Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: August 4, 1998
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A certain portion of my audience is flakier than I am comfortable with.”
“The whole point with psychedelics was to cut through the programming and the cant, and the propaganda of culture to true truth, real reality, not to just initiate an era of intellectual permissiveness where everything in the spiritual marketplace was placed on the same pedestal as Euclidean geometry.”
“It offends me that psychedelic people are susceptible to this [New Age thinking], because it seems to me that we’re the last people who should be susceptible to this. We have no need of spiritual illusions because we have access to spiritual realities through the substances and the plants. So why should we, least of all why should we, buy in to all these unanchored, wholly, fluffed-headed ideas that are being pushed in the spiritual marketplace?”
“If you’re intelligent and you live past forty you will outgrow your culture. Some people may do it sooner, but you have to be a complete idiot to just buy-in at fifty-five, at sixty, at seventy-five. At eighty what are you still going to be doing, expressing homophobic views, voting Republican, and worrying about the A, B, and C’s of phony reality? Most people get to a place where they just see it’s a bunch of crap.”
“It looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us. In other words, belief is for kids. It’s a fairy tale. Marxism is no different than belief in the Easter Bunny. Probability theory is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny. Everybody needs to get a grip on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise.”
“So the way to live with a human mind in the world is not to believe things, that’s childish. It’s undignified. The thing to do is to build models.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
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And since last week, we’ve received donations from three fellow salonners.
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Marie and Barry, who are dear friends of my wife and I,
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and from Dan O., who comes from a town not far from where I lived while in high school.
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And if it wasn’t for the fact that Dan is ten years younger than I am,
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I’d say that, well, we probably played football and
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basketball against one another. Anyway, it’s always good to hear from another Midwesterner,
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as is Barry as well, now that I think of it. Anyway, a big thank you to our donors and also
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to our fellow salonners who aren’t in a position to make a financial contribution to the salon, but
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who are regularly telling their
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friends about these podcasts. We’re all in this together, you know, so thank you all very much.
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Now, have you ever wondered what Terrence McKenna would say about some of the things that are taking
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place in the quagmire of U.S. politics today? I know that I have, and in just a moment, we’re going to hear his thoughts about what he calls the social virus of political correctness, which just happens to be in the news these days.
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This talk is the first of a series of what he called in-house get-togethers with the staff at the Esalen Institute.
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And there are seven tapes in this
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series, and to my knowledge, they were never formally produced or sold. And this introductory
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talk that I’m about to play was given on August 4th in 1998. And for those of you who have been
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to Esalen and would like to picture Terrence and his little crowd, well, this talk was given on
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the lawn of the big house,
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where those gathered could look out at the Pacific
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while listening to the Bard McKenna
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way out there on the edge of the West.
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As far as what these things are about,
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they’re much easier for me and more interesting for people
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if they’re driven by the agendas of the people present. I can always lapse into various set
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pieces and raves, but it’s getting harder and harder to do around here because everybody’s heard all my schticks.
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So that’s the basic notion. It’ll probably be a shifting population of people and the lectures if they’re that formalized probably won’t be particularly sequential or
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or linked thematically I’ve got different things on my mind you probably have different things on
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your mind and then again the question part makes it most interesting We’ll begin at 8 every night and then we’ll just go as long as
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there seems to be something to say. As far as today is concerned, it’s completely open.
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People can say what they would want to hear or ask questions or, you know, I can extemporize whatever works.
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I don’t know what the expectations of the people here are,
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so why don’t you tell me?
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And if necessary, I’ll organize some hideously declined process
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where everyone is forced
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to say something or you can
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just grow up
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and those of you who have
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something to say, say something and those
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who have not, not
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your choice
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jump into the
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fray, save a friend.
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Yeah, sure, I can talk about that.
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I mean, I’ve been thinking, I guess, more about my own philosophy
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because I’ve been, in the past couple of years,
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had more negative attention than i ever had before i mean it wasn’t
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overwhelming but those of you who are on the novelty list know that there were some fairly
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ugly cat fights over the higher mathematics of the time wave and and so i got to used to thinking of myself as something which needs to be defended
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so that was interesting
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also I don’t know whether it’s that I’m getting older
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or that the society is taking
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a sort of different developmental turn
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but I find lots more of what goes on seems not only idiotic
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but sort of personally irritating and confrontative
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and so I find myself, at least in my mind, going through a lot of kvetching and grinding about the situation in terms of public discourse and
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the search for truth and understanding. It’s become, well let me talk about this a little bit in california at any rate and since we’re in
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california i’ll talk about it more vehemently because when i’ve tried this rap in england and
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in new york city people say we don’t have this problem you’re talking about uh especially in England. And basically, so what I’ve identified
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is a kind of social virus of political correctness
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generated either north or south of here,
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a couple of hundred miles.
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And the basic notion is it has become uncool
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to point out, even to yourself,
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that somebody else doesn’t make sense. And I’ve talked a bit about
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this at Esalen. I’ve called it the Balkanization of epistemology, which is a very fancy phrase for
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meaning you have to show due respect to people who can’t tell shit from Shinola
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you have to admit
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that it’s a
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true the search for truth is a very
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uncertain
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enterprise and that
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revelation is on an equal footing
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with science and that
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the whole notion of
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evidence is hideously
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stifling and legalistic and not to be taken seriously, so forth and so on.
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So I come up against this problem fairly often because a certain portion of my audience is flakier than I am comfortable with and so I’ve had to try
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and understand how this could happen my thing consistently for 20 years or
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something has been in tight orbit around psychedelics and the psychedelic experience with special
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emphasis on experience that it’s not a philosophy it’s not a revelation it’s
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not a lineage it’s not a teaching it’s an experience and how you obtain it is
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quite simple you know you ingest a plant or a substance.
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It’s not about, you know, dietary prohibitions, celibacy, obedience, constancy, moral worth.
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None of these things enter into it.
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It was this very simple method. And I always, the reason I was so keen for it was because when I was growing up and in my youth, I was very interested in the idea of paranormal, of the miraculous.
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of the miraculous.
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And I remember one of the early things I read was Rockcliffe’s 19th century study,
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Illusions, Extraordinary Illusions and Delusions
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of the Supernatural and the Occult,
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which lists ectoplasm, crowd hysteria,
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mesmerism, Ouija boards,
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all these things are discussed in their turn.
