Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
“Cosmic Christ” by Alex GreyPhoto credit: Lorenzo
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“If a Buddhist could design their own genome they would become a fungus, because a fungus is a primary decomposer. It is the only karma-less place in the food chain. There is no karma for the fungi. They don’t destroy any life whatsoever.”
“The trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrials.”
“I think probably the biota of the Earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes, if not organisms, and possibly intelligences.”
“It’s very clear to me that every abduction case around, except for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata, can be explained by one simple fact: People are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories.”
“Trust only yourself.”
“I think we’re getting set, basically, to decamp into the imagination. That the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you’ve just acquired eyes.”
“A shaman is a seer, is a prophet, is a higher dimensional mathematician. And they may not use tensor equations to express what they’re doing, but mathematics before symbols is experience.”
“We have unleashed such novelty that I think we’re in the terminal phase of decamping from three dimensional space. We are leaving the womb of Newtonian being for something else, the imagination. And the birth is tumultuous. The entire planet is at risk.”
“If this planet hadn’t been wrecked sixty-five million years ago we wouldn’t be here. Well then, what is our position on planetary catastrophe? We’re in the process of making one. Is it so that sixty-five million years in the future an organism filled with love, and justice, and intelligence will look back at our skeletons in the shale and say, ‘Well, they had a good thing going, but if it hadn’t been for their extinction we wouldn’t be here.’ ”
“Thinking Outside the Quantum Box”
by Bernardo Kastrup
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And this is my first podcast on the Salon One track.
00:00:28 ►
And this, the first week of my 14th year of podcasting from here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:35 ►
It’s really good to have you here with me today as, well, together we begin yet another year in cyberdelic space.
00:00:43 ►
Last Saturday, which was the date marking the beginning of our 14th year here in the salon,
00:00:49 ►
I mentioned it on Twitter.
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And I want to thank all of my Twitter followers who either liked or retweeted or both to that post.
00:00:58 ►
When I logged into Twitter again a few days later,
00:01:01 ►
I thought that my account had been hacked
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because of all the notifications
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I received about your likes and retweets. That’s the most activity I’ve ever experienced on Twitter,
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and well, I thank you for that little rush. It felt great. Now, to ensure that these podcasts
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keep coming your way this year, I’m pleased to begin this new podcast year by thanking fellow salonners Joel L, Randall S, and Anatole L,
00:01:27 ►
who have recently made donations to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with
00:01:33 ►
these podcasts. And I want to be sure to thank you as well. I appreciate your being here with me here
00:01:40 ►
in the salon, and I promise to do my best to keep some interesting programs coming your
00:01:45 ►
way. And speaking of interesting programs, I’m going to pick up today with the next installment
00:01:51 ►
of the course that Terrence McKenna taught at CIIS in April of 1995. And there’s going to be
00:01:58 ►
at least one more podcast from this particular lecture series of his. After that, guess what?
00:02:02 ►
from this particular lecture series of his.
00:02:04 ►
After that, guess what?
00:02:07 ►
One of our fellow salonners from the UK discovered seven cassette tapes
00:02:09 ►
of what I believe to be an as-yet-unheard-of,
00:02:13 ►
on the internet at least, series of McKenna tapes.
00:02:16 ►
They’d been stored in his parents’ garage.
00:02:19 ►
Now, I haven’t checked them out yet,
00:02:20 ►
but my guess is that they’re going to be in good enough condition
00:02:23 ►
to permit me to digitize and play them here in the salon. So stay tuned in a few weeks for more news about that.
00:02:32 ►
Now, if like me, you enjoy it when Terrence takes off on one of his cosmic flights of fancy,
00:02:39 ►
I think that you’re going to enjoy hearing him today, because once again he’s going to talk about his intuition that
00:02:45 ►
psilocybin mushrooms are of extraterrestrial origin. And just when you think he was finished
00:02:52 ►
with that subject, another question lifts him up to yet another of his poetic visions that,
00:02:58 ►
well, that I so enjoy hearing. And I should remind you that when you hear him go off on
00:03:03 ►
what a great thing the internet has the potential to become,
00:03:07 ►
he was actually talking about the web, which at that time of his talk was only three years old.
00:03:14 ►
And back then, most of us were only able to access it through a 300 baud dial-up modem.
00:03:21 ►
But even then, it’s obvious that Terrence had an inkling of where we could be right now.
