Program Notes
Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Dale Pendell delivering his “Horizon Anarchism” lecture at the 2006 Palenque Norte Lectures during the Burning Man Festival
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I take psychedelics to be the catalysis of language.”
“This great period of creativity that we’re living through now in the sciences, in the arts, in the implementation of exotic technology, I think this is the real legacy of the Sixties. The people who run these fancy computer companies, and the World Wide Web, and the Net, and CERN, and all that, they’re all freaks. They’re all people who came up through the Sixties and have somehow fitted themselves in to straight society. But the great bulk of creative work in society and those areas is being done by people who took psychedelics.”
“On psychedelics essentially you feel, or you see, the morphogenetic field that surrounds objects.”
“Clearly we have become a toxic drag on the rest of nature.”
“What the New World Order is is a Corporate Order.”
“The best substitute for psychedelics, which takes a lot more time, energy, and dedication, is penny-less travel in Asian countries.”
“If I had to say one thing that DMT is, it’s alien beauty.”
“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a psychedelic experience you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last thousand years.”
He Spoke for the Plants
Remembering Dale Pendell
Obituary by Jon Hanna
https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-055-horizon-anarchism/
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book,
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
Previous Episode
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 573 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 1 - score: 0.87690
- Podcast 704 - Terence McKenna: Drugs, Computers and Other Stuff - score: 0.87629
- 275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience - score: 0.87405
- 117 - The Importance of Psychedelics - score: 0.87382
- 367 - The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker - score: 0.87123
- 411 - Our Involvement With Matter - score: 0.86759
- 627 - The Birth of a New Humanity – Part 2 - score: 0.86645
- 483 - Catalysts of Consciousness - score: 0.86629
- 358 - This Psychedelic Thing - score: 0.86608
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.86496
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And a great big thank you goes out to Samuel G., Jocelyn K., Brent J., and Ryan M.,
00:00:32 ►
all of whom have made donations to the salon during the past two weeks,
00:00:36 ►
and those donations will be going directly towards offsetting some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:43 ►
I also would like to thank my
00:00:45 ►
writing patrons over on patreon.com. Without their help, I don’t know where I’d be today because,
00:00:52 ►
well, their monthly contributions have made the difference in my ability to pay the rent after
00:00:56 ►
our landlord bumped it up $400 a month. But those 73 people have collectively come together to
00:01:04 ►
donate a little bit over that amount.
00:01:06 ►
And while 2 a month may not seem like much,
00:01:09 ►
but when it’s combined with a couple of dollars from a lot of other people,
00:01:13 ►
well, it’s made a very significant improvement in my life and my wife’s life.
00:01:18 ►
So I thank you one and all, donors to the salon and to my patrons.
00:01:23 ►
I thank you all from the top to the bottom of my heart.
00:01:27 ►
So now let’s get on with today’s program.
00:01:30 ►
Over the past several podcasts from the Salon One track, I’ve been playing a recording of a course that Terrence McKenna taught at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies.
00:01:43 ►
And it’s a talk that I thought was recorded in April 1993.
00:01:47 ►
However, after previewing today’s installment, it became quite clear that this recording was
00:01:54 ►
actually made in 1995 and not in 1993. So as we listen to this talk today, I think it’s probably
00:02:03 ►
wise to pay attention to what some of the
00:02:05 ►
attendees have to say, particularly in regard to their hopes and fears about what was then yet to
00:02:12 ►
be the 2012 event, or the non-event as it turned out. And if, like me, you marvel at how naive they
00:02:21 ►
were in their almost apocalyptic views of what they thought was to come,
00:02:25 ►
well then also it’s probably good to reflect on how fearful and strange and otherworldly
00:02:30 ►
some of the opinions are of those who are our friends, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers today.
00:02:37 ►
In every generation there seem to be things that, well, if we aren’t careful,
00:02:42 ►
they can distract us from the parts of our days
00:02:45 ►
that are, in fact, quite lovely. In other words, and I’m talking to myself here, it seems that
00:02:52 ►
most of the bad things that actually happen in our lives don’t really come around all that often.
00:02:59 ►
And so let’s not let the worries and fears of what’s to come distract us from the little joys that most
00:03:05 ►
of us encounter each day. I still remember many of the stories that my parents and grandparents
00:03:11 ►
told me about the times that they made it through, and relatively speaking, I’m not only living a lot
00:03:17 ►
better than they ever did, I’m actually living a more comfortable life than did the King of England
00:03:22 ►
when my great-grandparents were born.
00:03:32 ►
I don’t really know where all that came from, because all that I meant to say was that we shouldn’t be too smug about the fears had about 2012 back in 1995, when, well, we have our own
00:03:39 ►
catalog of fears yet today. So now let’s get to the continuation of what I now suspect is a 1995 and not 1993 Terrence
00:03:50 ►
McKenna class that was held for students at CIIS in San Francisco.
00:03:56 ►
Is that, is that, am I understanding that correctly?
00:04:01 ►
Well, let me back around.
00:04:03 ►
Well, let me background it.
00:04:12 ►
The question relates to an incident told about in both my book with Dennis,
00:04:16 ►
Invisible Landscape and in True Hallucination.
00:04:21 ►
That creatively agitated under the influence of Mushroom announced that he could do something,
00:04:27 ►
which is very hard to describe what it was.
00:04:29 ►
It was sort of like turn himself inside out, trigger the end of the world,
00:04:35 ►
open a doorway into hyperspace, something like that.
00:04:40 ►
Anyway, some highly touted dramatic thing.
00:04:44 ►
He organized an experiment to test the theory.
00:04:48 ►
And the result of the experiment was not nothing, which was what I was betting on,
00:04:55 ►
not what he said would happen, which what he was betting on, but a very peculiar incident then was generated where he seemed to lose his mind,
00:05:10 ►
to put it simply, for about three weeks, but in a very specialized and orderly way.
00:05:18 ►
And I seemed to also undergo a parallel but different kind of transformation.
00:05:29 ►
And the theory that was being manipulated was a theory that involved using vocally produced tones
00:05:38 ►
to acoustically cancel metabolizing psychedelic molecules in the body so that they would bond as dimers into DNA.
00:05:52 ►
In other words, so that they would interpolate into DNA.
00:05:56 ►
The hypothesis which lied behind all this was that DNA must be the physical storage site for memory.
00:06:08 ►
This is not a popular idea.
00:06:10 ►
This is a sneered-at idea.
00:06:12 ►
But memory is a great problem for modern science.
00:06:20 ►
We’ve decoded DNA.
00:06:22 ►
We’ve got the top quark.
00:06:24 ►
We’ve measured the core temperature of Betelgeuse.
00:06:27 ►
We have no idea how memory works.
00:06:32 ►
It’s absolutely confounding.
00:06:48 ►
years old can remember the way their great grandmother’s skirt smelled when they used to crawl up into her lap when they were four years old.
00:06:52 ►
It was 86 years ago.
00:06:56 ►
During that time, every molecule in the body has been cycled out every five to seven years.
00:07:04 ►
has been cycled out every five to seven years.
00:07:12 ►
So it’s ten bodies away is the body that crawled up into that woman’s lap and could smell the starch in her skirt, and yet the memory is completely clear.
00:07:19 ►
Where are the memories? And as you know, experiments have been done with ablating large parts of the brain
00:07:31 ►
or studying people who are the unfortunate victims of very traumatic head injuries.
00:07:37 ►
And there are cases in the medical literature of people who have fully 80% of their physical brain destroyed and no memory
00:07:47 ►
impairment whatsoever.
00:07:50 ►
So where are the memories?
00:07:53 ►
Well, there are a number of theories, but there is nothing more than theories at this
00:08:00 ►
point.
00:08:01 ►
Dennis said, let’s assume nature is conservative for a moment. We know that
00:08:08 ►
nature stores protein code in DNA, and we know that DNA has large silent portions, and
00:08:18 ►
in fact, some of you may have seen the data which came out just recently, that those large silent portions of the DNA
00:08:25 ►
exhibit the same mathematical properties as language.
00:08:31 ►
Did you all read this?
00:08:33 ►
Oh, this is hot news, folks.
00:08:36 ►
As you know, DNA codes for protein.
00:08:40 ►
That code is only about 6% of the DNA chain.