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So my fascination was with the weird and the fringy and even the occult and the frankly magical and the heretical.
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But my method was always scientific. It was never to believe these things unquestioningly.
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It was always to take A.E. Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic
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and collect rosemary and steal proper instruments from the village rectory
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and save the host
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and then attempt the conjuration.
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And then if it failed,
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put a checkmark after medieval ceremonial magic.
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Does not compute.
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And move on.
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So I grew up in a small town in a very isolated situation.
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And nothing about this seemed strange to me.
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This method of approaching the occult.
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And I read J.B. Rhine and that was all about statistically gathering data and so forth and so on.
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Well, somewhere along the line,
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and some people, interestingly, have suggested,
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both to me personally and then I’ve seen it in print, that these very substances and plants that I’m so keen for
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have somehow had on the mass mind
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the effect of generally softening heads
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so that
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epistemological rigor
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has broken down
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and rules of evidence
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have been compromised
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and now every
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half-baked intuition
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can come flooding
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through and as long as it has
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its coterie of bleating adherence,
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it will take its place, you know, in the great yellow pages of American Revelation
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as part of the spiritual smorgasbord.
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Well, I abhor this argument, because the whole point with psychedelics was to cut through the programming
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and the cant and the propaganda of culture to true truth real reality not to just initiate an era of intellectual permissiveness where everything in the spiritual marketplace
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was placed on the same pedestal as Euclidean geometry.
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And in a way, this is what has happened.
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So I’m interested to understand what went wrong.
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And, you know, I don’t know if anything can be fixed anymore, but it can be fixed in my own mind if I understand it.
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It began this devolution of the discursive environment with a healthy skepticism of science.
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There had been too much science.
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And science had thrown out too many babies
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with the bathwater.
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I’m talking approximately the time of the birth
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of the human potential movement
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and the coming on of LSD and all that.
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What was happening in science at the same time
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was people were building atom bombs
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or they were propounding behavioral psychology,
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ratomorphic theories of behavior.
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It was a great era of the triumph of reductionism and so forth.
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So a whole lot of people wrote deconstructive books and essays about science and trying to link it back to the spiritual
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and successfully in my opinion probably the most dramatic of these books was thomas kern’s book
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probably most of you have read it, The Structure of
00:13:45 ►
Scientific Revolutions, where he offers the, for the time, startling proposal and then
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proves it, that modern science is actually based on very woo-woo revelations, spiritual encounters with aliens,
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people who had visionary dreams, and so forth.
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And that the story science likes to tell
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about how it does its work,
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which is you take your colleague’s earlier work,
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you carefully check the facts,
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you perform experiments,
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you advance the theory
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by incrementally advancing hypotheses, which you perform experiments, you advance the theory by incrementally advancing
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hypotheses, which you carefully test. And that’s the story you tell once you have the beast
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dead in the boat. But the real experience of dragging one of these things out of the water
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is much more dramatic and hair-raising and chance-taking. For instance, we know now that Gregor Mendel,
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when he did his experiments with sweet peas,
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that if he had actually been rigorous in his observations,
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he would have missed the laws of genetic segregation.
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The sweet pea doesn’t quite perform in the theoretical way that Mendel’s
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notebooks seem to show. What he did was he rounded up and rounded down because he already had an
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intuition that the recessive gene would have a certain mathematical characteristic. So he played with the data to make the theory right.
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Well, then it turned out it was right.
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But rarely can you play this game and get away with it the way he did.
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So as acid came on in the late 50s and early 60s,
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and as science reached its most reductionist and obnoxious crescendo,
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there was this healthy skepticism of science.
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It had gone too far.
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It was producing atom bombs, but not giving us a social psychology
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or a theory of psychoanalysis or anything like that that we could really use.
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That seemed to be coming from the underground.
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What was wrong with science?
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Well, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but just as an aside, if you’re interested in it,
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just as an aside if you’re interested in it,
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I think it had become too dependent on probability theory,
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on statistical analysis, on certain assumptions in the way it did its mathematical bookkeeping
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were not apparent to the second, third generation of scientists
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working in this manner. So when I’m confronted with a historical phenomenon that seems like
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it’s gone off the tracks, it’s gotten into the ditch, my method is to go back through
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its history to try and find the last sane moment that it knew, and then encompass it somehow through modeling.
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And when you try to do this, a rule that quickly forces its limitations upon you is, and it’s very basic to the Western mind, is this thing formulated as Occam’s razor.
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William of Occam was a 14th century philosopher who founded a point of view called nominalism. But the thing that Ockham said that is germane for this argument is, he said it in Latin and there’s different arguments about exactly what he said, but here’s the boil down.
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down. What he said was hypotheses should
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not be multiplied without
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necessity.
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Or, to further
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boil it down,
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keep it simple, stupid.
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Or,
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halfway between these two points,
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in all situations,
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the simplest adequate
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explanation should be
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preferred.
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So see, what this is, it’s also sometimes called the principle of parsimony. Parsimony being the simplest and most elegant way of doing something.
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So it’s the principle of parsimony that the simplest adequate explanation should always
00:19:02 ►
be preferred. This is a great idea. I don’t think you will get into
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trouble with this idea. And to sort of close the loop generated by Jim’s question,
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this is where the reaction to science has gone wrong. The principle of parsimony is no longer now intuitively grasped by other
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people. In other words, when you sit down at the table in the dining room to talk about
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the universe with people, you cannot be sure that if you mention this idea, whether you
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called it Occam’s razor the
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principle of parsimony or you just explained what it meant you can’t be
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sure that it would have any intellectual force with people somehow people have
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moved into a Baroque or even Rococo phase in their model building. And they have no problem adding on incredibly improbable
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and illogical bells, whistles, curlicues, filigrees,
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fleur-de-lis, paisleys, and what have you to their thinking.
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And it’s a problem. It’s a problem for everybody in society.
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What puzzles me is it offends me that psychedelic people are susceptible to this,
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because it seems to me we’re the last people who should be susceptible to this we have no need of spiritual
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illusions because we have access to spiritual realities through the substances and the plants
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so why should we buy in to all these unanchored woolly fluff-headed ideas that are
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being pushed in the spiritual marketplace the only answer i’ve been able to come up with is
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simple proximity that by the rest of society we have been lumped in with these people
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and they move freely among us, easily detected but rarely ostracized.