00:03:27 ►
In other words, you and I in cyberspace, listening to a talk that he gave over 20 years ago.
00:03:34 ►
Yeah.
00:03:37 ►
So, it’s a deep thought about the community between the mind of man and plants. Why does it speak in such
00:03:50 ►
galactic terms? When I go to the Highlands, I have visions of UFOs and things that are
00:03:56 ►
not of this earth. There’s so much of the D&D flash like you said. I actually had precisely the same hallucinations at that time.
00:04:10 ►
That’s the way I see heavy doses of psilocybin speaking to me,
00:04:13 ►
not really about things here on this planet.
00:04:15 ►
Well, I agree with you.
00:04:17 ►
That’s my experience.
00:04:24 ►
And in trying to account for it, you know, you have to look at fungi.
00:04:29 ►
Fungi are primary decomposers.
00:04:33 ►
That means they can only live on decaying life.
00:04:42 ►
That suggests to me that they are late-evolving, or at least not early-evolving.
00:04:47 ►
Mushrooms are very soft-bodied, and so are all fungi.
00:04:55 ►
There is no record, no fossil record of a mushroom older than 40 million years.
00:05:01 ►
Well, that’s a tiny fraction of the time life has been on the Earth.
00:05:08 ►
Now, when I asked a paleontologist about this, he said, well, they’re soft-bodied and they don’t fossilize easily.
00:05:15 ►
But, hey, we have flatworms from the Gunflint Church of South Africa that are 4.3 billion years old.
00:05:18 ►
If they left a trace in the fossil record,
00:05:22 ►
you’d think there would be more of a trace of mushrooms. If you decondition your presuppositions and just look at the mushroom,
00:05:33 ►
it looks to me, number one, as though it is capable of surviving an extraterrestrial environment.
00:05:45 ►
In other words, if you have mushroom spores and you want to store them for long-term longevity,
00:05:52 ►
you seek an environment as much like outer space as you can find.
00:05:56 ►
You store them in liquid nitrogen at minus 200 degrees, and they will last virtually forever. If you look at the color of Stropharia
00:06:07 ►
cadensis spores, that’s in the brown-gilled
00:06:10 ►
mushroom family, the spores are deep
00:06:13 ►
purple, almost black. That’s
00:06:16 ►
the color you would paint a spacecraft
00:06:18 ►
if you wanted to absorb long
00:06:22 ►
wave radiation.
00:06:26 ►
If you look at the spore, you know, what is it?
00:06:29 ►
It’s a packet of crystallized DNA.
00:06:33 ►
A single mature Stropharia cubensis mushroom, when it’s sporulating,
00:06:38 ►
will shed up to 3 million spores a minute for up to 2 weeks.
00:06:45 ►
3 million spores a minute for up to two weeks. 3 million spores a minute for two weeks.
00:06:49 ►
And these things are microscopic,
00:06:52 ►
so small that the perturbations and agitation of air molecules,
00:06:58 ►
which are called Brownian motion,
00:07:01 ►
can actually percolate these things into the outer atmosphere where then energetic
00:07:08 ►
cosmic events can actually detach them from the terrestrial medium and they slowly, like
00:07:15 ►
planetary dandruff or something, drift off into space.
00:07:21 ►
Well, I always, it seems so obvious to me, maybe it’s because I live in Hawaii,
00:07:28 ►
but the most predictable major revolution in biology that you can imagine is,
00:07:36 ►
of course, within a few years it will be realized that the Earth is an island.
00:07:42 ►
That’s all. But the biota that is present here, much of it probably drifted in in cosmic debris.
00:07:50 ►
When stars go supernova, planets are destroyed.
00:07:55 ►
It’s a cliche of cosmic consciousness to say, you know,
00:08:00 ►
the atoms in your body were once in the hearts of distant stars.
00:08:13 ►
Well, if that’s true, then some of the atoms in your body were once a part of distant planets. And some vanishingly small fraction may have been part of the biota of extraterrestrial ecosystems.
00:08:21 ►
The other thing about the mushroom that’s very suggestive to me is it appears to be
00:08:29 ►
or there is a place, a perspective from which you can look at it
00:08:34 ►
that it appears to be not an organism but an artifact.
00:08:39 ►
It is incredibly well designed
00:08:43 ►
at a very high level of design criteria.
00:08:48 ►
For example, on this planet, one of the most advanced ethical systems we’ve been able to evolve is Buddhism,
00:08:57 ►
which teaches vegetarianism.
