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.]
“The payoff [of psychedelic experiences] is being able to design our way toward a more humane culture.”
“And I think that’s how we have to act. We have to each choose a small area and then act in that limited area with all the existential commitments we can muster. But not with anxiety.”
“Anybody who thinks that you can save the world by setting it on fire is going to be sadly disabused.”
“Politics without responsibility IS fascism.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I would like to thank all of our fellow salonners who have made donations to the salon this year.
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Without your help, well, I couldn’t have kept these podcasts coming.
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And the last five salonners to make donations this year are Joseph G., Michael L., Magnus J, Bruce W, and Jaguar Knight.
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I thank you one and all for your amazing support of these podcasts,
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and for what it’s worth, we haven’t made great strides in figuring out how to transition to the Salon 2.0.
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But it looks like the first phase, beginning sometime around March, will be for me to keep on doing these podcasts for a while.
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But at the very least, I hope to be able to post a list on the salon’s forums of the talks that I already have on hand,
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as well as any that are sent to me in the future, and let you and the rest of the salonners vote as to which one I should do
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next, maybe in a Reddit kind of format or something. And now these plans are still in flux, I should
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add, but that seems to be the next logical step until a more complete transition to a user-operated
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podcast comes into better focus. And so for my final podcast of 2016, I’m going to play the last tape
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in the Terrence McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to lately. And okay, I know that our
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Terrence McKenna purists are going to be a bit irritated with me, but while I’m titling this
00:02:00 ►
part five, it’s actually the sixth tape in this series. As you probably guessed, well, the fifth Part 5 On top of that, I thought that Terrence didn’t really have his heart into talking about the time wave on this particular night.
00:02:26 ►
So, if you want to listen to what I think is Terrence’s best talk about the time wave,
00:02:31 ►
I recommend that you go to my podcast number 519, which he gave seven years after the date of today’s talk, which is September 1990.
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And, in my opinion, that talk in 519 is his most complete discussion of his concept
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of a time wave. But for now, here’s Terence.
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Well, what else is hanging for anybody this morning?
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How about healing?
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Well, shamanism, we tend to lose sight of the fact that for the people who actually practice shamanism as a day-to-day thing,
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healing is what it’s always all about.
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And the shaman isn’t making these journeys for his own education or so forth.
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It’s always to heal.
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so forth. It’s always to heal.
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I don’t really see the mushrooms as specifically
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a cure in the ordinary
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sense for X, Y, or Z
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condition. It’s more
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that
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in the psychedelic state
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this is kind of hard to articulate
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and sounds like mumbo-jumbo
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and maybe it is.
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But I’ve noticed that in the psychedelic state, it’s as though within the parameters of the body,
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the ordinary laws of physics are somewhat in suspension.
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And there is a great deal to be learned by somebody about touch and light and sound,
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especially sound, I think.
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Sound, to me, is the key to understanding
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and going deeper with the psychedelic thing,
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not only in the healing modality,
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and in that case it’s about sound directed into the body
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because we do have extraordinary senses
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on psilocybin and on these other tryptamines
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and I’m not mystical or woolly-eyed about this
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and I don’t make any claims about what senses
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but if you sit down with a person or
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a watermelon for that matter
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when you’re stoned
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and sing into
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it
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the quality of the hallucination
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is such that there is
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a way of thinking about it
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where you could say
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this is an acoustical hologram of the interior
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of their body.
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I don’t say that.
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I just say, my goodness, isn’t it strange that I seem to be able to see the inside of the watermelon when I’m doing this.
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Touch.
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I’m not an aura man under ordinary circumstances.
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I’m not sensitive to these things that
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you have to be sensitive to if you have to be sensitive to something I don’t
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know that’s not for me because I’m basically insensitive but nevertheless
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there do seem to be qualities of density
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to the energy around the body.
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And I suppose,
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see, I’m not really an experimentalist
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in these areas.
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Like, I don’t immediately grab somebody
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and start kneading them
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and working them over.
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I tend to just sit and watch.
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But I do see all these possibilities.
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Sound has such, I mean, sound does pierce, you know, non-dense objects and return an echo. And we may have neurological processing capacity that we’re unaware of or that is ordinarily suppressed. For instance,
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I am very able, I have quite a good ability to navigate in darkness. I always have been
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able to do this. It doesn’t seem that strange to me. I mean, I’m pretty good at it to the
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point where there have been times in the Amazon when I’ve gone for water at night and literally forgotten to take the flashlight and gotten there and gotten halfway back before I noticed that, you know, and quite keyed up that I had the sense that
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I’ve never heard anybody talk about was a kind of geometric sense that told me
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the shortest distance between any two points in terms of energy expenditure it
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was something which I could see that aboriginal people would just absolutely have to have
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it’s a whole thing about following the edges of ridges
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and never descending unless you have to
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and always keeping to the high ground
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and my mind would just tell me this stuff
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draw these lines through space
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the fact that ayahuasca,
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which makes possible, you know,
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this visual language
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that seems to me the evolutionary compass
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for language and culture,
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the fact that the compounds which allow that
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occur in the ordinary brain
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suggests, you know,
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that we could be as much
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as close as a one gene
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mutation away
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from different styles
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of neural processing.
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And, you know, we don’t know to what
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degree technology
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pushes these things around. Did the
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people of manuscript culture
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have the same
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serotonin ratios as we have.
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How much, to what degree is culture a chemical feedback mechanism operating on us as a species?
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I mean, we’re like fish trying to discover water.
00:08:40 ►
These are fairly subtle issues.
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water. These are fairly subtle issues
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but the payoff is
00:08:45 ►
being able to design our way
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toward a more humane
00:08:49 ►
culture because
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what the psychedelics are teaching
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on one level I think
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is that we are
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that our prison
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and our palace is
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language and that
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today we have just allowed it to grow like Topsy,
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because it was like an unconscious function.
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But it no longer need be an unconscious function.