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Our own tolerance has become our weakness.
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And it’s this weird political correctness where people do not say
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what you just said
00:21:45 ►
is preposterous.
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It makes no sense
00:21:49 ►
whatsoever. This is
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just thought so
00:21:53 ►
ungenerous of spirit
00:21:57 ►
to point out that someone makes
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no sense at all.
00:22:01 ►
It’s that their feelings, I think,
00:22:04 ►
have become preeminent in the value system.
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It’s more important not to hurt someone’s feelings than to let them walk around with a head full of
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crap. So having identified this as a problem and having never been terribly sensitive to other people’s feelings anyway. I was a good person to send
00:22:31 ►
to the ramp. But the consequences of this are not good. In other words, if we really want to build a sane and caring world, we can’t do it
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based on illusion, unanchored thinking, and just plain silliness. It’s very hard. You know, the vitiating the thrust of
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critical thinking with this cult of generalized political correctness we weaken our case for a new way of running the world. In fact, our entire
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political phenomenon becomes a case against the relinquishing of power by the old order.
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relinquishing the relinquishing of power by the old order so you know i’ve tried to put this in a very general form without naming names or goring anybody’s particular ox because i don’t think it’s
00:24:15 ►
a good idea to then move on to the inquisition and drag each practitioner forward and you know with fire and Lance separate the the dross from the gold
00:24:28 ►
but in a sense I think this needs to be done internally and it’s a strange thing it’s a strange thing. It’s very complicated. Part of the problem,
00:24:47 ►
and we’ve talked about this in the past,
00:24:49 ►
is that the media
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is a system for amplifying
00:24:55 ►
the trivial and the absurd.
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In other words,
00:25:00 ►
man goes to work,
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does superb job,
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returns home.
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This is no headline.
00:25:09 ►
No one is interested in this.
00:25:12 ►
But, you know, alien mom nine gives birth to dead Christ.
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Now, this is extraordinary and resonates in many people’s minds.
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And, you know, if there were corroborative evidence, it would move around the planet as a hysteria within hours.
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As intellectuals, which by intellectuals I mean people who can read, as intellectuals, we are guiltier than most people in participating and tolerating this kind of a system,
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because it literally is a system of bread and circuses.
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You know, energy follows attention.
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Therefore, if attention’s focus can be trivialized,
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focus can be trivialized those who work in the background of social consciousness
00:26:08 ►
are completely unobserved
00:26:10 ►
and what can be done about the media
00:26:16 ►
why does the media behave this way and what can be done about it
00:26:20 ►
well the media amplifies trivia
00:26:24 ►
because trivia sells. And ultimately, you know,
00:26:30 ►
it’s hard not to reason back to one’s own guilt. Ultimately, it is the childishness and self-indulgence
00:26:40 ►
and muddle-headedness of each one of us that allows this entire system to come into existence,
00:26:48 ►
this system of commodity fetishization,
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objectification of social value,
00:27:01 ►
the marketplace of ideas,
00:27:04 ►
the idea that everything can be put into an economic model
00:27:09 ►
and value
00:27:10 ►
and then our appetite for pop culture
00:27:16 ►
which is essentially an arena of
00:27:21 ►
propagandization, brainwashing, and brand consciousness establishing.
00:27:29 ►
And it’s weird how everyone, and I include myself in this,
00:27:34 ►
issues themselves an exception to the felt moral obligation
00:27:40 ►
to have nothing to do with this stuff.
00:27:42 ►
I mean, you can be sitting with people of great intellect and intelligence
00:27:48 ►
and then somebody will say something so absolutely bonehead lame
00:27:53 ►
that the entire illusion of any intellectual class
00:27:58 ►
or class of exclusive understanding completely dissolves, you know,
00:28:04 ►
as someone tears off to a sail at Barney’s
00:28:07 ►
or something like that.
00:28:09 ►
There’s no end to it.
00:28:13 ►
And then in the ideological zone,
00:28:15 ►
which I keep being drawn back to talk about,
00:28:19 ►
but which I sense is the dangerous area.
00:28:22 ►
In the ideological zone,
00:28:24 ►
there’s just all kinds of unexamined,
00:28:26 ►
shoddy intellectual goods on the market.
00:28:31 ►
Rupert and I, Rupert Sheldrake was here a few weeks ago
00:28:34 ►
helping launch a new book that we wrote with Ralph Abraham.
00:28:38 ►
We were talking about this,
00:28:39 ►
and he said what we need to do
00:28:40 ►
is establish an ideological consumer report
00:28:44 ►
where you would publish each month and
00:28:47 ►
you would analyze these ideologies in columns and one of the columns would be requires any
00:28:55 ►
special conditions and so for instance if the theory required uh unobserved 12th planet you would put that in the column then you
00:29:06 ►
would say evidence of special condition none and then you would move on and by
00:29:13 ►
this way you would rate and then people could buy in the intellectual marketplace
00:29:18 ►
with a little more confidence of course this is a parody it’s a satire what is
00:29:23 ►
it a parody of it’s a parody of people’s inability to perform this function for themselves. Neoteny is a biological phenomenon of prolonged juvenileization in a species,
00:29:48 ►
or the technical definition is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.
00:30:00 ►
And primatologists studying human beings have been at pains to observe that many things about us
00:30:08 ►
are infantile when we look at other primates for instance our hairlessness all primates are born
00:30:15 ►
hairless but we alone retain that characteristic throughout most of life The ratio of our skull to our torso is a fetal ratio in other primates.
00:30:28 ►
We retain the fetal ratio throughout life. Well, what we talked about last time was how culture,
00:30:39 ►
evolution has carried this process to a certain level, and then culture seems to step in to put the nails in the
00:30:46 ►
coffin to completely neotenize you and so we have uh you know uh 65 year old men running around in
00:30:56 ►
sweatpants and nike running shoes and everybody having their butt tucked and their tits pumped
00:31:03 ►
and all of this well Well, what is this?
00:31:08 ►
This is a culture of youth, the youth values,
00:31:14 ►
only the youthful body, only the youthful vigor is worth talking about. And it sells.