00:09:01 ►
If a Buddhist could design their own genome, they would become a fungus,
00:09:09 ►
because a fungus is a primary decomposer.
00:09:12 ►
It’s the only carmal-less place in the entire food chain.
00:09:17 ►
There is no karma for the fungi.
00:09:20 ►
They don’t destroy any life whatsoever. So here you have this thing designed to traverse extraterrestrial space,
00:09:31 ►
occupying a carmalist niche in the ecosystem,
00:09:36 ►
and when complexed with a mammalian nervous system,
00:09:39 ►
a galactarian archive of historical data becomes accessible.
00:09:44 ►
Lactarian archives of historical data become accessible.
00:09:52 ►
We have only known about DNA since 1950, less than 50 years,
00:10:00 ►
and we’re already confidently talking about completely redesigning the human genome and so forth and so on. Well, if we pursue along these lines for 500 years we will look
00:10:05 ►
the way we want to look and you know you trivially we may all want to be Keanu
00:10:12 ►
Reeves or something but once the cultural agenda cuts in, if say Buddhism
00:10:20 ►
took over in the presence of an advanced molecular genetics,
00:10:25 ►
then we could design ourselves into a carmelist niche in the universe.
00:10:30 ►
I wish that we could bring, I don’t know who it is,
00:10:36 ►
but the content of the mushroom experience, which was what launched your question, is so evidently alien and non-human and self-referential to a world we don’t know
00:10:51 ►
that to me it would require a commission and several years of study to decide that this thing is not an extraterrestrial.
00:11:02 ►
is not an extraterrestrial.
00:11:06 ►
Our notions of extraterrestrials to this point have been incredibly self-reflexive.
00:11:14 ►
Once you have fully ingrass the size of the universe
00:11:20 ►
and the amount of time that is available,
00:11:25 ►
then the idea that someone would come in a metal ship
00:11:30 ►
with an interest in your gross industrial output
00:11:33 ►
and a desire to cure cancer is absolutely preposterous.
00:11:39 ►
That’s such a culture-bound notion.
00:11:41 ►
It’s like expecting them to arrive with a load of pizzas ready
00:11:45 ►
for delivery. The trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrial. The very notion
00:11:54 ►
alien means unfamiliar. So it’s not going to be like we think it is. The real task will be to recognize it. And we have discovered, after only a thousand years,
00:12:10 ►
that toxic metal-based technologies are fatal.
00:12:18 ►
And we have pushed our entire planet into planetary crisis
00:12:21 ►
by coming to this realization rather late in the game.
00:12:26 ►
If long-term survival is the name of the game for intelligent life in the universe, then
00:12:33 ►
the way we’re doing it is not the way to do it.
00:12:36 ►
It’s going to have to be non-polluting, biologically based, molecularly based, so forth and so
00:12:43 ►
on.
00:12:43 ►
biologically based, molecularly based, so forth and so on.
00:12:51 ►
And as you run down the list, the mushroom begins to look more and more like the real thing. And then, of course, the content of the experience is so different from other psychedelics
00:12:58 ►
and so other-oriented that I am puzzled that we’ve been at this now nearly 30 years
00:13:08 ►
and we still don’t have a consensus.
00:13:11 ►
I don’t know what it is.
00:13:13 ►
Is it that when you take the mushroom you lose all ability to then operate
00:13:18 ►
in the world of straight judgments and understanding?
00:13:22 ►
judgments and understanding.
00:13:32 ►
It’s very puzzling, but I think probably the biota of the earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes, if not organisms, and possibly intelligences.
00:13:38 ►
But they’re not interested in your fetal tissue or putting implants in you or taking you up and slicing you up in very large-scale
00:13:48 ►
surgical wards.
00:13:50 ►
I find all that paranoid and pathological.
00:13:53 ►
I can talk about that if you want, but it’s not really our subject.
00:13:57 ►
Yeah.
00:13:57 ►
In the month of 2000, you talked about the DNA molecule, the DNA chemical.
00:14:03 ►
I’m not sure.
00:14:09 ►
There’s something about the medical position of the molecule. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes. There are different ways to look for extraterrestrials.
00:14:13 ►
One way is to build a vast radio telescope and search for a signal.
00:14:18 ►
The way I would do it, if I were in charge of things,
00:14:22 ►
is I would search the terrestrial ecosystem for
00:14:27 ►
anomalous molecules, molecules that have no near relatives or history of evolutionary
00:14:34 ►
development in terrestrial organisms.