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After all, we are now writing languages like crazy for computers,
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defining for them what concepts they can and can’t think,
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defining for them what concepts they can and can’t think what forms of logic, what algebras shall and shall not be permitted
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we need to also think about
00:09:33 ►
taking control of the design process of language
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up to this point the only people who have gotten onto this principle
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have been fascists of one sort or another, either Joseph Goebbels and his crowd or advertising weasels or people like that.
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victim of the linguistic agenda of those cliques. You know, it’s like the Bob Dylan song,
00:10:14 ►
the strong men make the rules for the wise men and the fools. Well, if the rules are syntactical rules, then nobody even realizes they’ve been hijacked and held up. It’s just that, you know,
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you can’t think any other way, so why do you have this itch that you can’t seem to ever scratch?
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Well, it’s because it’s freedom calling out to you from the unconscious.
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I don’t really talk about all this with any sense of urgency.
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One of the issues that sometimes comes up,
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or often comes up in these groups
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is, you know, am I saying it’s all okay? Is it all okay? Is there a political agenda?
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What should be done? And, you know, it was Mahatma Gandhi who said, what you do has very little importance
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and it’s very important that you do it.
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And I think that’s how we have to act.
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We have to each choose a small area
00:11:15 ►
and then act in that limited area
00:11:19 ►
with all the existential commitment we can muster,
00:11:23 ►
but not with anxiety
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you know, anxiety
00:11:27 ►
the Chinese Taoist alchemist said
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worry is preposterous
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worry is preposterous
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you don’t know enough to worry
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you know, do liver cells worry
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do skin cells worry do skin cells worry it’s just a complete waste of metabolic
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energy the better thing is to function well in place and then to wonder you know wonder is sort
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of worry without animal uh anxiety but it’s living in the light of non-closure.
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That, you know, we’re not going to get this thing
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wrestled into a box.
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Not positivism, not Islam,
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not the Kabbalah, no, no.
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All these things are very good tries,
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nice efforts.
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We set them on their pedestals in a long row in the
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museum of no ethic
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good tries
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but
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it isn’t in that
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it’s in the moment
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in the recapturing of
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direct experience
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my publisher in
00:12:42 ►
New York for this new line of books
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he’s bringing out has coined the
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battle cry, take back your mind. And I think that’s a pretty good way of putting it. Take back
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your mind. Because we have transferred our loyalty to mythical structures, you know, structures about sexual politics,
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about what a man is supposed to be,
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what a woman is supposed to be,
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how much money a person is supposed to have,
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how much art they’re supposed to produce,
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how many times a week they’re supposed to get laid.
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We have all these images
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that we’re supposed to live up to,
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very complex,
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all being sold down to us
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through a culture
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whose motivations are very murky
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and highly suspect.
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I mean, culture is not your friend.
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You know, all these people
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who want you to smell good
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and drive the right car
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and have your extra facial hair removed and all that.
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These are not your friends, these people.
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And it pays to remember that, you know,
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that there’s a struggle on for loyalty,
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that you are much
00:14:06 ►
more, you look
00:14:08 ►
much better to the
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institutional structure
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if you work hard
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consume quietly
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choose from the political
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menu without a lot of
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fuss and
00:14:21 ►
that sort of thing
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but in fact, you know,
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this kind of business as usual
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has led to the sort of lethal crisis we’re in.
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Our real problem,
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well, it’s two things
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which are two sides of the same coin.
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It’s ego
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and an inability to emotionally connect with the true outline of the situation.
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Because the true outline of the situation is fairly horrendous.
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It’s that somewhere around 1945, or you name it, but that seems all right,
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1945 or you name it but that seems alright
00:15:03 ►
we began to
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loot the future
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as a strategy
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for survival
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as some kind of
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ethical
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norm was
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shattered in the same
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way that in
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late
00:15:23 ►
in early mercantile civilization, there was
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this horrifying moment when even though
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slavery had been dead for a thousand
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years, they realized that if they brought
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back this wholesale sale and transport
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of human beings, they could make millions
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in sugar. And it was like the heart of darkness reared up
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and they went for it.
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And our circumstance is somewhat similar.
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We have embarked on a similar kind of descent into an ethical dark dimension
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by looting the future.
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And this is going on at a faster and faster rate.
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I mean, this current situation in the Middle East,
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much could be said about it,
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but any moral justification seems preposterous i mean
00:16:29 ►
what’s happening is eight percent of the world’s people use 35 percent of the world’s petroleum
00:16:35 ►
and are ready to blow everybody off the map to keep it that way mean, this is nothing more than a manifestation of junkie psychology on a
00:16:46 ►
mass scale. It’s, you know, we’re addicted, they’ve got it, we’re happy to pay for it, but if they
00:16:53 ►
won’t sell it, we’ll break into their house and take it, because by know, it’s the culmination of the whole machine age metaphor.
00:17:12 ►
I mean, this is the golem of Metropolis.
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This is the robot mind run amok.
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This is Frankenstein.
00:17:21 ►
This is Brave New World. It’s a world where lethal, habitual activities
00:17:27 ►
can nevertheless not be controlled.
00:17:32 ►
And it’s a perfect example of a culture
00:17:36 ►
with lockjaw of the mind.
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I mean, we’re just going to march off the edge of a cliff, apparently.
00:17:46 ►
Three days ago in the New York Times, the American estimates of casualties in the first 30 days of successfully invading Kuwait and Baghdad were published. 50,000 American casualties in the first 30 days if we win.
00:18:10 ►
This is the number of people who died in the Vietnam War
00:18:13 ►
over the whole stretch of the war.
00:18:15 ►
Well, so then if you win means, you know,
00:18:20 ►
standing in the middle of a sea of fire
00:18:22 ►
with 550 million enraged Arabs
00:18:26 ►
looking to cut you down.
00:18:29 ►
It’s a complete misunderstanding.
00:18:35 ►
And I mention it not only because
00:18:38 ►
it looms large in our future.
00:18:40 ►
I mean, I think, you know,
00:18:41 ►
we’re arranging the deck chairs
00:18:42 ►
of the Titanic sitting here talking about this.
00:18:46 ►
It’s basically June of 1939, and everyone’s planning their summer vacation in the Catskills.