00:08:45 ►
The rest of the DNA, the other 94%, is called silent DNA or by some people junk DNA
00:08:54 ►
because it doesn’t code for protein.
00:08:57 ►
So what does it do?
00:08:59 ►
Well, recently they’ve been sequencing this junk DNA and then studying it with algorithms used by the CIA to detect code in noise,
00:09:12 ►
and they discover that these silent portions of the DNA fit all the necessary criterion of language.
00:09:20 ►
They have syntactical structure.
00:09:23 ►
This seems to support Dennis’ contention, which was, and it would be very controversial, you see,
00:09:31 ►
because it’s a Lamarckian mechanism.
00:09:33 ►
It’s saying that experience can modify nuclear DNA, which is denied by anti-Lamarckian evolution.
00:09:42 ►
That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,
00:09:45 ►
according to Darwin and the neo-Darwinians.
00:09:49 ►
Nevertheless, if we don’t believe that the only part of the body
00:09:55 ►
which is not traded out many times over the course of a long lifetime,
00:10:01 ►
the only part of the body which you are born with and die with is neural
00:10:08 ►
DNA. Neural DNA, what you’re born with, you keep. Therefore, it’s reasonable, following
00:10:16 ►
good scientific method, to hypothesize that the neural DNA must be where the memories
00:10:21 ►
are. Well, then Dennis’ idea was that ordinary experience has to do with serotonin
00:10:29 ►
dropping into a relationship of bonding with DNA
00:10:35 ►
and giving off a signal like a radio transmitter
00:10:42 ►
of the structural hyperfine ESR of the DNA,
00:10:47 ►
and that that then constitutes the electro-biochemical foundation of the experience of thought.
00:10:57 ►
And so what he was saying was then what these psychedelics are
00:11:01 ►
is they’re like different kinds of transmitters, stronger or transmitting in different wavelengths
00:11:09 ►
or transmitting with a higher bandwidth.
00:11:12 ►
And it is known, in fact, that these psychedelic molecules do compete with serotonin.
00:11:19 ►
They are serotonergic competitors. So visualize the DNA in the course of metabolism unfolding and folding
00:11:30 ►
itself to expose various runs of nucleotides to ribosomal coding into RNA. And in this
00:11:39 ►
molecular environment, these drug molecules are whirling around, and by Brownian motion
00:11:47 ►
or by enzymatic delivery, the details don’t matter, these molecules intercalate, meaning
00:11:55 ►
they slip neatly between the nucleotides.
00:11:59 ►
Many drugs do this.
00:12:01 ►
This is known.
00:12:07 ►
do this. This is known. But most drugs or compounds, when they intercalate into DNA, they distort the twisting of it and it’s dysfunctional. It messes up. The thing
00:12:15 ►
can’t transcript anymore. These drug molecules, if you look at them, they’re
00:12:20 ►
usually a pentaxel five-sided central group with two benzene rings or a
00:12:29 ►
benzene ring and a partial benzene ring hanging off of this thing.
00:12:34 ►
And they’re flat.
00:12:35 ►
It’s flat.
00:12:36 ►
They’re planar.
00:12:37 ►
It means if you could blow up a psilocybin molecule to the size of a cutting board, it
00:12:44 ►
would be about as thin as a cutting board,
00:12:47 ►
and as wide and as long.
00:12:49 ►
Those flat molecules fit right in between the nucleotides, and when this happens, the
00:12:58 ►
electron spin resonance signal is amplified, just as though a more efficient transceiver had been dropped into place.
00:13:08 ►
And you can measure the hyperfine ESR signature of DNA in an in vitro laboratory situation.
00:13:18 ►
This is not mysterious.
00:13:20 ►
So the idea then is that we have a family of molecules, endogenous neurotransmitters like serotonin, acetylcholine,
00:13:30 ►
and so forth and so on, and exogenous neurotransmitters like psilocybin, DNA, I’m sorry, psilocybin, mescaline,
00:13:40 ►
and then exogenous endogenous like DMT found inside and outside the body.
00:13:46 ►
And it may be that what the evolution of consciousness is,
00:13:51 ►
is the slow trading in of low gain molecular transceivers like serotonin
00:13:59 ►
for much more broadband high gain molecular transceivers like DMT.
00:14:07 ►
So Dennis’ idea was to take all this theory that I just laid out
00:14:13 ►
and then use acoustically produced vocal sound to cancel the charge of these molecules.
00:14:23 ►
the charge of these molecules.
00:14:26 ►
And as you probably know, or maybe you don’t know, when a molecule becomes superconducting, it will bond into anything.
00:14:35 ►
It becomes a hyperbonding molecule.
00:14:39 ►
It will bond anywhere.
00:14:40 ►
So theoretically, if you could cause psychedelic molecules during their act of being
00:14:49 ►
intercalated into your genetic material to become superconducting, even for a moment,
00:14:55 ►
they would lock in permanently and you would begin to have a very deep, a much deeper experience of consciousness.
00:15:07 ►
It would be much broader, much deeper.
00:15:10 ►
He claimed he could do this, but he also went further and claimed,
00:15:15 ►
and this is where I am not good at explaining it because I didn’t understand it then
00:15:19 ►
and I don’t understand it now,
00:15:22 ►
but he claimed that in the act of becoming superconducting and intercalating,
00:15:28 ►
this thing would cause the molecule to undergo something which he named.
00:15:33 ►
He called it hyperdextrorotation,
00:15:39 ►
which means simply that it would turn inside out,
00:15:42 ►
and he said then that you would produce something,
00:15:47 ►
and I’m embarrassed at the strangeness of the concept,
00:15:52 ►
but that you could in some sense give birth to your own soul,
00:15:58 ►
that something could be generated out of your body
00:16:01 ►
which you would have a high degree of personal identification with,
00:16:06 ►
because it would in fact be the central essence of yourself.
00:16:11 ►
It would be, he made analogies to the philosopher’s stone, to the flying saucer, to the birth of an idea.
00:16:21 ►
It’s the idea that you could create what he called translinguistic matter.
00:16:26 ►
That means an ontological form of being which looks like matter, but which behaves like mind.
00:16:38 ►
And that somehow this would trigger the collapse of the illusion of history
00:16:45 ►
and everything would be swept into the presence of almighty God upon her throne or something like that.
00:16:54 ►
Anyway, that was the notion.
00:16:56 ►
And in proceeding to carry out this experiment,
00:17:00 ►
which I just thought was madness and would result in nothing,
00:17:04 ►
and then we could go back to botanizing.
00:17:07 ►
Instead, in a sense, it seemed to work.
00:17:12 ►
The condensation of the philosopher’s stone
00:17:14 ►
and the collapse of the historical state vector is slightly delayed,
00:17:20 ►
but the rest of it seems right on track in that when he threw the out, not my body, but my mind.
00:17:48 ►
And it seemed as though that was precisely what had happened.
00:17:52 ►
He could recite the alphabet backwards.
00:17:56 ►
He spoke in a language which if you got him to spell it,
00:18:01 ►
you could turn it around and you could see these were full sentences, but spoken
00:18:07 ►
backwards.
00:18:08 ►
In other words, he truly seemed to be running backwards while we were all, the rest of us
00:18:14 ►
were running forward.
00:18:16 ►
Well, after about 21 days, that faded and he got his act together and went back to get
00:18:23 ►
multiple PhDs in molecular biology, pharmacognosy, and what have you.
00:18:31 ►
Coincident with the throwing of the switch, I, who had been the skeptic,
00:18:38 ►
noticed that it was as though a switch had been thrown in me,
00:18:45 ►
and I began to understand.
00:18:49 ►
It was not like any drug I’d ever taken.
00:18:51 ►
It was not like psilocybin or ayahuasca.
00:18:54 ►
There were no hallucinations.
00:18:56 ►
But what began to happen was I simply began to understand
00:19:02 ►
faster and faster and faster and faster,
00:19:07 ►
so fast that I was just walking around on these jungle trails holding my head,
00:19:13 ►
going, uh-huh, I see, yes, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,
00:19:21 ►
and it was opening up ahead of me.
00:19:24 ►
and it was opening up ahead of me.
00:19:28 ►
And eventually this understanding settled down into the theory of the time wave,
00:19:32 ►
which I will not slay you with
00:19:35 ►
because this is a course in psychobotany,
00:19:38 ►
not a course in megalomania revealed.
