:49 ►
the right plan will emerge almost simultaneously
00:46:54 ►
in everybody’s mind at the same moment
00:46:57 ►
and in the meantime we all are going to have
00:47:00 ►
this sort of half-baked plan
00:47:03 ►
that we can’t articulate that we can’t quite bring out.
00:47:08 ►
It’s a quality of the time.
00:47:11 ►
I’m going to talk this afternoon more about the quality of the time.
00:47:15 ►
But we can’t think any more clearly than we’re thinking at the moment
00:47:20 ►
when we’re thinking at our best.
00:47:24 ►
Part of what history is
00:47:26 ►
is a clarification of the human situation.
00:47:29 ►
And I think you have to press the envelope.
00:47:32 ►
You have to keep your nose against the glass,
00:47:35 ►
forcing the definitions into ever new territory,
00:47:39 ►
but not anxiously.
00:47:41 ►
It’s just like a growth process.
00:47:44 ►
We can’t evolve any faster than our language evolves
00:47:50 ►
the language is the thing in which we’re embedded so the use of technologies like virtual reality
00:47:57 ►
or drugs like psilocybin and dmt or practices of various sorts, if they prove effective,
00:48:05 ►
to put pressure on the evolution of language.
00:48:10 ►
All spiritual disciplines properly analyzed
00:48:13 ►
can be seen to be language courses,
00:48:17 ►
to get you to think a certain way,
00:48:20 ►
to get you to carve out of the background of undifferentiated data certain things which
00:48:28 ►
you previously couldn’t see, auras or acupuncture meridians or states of disease. I mean, it
00:48:38 ►
can be anything. But the mind sensitizes itself to phenomena by following language into the forest,
00:48:50 ►
into the forest of the unknown.
00:48:52 ►
And most people have no stomach for this kind of thing.
00:48:56 ►
They prefer to stay back in the village and just kill time grinding wheat and drying meat around the fire.
00:49:06 ►
But, you know, you can almost make a kind of a fractal quasi-reductionist argument
00:49:14 ►
and say that people are like electrons,
00:49:17 ►
and you don’t learn what electrons really are
00:49:21 ►
until you get just one of them off by itself somewhere in a magnetic field
00:49:28 ►
in a vacuum and then you see what electrons are if you have millions of electrons then you have
00:49:34 ►
an electrical current and an electrical current operates according to laws and rules and constraints
00:49:41 ►
completely different from an electron and what we have done very perversely as a society
00:49:48 ►
is taken the laws of large numbers,
00:49:53 ►
how a million people act, how 10 million people act,
00:49:56 ►
and then we have applied it back to ourselves as individuals.
00:50:01 ►
We said, well, why am I not happy?
00:50:03 ►
You know, 70% of everybody does x and i don’t and i’m not
00:50:09 ►
happy then you know trying to redefine yourself as against a very large body of statistical data
00:50:18 ►
all of this is dehumanizing all of this is bad mental hygiene,
00:50:28 ►
usually quickly cleared away by psychedelics. Because what they show you is that you are unique,
00:50:34 ►
that you are unique,
00:50:35 ►
and that the confluence of space and time
00:50:38 ►
that you’re operating in is unique.
00:50:42 ►
And that any model that is put forward is number one provisional provisional
00:50:50 ►
means it can be abandoned at any moment and then the second and most important thing is any model
00:50:57 ►
you can’t understand is useless so you know most of us can’t understand most of the models. I mean, who here
00:51:08 ►
would care to walk to the blackboard and begin to describe the first stage of quantum electrodynamics
00:51:14 ►
to us? And yet we all know that our world is supposedly hung on this very well thought out
00:51:21 ►
theory that experts are in charge of. But notice, no pun intended, but notice that
00:51:27 ►
if experts are in charge of it, you’re not. It’s absolutely useless to you. You know nothing about
00:51:34 ►
it. Well, so when you start peeling away and saying, well, what do I know? You know, it turns
00:51:41 ►
out it gets into thin soup rather quickly.
00:51:45 ►
This is no cause for despair.
00:51:47 ►
This doesn’t mean you should go back to night school
00:51:50 ►
and study quantum physics.
00:51:53 ►
That’s the wrong conclusion.
00:51:55 ►
It means that all of this stuff
00:51:57 ►
that you thought were the high walls of reality
00:52:01 ►
are just smoke blown by somebody else. These constraints are not binding upon you at all.
00:52:09 ►
Somebody said to me once, their father had been a professional scientist, and he said once,
00:52:17 ►
I never would have seen it if I hadn’t known it was there. And we all are in the habit of seeing all kinds of things because we know
00:52:28 ►
that they’re there. And in many cases, they’re not there. And you just walk through and you
00:52:33 ►
discover all kinds of things. I mean, I am convinced that anybody who has a major psychedelic
00:52:41 ►
trip, at some point in that trip their eye falls
00:52:45 ►
on things no human eye
00:52:47 ►
has ever seen before
00:52:49 ►
or ever will see again
00:52:51 ►
you know it’s that big
00:52:53 ►
in there
00:52:55 ►
it’s not at all clear that we’re mapping
00:52:57 ►
a generalizable reality
00:52:59 ►
it may be
00:53:01 ►
that it’s just so huge
00:53:03 ►
in there that never do we pass through the same matrix twice.