00:18:55 ►
But it’s also an example of how these institutions can’t save themselves.
00:19:01 ►
I mean, everybody knew in 1973 that this moment would come, that
00:19:06 ►
policies needed to be put in place, a dollar a barrel tax on oil, some minor, minor thing.
00:19:12 ►
But no, it’s just a mindset that is self-destructive. And, you know, the fundamentalists are in anticipation of the end of the world and so forth and so on.
00:19:29 ►
There isn’t going to be any end of the world.
00:19:33 ►
There’s no easy way out like that.
00:19:35 ►
Even, and you’re hearing this from the prophet of 2012,
00:19:39 ►
all of these fantasies, all of these infantile fantasies will be acted out. So, you know,
00:19:46 ►
if you want your mini apocalypse, you know, you can have it and we can bomb Baghdad and
00:19:52 ►
gas Tel Aviv and fire the oil sands and kill millions of people on both sides. And you
00:19:58 ►
know what? It ain’t going to bring the guy from Galilee and it ain’t going to bring friendly
00:20:03 ►
flying saucers from Marturus
00:20:05 ►
all it’s just gonna bring is a deeper
00:20:08 ►
bigger mess for the
00:20:09 ►
human race to try and clean up
00:20:12 ►
anybody who thinks that
00:20:14 ►
you know you’re gonna save the world
00:20:16 ►
by setting it on fire
00:20:17 ►
is going to be sadly
00:20:19 ►
disabused so
00:20:21 ►
it’s a rare moment for the
00:20:26 ►
collectivity to try to anchor itself in
00:20:31 ►
larger visions. You know, the reason human
00:20:35 ►
society is haunted by messiahs and
00:20:39 ►
tin horn visionaries preaching on every
00:20:42 ►
corner and people waving little books of different
00:20:46 ►
colors is because there is no full development of the individual.
00:20:57 ►
There’s this kind of arrested, prolonged adolescence.
00:21:02 ►
And it’s created through institutions.
00:21:06 ►
Institutions are a demonic force in human life
00:21:11 ►
because they give permission for us to cease developing
00:21:16 ►
and to put our loyalty behind some weird creed
00:21:22 ►
that has been worked out usually by a bunch of guys wearing dresses.
00:21:26 ►
And then they, you know, hand it down to the rest of us.
00:21:33 ►
Anarchy and chaos, you know,
00:21:36 ►
anarchy is always just,
00:21:39 ►
that’s, you know, surely not, my dear fellow.
00:21:42 ►
That’s so awful to contemplate.
00:21:44 ►
But what it’s coming down to is a real make-or-break revelation on what is human nature.
00:21:55 ►
You know, the French cartoonist Mobius asks the question in one of his books,
00:22:00 ►
Is man good?
00:22:02 ►
And he answers it, sufficiently seasoned and marinated, yes. But, you know,
00:22:10 ►
we’re actually going to get the chance to answer this question because all barriers
00:22:17 ►
to the expression of our will, our vision, our dream is falling away and are we some kind of
00:22:27 ►
anti-life sadomasochistic suicidal contradiction
00:22:35 ►
or can we break through
00:22:40 ►
the millions of years of primate programming
00:22:44 ►
and alpha male hierarchical dominance and so forth
00:22:48 ►
to actually uncover the angelic force
00:22:53 ►
that we glimpse within ourselves,
00:22:55 ►
that we glimpse with high definition.
00:22:58 ►
I mean, it’s really there.
00:23:00 ►
If there is a demon in human nature,
00:23:02 ►
there is surely equally an angel of equal power.
00:23:08 ►
So then it’s just about breaking this free.
00:23:12 ►
And I don’t think it can happen in the monkey body on the surface of this planet.
00:23:19 ►
Somehow there has to be an act of surrender to our own nature and then concomitant with that
00:23:28 ►
a kind of
00:23:30 ►
a kind of making of a peace
00:23:35 ►
with nature as it is
00:23:38 ►
and I don’t know how to envision the future
00:23:41 ►
in the past year you know
00:23:43 ►
there’s been a lot of flack about virtual reality.
00:23:46 ►
Does this hold any hope? And, you know, if we think of the virtual reality thing as a wave,
00:23:53 ►
six months ago, I would say it was very up. Now enough people have done it to be disappointed,
00:24:00 ►
and a bunch of people are saying, holy shit, you must be kidding.
00:24:05 ►
This is going to save us?
00:24:07 ►
Because it is hokey and crude and mechanistic
00:24:13 ►
and, you know, surrounded by a clique of visionary weirdos
00:24:18 ►
with a strange light in their eyes
00:24:20 ►
that you probably wouldn’t want to leave alone with your chickens.
00:24:24 ►
But nevertheless, I count myself
00:24:28 ►
one of these people so
00:24:29 ►
but
00:24:33 ►
still there are some interesting ideas
00:24:40 ►
the thing is there is going to be
00:24:43 ►
some kind of fusion of technology, spirit, and mind.
00:24:49 ►
I mean, the drugs of the future will be more like computers.
00:24:53 ►
The computers of the future will be much more like drugs.
00:24:57 ►
And we’re beginning to see this. inside a virtual reality rig and discover, you know, that it’s taken $200,000 worth of
00:25:07 ►
equipment to make you think that you’re walking around in an unfurnished office of a third-rate
00:25:15 ►
bureaucrat somewhere, it looks pretty grim.
00:25:19 ►
But on the other hand, when Henry Ford built his automobile the main objection people had as to why it
00:25:26 ►
would never catch on was there are no roads you know and he admitted this was a barrier
00:25:35 ►
but clearly had a grander vision than everybody else he was talking to.
00:25:50 ►
was talking to. Maybe this is where we should sort of lead the discussion and then leave it,
00:25:56 ►
because I think this is the toughest issue for groups like this. This is where we sort of divide, and it’s not easy to hold it all together. And that is, you know, is the psychedelic agenda somehow the preservation, nurturing, caring for, and completion, and even reconstruction and recovery of what we have destroyed and ravaged and mauled to get where we are at this moment? Or are we stuff of a different nature?