00:19:42 ►
But what I finally came to rest with was a complete model of space and time,
00:19:50 ►
which is what you would end up with if he had succeeded.
00:19:55 ►
He said it would condense into three-dimensional space and end history and everyone would leave
00:20:01 ►
their factories and offices and discard their clothes
00:20:05 ►
and with tears of joy streaming down their faces begin to form the cosmic round dance
00:20:11 ►
that precedes the departure for Alpha in Sagittarius.
00:20:15 ►
Well, that remains a future promise to be redeemed.
00:20:22 ►
But what happened to me was I obtained this strange idea out of the I Ching
00:20:28 ►
that offered me a complete model of space and time and the future and the past
00:20:35 ►
and has continued to be the touchstone of my intellectual life.
00:20:41 ►
So I think that we can argue for hours, although it’s probably not worth doing,
00:20:47 ►
about whether anything at all happened at La Charrera. I was there. I should mention,
00:20:53 ►
I didn’t sleep for 11 days. And it was the most amazing 11 days I’ve ever had. I was absolutely ecstatic. I barely ate. And I was full of compassion and understanding forios and here my brother proceeds to go nuts and
00:21:26 ►
I’m saying it’s okay but the world may end in a few days and on and on.
00:21:34 ►
It took me about five years to get myself publicly presentable.
00:21:40 ►
In that time I was a burden to my friends and a joy to my enemies
00:21:45 ►
because I just appeared to be a social menace.
00:21:50 ►
I could back people into a denny’s and hold them there for 16 hours at a stretch
00:21:57 ►
with a wrap so alarming and appalling that people would just back to the wall
00:22:03 ►
to wait to see if I was going to explode.
00:22:07 ►
It was simply, it takes a long time.
00:22:11 ►
You have to leaven it with humor and self-criticism
00:22:14 ►
and convince people that you don’t take yourself seriously
00:22:18 ►
and all these things to make it palatable.
00:22:26 ►
Yeah, that is true hallucination.
00:22:29 ►
And I think, you know, if you want to read an eye-opening book,
00:22:32 ►
if you haven’t read it, read Thomas Kuhn’s book,
00:22:35 ►
The Structure of Scientific Revolution.
00:22:38 ►
Because what you’ll learn there, to your amazement,
00:22:41 ►
is that these great intellectual breakthroughs like Newton and Einstein and Planck and so forth,
00:22:49 ►
they don’t come out of careful examination of the evidence
00:22:54 ►
and conservative adumbration of theories and all.
00:22:59 ►
No, they don’t come like that.
00:23:00 ►
They come like revelations, you know, completely.
00:23:08 ►
And then you argue backwards to convince your colleagues.
00:23:13 ►
You go out and you get the evidence and you argue backwards and you convince everybody,
00:23:20 ►
and then everybody says, well, it was obvious all the time, and anyway, they knew it 50 years earlier, and on and on and on.
00:23:28 ►
But that’s what you have to do. So I have stuck with this, my devotion to psychedelics, because it gave me really my greatest wish, which was I want to have a complete
00:23:38 ►
understanding of how things work. That doesn’t mean there is no more surprises, but it means you at least have a structure that you can pour it into.
00:23:49 ►
And I think this is what shamans do.
00:23:52 ►
They create a personal ideology sufficient to their needs,
00:23:58 ►
and my needs are complex because I live in a society
00:24:02 ►
where I’m going to be talking to quantum physicists,
00:24:05 ►
mathematicians, historians of science, epistemologists, so forth and so on.
00:24:11 ►
So it had to perform at top speed.
00:24:15 ►
If you’re in a rainforest situation, in a culture, in a monoculture,
00:24:21 ►
then it is perhaps not so challenging.
00:24:24 ►
But the point of all this is catalysis of ideas.
00:24:29 ►
You know, culture can evolve no faster than its language.
00:24:35 ►
It can evolve no faster than the models that it can set up for itself to achieve.
00:24:40 ►
And that requires language.
00:24:43 ►
So I take the psychedelics to be catalysts of
00:24:48 ►
language they probably caused it to come into existence in the first place and
00:24:54 ►
then they continue to push it forward into new domains and this great period
00:25:04 ►
of creativity that we’re
00:25:06 ►
living through now in the sciences
00:25:08 ►
in the arts, in the
00:25:10 ►
implementation of exotic technologies
00:25:12 ►
I think this is the real
00:25:14 ►
legacy of the 60s
00:25:16 ►
the people who run
00:25:17 ►
these fancy computer companies
00:25:20 ►
and the world wide web
00:25:22 ►
and the net and CERN and all that
00:25:24 ►
they’re all freaks.
00:25:26 ►
They’re all people who came up through the 60s and have somehow fitted themselves into
00:25:31 ►
straight society.
00:25:34 ►
But the great bulk of creative work in the society in those areas is being done by people
00:25:40 ►
who took psychedelics.
00:25:42 ►
who took psychedelics. And in fact, arguably, the scientists of today,
00:25:47 ►
the technological implementers of today,
00:25:50 ►
are in fact shamans.
00:25:52 ►
And we are creating a kind of culturally validated shamanic super space,
00:25:58 ►
except we call it cyber space.
00:26:01 ►
But all we’re doing with the creation of cyber space
00:26:04 ►
is hardwiring in a male way
00:26:08 ►
what has always been there in a female way. I mean, the web of invisible, hidden associations
00:26:17 ►
that make up the cosmos instead of the chaos. Well, that seems to be an overlong answer
00:26:24 ►
to a question I forgot. Yeah?
00:26:27 ►
You’ve been doing this and what’s happening from 2012 and what do you think, what is your
00:26:36 ►
idea of what’s going to happen in 2012?
00:26:39 ►
All points will become cotangent in a super space.
00:26:46 ►
Can’t say.
00:26:47 ►
Not that we don’t know.
00:26:48 ►
Can’t say.
00:26:53 ►
Language is not capable of describing a cotangent hyperspace.
00:26:56 ►
That’s only in all dimensions?
00:27:00 ►
Yeah, basically you will be everybody.
00:27:02 ►
Everybody will be you.
00:27:04 ►
You will be everywhere.
00:27:06 ►
You will be every when. You will be you, you will be everywhere, you will be every when,
00:27:11 ►
you will be every which, and every when, which, and where will be you.
00:27:18 ►
All assumptions of distinctness will be illusory.
00:27:21 ►
And so we can see this happening. I mean, people are fond of saying the Earth has shrunk to a point
00:27:25 ►
under the influence of electronic technology.
00:27:28 ►
It’s a nice way of putting it, but it’s just beginning.
00:27:31 ►
The World Wide Web further shrinks it.
00:27:34 ►
And when the World Wide Web is virtual and an implant behind your eyelids,
00:27:40 ►
and, and, and, I mean, you can carry out these fantasies for yourself.
00:27:45 ►
Coming a little bit more centered in Tiberius’ speech.
00:27:50 ►
Yeah, mine’s the earliest of all of the non-completely insane people
00:27:56 ►
or the latest of the completely insane people.
00:28:02 ►
Well, the Parasoms are from the mountains.
00:28:07 ►
They live in the Indian 17,000 feet.
00:28:09 ►
They, according to their prophecy,
00:28:11 ►
which they’re the direct committee of Jumbo-Nicot,
00:28:13 ►
they said that in 1995,
00:28:15 ►
they are coming out of the mountains because it was part of their prophecy
00:28:17 ►
that they would come and teach the earth
00:28:20 ►
how to shift into planetary consciousness,
00:28:22 ►
which is evolving beginning this year and then will shift into the planetary consciousness, which is evolving at the beginning this year,
00:28:25 ►
and then will shift into the next millennium.
00:28:28 ►
And then the body of it will come out of North America
00:28:30 ►
because we have done so much destruction,
00:28:33 ►
and also because we don’t have the assets in the body.
00:28:36 ►
But the intellect will come from Europe,
00:28:38 ►
and the heart and soul will come from South America.
00:28:40 ►
And then they’re coming down to teach
00:28:42 ►
how to begin to move into the second century.
00:28:46 ►
Well, there is a lot of this kind of anticipation of a great shift, and I think there’s more
00:28:53 ►
to it than simply the pressure the millennial turn of the calendar puts on us.
00:28:59 ►
This garden party is over.