00:31:18 ►
If you can get people really neurotically twisted around this idea,
00:31:23 ►
then instead of life being an unfoldment into wisdom,
00:31:28 ►
it’s an anxiety-producing fall away from a perfect state of youth, which can only then be approached
00:31:35 ►
through dyeing your hair, wearing certain colognes, certain brands of clothes, psychotherapy, yada yada yada, all of these things. So, neoteny is what I have identified
00:31:48 ►
as the way culture works at us to dumb us down. And I’ve even sort of reached the conclusion that,
00:32:00 ►
you know, nature has a limited repertoire of energy
00:32:06 ►
to expend in the evolution of any given species,
00:32:10 ►
so once a purpose is achieved,
00:32:13 ►
excess energy doesn’t flow toward that purpose.
00:32:17 ►
Well, it hit me once after I had a physical
00:32:20 ►
and I was buttoning up,
00:32:22 ►
my doctor said,
00:32:28 ►
you know, in the 19th century, people,
00:32:35 ►
most people your age were dead, which is true. In the 19th, the average age in the 19th century was about 36 to 40 for the American male. I’m 52. A lot of people are outliving their culture and if you’re intelligent
00:32:48 ►
and you live past 40
00:32:51 ►
you will outgrow your culture
00:32:54 ►
some people may do it sooner
00:32:56 ►
but you have to be a complete idiot
00:32:58 ►
to just buy in at 55, at 60
00:33:03 ►
at 75, at 80.
00:33:05 ►
You know, what are you still going to be doing?
00:33:08 ►
Expressing homophobic views, voting Republican,
00:33:11 ►
and worrying about the A, B, and Cs of phony reality?
00:33:16 ►
I mean, most people get to a place where they just see it’s a bunch of crap, you know?
00:33:22 ►
The scandals are recycled.
00:33:28 ►
The philosophical issues are recycled, the philosophical issues are recycled, the technical innovations are recycled. Once you’ve been through about three cycles of this, you
00:33:33 ►
realize that, you know, this is a media-created state of cultural involvement and reciprocal
00:33:42 ►
narcissism, only to be assuaged by the expenditure of money
00:33:47 ►
and that you can just walk away from it’s uh it’s unnecessary and in fact this walking away from it
00:33:55 ►
by more and more people i think is a precondition to any kind of reasonable attempt to get the planet on a course where crises begin to diminish
00:34:11 ►
rather than be endlessly exacerbated.
00:34:16 ►
The values of production, acquisition, reproduction are all fatal to any human enterprise
00:34:27 ►
except the short-term success of the marketplace.
00:34:31 ►
And apparently that is to be the primary maximized value.
00:34:37 ►
So this is a long answer to the question. The short answer is my approach to reality is
00:34:47 ►
hands-on, and I wouldn’t call it scientific
00:34:53 ►
because it’s not statistical, but it’s realistic.
00:34:59 ►
First of all, nothing is what it appears to be.
00:35:03 ►
But on the other hand, very large structures are not likely to come into being
00:35:09 ►
unless they quickly achieve their purpose.
00:35:12 ►
So in other words, forms of conspiracy theory seem to me over-Baroque.
00:35:18 ►
I think the real truth about how reality works is that it’s pretty much on automatic.
00:35:24 ►
Chaos is the ruling player. Chance
00:35:28 ►
is cast in the number two role. And the unexpected is in there somewhere. And then, you know,
00:35:36 ►
if somebody can organize a conspiracy and keep it running in one direction in the face of all that? Well, fine. It’s good to talk about this here because Esalen has been,
00:35:50 ►
you know, a place where many very deep new ideas have been generated.
00:35:57 ►
Revolutions in psychotherapy, revolutions in general systems thinking,
00:36:03 ►
revolutions in general systems thinking very significant political
00:36:06 ►
movements have been advanced from here
00:36:09 ►
the whole Soviet
00:36:11 ►
reassessment and all that
00:36:15 ►
but also Esalen has been a source of
00:36:18 ►
some of the wackiest and least anchored
00:36:22 ►
of these ideas
00:36:24 ►
and that’s fine in the context of the idea and least anchored of these ideas.
00:36:29 ►
And that’s fine in the context of the idea that all forms of advocacy should be permitted,
00:36:36 ►
and I would agree with that.
00:36:37 ►
But I think the counter or the reflexive value
00:36:42 ►
that must attend that is that all forms of advocacy must be
00:36:46 ►
fairly criticized and there needs to be a general and this is the part that
00:36:54 ►
is the itch i keep trying to scratch there needs to be a general understanding of what constitutes of what we mean by words like
00:37:06 ►
proof, evidence
00:37:08 ►
and testimony
00:37:12 ►
you know
00:37:15 ►
the law is an interesting
00:37:17 ►
it’s interesting to me how the law has been remarkably
00:37:21 ►
immune to the general
00:37:24 ►
wooliness that has crept into
00:37:27 ►
thinking. It is, if you commit
00:37:32 ►
murder, that the greys made you do it is not
00:37:36 ►
defensible. The devil made me do it. I mean, maybe it
00:37:40 ►
is defensible, but it’s a pitiful
00:37:42 ►
defense.
00:37:51 ►
It may be traumatic for people to testify in front of a grand jury, but on the other hand, if you have evidentiary material related to a crime,
00:37:58 ►
you’re going to have to talk to the grand jury in the name of the generally established canons
00:38:08 ►
of what is good for society.
00:38:13 ►
And I think, you know,
00:38:15 ►
if those kinds of methods were applied
00:38:18 ►
to a lot of so-called paranormal phenomena,
00:38:21 ►
abductions, flying saucers, sightings, so forth and so on,
00:38:25 ►
they would just melt like the morning dew.
00:38:29 ►
It’s the inability to subpoena testimony and explore contradiction
00:38:35 ►
that makes this stuff at the second, third, fourth, and fifth retelling seem so compelling.