00:26:28 ►
And is our destiny to weave webs, you know,
00:26:32 ►
that hang between the stars
00:26:34 ►
and leave forever behind this small, wet,
00:26:38 ►
humble, life-infested place
00:26:40 ►
and go and live in the constructs of our imagination
00:26:44 ►
forever in silicon and so forth and
00:26:48 ►
so on and this is uh you know at least in my personality these things are almost equally
00:26:55 ►
balanced i mean i feel very torn i don’t like the gnostic manichaean need to say, well, there must be a total split, that man and nature cannot coexist.
00:27:08 ►
Man, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of nature, must go into our own dimension,
00:27:16 ►
that the imagination is our cosmos and we are to inhabit it. I don’t know, I’d be interested in what people think.
00:27:26 ►
Psychedelics go both ways.
00:27:28 ►
There seem to be psychedelics that vote one way,
00:27:32 ►
like the mushroom,
00:27:33 ►
which has a vast, extraplanetary,
00:27:37 ►
almost galactic-scale vision of interrelated intelligences
00:27:42 ►
and information transfer between species
00:27:46 ►
and a scale of time where the coming and going of suns
00:27:50 ►
is just something which is going on.
00:27:53 ►
Ayahuasca, on the other hand,
00:27:55 ►
like claims you for your humanness,
00:27:59 ►
pours you into your body and puts an oar in your hand
00:28:02 ►
and sets you out on a black river in the middle of the night
00:28:05 ►
to hunt catfish you know and you just feel the life human life what it is to be born to die
00:28:15 ►
to have relationships with people to make and lose fortunes to have and lose dreams, all of this tremendously emotional stuff.
00:28:26 ►
And then there’s a gradient in between.
00:28:30 ►
So the psychedelic quest then, or the psychedelic life,
00:28:34 ►
becomes ultimately a meditation on what is human nature.
00:28:39 ►
You know, is it these titanic aspirations
00:28:42 ►
to the techno-organo-mat metallo, immortal kind of existence?
00:28:50 ►
Or is it some kind of Tao-like, Zen-like acceptance of place and position and destiny?
00:28:59 ►
Or can it be both?
00:29:01 ►
I mean, I have fantasies where I see a a world and i don’t know how we get there i
00:29:08 ►
mean don’t ask me how we get there but a world of many many fewer people and people live basically
00:29:17 ►
as people live 25 000 years ago basically naked except that everybody has a little thread like Brahmans have in India a little
00:29:28 ►
thread that goes around your shoulder and around your waist and on this thread are you could get
00:29:33 ►
maybe a couple of thousand small beads on this thread well each one is essentially a menu an
00:29:42 ►
interface into a piece of software
00:29:45 ►
which is hidden in hyperspace.
00:29:48 ►
And by just moving this thread around and touching these beads,
00:29:52 ►
you navigate into mental dimensions.
00:29:55 ►
I mean, I can imagine the person of the future
00:29:59 ►
would look like a rainforest primitive,
00:30:02 ►
but when they close their eyes,
00:30:04 ►
there would be menus hanging in space and you select and navigate and move through these
00:30:11 ►
things but you know then there are issues different aspects of the same
00:30:17 ►
issue of the human split with nature you know what do we do with the human body
00:30:22 ►
the monkey body?
00:30:27 ►
Is it a monkey animal body that drags us down into territoriality and violence?
00:30:31 ►
Or is it somehow the glory and the purpose?
00:30:36 ►
Where do you put the body
00:30:39 ►
in a psychedelic value system?
00:30:43 ►
If we’re talking about more and more
00:30:45 ►
ephemeralization
00:30:47 ►
depersonalization
00:30:49 ►
decentralization
00:30:50 ►
electronic
00:30:51 ►
diffuseness
00:30:53 ►
well then where is sexuality
00:30:55 ►
in all that
00:30:57 ►
still more where is biology
00:30:59 ►
in all that
00:31:01 ►
it’s very
00:31:03 ►
we are the generation of people
00:31:06 ►
who actually will take the reins
00:31:09 ►
of the human dream
00:31:11 ►
in a way that it’s never been taken before.
00:31:14 ►
As recently as a single generation ago,
00:31:18 ►
there were like insoluble problems
00:31:21 ►
of a technological
00:31:23 ►
and resource delivery type. valuable problems of a technological and
00:31:28 ►
Resource delivery type now
00:31:36 ►
It’s basically I think I began this weekend by saying this it’s a all dimension all
00:31:38 ►
Problems have become problems of human psychology
00:31:46 ►
Everything can be done. It’s all about how do you convince people in a democracy to pay for it,
00:31:50 ►
how do you convince people in a, you know, whatever to follow along.
00:31:55 ►
All problems have achieved a human dimension,
00:31:57 ►
the state of the atmosphere.
00:31:59 ►
It’s a human problem. You know, the temperature of the ocean, human problem.
00:32:04 ►
Everything has to do with changing and
00:32:07 ►
re-engineering the human mind now the real barrier to doing this as i see it is the cultural momentum
00:32:16 ►
of the past and that’s a very nice and sanitized way of saying fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalist religion goes into a tizzy when you
00:32:29 ►
start to, they would say, tamper with human nature. This is why drugs, abortion, homosexuality,
00:32:39 ►
notice that what these things all have in common is they slightly seek to tweak or define human nature.
00:32:47 ►
And this is extremely unwelcome.
00:32:50 ►
But if we’re all God’s children,
00:32:53 ►
how come we’ve rigged the earth with dynamite
00:32:56 ►
and are flipping coins to see who gets to set it off?
00:33:01 ►
We have been infected with the idea of original sin
00:33:09 ►
and this is part of what keeps us infantile
00:33:13 ►
we actually believe
00:33:15 ►
I think every single one of us
00:33:17 ►
at some level
00:33:18 ►
that we are flawed
00:33:20 ►
unfit
00:33:22 ►
and this is paralyzing
00:33:25 ►
because if we start talking about
00:33:29 ►
redesigning human nature,
00:33:32 ►
people say,
00:33:33 ►
oh, wow, you know,
00:33:35 ►
this is what Hitler was talking about.