00:29:02 ►
You know, there’s nothing but crumpled plates and stabbed out cigarette butts in Aspic now.
00:29:09 ►
It’s over.
00:29:10 ►
The party’s over.
00:29:12 ►
And where we’re headed now is not clear.
00:29:15 ►
But we have finished our sojourn in three-dimensional space and historical time.
00:29:21 ►
And our technology and our dreams are about to carry us further.
00:29:26 ►
What this means for the rest of the Earth is hard to say.
00:29:30 ►
Life once left the ocean.
00:29:33 ►
Life once elaborated oxygen to the point where it threatened its own survival on the planet.
00:29:41 ►
Dan Joy once said to me, once you strip away the height, it’s just another
00:29:47 ►
concrescence. Quite true, but the height is major because, you know, we haven’t
00:29:53 ►
seen a turning point like this since before the bust up of Pangea, and that
00:29:58 ►
was 275 million years ago. This is bigger than that. And it’s mind shedding matter. Matter was
00:30:07 ►
the vehicle that could carry mind a certain distance in its self-revelation. But now,
00:30:15 ►
clearly, we have become a toxic drag on the rest of nature. And it means it’s time to
00:30:21 ►
move on. The womb would like to expel this puppy into whatever hyperspace awaits us.
00:30:29 ►
But clearly, if we remain in the womb of three-dimensional space and time,
00:30:34 ►
we’re just going to mess the joint up, toxify it, wreck the oceans,
00:30:38 ►
and ultimately pollute ourselves and everything else to death.
00:30:42 ►
So the time has come to move on, and hey, we’re moving on.
00:30:46 ►
Yeah?
00:30:47 ►
What responsibility do you personally have?
00:30:50 ►
I think you spoke earlier about not necessarily being God’s people,
00:30:53 ►
but we’re really making a difference.
00:30:55 ►
I think the responsibility that we have is to spread reasonable hope.
00:31:06 ►
In other words, a lot of people are becoming frightened,
00:31:10 ►
and a lot of people will be more frightened.
00:31:12 ►
We haven’t hit the white water yet.
00:31:15 ►
It’s coming.
00:31:16 ►
But this is the long garden party before the white water.
00:31:21 ►
And there are going to be a lot of doomsayers. There’s going to be a lot of
00:31:27 ►
ugliness like Rwanda, Bosnia, this sort of thing. Much reason for despair unless you
00:31:34 ►
have the broad picture. But I think that our purpose is to educate ourselves about the
00:31:42 ►
situation and that when that task is completed
00:31:46 ►
you will be filled with hope
00:31:48 ►
and then to spread that hope.
00:31:52 ►
There is no other ideology of hope on this planet.
00:31:56 ►
Christianity is so dramatically on the ascendant
00:31:59 ►
because it offers otherworldly hope.
00:32:02 ►
It denies this world.
00:32:04 ►
It confines it to the flames and asks you to seek salvation in some other world.
00:32:11 ►
Secular humanism and its various forms, capitalism, so forth and so on, offers nothing but more
00:32:19 ►
stuff.
00:32:21 ►
They are willing to hasten the end in order to keep people playing deck tennis
00:32:28 ►
while the Titanic goes down
00:32:30 ►
there is no sanctionable position of hope
00:32:36 ►
except the belief that history is ending
00:32:40 ►
and that the acceleration of novelty
00:32:43 ►
which we see happening back and back the further back
00:32:47 ►
in time you go the less novel things are and the slower time moves now we have come to the place
00:32:53 ►
where time is moving very quickly so that by a moment in the future as near as 2012 we may
00:33:01 ►
traverse as much distance as we’ve traversed from the Big Bang to this afternoon
00:33:07 ►
in terms of how quickly things are going to unfold.
00:33:12 ►
James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.
00:33:16 ►
It’s a wonderful thing to hope for.
00:33:19 ►
Do you have any…
00:33:20 ►
One thing that I’ve been fascinated the time I’ve been talking about is that there’s some objective way to quantify this novelty.
00:33:33 ►
I mean, other than by asking parents or someone else looking at the waves to say,
00:33:40 ►
well, here’s a big ball and obviously there was novelty at this time. If you just look back and you find out, ah, that’s a big ball, and obviously there was novelty of the time,
00:33:45 ►
but if we just look back and we find out, ah, that’s when Poland fell to the Germans.
00:33:49 ►
I mean, can we somehow work the other way and look at a historical record,
00:33:54 ►
plot out the novelty without looking at the time waves,
00:33:57 ►
and then look back at the time waves and see if we were right?
00:33:59 ►
The problem is, you see, that history is not a quantifiable entity.
00:34:05 ►
There’s no theory that agrees on how we quantify history.
00:34:09 ►
I mean, do we give the War of the Roses a 10 and the Thirty Years’ War a 42?
00:34:14 ►
How do we do that?
00:34:16 ►
I maintain that we can’t scientifically prove it,
00:34:22 ►
but we can make a very strong case because the ebb and flow of novelty continues.
00:34:29 ►
And we can look back in the past and see that where there were vast descents into novelty,
00:34:35 ►
novelty certainly occurred.
00:34:38 ►
I’m willing to go out on a limb because next year is a very dramatic descent into novelty
00:34:44 ►
on the time wave. I’m willing to go
00:34:47 ►
out on a limb and say if next year doesn’t deliver, I’ll be willing to seriously talk about cashing it
00:34:53 ►
in because next year is predicted by the time wave to be an enormously dramatic year. And in a sense, we can already see the
00:35:05 ►
prophecy fulfilling itself.
00:35:08 ►
We know there will be a presidential
00:35:10 ►
election next year. We know
00:35:12 ►
this society will go mad
00:35:14 ►
and rip itself apart for months
00:35:16 ►
over that. We also know that there
00:35:18 ►
will be a presidential election in
00:35:20 ►
Russia next year. They will
00:35:22 ►
probably put our act in
00:35:24 ►
the shade when they begin to rip their society apart.
00:35:29 ►
Revolution in China,
00:35:31 ►
that would affect a third of mankind.
00:35:35 ►
That’s scheduled, that’s on the menu.
00:35:39 ►
It’s possible that next year is the year
00:35:43 ►
when even doubters realize that global warming is upon us.
00:35:49 ►
In other words, worldwide climate upheaval.
00:35:52 ►
So we’re going to have some, if not all, of those things next year.
00:35:58 ►
And I maintain it could even be the unexpected.
00:36:02 ►
As I said to somebody today, you know, if the Kobe earthquake had been Tokyo,
00:36:07 ►
the capital retraction from the rest of the world by Japanese banks would have sent us into the Stone Age.
00:36:14 ►
And, you know, there are this gas attack.
00:36:19 ►
It was designed to kill millions.
00:36:21 ►
It just happened to be botched.
00:36:24 ►
The attack on the World Trade Center was designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
00:36:28 ►
It happened to be botched, but they’re not all going to be botched.
00:36:32 ►
The nuts are out there.
00:36:35 ►
And so I think that what we are seeing is a recapitulation of much of the past several thousand years of history
00:36:45 ►
in a very compressed form as we get closer and closer to the transcendental object at the end of time.
00:36:52 ►
And shamanism has always been the technique for anticipating and mapping this transcendental object.
00:37:03 ►
In a pre-scientific world, you get a vocabulary that is religious,
00:37:10 ►
that there is a force in the universe, not a sparrow falls,
00:37:15 ►
but that this force doesn’t take note of it.
00:37:18 ►
This force is love.
00:37:20 ►
This force created everything.
00:37:23 ►
This force cares for us, we are its children,
00:37:27 ►
it is calling us to return to its essence.
00:37:31 ►
I mean, this is a religious vocabulary.
00:37:34 ►
But in the 20th century, we’ve gone beyond that.
00:37:38 ►
We’re no longer moving in a coinage of emotional terms.
00:37:43 ►
We can say, you know, God is physics.
00:37:46 ►
God is the universe trying to birth itself into a higher dimension.
00:37:52 ►
God is the universe’s appetite for self-reflective complexity
00:37:58 ►
coming into its fullest flower.
00:38:02 ►
And then the distinctions between science and religion
00:38:05 ►
are seen to be small potatoes indeed.
00:38:08 ►
I mean, we can calculate our way towards the second coming, I maintain.