00:38:48 ►
And then one other aspect of all this, and then we can go on to something else and that is we seem to be very naive about the nature of communication
00:38:55 ►
and how 95 or 99 of what moves around is unsubstantiated rumor based on uninformed
00:39:08 ►
opinion i mean you know we sit here with the assumption that we’re all in the same universe
00:39:17 ►
more or less and that we’re all experiencing the same reality more or less but this is just a polite fiction i mean if if we were
00:39:28 ►
to go around the circle and instead of telling your name and your professional occupation you
00:39:34 ►
were uh asked to explain how a common household device works so for you the television set for you the austerizer for you
00:39:49 ►
the thermostat for you the furnace i think we would largely discover that if anything
00:39:56 ►
passed the most trivial level it just turns into elves and goblins out there. I mean, we’re hardly different from New Guinea Highlanders.
00:40:08 ►
And we think we understand.
00:40:11 ►
Everybody’s model works for them,
00:40:14 ►
even if they think, you know,
00:40:15 ►
that it’s hemogoblins in your blood
00:40:18 ►
that run around carrying oxygen,
00:40:21 ►
because they heard it that way in second grade.
00:40:29 ►
So this is sort of a terrifying thought to contemplate, that the actual understanding of reality is held in our species as a kind of
00:40:37 ►
diffuse cloud of expertise. But when you try to tease it out from any given individual in the cloud,
00:40:46 ►
you find just a cartoon is what you actually find.
00:40:51 ►
You know, if you read Ulysses, James Joyce’s masterpiece,
00:40:55 ►
a lot of what’s going on in Leopold Bloom’s head as he wanders around Dublin
00:41:02 ►
are crack-brained understandings of technical devices,
00:41:07 ►
how he thinks the electric tram works,
00:41:09 ►
how he thinks about the odds in the horse race,
00:41:13 ►
how he thinks about how the sewer works.
00:41:15 ►
And it’s all absolutely cartoon-like fairy tales about reality.
00:41:21 ►
Well, if we don’t understand things as simple as can openers and TV sets,
00:41:26 ►
then what is our real grip on phenomena like representative democracy, or the healthcare
00:41:33 ►
delivery system, or the theory of evolution and molecular genetics? You know, it begins to get pretty scary out there. consistency seek the weird seek the bizarre seek the edge but understand that
00:42:08 ►
you can only rely directly on your own experience the conclusions you draw from
00:42:21 ►
it and mathematics and anything which comes down the collective epigenetic telegraph
00:42:29 ►
is so shaped by the cultural mind that none of it can be trusted.
00:42:37 ►
All of it serves hidden agendas of salesmanship, marketing,
00:42:43 ►
propagandization,
00:42:48 ►
glamorization, fetishization.
00:42:51 ►
In other words, nothing can be taken at face value.
00:42:53 ►
Nothing is what it seems.
00:42:56 ►
And if you move through reality like that,
00:42:58 ►
testing as you go,
00:43:03 ►
I think there’s not a great deal of danger of going over the edge.
00:43:05 ►
In my own experience of doing that,
00:43:08 ►
the only interesting thing I found that transcended the mundane was psychedelics.
00:43:14 ►
But I’m perfectly willing to admit that one life may not be enough.
00:43:19 ►
And maybe if I’d gone to Paraguay instead of Nepal,
00:43:23 ►
or maybe I would have found something.
00:43:26 ►
But I do believe induction, induction, if not prosecuted too far, can be helpful.
00:43:36 ►
What do I mean by induction?
00:43:48 ►
bankers and they all are jerks you may be reasonable in forming the supposition that the 21st banker will be a jerk you may be wrong but the force of presupposition
00:43:54 ►
is with you so induction deduction and experiential confirmation.
00:44:06 ►
What’s not a good thing, I think, is buying in on hype or charisma.
00:44:12 ►
Hype is when somebody says,
00:44:14 ►
ex-NASA scientist so-and-so says this
00:44:21 ►
about pro bono proctologists from nearby star systems making late night house calls in
00:44:27 ►
north america uh when you hear somebody lead with credential ex-nasa scientist i feel like i should
00:44:36 ►
reach for my revolver how many ex-nasa scientists are there around with crack-brained ideas and is this why
00:44:45 ►
they’re ex-NASA scientists because they had to be let go because their belief in
00:44:50 ►
13th planets higher dimensional gods on the face of Mars and so forth and so on
00:44:57 ►
interfered with them doing their job
00:45:03 ►
anyway that’s the answer to the question,
00:45:06 ►
with all the footnotes and bells and whistles.
00:45:09 ►
As you can tell, I’m mildly agitated about this.
00:45:13 ►
And it’s a personally troubling thing to me,
00:45:16 ►
because, as I said, part of my audience is part of the problem.
00:45:27 ►
And it’s a really weird experience to have someone come up to you after a talk and say, you know, I love your stuff. There aren’t very
00:45:34 ►
many people I respect and I love your stuff. And I also love, and then they name two indictable
00:45:41 ►
morons from the land of woo-woo,
00:45:47 ►
and you think, oh my God,
00:45:51 ►
this person has no power of discrimination whatsoever.
00:45:54 ►
I am a pearl placed among swine.
00:45:57 ►
Either they’re wrong or I’m wrong.
00:46:02 ►
In any case, there’s enough wrong around to be disturbing.
00:46:08 ►
Because what you want to do is be understood.
00:46:13 ►
And, you know, if people don’t understand what you’re saying,
00:46:17 ►
then they’re perfectly happy to, you know,
00:46:22 ►
put a communist, a national socialist, and a Zionist all in the same box and say they’re all wonderful and inspiring people
00:46:24 ►
and you’d follow any one of them anywhere.
00:46:27 ►
What kind of a statement is that?
00:46:29 ►
These things are in direct contradiction.
00:46:32 ►
And, you know, the reason I feel like
00:46:37 ►
the psychedelic position occupies the philosophical high ground
00:46:42 ►
is because it does not require belief. I mean, we like doubters.
00:46:48 ►
Doubters are the favorite fodder for the psychedelic experience. You know, those people
00:46:54 ►
who say, oh, you drug people, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You know, give me a scotch
00:47:00 ►
and soda. That carries me about as far as God intended the human mind to go.
00:47:06 ►
And then you say, look, great.
00:47:09 ►
Love your attitude.
00:47:11 ►
Here’s some DMT.
00:47:12 ►
Smoke it.
00:47:13 ►
Then see what you think.
00:47:16 ►
With ideologies, you can’t do that.