00:33:37 ►
As soon as you start redefining human nature,
00:33:40 ►
you redefine it worse.
00:33:41 ►
The beast returns.
00:33:44 ►
It means, you know,
00:33:47 ►
we have no faith whatsoever and It means, you know, we have no faith whatsoever,
00:33:51 ►
and we believe, you know, that the given situation is the best of all possible worlds, is what that’s saying.
00:33:55 ►
And I don’t believe that.
00:33:57 ►
I agree there have been horrendous misapplications
00:34:00 ►
of the wish to redesign human nature.
00:34:04 ►
But on the other hand,
00:34:05 ►
the style which lets it just develop
00:34:07 ►
like an untended weedy lot
00:34:10 ►
has produced a fairly weedy lot of leaders
00:34:14 ►
with no great apparent commitment
00:34:19 ►
to the salvation of the human race either.
00:34:22 ►
What it comes down to is responsibility.
00:34:26 ►
Politics without responsibility is fascism.
00:34:30 ►
And politics responsibly practiced
00:34:34 ►
is the only other option available.
00:34:39 ►
All this goes back to this theme
00:34:42 ►
of the primacy of experience,
00:34:46 ►
recapturing the primary importance of yourself, first of all,
00:34:52 ►
and then your affinity group, the people around you.
00:34:58 ►
McLuhan said that this would happen naturally,
00:35:01 ►
and from what I see over the past few years,
00:35:04 ►
it seems to me this is so, that he called it electronic feudalism and said that the nation state would dissolve under the impact of electronic media. His timetable was a little too short. This is really a problem for prophets.
00:35:22 ►
is really a problem for profits.
00:35:24 ►
But he was perfectly right.
00:35:27 ►
I mean, what happened in Tiananmen Square,
00:35:28 ►
what happened in Eastern Europe,
00:35:32 ►
was entirely the product of information technology just conveying images,
00:35:35 ►
just conveying images from the West
00:35:38 ►
dissolved the whole myth of Marxism,
00:35:41 ►
which relied on a false view of reality
00:35:46 ►
the thing is these images
00:35:47 ►
are value neutral
00:35:49 ►
they’re corrosive wherever they move
00:35:52 ►
the same forces that
00:35:53 ►
destroyed the communist party
00:35:55 ►
in Eastern Europe will destroy
00:35:58 ►
the ruling families
00:35:59 ►
of the Arabian Peninsula with
00:36:01 ►
equal ease because what it is
00:36:03 ►
is it’s an anti-oligarchic virus
00:36:07 ►
that has gotten loose in the language ocean of the planet I mean the thing that happened in
00:36:14 ►
Tiananmen Square you could feel every government on earth heave a sigh of relief when they got
00:36:21 ►
that under control because the nightmare of every government on earth
00:36:25 ►
is a million peaceable people
00:36:28 ►
assembled in the main square of your capital city
00:36:31 ►
demanding that you pack up for Switzerland
00:36:33 ►
I mean that is it
00:36:36 ►
and if it happens
00:36:38 ►
if it happens in Bucharest you go
00:36:41 ►
if it happens in Tarania you go
00:36:43 ►
if it happens in Washington you go nobody you go. If it happens in Washington, you go.
00:36:46 ►
Nobody says no to
00:36:48 ►
a million people in the streets.
00:36:50 ►
That’s what the Shah of Iran found out.
00:36:52 ►
I mean, he made a decree
00:36:54 ►
that if more than three people
00:36:55 ►
gathered in any place, they would be
00:36:58 ►
shot dead. The next day
00:37:00 ►
two and a half million people marched
00:37:01 ►
screaming beneath his window for his
00:37:04 ►
head. You look at a scene like that and say you know hey it’s time to retrench it’s time
00:37:10 ►
to seriously cut a deal here well this is a long rambling answer to the question you know what is
00:37:20 ►
to be done how can we make a difference and And I think the way that it’s to be done
00:37:27 ►
is by empowering individual discourse
00:37:31 ►
and recognizing the power of the individual.
00:37:37 ►
Huge amounts of global civilization
00:37:39 ►
are operating on automatic pilot.
00:37:42 ►
You know, you think that if you were to walk
00:37:44 ►
into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon
00:37:46 ►
or NATO headquarters in Brussels
00:37:49 ►
that there would be smart people furiously running things.
00:37:54 ►
There are idiots everywhere
00:37:56 ►
at every level of organization.
00:37:59 ►
I mean, if you were to attend a cabinet meeting,
00:38:01 ►
one guy will be asleep with his face in his plate.
00:38:04 ►
I swear,
00:38:07 ►
it makes no difference. And we, the little people down in the labyrinthine streets of
00:38:13 ►
the city looking up at the castle as the great ones come and go, we believe that they’re
00:38:19 ►
all about the fine business of humanity. But, you know, it’s just a fiction.
00:38:25 ►
It’s an absurdity.
00:38:27 ►
And to the degree that we proclaim it so,
00:38:31 ►
the meme spreads
00:38:34 ►
and the dream of the oligarchs,
00:38:38 ►
the autocrats, the programmers,
00:38:41 ►
is dissolved.
00:38:43 ►
This is why the psychedelic thing
00:38:45 ►
is so controversial
00:38:48 ►
such political dynamite
00:38:50 ►
because ultimately it dissolves
00:38:54 ►
the linguistic structures that it finds pre-existing
00:38:58 ►
whatever they are
00:38:59 ►
I really believe this
00:39:01 ►
talking to shamans in the Amazon
00:39:04 ►
ultimately when you get to know them, they will tell you, you know, you think this is easy? You think because I am a wetoto, you think because I wear a gourd on my penis, I am it may be the last time because it’s so hard.
00:39:25 ►
It’s so challenging to who I am.
00:39:28 ►
It always is.
00:39:30 ►
I mean, it’s a real edge.
00:39:31 ►
It’s not an edge that you go and map and then the next time it’s not an edge.
00:39:38 ►
It’s that every time you go, you discover this edge.