00:38:15 ►
Well, this is somewhat far afield from most people’s ideas
00:38:18 ►
of what constitutes botanical shamanism,
00:38:21 ►
but not mine,
00:38:32 ►
shamanism but not mine because I think that we could have lived in the light of this gnosis and never made the descent into history that we made with the abandonment of partnership
00:38:40 ►
society, psychedelic religion, pastoralism, and so forth. We were designed to live in paradise until the coming of the kingdom,
00:38:49 ►
but instead we fell into history, which is a kind of hell,
00:38:55 ►
where the animal nature was able to reassert its power over the human dream.
00:39:02 ►
And we have lived with that paradox now for some
00:39:07 ►
12,000 years and it’s left us fairly frazzled and sketched out I think well
00:39:15 ►
if this is what is on a macro scale happening to the human race and this
00:39:21 ►
goes back to the question some time ago of what should be done,
00:39:25 ►
if this is what’s happening on a fractal macrocosm, then what you can do to aid this process is
00:39:32 ►
just accelerate your own arrival at the omega point.
00:39:36 ►
And what that means is psychedelicize yourself.
00:39:51 ►
Begin to deconstruct the hold over your freedom that culture, history, biology has on you and begin to experiment with the concept of yourself as a being trembling on the edge of true liberation.
00:40:01 ►
Because I think that’s probably what you really are.
00:40:03 ►
Yeah.
00:40:03 ►
liberation, because I think that’s probably what you really are.
00:40:04 ►
Yeah?
00:40:11 ►
What do you feel, as you travel around the world, the dynamics between the mainstream dominant and what is an emerging psychedelic culture?
00:40:16 ►
What kind of sessions do you see among this emerging culture?
00:40:21 ►
What kind of dynamics do you see happening?
00:40:23 ►
Kind of a lot of questions.
00:40:26 ►
Well, there are a lot of things well there are a lot
00:40:27 ►
of things
00:40:27 ►
going on
00:40:28 ►
the collapse
00:40:31 ►
of Marxism
00:40:33 ►
was really
00:40:35 ►
the collapse
00:40:36 ►
of everything
00:40:37 ►
because
00:40:38 ►
Marxism
00:40:39 ►
and capitalism
00:40:40 ►
were balanced
00:40:41 ►
against each
00:40:42 ►
other like a
00:40:42 ►
house of
00:40:43 ►
cards
00:40:44 ►
in the absence of any intellectual critique of capitalism,
00:40:50 ►
capitalism has asserted itself with a vengeance.
00:40:56 ►
And what we see happening in the world, what the new world order is,
00:41:00 ►
is a new corporate order.
00:41:03 ►
Some things about it are good and some things are bad.
00:41:06 ►
For instance, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies,
00:41:12 ►
and remember that was as recently as seven years ago,
00:41:16 ►
when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies,
00:41:21 ►
war was a frequent instrument of national policy.
00:41:26 ►
Racism was tolerated as a reflection of national identity.
00:41:32 ►
Nuclear arsenals and a mutual standoff in that area was tolerated.
00:41:40 ►
Suddenly, now, a new gang is in charge.
00:41:47 ►
Marxism is gone.
00:41:49 ►
Racism in the institutionalized form known as apartheid is gone.
00:41:55 ►
Trade barriers are being lowered all over the world.
00:42:01 ►
And if you look at governments in the United States, in England, in France, Germany, and Japan,
00:42:08 ►
they are universally characterized by being staffed and run by jackasses.
00:42:16 ►
In other words, high-caliber talent isn’t going into government.
00:42:21 ►
Government is a place where the Jesse Helms of this world hang out.
00:42:27 ►
And when was the last time an official of the World Bank
00:42:29 ►
or the International Monetary Fund
00:42:32 ►
felt the need to threaten the life of an American president?
00:42:36 ►
It won’t happen.
00:42:38 ►
Those people are heavy hitters.
00:42:40 ►
Only a hysterical, powerless Yahoo would behave that way.
00:42:45 ►
Well, that’s a good question.
00:42:48 ►
There are a number.
00:42:49 ►
First of all, the alt.drugs conference.
00:42:54 ►
Most people know about this.
00:42:56 ►
There are thousands, a couple thousand people participating in that,
00:43:00 ►
and it’s now fragmented into alt.pilocybin, alt.psychedelic, alt.mescaline.
00:43:09 ►
You know, there’s a whole subset of those.
00:43:12 ►
If you don’t like news groups, there is an e-mail conference.
00:43:19 ►
Anybody here in that e-mail conference?
00:43:22 ►
Hmm.
00:43:23 ►
Well, I can’t remember.
00:43:24 ►
I was in it.
00:43:25 ►
But the problem with these email conferences is, you know, you think, oh, great, I’ll meet
00:43:30 ►
some people interested in what I’m interested in.
00:43:32 ►
You join, and the next day there are 80 messages in your email, and you spend hours a day pouring
00:43:40 ►
through the email.
00:43:42 ►
pouring through the email.
00:43:49 ►
I just joined a conference where I get dispatches from the front in Chiapas,
00:43:54 ►
including all the latest statements from Subcomandante Marcos.
00:43:56 ►
I just picked up the mail.
00:44:01 ►
There were 130 messages, half in a language I barely read.
00:44:07 ►
But there’s a lot of action on the net.
00:44:13 ►
I have a website too, but I’m not going to give out the public number yet because it’s not cool enough yet.
00:44:15 ►
It’s more like a construction zone with yellow ribbons strung around
00:44:20 ►
and a sign which says, someday something really cool will be here.
00:44:25 ►
That’s how a lot of the Internet is.
00:44:27 ►
It’s a vast, vast construction zone.
00:44:32 ►
But that’s probably enough on that.
00:44:36 ►
If you’re using the Internet, you should use it more.
00:44:40 ►
If you’re not using it, you should really put that at the top of your agenda
00:44:45 ►
because it’s going to become increasingly indispensable as a part of your cultural toolbox.
00:44:54 ►
I have to pay 35 cents a minute to reach the Internet
00:44:58 ►
because I’m on a cellular modem from U.S. Cellular at 7,200 baud,
00:45:04 ►
and I still spend far more time and money than I should there.
00:45:09 ►
Yeah.
00:45:09 ►
I was wondering, are there any other means?
00:45:13 ►
Well, this question always comes up, and my answer is the answer of a fanatic and a purist.
00:45:21 ►
Not really. not really I mean the best substitute for psychedelics
00:45:28 ►
which takes a lot more time, energy and dedication
00:45:31 ►
is penniless travel
00:45:34 ►
in Asian countries
00:45:36 ►
but it’s not nearly as pleasant
00:45:39 ►
and the risk to your gastrointestinal tract
00:45:44 ►
is orders of magnitude greater.
00:45:50 ►
It’s an interesting question.
00:45:52 ►
I mean, and I may be a special case, more lumpen than others.
00:45:58 ►
I mean, naturally in this business all the time I meet people who say,
00:46:04 ►
I hallucinate all the time I meet people who say, I hallucinate all the time.
00:46:07 ►
I don’t understand what the excitement is about.
00:46:11 ►
Well, it’s a very hard thing because you either have to say, you don’t know what I’m talking about,
00:46:17 ►
or you have to define yourself ever after as an impoverished individual
00:46:23 ►
with a genetic constitution that places this out of your reach.
00:46:28 ►
If I had psychedelic experiences not in the presence of psychedelic substances, I would be alarmed.
00:46:38 ►
I’m not shooting for being high on the natch.
00:46:43 ►
Why?
00:46:42 ►
for being high on the natch.
00:46:43 ►
Why?
00:46:47 ►
When the substances work perfectly well and being high on the natch
00:46:48 ►
indicates a physiological situation
00:46:52 ►
that may be problematic
00:46:54 ►
or could be problematic.
00:46:58 ►
I practiced yoga
00:47:01 ►
and silent sitting
00:47:04 ►
and I find all these things very, very interesting Practiced yoga and silent sitting.
00:47:12 ►
And I find all these things very, very interesting, but pretty non-competitive with psychoactive. One of the things that was so astonishing to me when I first got into all this,
00:47:17 ►
my original impulse at university was toward art history.
00:47:30 ►
university was toward art history. Well, art history, you study the evolution of style and motif over space and time.