00:47:19 ►
You know, ideologies, they start talking about, well, you have to have the gift of faith
00:47:23 ►
or Mama G has to put the gift of faith, or mamma G has to
00:47:25 ►
put the whammy on you, or you have to be led forward through the theology of it for a few
00:47:32 ►
decades. Well, this just means, you know, that this is crap. The real is real. It’s real. It does not require your participation to be real. On the other hand, a mirage, an illusion, a delusion, you’re 50% of its lifeblood. Without you, it can’t function. Without your credulity, your need, your hope, your weakness, your inability to ontologically parse what’s going on.
00:48:02 ►
hope, your weakness, your inability to ontologically parse
00:48:03 ►
what’s going on.
00:48:06 ►
So,
00:48:07 ►
that’s that. Anybody want to say anything about it?
00:48:11 ►
Anybody
00:48:12 ►
got anything they want to x-ray?
00:48:13 ►
And we’ll just shove it into the rhetorical
00:48:16 ►
fluoroscope.
00:48:18 ►
After our discussion at lunch,
00:48:20 ►
I don’t want to be on tape anywhere ever again.
00:48:26 ►
And it’s fine to, you you know if you think you’ve got
00:48:28 ►
a case it’s okay to debunk
00:48:29 ►
this and reject it
00:48:31 ►
talk a little more about it
00:48:35 ►
well in a sense that’s what
00:48:38 ►
we’ve been talking about
00:48:39 ►
you know it’s
00:48:41 ►
the faith of
00:48:43 ►
it’s almost like there are two ways of looking at the world,
00:48:48 ►
and they come down to whether you think the world is out there
00:48:53 ►
and was there before you got here and will be there after you depart.
00:49:01 ►
And this is essentially the view of science, you know.
00:49:04 ►
Whitehead said there are certain stubborn
00:49:07 ►
facts and the world is one of them or if you were uh the other philosophical flavor has different
00:49:16 ►
names but it’s usually called radical idealism or something like that and it’s the idea that we are making the world moment to moment. Somehow it depends on our existence. And of course, immediately following that assumption is the idea that we can change it with our minds, which brings up the moral dilemma. so resistant or why isn’t it the way we want it to be if it’s so malleable
00:49:45 ►
why is it so
00:49:46 ►
resistant
00:49:48 ►
and once you understand
00:49:51 ►
you know what philosophy
00:49:54 ►
is I think you
00:49:55 ►
see that these two positions
00:49:57 ►
are polar
00:50:00 ►
and that
00:50:01 ►
there’s a lot to recommend
00:50:03 ►
each one and it’s very hard to make a fusion.
00:50:06 ►
And you describe the idea…
00:50:08 ►
I tend to act as though the world is really there,
00:50:15 ►
but I think that ideology is very poisonous
00:50:20 ►
and that we should not believe anything.
00:50:26 ►
It’s a form of metaphysical hubris.
00:50:30 ►
It means you really think you’re an important cosmic actor.
00:50:34 ►
I mean, if you met a termite who wanted to tell you his beliefs,
00:50:39 ►
you would be puzzled at why he even bothered.
00:50:43 ►
Well, are you so greatly different than this termite in
00:50:47 ►
relationship to the cosmic all of it so beliefs are like they’re forms of culturally endowed
00:50:58 ►
paralysis you know i believe in the democratic. I believe in the resurrection and the life.
00:51:05 ►
Well, so what?
00:51:07 ►
We don’t care.
00:51:08 ►
What we want to know is what can we reach
00:51:10 ►
through examining the evidence
00:51:12 ►
and applying inductive and deductive approaches to it.
00:51:18 ►
I, you know, we’ve talked about this before,
00:51:21 ►
but some people think that what life is about
00:51:24 ►
is looking for the good ideologies.
00:51:28 ►
We want good ideologies, not bad ideologies.
00:51:32 ►
But I think the history of the 20th century is trying to show us, is shouting to us, in fact,
00:51:41 ►
that all ideologies, that the ideology itself is a betrayal of being
00:51:48 ►
uh you know certainly fascism when carried to its logical extremes seemed quite unappealing
00:51:59 ►
the holocaust and so forth how then is it that the countervailing idea
00:52:07 ►
which people of morally felt obligation were moved toward
00:52:13 ►
produced nearly equal, if not equal, horror?
00:52:18 ►
You know, socialism.
00:52:20 ►
You know, different people died for different reasons,
00:52:24 ►
but you had the same thing.
00:52:26 ►
Camps, secret police, the knock on the door, the godlike bureaucrat, the indomitable state, on and on and on.
00:52:35 ►
So it looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us.
00:52:46 ►
In other words, belief is for kids.
00:52:49 ►
It’s a fairy tale.
00:52:51 ►
Marxism is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny.
00:52:56 ►
Probability theory is no different
00:52:58 ►
than a belief in the Easter Bunny.
00:53:01 ►
Everybody needs to get a grip
00:53:03 ►
on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise.
00:53:07 ►
If modernism is worth anything,
00:53:12 ►
then it should carry us to a sense
00:53:14 ►
of the fragileness of knowing.
00:53:17 ►
There are no platonic archetypes.
00:53:21 ►
Gödel showed that simple arithmetic
00:53:23 ►
is fraught with uncertainty. archetypes. Gödel showed that simple arithmetic is
00:53:28 ►
fraught with uncertainty. Things that we thought were so
00:53:31 ►
writ in adamantine that they could never be questioned, like the second law of thermodynamics,
00:53:36 ►
turns out to be written in sand. It’s just somebody’s opinion. It applies locally in some cases, sometimes.
00:53:44 ►
So the way to live with a mind in the world,
00:53:50 ►
with a human mind in the world,
00:53:53 ►
is not to believe things.
00:53:56 ►
That’s childish.
00:54:00 ►
It’s undignified.
00:54:03 ►
The thing to do is to build models
00:54:06 ►
and to call them that.
00:54:09 ►
Call it model building.
00:54:11 ►
And why?
00:54:12 ►
Because the implication is
00:54:13 ►
if you exceed your model
00:54:16 ►
or if the thing you’re studying has dimensions
00:54:18 ►
your model can’t encompass,
00:54:20 ►
throw the model out.