00:39:42 ►
It’s the great gift, the great challenge,
00:39:45 ►
the great miracle of human existence
00:39:48 ►
is that within each one of us
00:39:50 ►
there is this dimension
00:39:52 ►
which we can choose to access
00:39:55 ►
which is a constant challenge
00:39:59 ►
to our existential modality.
00:40:02 ►
You know, you don’t have to
00:40:03 ►
mush your way up jungle rivers
00:40:05 ►
and rip jewels from the eyes
00:40:07 ►
of idols and
00:40:09 ►
stuff like that. You can
00:40:12 ►
on a Saturday evening
00:40:13 ►
in the privacy of your own
00:40:15 ►
living room
00:40:17 ►
become your own Magellan.
00:40:21 ►
And you are no
00:40:21 ►
less courageous than Magellan.
00:40:24 ►
Maybe Magellan is a bad example
00:40:26 ►
since he didn’t make it all the way around.
00:40:29 ►
Your own Columbus.
00:40:33 ►
And this dimension of freedom
00:40:36 ►
has always been 95%
00:40:39 ►
of what the human experience was about
00:40:42 ►
in terms of risk and thrills.
00:40:46 ►
And religion is not, you know,
00:40:49 ►
the mumblings of men wearing dresses.
00:40:52 ►
It just isn’t.
00:40:53 ►
Nor is it all of this philosophical mumbo-jumbo
00:40:57 ►
that arises out of rational discourse
00:41:00 ►
and brain specialization.
00:41:04 ►
It’s that somehow part of the package
00:41:08 ►
of being a living, thinking being
00:41:11 ►
is that you get a universe inside of you.
00:41:16 ►
You get a galaxy-sized object inside you
00:41:21 ►
that you can access.
00:41:24 ►
And there there are the mountains,
00:41:26 ►
the rivers, the jungles,
00:41:28 ►
the dynastic families,
00:41:30 ►
the ruins, the planets,
00:41:31 ►
the works of art, the poetry,
00:41:33 ►
the sciences, the magics
00:41:36 ►
of millions upon millions upon millions of worlds.
00:41:39 ►
And this is apparently who we each are.
00:41:43 ►
We’re a little bit of eternity sticking into three-dimensional space
00:41:49 ►
and for some reason occupying time in a monkey body.
00:41:53 ►
But when you turn your eyes then inward, you discover the birthright,
00:42:00 ►
the existential facts out of which this particular existence emerged.
00:42:08 ►
And, you know, without going dewy-eyed,
00:42:11 ►
without lining up with all the religious people,
00:42:16 ►
it’s more real than religion,
00:42:20 ►
because it’s apparently rooted in biology.
00:42:22 ►
And it’s a great secret.
00:42:24 ►
A great secret and a great comfort
00:42:27 ►
because it means, you know,
00:42:29 ►
mystery didn’t die with the fall of Arthur
00:42:33 ►
or the fall of Atlantis
00:42:35 ►
or the fall of anything.
00:42:37 ►
Mystery is alive in the moment,
00:42:40 ►
in the here and now.
00:42:41 ►
It just simply lies on the other side
00:42:44 ►
of a barrier of courage.
00:42:46 ►
And it isn’t even that high a barrier.
00:42:49 ►
It just is a barrier high enough
00:42:51 ►
to keep out the insincere
00:42:53 ►
and the misdirected.
00:42:56 ►
But for those who will claim it,
00:42:58 ►
in the midst of the historical chaos
00:43:00 ►
of the late 20th century,
00:43:02 ►
they become the archaic pioneers.
00:43:07 ►
They become the first people
00:43:09 ►
to carry the Ouroboric serpent around
00:43:12 ►
to its own tail
00:43:14 ►
and to make a closure.
00:43:16 ►
And to the degree that any one of us
00:43:19 ►
has this connection back to the archaic in our life,
00:43:24 ►
it makes where we have been make a lot more sense this connection back to the archaic in our life,
00:43:29 ►
it makes where we have been make a lot more sense and it makes where we’re going seem a lot more inviting,
00:43:34 ►
which it really is, I think.
00:43:38 ►
Well, that’s all I have to say.
00:43:40 ►
I think we can probably…
00:43:42 ►
It’s a little early.
00:43:44 ►
Does anybody have anything
00:43:45 ►
they want to add? Yeah.
00:43:47 ►
You’ve been talking about the ego a lot
00:43:50 ►
and its dissolution and breaking through
00:43:51 ►
the boundaries of it.
00:43:54 ►
And it sometimes sounds
00:43:56 ►
like ego has a pejorative connotation.
00:43:58 ►
On the other hand, you’ve just been talking
00:44:00 ►
very briefly about the fact
00:44:02 ►
that it’s up to each of us
00:44:04 ►
in our own unique individuation to claim what
00:44:08 ►
can be claimed, and that even a small individual little ego can virtually change the world
00:44:15 ►
if it has the right place to stand.
00:44:18 ►
It seems like these…
00:44:19 ►
So how do you balance these things?
00:44:21 ►
Yeah, I just…
00:44:22 ►
Really, the question is, what is the future of the ego as we know it? Say
00:44:27 ►
post-2012, will the ego really be more of a group ego or a transformation of our ego
00:44:34 ►
or is the ultimate goal to shed our egos completely and become some form of individuation which
00:44:40 ►
we can’t even dream about at this point?
00:44:42 ►
individuation which you can’t even dream about at this point
00:44:42 ►
well you’re right
00:44:45 ►
there’s a dynamic tension there
00:44:47 ►
sometimes when this comes up
00:44:49 ►
I answer it by saying
00:44:51 ►
that you need an ego
00:44:54 ►
if you didn’t have an ego
00:44:56 ►
you wouldn’t know whose mouth
00:44:58 ►
to put food in when you have dinner
00:45:00 ►
with someone at a restaurant
00:45:01 ►
so ego
00:45:04 ►
is necessary to keep
00:45:05 ►
straight whose orifices are
00:45:07 ►
whose and
00:45:09 ►
that’s the main function of ego
00:45:11 ►
but
00:45:14 ►
then you know there is
00:45:16 ►
a deeper level to it
00:45:17 ►
somehow the way I imagine
00:45:20 ►
it is that
00:45:21 ►
the ego is
00:45:23 ►
the correct expression of ego
00:45:26 ►
is when there is ego present,
00:45:31 ►
but it is perceived as Tao.