00:47:48 ►
That’s basically what it’s about. And a good art historian has a fairly complete inventory of world style, which I felt I did. Well, then I took DMT, and it was absolutely unfamiliar. I could make no comparisons. It wasn’t like Tibetan tantric painting. It wasn’t like Amazonian bark cloth
00:47:55 ►
painting. It wasn’t like Jan van Eyck. It wasn’t like Hieronymus Bosch or Jackson Pollock
00:48:00 ►
or anybody else. And I thought, how extraordinary. If you take the Jungian view
00:48:07 ►
that the function of artists is to explore and communicate the unconscious to the rest
00:48:13 ►
of us, then how bizarre that 3,000 years of Eastern and Western art and nobody passed very close at all to the DMT space.
00:48:35 ►
That’s why, and yet it is without contest, I think, a Niagara of orgasmic beauty. I mean, if I had to say one thing that DMT is, it’s alien beauty.
00:48:41 ►
It’s alien beauty.
00:48:48 ►
Well, if the purpose of art and those who follow Aristotelian and Platonic aesthetics believe that the purpose of art is the communication of the beautiful,
00:48:54 ►
well, why is it then that so little of this has been communicated?
00:48:59 ►
I mean, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a psychedelic experience,
00:49:06 ►
you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last thousand years.
00:49:13 ►
You, little you.
00:49:16 ►
The relationship then of the individual to genius is very puzzling. Any one of us, if we could just get the door jammed open,
00:49:26 ►
would then become a Duchamp, a Da Vinci,
00:49:31 ►
in other words, a major formative force of their contemporaries.
00:49:36 ►
I’m hoping we’ll be able to do that with virtual reality.
00:49:40 ►
I mean, I see virtual reality as a technology
00:49:43 ►
that will allow one person to show another the contents of their mind.
00:49:49 ►
And that when we get the cross-fertilization and creativity that will flow from that,
00:49:55 ►
we’ll create art that will make everything done to this point look like scratchings in the dirt.
00:50:02 ►
I mean, at least that’s my hope.
00:50:01 ►
scratching in the dirt.
00:50:04 ►
I mean, at least that’s my hope.
00:50:09 ►
I don’t think the last word has been said on this subject.
00:50:13 ►
In science news last week or the week before,
00:50:19 ►
there are 120 anatomical differences between the brains of men and women that are not genital related.
00:50:23 ►
I think that we’re on the brink of a whole frontier
00:50:27 ►
of discovering who and what women are.
00:50:32 ►
They were just thought to be soft boys up until fairly recently.
00:50:40 ►
And the most enthusiastic proponents of feminism, I think, don’t understand how deep a subject they’ve grabbed onto.
00:50:52 ►
In a way, I would sort of plead guilty to your metaphor that I do sort of see women as out of history. They are unhistorical creatures,
00:51:05 ►
and men invented history, lost themselves in it,
00:51:10 ►
and femininity, if you want to call it that,
00:51:13 ►
Gaian consciousness, if you want to call it that,
00:51:16 ►
psychedelic spirituality, if you want to call it that,
00:51:20 ►
is beckoning, does sort of hold the high ground,
00:51:24 ►
That is beckoning, does sort of hold the high ground, and is drawing history back toward a feminizing, archaic mode.
00:51:34 ►
But, you know, race is a phenomenon of groups of people.
00:51:40 ►
In a sense, so is femininity.
00:51:43 ►
As an individual, you have to deal with the cards you’re dealt.
00:51:48 ►
And we all have a feminine, a masculine, an androgynous, so forth and so on component in our psyche.
00:51:56 ►
But in a sense, I guess I’m a conservative because I don’t see history doing anything other than recapturing what once was and which once was definitely
00:52:09 ►
under the aegis of the feminine.
00:52:13 ►
Like, for instance, the World Wide Web, this vast technological artifact that’s being put
00:52:18 ►
in place.
00:52:19 ►
All it is is a hard wiring of female intuition.
00:52:23 ►
Well, it is. It’s a hard wiring of female intuition.
00:52:33 ►
It’s the engineering mentality is catching up with the feminine outlook.
00:52:38 ►
But your question disquiets me. I’m not sure.
00:52:46 ►
Again, it’s important as an individual not to identify with the characteristics of a group.
00:52:55 ►
And it’s very tricky because you’re constantly binned into thinking of yourself as black, gay, white, poor.
00:53:00 ►
But those are not really qualities of individuals.
00:53:02 ►
Individuals are more complex than that.
00:53:04 ►
I mean, you may have a gay component. You may have a black portion of your genetic heritage.
00:53:10 ►
But don’t define yourself as a group.
00:53:12 ►
That’s a trick that was launched by print in the act of creating this peculiar entity called the public.
00:53:21 ►
The public is a fiction of the print-created galaxy.
00:53:26 ►
You are not a citizen and you are not part of the public
00:53:30 ►
unless you seriously do damage to your humanness
00:53:35 ►
in order to fit yourself into such a narrow definition.
00:53:39 ►
Yeah? It’s a sense that this, um, the chemicals passed on the brain of females have this huge hormonal swing and wave.
00:53:52 ►
I find that I have certain experiences during certain times of the month and I would consider a little things on it.
00:53:59 ►
And it is a mystery to me about women and men. There is a difference just in the chemistry of the body.
00:54:05 ►
So maybe there is really not an up or down to it.
00:54:10 ►
You know, somebody with a hand and somebody’s behind.
00:54:12 ►
There’s just a difference.
00:54:13 ►
Well, you know, we can talk about this, but since this is a room full of aspiring professionals,
00:54:22 ►
this is obviously an area where incredibly good work could be done using ordinary
00:54:29 ►
scientific sampling techniques.
00:54:31 ►
You probably know it’s a scandal how much medical research is done on male human subjects
00:54:39 ►
and then extrapolated to all human subjects.
00:54:43 ►
I would be willing to bet you just sitting here that
00:54:46 ►
in 30 years of research on psychedelics, there has never been a study which attempted to
00:54:53 ►
differentiate the difference in the response of men and women to the substance. It’s like
00:54:59 ►
step one, but it’s never been done. Again, you know, how does menstruation affect this?
00:55:07 ►
How does menopause affect this?
00:55:10 ►
How does the postpartum chemistry affect?
00:55:13 ►
These are easily answered scientific questions that have never been looked at
00:55:20 ►
because of gender bias in the scientific establishment.
00:55:25 ►
Yeah. looked at because of gender bias in the scientific establishment. Yeah? Male Speaker 1 That’s a way of putting it.
00:55:32 ►
Male Speaker 1 That’s driving that, aggressive driving that.
00:55:37 ►
Male Speaker 1 Oh.
00:55:39 ►
Male Speaker 1 That’s driving that.
00:55:42 ►
Male Speaker 1 Oh, well that’s a very straightforward theory.
00:55:53 ►
If psychedelics inhibit and compete with testosterone,
00:55:56 ►
obviously their impact on men is going to be much more profound than their impact on women.
00:56:01 ►
Right there you have a hypothesis.
00:56:07 ►
profound in their impact on women. Right there you have a hypothesis. Has there been any research on that or has anyone looked at the
00:56:14 ►
the inner senses that are going to form on the effect that psilocybin has on changes in the body’s chemistry that actually drives your body? No.
00:56:31 ►
The amount of research, you know, the first psilocybin project is underway now,
00:56:32 ►
the first one in 30 years, and they’re just trying to define the basic pharmacodynamics of the substance.
00:56:38 ►
They haven’t looked at this stuff.
00:56:40 ►
I should say to you, you know, I’m urging you aspiring young professionals into these fields.
00:56:46 ►
Let me caution.
00:56:48 ►
That’s because I’m an enthusiast and I want to know the answers to these questions.
00:56:53 ►
Professionally, it’s a life of hell.
00:56:55 ►
You will not be promoted.
00:56:57 ►
Your colleagues will look upon you as a freak.
00:57:01 ►
You will find yourself, you know, my brother can talk to this point.
00:57:06 ►
It’s not a pleasant thing to associate yourself with psychedelics professionally.
00:57:13 ►
Yeah.
00:57:14 ►
I guess something that I feel like you need to take responsibility for
00:57:21 ►
is the use of words like profound and transformative
00:57:24 ►
because what is profound and transformative
00:57:25 ►
because what is profound and transformative for a male, if it’s more profound for a male,
00:57:32 ►
it might be just a different profound and transformative that’s not on the male scale
00:57:38 ►
of what is profound and transformative.