00:53:09 ►
Well, that means you can give up on closure.
00:53:14 ►
You can give up on any theory that will ever give you very much of a more than provisional handle on what’s going on.
00:53:22 ►
of a more than provisional handle on what’s going on.
00:53:24 ►
And I think this is probably
00:53:25 ►
a good step to take,
00:53:28 ►
to open ourselves to the freedom
00:53:31 ►
that lies beyond culture.
00:53:34 ►
Culture is a kind of prison,
00:53:37 ►
and the only way that we know
00:53:39 ►
to get beyond it
00:53:40 ►
is to dissolve its boundaries.
00:53:43 ►
Now, you can do that with psychedelics,
00:53:46 ►
and then you really explore the baseline of being.
00:53:50 ►
Or you can dissolve it with travel.
00:53:52 ►
But then you dissolve your own cultural programming
00:53:55 ►
only to discover you’ve fitted yourself
00:53:57 ►
into somebody else’s cultural programming.
00:54:00 ►
And this, while definitely educational,
00:54:08 ►
is like a psychedelic drug I’m not that fond of.
00:54:18 ►
I do a lot of traveling, but it’s not the same thing as replacing space and time with some kind of alternative.
00:54:26 ►
That comes from doing the hard work on five grams in silent darkness.
00:54:34 ►
And really what you see, I think, is the morphogenetic field,
00:54:39 ►
the invisible world that holds everything together, the knit of it all, not the knit of matter and light,
00:54:45 ►
but the knit of casuistry,
00:54:48 ►
of intentionality,
00:54:50 ►
of caring,
00:54:51 ►
of hope,
00:54:51 ►
of dream,
00:54:52 ►
of thought.
00:54:53 ►
And that all is there,
00:54:57 ►
but it’s been hidden from us for centuries
00:55:01 ►
because of the exorcism of the spirit
00:55:04 ►
that took place in order to allow science to do business.
00:55:09 ►
And that momentous and ill-considered choice
00:55:14 ►
then has made us the inheritors of a tradition
00:55:19 ►
of existential emptiness, really.
00:55:28 ►
But that has impelled us to go back to the jungles
00:55:32 ►
and to recover this thing.
00:55:35 ►
It’s all of a piece, you see.
00:55:38 ►
I mean, these people in the Amazon and whatnot
00:55:40 ►
were keeping this cultural flame burning.
00:55:47 ►
But these cultures are now all dead
00:55:48 ►
they are either dead or in a state
00:55:51 ►
of advanced
00:55:52 ►
suspended animation
00:55:55 ►
I mean the best anyone
00:55:57 ►
hopes for when they go to a
00:55:59 ►
rainforest culture
00:56:00 ►
is that it be somehow
00:56:03 ►
resisting the change all around it. There’s no rainforest culture that
00:56:09 ►
is elaborating new forms and thriving on its own terms. So all the things that were learned,
00:56:16 ►
the legacy of the ancestors, is now laid basically at the feet of this high-tech electronic society.
00:56:26 ►
And the question is, you know, can we dream a dream sufficiently noble
00:56:31 ►
that we give meaning to the sacrifices that have been made
00:56:39 ►
to allow the 20th century to exist?
00:56:42 ►
I mean, my God, the amount of blood shed
00:56:45 ►
and infectious diseases
00:56:49 ►
spread around,
00:56:50 ►
metals ripped out of the earth,
00:56:52 ►
mountains moved,
00:56:54 ►
railroads laid across continents.
00:56:56 ►
All of this stuff
00:56:58 ►
as the means to reclaiming
00:57:04 ►
the human birthright
00:57:06 ►
that science hides from us.
00:57:09 ►
It’s a very strange enterprise.
00:57:12 ►
I mean, it’s hard to put it across
00:57:14 ►
because the thing is, it’s real, you know,
00:57:17 ►
and we’re in the habit of thinking
00:57:21 ►
that the mind can move unobstructed
00:57:26 ►
from one edge of the universe to the other,
00:57:29 ►
that there are no secrets.
00:57:32 ►
But actually there are secrets.
00:57:35 ►
At least these are secrets.
00:57:39 ►
And hard to tell.
00:57:41 ►
I mean, I tell them and you hear them
00:57:44 ►
and we seem to have been allowed a cosmic dispensation,
00:57:48 ►
but why that is is very hard for me to understand. I would have thought that this would have been
00:57:53 ►
headline news 20,000 years ago, right up until the present. Instead, you know, it’s very tentative.
00:58:01 ►
It’s very tentative.