00:54:22 ►
You don’t round up everybody who’s against the model and send them
00:54:27 ►
to the wall because god revealed the model this would be the usual method of of acting no then
00:54:35 ►
you have provisional ever-changing uh relationships to the world another way of thinking about this is that what ideology tries to do is create closure. There’s something in the human mind. We want to finish the crossword puzzle. We want the good guys to win. We want the equinox to happen against the same pattern of fixed stars. In other words, we want order. Worse than that, we want narrative. But this again is childish. The world is not a bedtime story. It is not a narrative. It does not have white hats and black hats. And so part of this growing up thing or growing beyond culture or deneotinizing one’s psyche is to accept lack of closure.
00:55:39 ►
You know, that it doesn’t come to an end.
00:55:43 ►
It never makes sense.
00:55:46 ►
There is never the moment of resolution.
00:55:50 ►
We want it. We want it.
00:55:52 ►
We deserve it.
00:55:53 ►
But it ain’t in the cards.
00:55:56 ►
Everything always transmutes itself
00:55:59 ►
and opens up new avenues of possibility.
00:56:07 ►
So learning to live without closure.
00:56:10 ►
And I think this is very hard for people.
00:56:12 ►
And a lot of decent impulses serve this
00:56:20 ►
and tend to make people more neurotic.
00:56:24 ►
For example, relationship anxiety. People
00:56:30 ►
want stable relationships. They might as well wish for a silent ocean, you know. All wishing
00:56:41 ►
for stable relationships brings you is further anxiety about your obviously unstable relationship.
00:56:49 ►
People want answers.
00:56:53 ►
Say, well, I believe this and that. I believe in reincarnation.
00:56:59 ►
So then that settles it. That means you don’t believe in a whole bunch of other things.
00:57:04 ►
Do you find the security?
00:57:05 ►
Yes. It makes the world
00:57:08 ►
so simple. But
00:57:09 ►
you can make the world so simple.
00:57:11 ►
You can just tile over every
00:57:13 ►
open question with a
00:57:15 ►
dogmatic position.
00:57:17 ►
And then when you’ve entirely done this
00:57:20 ►
you’re so ossified we can
00:57:21 ►
just toss you in a hole and bury
00:57:23 ►
you and
00:57:25 ►
you will then have achieved
00:57:28 ►
this closure
00:57:29 ►
that you were so frantic to create
00:57:32 ►
in life
00:57:32 ►
that wonderful
00:57:36 ►
line from the movie
00:57:38 ►
HUD where he says
00:57:40 ►
the only peace you
00:57:42 ►
ever know is when they lower
00:57:44 ►
the box well you ever know is when they lower the box.
00:57:46 ►
Well, you might as well get used to that.
00:57:48 ►
And if that’s your idea of where you want to go,
00:57:51 ►
well, I don’t know.
00:57:52 ►
It’s not my idea of where I want to go.
00:57:55 ►
You know that place in Andrew Marvel’s poem
00:57:58 ►
to his coy mistress,
00:58:00 ►
where he says the grave’s a lovely private place,
00:58:04 ►
but none do there, I think, embrace.
00:58:08 ►
Always at my back I hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near,
00:58:13 ►
so get your bloomers off and get over here.
00:58:17 ►
A paraphrase, admitted, but that was thought.
00:58:24 ►
Yeah, living with lack of closure.
00:58:27 ►
And, you know, I’ve been trying to do this.
00:58:31 ►
And it’s an acquired taste.
00:58:35 ►
It’s not easy, but it’s sort of like doing,
00:58:38 ►
eating bran muffins once a day
00:58:41 ►
or doing your calisthenics or something.
00:58:43 ►
It’s a healthy thing to do, which takes an effort.
00:58:48 ►
And, you know, I recommend it simply because I think it makes it easier
00:58:55 ►
to laugh, to groove with what’s going on.
00:59:01 ►
I mean, things become much more comical once you have totally rejected culture.
00:59:07 ►
And then you just see what a crazy game it is.
00:59:10 ►
And watch ordinary people with the fascination
00:59:14 ►
you normally reserve for television sitcoms.
00:59:17 ►
I mean, they are living television sitcoms.
00:59:21 ►
They’re acting out Seinfeld for you
00:59:23 ►
better than Seinfeld ever could.
00:59:27 ►
The conversations in the bath
00:59:30 ►
are a good place to begin.
00:59:32 ►
I mean, how people deliver these lines
00:59:34 ►
with a straight face,
00:59:35 ►
I do not know, but I
00:59:38 ►
thank them for it.
00:59:40 ►
How do I deliver
00:59:42 ►
my lines with a straight face?
00:59:44 ►
I don’t know either.
00:59:46 ►
Well, it’s more like a not-thought-out conspiracy.
00:59:50 ►
I mean, I think what’s happening is,
00:59:54 ►
you know, I’ve always said that what psychedelics do,
00:59:57 ►
and to some degree all drugs,
00:59:59 ►
but psychedelics are the most dramatic,
01:00:01 ►
is they dissolve boundaries.
01:00:04 ►
Well, cultures and governments are totally, and they sell boundaries.
01:00:10 ►
Boundary consciousness is what they’re all about.
01:00:12 ►
Our class, our group, our fatherland, motherland, our aboriginal lineage, our noble race.
01:00:18 ►
This is all the rhetoric of nationalism and uh and so governments whether a socialist state an industrial democracy
01:00:29 ►
a theocratic state they can all get together on one proposition the drugs are just terrible
01:00:37 ►
terrible things because they erode loyalty to the myth the the societal myth that’s one reason of pretty abstract social engineering
01:00:50 ►
reason and the other reason is for at least the past 500 years drugs by different names
01:00:59 ►
but drugs have been the one of the largest money earners ever brought into the marketplace.
01:01:09 ►
Where is the CIA going to get a quick billion dollars or two off budget
01:01:16 ►
if they have a sudden need to topple an unfriendly Middle Eastern government?
01:01:22 ►
Well, it’s called taking a flyer on drugs.
01:01:26 ►
It’s very clear that in the 60s,
01:01:29 ►
China white heroin was used
01:01:34 ►
as a social engineering drug
01:01:37 ►
in the American ghettos
01:01:39 ►
because every time you let in a lot of heroin,
01:01:43 ►
the political rhetoric in the ghetto fell to a murmur.