00:57:40 ►
And I think that it’s irresponsible to say that it’s more profound for males, especially when no research has been done on the way in which it’s directed to affect.
00:57:49 ►
Well, I guess what I meant by more profound is that I think the average male is set down further from where he started
00:57:57 ►
than the average female is at the conclusion of a psychedelic experience.
00:58:03 ►
One of the things, let me mention this as long as we’re on this subject,
00:58:06 ►
this is just throwing this out, but one of the things that’s always fascinated me
00:58:10 ►
is the difference between male and female orgasm
00:58:14 ►
and how male orgasm, here’s a place where it seems to be reversed.
00:58:20 ►
Male orgasm seems to lie fairly close to the surface
00:58:24 ►
and be a fairly unspectacular event most of the time,
00:58:29 ►
where why is the female sexual response so much more dramatic,
00:58:36 ►
and why is there an orgasmic response at all?
00:58:39 ►
In other words, many animals don’t have such a response.
00:58:44 ►
In other words, many animals don’t have such a response. You can build an urge, you can build a sexual urge into an organism
00:58:50 ►
without this payoff of immediate experiential fireworks.
00:58:57 ►
There are species of fish where the female lays the eggs
00:59:00 ►
and the male swims over them and releases the sperm,
00:59:04 ►
and that’s sex in that
00:59:06 ►
species.
00:59:07 ►
I sense, and I’ve never been able to articulate it, that the DMT flash is very orgasmic in
00:59:17 ►
some sense.
00:59:18 ►
It’s somewhat like a full body orgasm, but it has components in it which are only encountered otherwise in orgasm.
00:59:27 ►
And I wonder what this orgasmic response is for, what evolutionary role it fulfills.
00:59:37 ►
It seems to emerge late in animal organization.
00:59:41 ►
This is not something you trace back to flatworms or something.
00:59:44 ►
organization. This is not something you trace back to flatworms or something.
00:59:50 ►
Sexual orgasm, it seems most intensified in the primates.
00:59:55 ►
And again, I have no answers, but I would bet when this is all teased apart, the chemistry of orgasm
01:00:00 ►
and the neurochemistry of orgasm and the chemistry of the DMT flash
01:00:05 ►
are going to be found to be at least cousins of each other in some sense.
01:00:12 ►
Yeah.
01:00:12 ►
I wanted to make a comment about the gender issues.
01:00:17 ►
I think that my experience with suicide is that it has a sense of healing
01:00:23 ►
and bringing back the wholeness of balancing.
01:00:28 ►
So if you have too much testosterone that you’ve got up,
01:00:33 ►
or if you have too much of one thing, it will bring you back and direct you and center you.
01:00:38 ►
And since males usually do all the talking,
01:00:41 ►
that’s why we have said suicide has had a feminizing effect. Well,
01:00:46 ►
it has a feminizing effect on most of the people who have been doing the talking who
01:00:51 ►
take psilocybin. I’ve also had experiences where I’ve been very, you know, at times
01:00:58 ►
when I’ve been depressed and weak where psilocybin has not made me very sad, it’s actually given me power in my stomach.
01:01:05 ►
I felt very like, I remember one time I went out
01:01:09 ►
and really liked the sound of bottles breaking.
01:01:12 ►
And I would break the bottle and make it feel really good.
01:01:16 ►
It was almost a building up of an ego
01:01:20 ►
when my ego was down.
01:01:22 ►
And when my ego was too big, it would fall back down again.
01:01:25 ►
So that would then, you know, as Piggie was saying, that would then fit in, you know,
01:01:30 ►
that everyone who takes it will be balanced, will be kind of redirected and, you know, led further along.
01:01:37 ►
So it’s a kind of regulator is what you’re saying.
01:01:40 ►
Yeah, it’s a kind of thing with what’s real. And, you know, extreme feminism and extreme nationalism are far and dearly real.
01:01:48 ►
They’re both extremes.
01:01:50 ►
And it’ll bring you back into a more integral form of just the way the world is.
01:01:55 ►
Well, I would certainly agree with that as a description of ayahuasca.
01:02:01 ►
There’s a lot of work being done right now. I mean, I’m sure you all have heard of Prozac,
01:02:06 ►
which is the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the world now,
01:02:11 ►
and six or seven years ago it didn’t even exist.
01:02:14 ►
Well, what’s interesting about Prozac is that it is a serotonergic competitor.
01:02:22 ►
This is the same system that the psychedelics are working on.
01:02:29 ►
And I think probably we’re converging on some kind of a breakthrough where sexual dysfunction,
01:02:39 ►
depression, psychedelic states are all going to be seen to be various twiddlings of the serotonergic system
01:02:49 ►
and probably whole new families of drugs will come out of this.
01:02:55 ►
I have never taken any antidepressant and at my brother’s urging I took Prozac
01:03:03 ►
and I’ve always been contemptuous of all of the Valium, that whole thing.
01:03:09 ►
That’s not our church, for sure.
01:03:14 ►
But I was very, very impressed with what Prozac was doing.
01:03:21 ►
And in a way, it was a strangely painless kind of psychedelic.
01:03:26 ►
What Prozac seems to do is put you where ayahuasca puts you four days after the trip.
01:03:35 ►
In other words, there’s no dramatic episode of intoxication.
01:03:39 ►
There’s just a slow kind of getting real, which means dropping your illusions,
01:03:46 ►
which are usually what is depressing you.
01:03:49 ►
I think Prozac is being misprescribed in the sense that it’s thought of as an antidepressant.
01:03:55 ►
I don’t think that’s quite correct.
01:03:59 ►
I think it’s the cure for seasonal light deficit syndrome.
01:04:06 ►
I think that as tropical primates,
01:04:09 ►
we paid a terrible price for conquering the temperate and subarctic zones of the world,
01:04:17 ►
and that is six months of kind of downness out of the year.
01:04:23 ►
And that can be chemically corrected.
01:04:27 ►
Our genetics are designed for the arboreal tropics,
01:04:30 ►
and yet we insist in living in places like Boston and Hamburg,
01:04:35 ►
which are so far north, you know, that you’re physiologically dysfunctional seven months out of the year,
01:04:41 ►
and you don’t know it because so is everybody else there.
01:04:45 ►
Yeah.
01:04:45 ►
I think you were doing some of your work with Prozac in conjunction with MDMA
01:04:50 ►
to sort of offset some of the, you know, MDMA to get real speedy with Prozac
01:04:55 ►
how to tone the data.
01:04:57 ►
Did you work with that at all?
01:05:00 ►
There may be a confusion here.
01:05:04 ►
The way I’m familiar with Prozac being mentioned in connection with MDMA
01:05:09 ►
is that MDMA has a toxic effect on the dendritic spines of the nerves.
01:05:20 ►
This is part of what you buy into with MDMA.
01:05:24 ►
But strangely enough, if you pre-dose yourself with Prozac,
01:05:29 ►
not as Prozac is supposed to be taken for depression,
01:05:33 ►
where you take it for 30 days and then like that,
01:05:35 ►
but if you just take a 20 milligram capsule of Prozac six hours before you take MDMA,
01:05:42 ►
it absolutely blocks this toxic effect.
01:05:47 ►
I have mixed feelings about mixing drugs and handing this information on,
01:05:53 ►
but on the other hand, this is a group of professionals.
01:05:56 ►
You should know this.
01:05:58 ►
It’s a fact.
01:05:59 ►
It was published in Brain, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and so forth and so on.
01:06:04 ►
in Brain, the Journal of Neurophysiology, and so forth and so on.
01:06:12 ►
MDMA by itself has a physiological profile that causes me to stay away from it.
01:06:17 ►
I have no quarrel with the effect, the experience, but when you can see histological damage to macro structures in the nerve, you want to slow down a little
01:06:28 ►
and send a few tens of thousands ahead of you.
01:06:32 ►
How is that doing it once that you’re allowed that sort of damage?
01:06:41 ►
Well, every time you take it, it has this effect.
01:06:44 ►
Oh, well, but let me say something about this damage that MDMA does.
01:06:49 ►
It does damage.
01:06:50 ►
You can see it.
01:06:52 ►
However, there is no behavioral sequela.