00:58:04 ►
Apparently this is very threatening to us.
00:58:10 ►
We are not as eager to sail over the edge collectively as we think we are.
00:58:12 ►
So then it becomes the function of the shaman,
00:58:15 ►
the gadfly, the go-between,
00:58:20 ►
to carry information back and forth
00:58:23 ►
between these worlds.
00:58:25 ►
I’m convinced that if there were no shamanic pipeline,
00:58:32 ►
there would be no human life as we know it on this planet.
00:58:36 ►
I mean, there could be climaxed animal life.
00:58:39 ►
There was no need for this higher-order linguistic style of self-reflection
00:58:44 ►
to come into being
00:58:45 ►
it’s that something is plotted something is working itself out in us we are the
00:58:55 ►
cells of a much larger body and like the cells of our own body it’s very hard for
00:59:01 ►
us to glimpse the whole pattern the whole purpose of what is happening,
00:59:06 ►
and yet we can sense that there is a purpose
00:59:09 ►
and there is a pattern.
00:59:11 ►
Well, the way you connect the pattern with the lower level
00:59:15 ►
is by dissolving the boundaries of the ego and the self
00:59:21 ►
into this larger thing,
00:59:23 ►
and then it’s found to be there, reflective on many
00:59:27 ►
levels. It doesn’t require a mechanism. Everything is obvious. If things don’t appear simple to us,
00:59:37 ►
I think it’s because we haven’t thought about it long enough.
00:59:41 ►
Well, so that’s sort of a survey of some of this stuff.
00:59:45 ►
Thank you very much.
00:59:51 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:53 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:58 ►
If things don’t appear simple to us,
01:00:00 ►
I think it’s because we haven’t thought about it long enough.
01:00:04 ►
So says the bard
01:00:05 ►
McKenna. Well, do you think that maybe our situation in the here and now is much more
01:00:12 ►
simple than we perceive at first glance? Well, I don’t really know myself, but maybe that’s
01:00:18 ►
something you might want to give a little thought to. Now, while I am trying to avoid a discussion
01:00:23 ►
of U.S. politics in today’s podcast,
01:00:26 ►
well, I just can’t help pointing out what Terrence had to say about institutions in this talk.
01:00:31 ►
Do you remember what he said?
01:00:33 ►
And as you listen to this little soundbite that I’m about to play,
01:00:38 ►
also think about what the political class is now saying about the disarray
01:00:43 ►
of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and that we all need to come together, whichever side you are on, and help to rebuild these political parties.
01:00:53 ►
So, you know, a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing.
01:01:05 ►
I’m not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions.
01:01:10 ►
I think institutions have done us about all the good we can stand at this point.
01:01:16 ►
And, you know, but then they wave the black flag of anarchy in front of you
01:01:21 ►
and say, oh, you’re just an apostle of chaos and madness.
01:01:26 ►
Chaos, yes.
01:01:27 ►
Madness, maybe.
01:01:29 ►
But disorder, never.
01:01:32 ►
Rather than spending our time rebuilding these political dinosaurs, it seems to me that there
01:01:38 ►
may be some better ways to invest our time to help build a truly just society.
01:01:44 ►
You see, if you aren’t careful,
01:01:46 ►
you will begin to think that the population of the United States
01:01:49 ►
is divided 50-50 between the Clinton and the Trump people.
01:01:54 ►
But that isn’t actually the case.
01:01:57 ►
If you take the time to analyze the voting
01:02:00 ►
that recently took place here in the United States,
01:02:03 ►
you will find that approximately 28% of the eligible voters voted for Trump,
01:02:09 ►
and approximately 28% of the eligible voters voted for Clinton.
01:02:14 ►
The other 44% of eligible voters, myself included,
01:02:19 ►
voted for none of the above by simply not casting a vote in this election.
01:02:24 ►
That’s right, the majority of people in this election. That’s right.
01:02:25 ►
The majority of people in this country didn’t want either of them.
01:02:29 ►
This country isn’t divided into two simple sides
01:02:32 ►
because 44% of us feel that we weren’t actually given a decent choice.
01:02:38 ►
Now, couple those people with the large number of people who gave their vote,
01:02:42 ►
but not their support, to Trump,
01:02:46 ►
just because they were fed up with the status quo, well, then it seems to me that Terrence may have
01:02:51 ►
been onto something when he said, a lot of the debate and talk that I hear is about saving
01:02:56 ►
and restructuring institutions and that sort of thing.
01:02:59 ►
I’m not very much interested in saving and restructuring very many institutions, because I think institutions
01:03:06 ►
have done us about all the good we can stand at this point. And that is precisely how I feel about
01:03:13 ►
both the Democratic and the Republican parties. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn that
01:03:19 ►
I’ve got a few ideas about a way that we can move forward without becoming involved in rebuilding either of those corrupt institutions.
01:03:28 ►
But, again, I’ll save that for my essay in a few weeks.
01:03:32 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:03:36 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.