00:45:35 ►
In other words, Tao is this state
00:45:38 ►
where you just go along
00:45:40 ►
and somehow get along.
00:45:43 ►
And ego is a state where you’re somehow pushing the river
00:45:47 ►
and that’s how you get along
00:45:48 ►
I think the ego of the future
00:45:52 ►
will be much less possessive
00:45:55 ►
and that it’s the possessiveness
00:45:58 ►
the projection of the
00:46:00 ►
domain
00:46:04 ►
really of the ego outside of itself,
00:46:08 ►
specifically the control of other people,
00:46:12 ►
you know, sexual partners, children, parents.
00:46:18 ►
The way I imagine this pastoral situation of 12 or 15,000 years ago to work
00:46:25 ►
was people simply had group values
00:46:29 ►
because the children were group-owned.
00:46:34 ►
And that made such a tremendous difference
00:46:37 ►
in how the society imaged itself.
00:46:40 ►
People lived for the group,
00:46:44 ►
and at the core of the group were the children
00:46:46 ►
and people always put them first
00:46:49 ►
so everyone identified with the children
00:46:54 ►
everyone was willing to face risk
00:46:56 ►
to preserve the core of the younger gene pool
00:47:01 ►
and that that was what made the difference
00:47:04 ►
this concern for male paternity is
00:47:07 ►
really a poisonous factor and uh see the the when you look at primatology generally it’s pretty
00:47:20 ►
clear that as a group of species primates do tend to male dominance that even the even the the apes
00:47:29 ►
and the squirrel monkeys and the New World primates in the wild there’s usually an alpha male that’s
00:47:37 ►
dominant so this symbiosis between human beings cattle cattle, and psychedelic plants that
00:47:46 ►
allowed the feminine to emerge
00:47:48 ►
was something that was emerging
00:47:50 ►
against the grain
00:47:52 ►
of primate organization.
00:47:54 ►
So really what has happened is we
00:47:56 ►
have returned to a more
00:47:58 ►
animal kind of existence. We are
00:48:00 ►
more like beasts
00:48:02 ►
than the people of
00:48:03 ►
10,000 to 15,000 years ago, because they were using
00:48:08 ►
psychedelics to artificially, you could say, or pharmacologically inflate feminine values.
00:48:18 ►
And this allowed them to become civilized people. I mean, I have somewhat elaborate theory about this,
00:48:26 ►
but I think that women are responsible for the emergence of language
00:48:31 ►
because I think that the division of labor that we know went on very early
00:48:38 ►
because of the male’s larger body size in the upper half of the body,
00:48:42 ►
that the males tended to specialize toward hunting.
00:48:46 ►
Hunting puts a premium on physical strength
00:48:49 ►
and stoicism,
00:48:52 ►
meaning sitting a long time with your mouth shut.
00:48:55 ►
And then you have a limited number of commands.
00:48:59 ►
The women and bladder control is very important
00:49:04 ►
where women fail that test.
00:49:07 ►
So then what the women were doing was they were specialized as gatherers
00:49:13 ►
of plants and roots and insects and stuff like that.
00:49:16 ►
Well, this is a tremendous pressure to develop descriptive taxonomy
00:49:22 ►
because gathering is the art of descriptive taxonomy. Because gathering is the art of descriptive taxonomy.
00:49:27 ►
You want to know that you want, you know,
00:49:30 ►
the little bulbous root with the yellow flowers
00:49:34 ►
that grows down between the shattered granite boulders near the creek.
00:49:38 ►
It’s all language, language, language.
00:49:41 ►
And the pressure is life and death.
00:49:47 ►
If you eat the wrong plant, you become very sick, or you abort your fetus, or you die. So those who were well able to describe the objects
00:49:55 ►
of the hunting gathering, of the gathering side of the economy, were quickly outbred those who weren’t. And language may have even been a kind of secret ability of women at some point.
00:50:10 ►
You see, psilocybin synergizes language-like bursts of activity
00:50:16 ►
and may have been the thing which set it over.
00:50:21 ►
But what happened in this woman situation with language is a good example of what often
00:50:27 ►
happens with cultural innovation. The women possessed all this knowledge about hunting,
00:50:33 ►
about the gathering of plants and the magical use and preparation of plants, but at a certain point, the database became so huge that it underwent a collapse conceptually.
00:50:49 ►
And some brilliant woman realized, we don’t have to know about 600 plants and all these locations and seasonal variations and all this.
00:51:00 ►
We just have to concentrate on five plants and really learn all about those plants
00:51:07 ►
and then we can dispense with all this stuff
00:51:09 ►
and this was probably because in the nomadic cycle
00:51:12 ►
they would encounter their own middens from the year before
00:51:16 ►
and there there would be cereal grains sprouted
00:51:19 ►
and you quickly put it together
00:51:21 ►
but the specialization represented by agriculture,
00:51:25 ►
that was the beginning of the end, as far as I’m concerned.
00:51:29 ►
Because at that point, there was retraction away from nature.
00:51:35 ►
It was no longer about letting nature guide you
00:51:38 ►
to gather and find what you needed.
00:51:42 ►
It was a kind of paranoid,
00:51:47 ►
a kind of rip-off attitude.
00:51:48 ►
It was, you know,
00:51:52 ►
let us exploit these five plants.
00:51:53 ►
This means tilling the ground.
00:51:56 ►
It means the end of nomadism because now we’re going to settle in one place
00:51:59 ►
and we’re going to redirect the flow of water
00:52:01 ►
and we’re going to become agriculturalists.
00:52:05 ►
It’s an entirely different psychology.
00:52:08 ►
Weston Labar said that psychedelic shamanism died
00:52:13 ►
when it became important to get up in the morning
00:52:17 ►
and go out and hoe the corn.
00:52:19 ►
And then people replaced the psychedelic gods
00:52:23 ►
with the gods of wheat and corn.