01:06:56 ►
What does this mean?
01:06:57 ►
It means you don’t act funny.
01:07:00 ►
You don’t fall down twitching or your eyes go out of focus or become manic.
01:07:05 ►
So you can have two opinions about this.
01:07:08 ►
Well, if it destroys the structure, then there’s no behavioral consequence.
01:07:14 ►
You must not have needed that structure.
01:07:17 ►
However, when we start tossing out chunks of our brain based on our own judgment,
01:07:23 ►
you have to wonder about that.
01:07:28 ►
You can always take psilocybin and say to it in the middle of the second hour,
01:07:36 ►
be MDMA.
01:07:39 ►
And that’s how I do my MDMA. Thank you. Yes.
01:07:46 ►
There’s a friend called Elliot Cohen, I don’t know if you know him,
01:07:49 ►
who works with healing plants, and his method is to communicate with the plants.
01:07:54 ►
He says the plants are bursting to tell us what their purpose is, how they can help us.
01:07:59 ►
We just have to learn how to listen.
01:08:00 ►
So in the same way that you’re saying that he sees communication and information. But what he does
01:08:08 ►
is once the shaman has made contact with the plant, he doesn’t have to give
01:08:12 ►
that plant to the person. He can use a messenger plant. And they use Moxa in the home
01:08:15 ►
and public pension. And because he knows the information of the plant, he can
01:08:19 ►
send the messenger for the information without actually having to give the
01:08:23 ►
plant itself. And I’m wondering whether anybody’s done that with psychedelics
01:08:27 ►
or whether you see that that’s feasible to do with psychedelics.
01:08:31 ►
I assume, being a practical person, that it must not be feasible
01:08:38 ►
because, as you know, in the highly succust homeopathic preparation,
01:08:44 ►
no physical trace of the original material can be found.
01:08:49 ►
If there were such a thing as homeopathic psychedelics,
01:08:53 ►
they would be impossible to prosecute under the drug laws.
01:08:58 ►
What are you asking?
01:08:59 ►
I’m asking if seeing it as information that you can actually have a messenger found,
01:09:04 ►
like you were saying the shaman is the messenger between the worlds.
01:09:07 ►
What he’s doing is using a fairly innocuous plant as the messenger between the information
01:09:12 ►
of a huge array of pharmacopoeias, what plants can do,
01:09:16 ►
and using just a drop of that messenger to be able to give an experience.
01:09:21 ►
Well, in a sense, there’s a parallel idea in the Amazon,
01:09:27 ►
which is shamans take ayahuasca,
01:09:30 ►
and then they take very, very minuscule amounts of other plants
01:09:38 ►
that they want to learn about,
01:09:41 ►
and they say that the ayahuasca then informs them of the properties of the
01:09:48 ►
other plant. This whole business of information and how it moves around in nature is an area
01:09:56 ►
where we are uniquely ill-fitted to understand it because we are objective materialists and
01:10:04 ►
to understand it because we are objective materialists and it’s very hard for us to understand and operate
01:10:09 ►
on the assumption that the world is made of language.
01:10:13 ►
We may say it so,
01:10:15 ►
but we don’t know how to operationally operate with that perception.
01:10:19 ►
As we learn how to do that, I agree with you.
01:10:24 ►
Not only plants, everything seeks to communicate.
01:10:29 ►
Everything is somehow completed in an act of mutual recognition and understanding.
01:10:37 ►
Nature is alive, not only biological nature, but the atoms and the continents and everything seeks to communicate.
01:10:48 ►
I think what psychedelics are is a kind of opening of our portals to this constant stream
01:10:56 ►
of communication that evolutionary necessity has shut us away from.
01:11:02 ►
has shut us away from.
01:11:07 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:11:11 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:11:17 ►
So, what do you think about the last thing that Terence just said?
01:11:18 ►
And I quote,
01:11:23 ►
I think what psychedelics are is a kind of opening of our portals to this constant stream of communication
01:11:25 ►
that evolutionary necessity has shut us away from, end quote. Well, I not only agree with that,
01:11:33 ►
I suspect that this feature of psychedelics is also the cause of most people coming back from
01:11:39 ►
these experiences with a significantly more green outlook than we previously held.
01:11:46 ►
experiences with a significantly more green outlook than we previously held. In essence,
01:11:52 ►
experiences such as the ones that we have in an ayahuasca circle, well, they seem to provide a direct communication link to Gaia, or the heart of nature. In other words, the best way to go green
01:11:58 ►
is to psychedelicize yourself. Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you
01:12:04 ►
already know what I think
01:12:05 ►
about Terrence’s time wave idea, so I’m not going to repeat it now. But just to play devil’s advocate,
01:12:13 ►
when Terrence predicted that the following year was going to be one of the most significant years
01:12:18 ►
between then and 2012, well, I had to pause and see if I could find anything of significance that took place that year.
01:12:26 ►
To be honest, for the most part, it wasn’t all that extraordinary of a year, at least compared to now,
01:12:32 ►
except for one little thing that was completely unnoticed, I’m sure, by all but a very small group of people in this country.
01:12:40 ►
Because it was in August of 1996 that Osama bin Laden issued a message that was titled, and I quote,
01:12:48 ►
a declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places, end quote.
01:12:57 ►
And while I doubt that Terence picked up on this either,
01:12:59 ►
I think it could be argued that this, in fact, was an extremely significant event that continues to have ramifications in the everyday life of all Americans, certainly, and many other people in the world as well.
01:13:13 ►
If you live outside of the States, you may not be aware of this, but the USA is no longer the land of the free.
01:13:20 ►
We’ve become a land of constantly watched and fearful people.
01:13:26 ►
free. We’ve become a land of constantly watched and fearful people. East Germany and the Soviet Union never even came close to the level of surveillance that all Americans experience today.
01:13:32 ►
So, in a way, I guess that Terence’s prediction of a significant event taking place in 1996
01:13:39 ►
may have been closer to the truth than even he believed at the time. Sometimes it’s the little
01:13:45 ►
things that make the biggest differences over time, and that can be true in your own life as
01:13:51 ►
well if you think about it. Now I’m going to close with a bit of sad news that I should have
01:13:57 ►
discovered earlier. But on the 13th of January of this year, another important member of our
01:14:03 ►
worldwide psychedelic community
01:14:05 ►
died. While his name may not be a household word, the work of Dale Pendle has had a profound
01:14:12 ►
influence on many of the people who you’ve listened to here in the salon. Sadly, I’ve
01:14:18 ►
podcast only one of Dale’s talks here in the salon, but as it turned out, it was one of his more important talks.
01:14:30 ►
It took place at the 2006 Palenque Norte lectures during the Burning Man festival,
01:14:38 ►
and there Dale first publicly articulated his concept of Horizon Anarchism. And this is a political concept that he used to describe the newly emerging anarchist communities at Burning Man. And in addition to
01:14:46 ►
the traditional anarchist concept of building a new society in the shell of the old, Dale used
01:14:53 ►
the phrase horizon anarchism to denote the current building of alternative structures while also
01:14:59 ►
planning for a long-term anarchist future, which was still on the horizon.
01:15:10 ►
I’m afraid that the recording of this important talk isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be,
01:15:15 ►
but, well, at the time all I had to record with was a little handheld cassette recorder that I placed near where he was talking.
01:15:17 ►
I posted this talk in November of 2006 as podcast number 55,
01:15:22 ►
and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes.
01:15:24 ►
as podcast number 55, and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes.
01:15:31 ►
Dale is probably best known as the author of somewhere around 20 books about psychedelics,
01:15:33 ►
including the famous Pharmaco series.
01:15:38 ►
And if you aren’t familiar with Dale and his work, I think it would probably be worth your time to read the obituary that John Hanna wrote and published on Erowid.org.
01:15:43 ►
That’s E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
01:15:46 ►
And I’ll link to that in today’s program notes as well.
01:15:49 ►
And as you know, you’ll find those notes for all of the Salon podcasts
01:15:53 ►
at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:15:56 ►
And I hope that you can remember, whether you’re fully aware of this or not,
01:16:01 ►
but we live in a very special time.
01:16:04 ►
And it’s special because this is the only
01:16:07 ►
time that you and I are ever going to have. This is your time. This is our time. So let’s make the
01:16:14 ►
best of it, huh? And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.