01:01:47 ►
It was directly related to how loaded people were on these completely dulling sedative drugs.
01:01:55 ►
Well, then when the geopolitical game slipped from the control of the U.S. in one area of the world, and we were run into the ocean in Vietnam,
01:02:07 ►
suddenly the world heroin supply
01:02:10 ►
was in the hands of the imams in Iran,
01:02:14 ►
and the brown tar Iranian heroin
01:02:18 ►
became a drag on the market,
01:02:21 ►
and suddenly cocaine became the chic drug in the American ghetto.
01:02:28 ►
And that was because the CIA could just open certain taps and close other taps
01:02:34 ►
and bring this stuff in, and it made them a lot of money.
01:02:38 ►
I can remember, you know, there was a period in the mid-70s to mid-80s where hashish just basically disappeared from the underground market.
01:02:51 ►
It was unknown in quantity.
01:02:55 ►
And then when the Mujahideen began to struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, suddenly you could get 100 kilo lots of hash unbroken from how it’s sold in the markets in Peshawar.
01:03:11 ►
So you could see it had not been concealed in any ordinary method.
01:03:15 ►
No, it had been drawn up to Pier 9 in San Francisco and unloaded with forklift trucks
01:03:21 ►
because the CIA wanted the Mujahideen to have a bank account so they
01:03:27 ►
could pay for weaponry, and they knew that hash wasn’t a problem anyway.
01:03:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:03:39 ►
thought at a time.
01:03:41 ►
Before I say anything else, well, I’ve got to ask if you are as impressed as I always am
01:03:47 ►
when right in the middle of a long extemporaneous answer to some question that Terrence can,
01:03:53 ►
well, right out of the blue begin quoting some obscure, at least to me, obscure poem.
01:03:59 ►
I wouldn’t be so impressed if Terrence had known the night before what questions were going to be asked and was able to prepare his answers.
01:04:07 ►
But to just jump into a poem right along with his regular train of thought, well, that simply blows me away.
01:04:14 ►
What a wonderful mind he had.
01:04:16 ►
Now, is it just me, or did Terence sound like he was getting a little pissed off here about fuzzy-headed thinkers?
01:04:23 ►
like he was getting a little pissed off here about fuzzy-headed thinkers.
01:04:27 ►
While there aren’t many examples of it in these talks of his,
01:04:34 ►
there were a couple of times when I saw him go on a rather angry rant about something or other.
01:04:40 ►
And in my opinion, at times like that, he wasn’t somebody that you wanted to get into an argument with.
01:04:46 ►
But those were very rare occasions, and most of the time he came across as a really nice guy. For me, however, one of the most important things that Terrence said in this talk
01:04:53 ►
was that we should just get used to the fact that there is never going to be any closure in our
01:04:58 ►
lives. Let me illustrate that with a little example. For just a minute here, no matter what your current political belief may be,
01:05:07 ►
put yourself in the mind of somebody who, about a year ago, would have been identified as a Bernie bro.
01:05:13 ►
In other words, a Bernie Sanders kind of person politically.
01:05:17 ►
Now, take that mindset back to the days of Little Bush and the war that he launched on Iraq.
01:05:23 ►
Then think how grand you thought it would be one
01:05:25 ►
day to just get some closure about what was going on in the White House. Now think of the Obama
01:05:31 ►
years and his drone attacks on women, children, and old people, and think about how much we wanted
01:05:37 ►
closure from that insane behavior. Now we’ve got Trump, and we sure do hope that four years from
01:05:44 ►
now there’ll be some kind of closure on the craziness that’s oozing out of the Oval Office these days.
01:05:50 ►
Well, it just isn’t going to happen, my friends.
01:05:54 ►
Just like you aren’t going to permanently lose weight, and you aren’t going to begin to exercise regularly.
01:06:00 ►
Well, maybe you can pull one of those things off, but when it comes to human history, we are never going to come to a point where somebody says, the end.
01:06:10 ►
One day, we’ll each have our own personal closure in this life, but that’s not going to happen until we take our last breaths.
01:06:18 ►
So, I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking for closure anytime soon.
01:06:23 ►
Now, before I go, there is one more thing that I want to let you know about.
01:06:28 ►
As you know, for those who want to poke around in some forums
01:06:31 ►
and exchange ideas with other fellow salonners,
01:06:34 ►
you can go to psychedelicsalon.com and click on the forums link at the top of the page.
01:06:39 ►
From there, if you go to the forums listing,
01:06:42 ►
you’ll find a post labeled, This Week in Psychedelics.
01:06:46 ►
And this is an ongoing thread that’s posted by fellow salonner David Wilder.
01:06:51 ►
And he’s been updating it for us each week for over a year now.
01:06:55 ►
Here’s how he introduced this series of posts.
01:06:57 ►
And I quote,
01:06:59 ►
I have been writing a This Week in Psychedelics column on my website, Think Wilder, and on Reality Sandwich since June of 2015.
01:07:09 ►
And I wanted to begin sharing my work with the Psychedelic Salon Forum community.
01:07:14 ►
Each week I collect links to articles from the mass media that are related to psychedelics,
01:07:19 ►
and some other psychoactives that are not classified as psychedelic.
01:07:23 ►
And I compile them into a comprehensive list in my column.
01:07:27 ►
It has been pretty interesting for me, as someone who likes to follow psychedelic news quite closely,
01:07:33 ►
to see how the mass media covers the topic.
01:07:36 ►
Please note that I make it a point to include all articles that I find,
01:07:40 ►
whether they present accurate information or not,
01:07:43 ►
and also that do not frame psychedelics in a positive light.
01:07:48 ►
End quote.
01:07:49 ►
David then posts several links to his various columns in this first post,
01:07:53 ►
and after that, each week he provides a very brief summary of what’s new,
01:07:58 ►
along with a direct link to that week’s news.
01:08:01 ►
This is a really amazing source of information,
01:08:04 ►
and it’s particularly valuable as a resource for writers and reporters, not to mention people like you and me who just have an interest in these matters.
01:08:13 ►
So check out David’s work if you get a chance, and I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.
01:08:19 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:08:24 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.