00:52:26 ►
The Tammuz, the corn god of ancient Babylon, then appears.
00:52:32 ►
And gods of agriculture and male dominance go hand in hand.
00:52:37 ►
The previous religion at the edge of the high Neolithic
00:52:41 ►
was this religion of the great horned goddess.
00:52:46 ►
edge of the high neolithic was this religion of the great horned goddess and it was a religion of nomadic pastoralism orgiastic sexual you know activity psychedelic drugs and
00:52:56 ►
and tremendous emphasis on cattle cattle were the great bridge to all these concepts. We start out as a baboon-like creature
00:53:06 ►
wandering behind these herds of ungulate cattle.
00:53:10 ►
I’ve seen baboons do this in Kenya,
00:53:14 ►
flipping over cow pies,
00:53:16 ►
looking for carrion beetle grubs as a source of fat and protein.
00:53:22 ►
But then, you know, we went from predation on carrion the kills of
00:53:28 ►
larger animals to slowly actually domesticating these things and the milk
00:53:34 ►
and the blood and the manure and the meat and the mushroom would all be seen
00:53:43 ►
to be things which came quite naturally from
00:53:46 ►
the cow the cow was like the supreme feminine symbol and all over North
00:53:54 ►
Africa and the ancient Middle East you get this paleolithic late paleolithic
00:54:00 ►
great horned goddess the cattle religion and the emergence of consciousness
00:54:05 ►
seemed to go
00:54:06 ►
hand in hand
00:54:09 ►
one time I was
00:54:11 ►
waiting for a load of
00:54:13 ►
mushrooms to come on
00:54:15 ►
and
00:54:16 ►
it was very
00:54:19 ►
strong, I had sort of
00:54:21 ►
miscalculated and I had gotten
00:54:23 ►
too much and I could see this thing
00:54:25 ►
just coming at me, huge force. And, uh, I heard a voice. It was actually the Swiss air stewardess
00:54:35 ►
from Frederico Fellini’s eight and a half, but it was that voice. And she said, uh,
00:54:44 ►
they say it helps to lay down cowboy
00:54:47 ►
and I was amused
00:54:52 ►
at the time or later
00:54:54 ►
when I had time to be amused
00:54:55 ►
I was amused
00:54:56 ►
but then I realized
00:54:58 ►
this mode of address
00:55:00 ►
cowboy
00:55:01 ►
is probably typical of the mushroom
00:55:04 ►
because for most 95% of its
00:55:07 ►
existence most of what it’s dealt with are cowboys and cowgirls because these
00:55:12 ►
are the people who follow along behind the cows these are the people who
00:55:16 ►
invented astrology from watching the stars and many people myself included
00:55:22 ►
have reported the experience of looking at the stars stoned on psilocybin
00:55:27 ►
and having the mushroom supply dotted lines between the constellations.
00:55:32 ►
There it is, there’s the map.
00:55:37 ►
Yes, pastoralists, herders, they invented the calendar from watching the horizon
00:55:46 ►
and you know what we looked at
00:55:48 ►
last night was partially a calendar
00:55:50 ►
it’s very interesting
00:55:52 ►
if you look, if you want a meditation
00:55:54 ►
on shamanism
00:55:56 ►
politics, time
00:55:58 ►
and so forth
00:55:59 ►
look at hexagram 49
00:56:02 ►
in the I Ching
00:56:03 ►
which is revolution.
00:56:06 ►
And you might go to this
00:56:07 ►
expecting a treatise on political upheaval.
00:56:11 ►
And it says instead,
00:56:13 ►
the magician is a calendar maker.
00:56:17 ►
He measures the seasons and sets them right.
00:56:20 ►
And it’s this idea of reconstruction of time. the message that i get out of the psychedelics
00:56:29 ►
is that that we need to reframe the largest frames in our linguistic cosmology means reformation of
00:56:40 ►
the calendar reformation of language that we cannot evolve any faster
00:56:47 ►
than the languages that we are imprisoned within.
00:56:50 ►
We are linguistic creatures somehow.
00:56:54 ►
And so we need strategies,
00:56:58 ►
catalysts, enzymes,
00:57:02 ►
whatever it is, practices,
00:57:04 ►
that force the evolution of language
00:57:07 ►
along conscious lines.
00:57:09 ►
If we don’t do this,
00:57:11 ►
the old styles of thinking,
00:57:13 ►
the old concepts,
00:57:14 ►
are just going to pull us down.
00:57:17 ►
Well, to my mind,
00:57:19 ►
this makes psychedelics central
00:57:21 ►
to any political reconstruction
00:57:24 ►
because psychedelics are the only force in nature
00:57:28 ►
that actually dissolves linguistic structure,
00:57:32 ►
lets the mechanics of syntax be visible,
00:57:36 ►
allows the possibility for the introduction,
00:57:39 ►
rapid introduction and spread of new concepts,
00:57:43 ►
gives permission for new ways of seeing.
00:57:48 ►
And this is what we have to do.
00:57:49 ►
We have to change our minds.
00:57:52 ►
Well, that’s it.
00:57:54 ►
Thank you very much.
00:57:55 ►
I enjoyed this.
00:57:58 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:58:00 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:58:02 ►
one thought at a time.
00:58:05 ►
We have to change our minds. so says the Bard McKenna. And if that isn’t an open-ended statement,
00:58:13 ►
then I don’t know what is. And if I can get my act together, well, that is the very topic that
00:58:19 ►
I plan to cover in my next podcast. But for today, I’m going to have to keep this short,
00:58:24 ►
because for the last several days,
00:58:27 ►
I’ve been fighting a head cold and a sore throat.
00:58:29 ►
So I’m not inclined to do much more talking right now.
00:58:33 ►
So I’ll just leave you with a brief soundbite
00:58:36 ►
from today’s podcast.
00:58:38 ►
And hopefully you’re going to give this some serious thought.
00:58:43 ►
It’s a rare moment for the collectivity
00:58:47 ►
to try to anchor itself in larger visions.
00:58:54 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:58:59 ►
Be well, my friends.