00:14:37 ►
Well, it turns out you don’t have to look far.
00:14:41 ►
It’s psilocybin.
00:14:42 ►
Psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine. It’s the only 4-phosphorylated
00:14:51 ►
indole in nature. The only one. Okay, well, here you have a pentaxyl group. It’s a five-sided
00:14:59 ►
thing. And then you have a benzene molecule off it, and these molecules have numbered positions, one through six.
00:15:07 ►
And then you have a phosphorus group.
00:15:10 ►
It can attach at any one of those six positions.
00:15:14 ►
Attached in the four position, this is unheard of.
00:15:18 ►
It only occurs in this one case.
00:15:21 ►
Well, that’s very odd.
00:15:24 ►
this one case. Well, that’s very odd.
00:15:28 ►
I mean, if we believe nature is a continuum of evolutionary adumbration, then have suddenly, out of nowhere,
00:15:32 ►
completely anomalous molecules sticking up,
00:15:36 ►
suggest it may have come in from somewhere else.
00:15:38 ►
Yeah?
00:15:45 ►
It’s similar. I mean, serotonin? It’s similar.
00:15:46 ►
I mean, serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
00:15:49 ►
Serotonin is ubiquitous in life on this planet, from flatworms to man.
00:15:56 ►
It’s in every organism there is.
00:15:58 ►
Yeah, the structure, yes.
00:16:00 ►
I mean, here’s the thing.
00:16:01 ►
Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
00:16:04 ►
Psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:16:08 ►
What you’ve got then is 4-NN-dimethyltryptamine as opposed to 5-hydroxytryptamine.
00:16:19 ►
Yeah, these things are a chemical family.
00:16:23 ►
Yeah.
00:16:25 ►
things are a chemical family. Yeah. I’m curious about this alienation of people’s experience with the psilocybin, having that sort of galactic experience.
00:16:36 ►
And since we’re talking about persons with the transformation, what role do you think that either the psilocybin range images in or the sort of cultural mythology around, you know, close encounters,
00:16:51 ►
what role do you think that’s playing?
00:16:53 ►
Why is that coming up in terms of the consciousness shift that we’re trying to make?
00:16:58 ►
What’s that about?
00:17:00 ►
Well, if you want, I mean, if you’re interested in UFOs, one of the first books ever written is, I think, one of the best.
00:17:10 ►
It’s called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky by Jung.
00:17:18 ►
And what he says is that, I hope I don’t have to do too much backgrounding for an audience like this,
00:17:25 ►
but as you know, Jung analyzed alchemy and said that in the presence of a psyche,
00:17:32 ►
epistemologically naive about the real nature of matter,
00:17:36 ►
the contents of the unconscious will be projected upon chemical processes.
00:17:42 ►
Well, our level of naivete about the cosmic environment is approximately at the same level of sophistication as the 16th century’s grasp of matter was. He talked about in alchemy what’s called the rotundum, that which spins.
00:18:06 ►
And he said the spinning rotundum is a symbol of the psyche.
00:18:12 ►
The flying saucer, I believe the other, call it the ancestors,
00:18:27 ►
call it Jesus, call it galacterium civilization.
00:18:31 ►
It’s all and more than any of these things.
00:18:34 ►
And I believe, and I’m fairly alone in this, I think,
00:18:40 ►
that the pressure and the chaos that we’re experiencing at the end of the 20th century
00:18:48 ►
is because we are drawing near to a bifurcation point in the,
00:18:57 ►
there’s not even words for it, in the dimensionality of our cosmos.
00:19:02 ►
I mean, we’re very close to some kind of cusp,
00:19:05 ►
some kind of breakthrough point.
00:19:07 ►
History is, in fact, the enunciation
00:19:09 ►
that an animal is standing too close
00:19:13 ►
to the transcendental object
00:19:15 ►
and is, in fact, beginning to be transformed
00:19:17 ►
into a partial simulacrum of the transcendental object.
00:19:22 ►
That’s what we are, half beast, half angel.
00:19:26 ►
You know, one foot in the slime, one foot in the platonic super spaces.
00:19:34 ►
As far, I mean, I suppose we have to talk at least briefly about the abduction thing.
00:19:40 ►
I think that this is much ado about nothing.
00:19:43 ►
I think that this is much ado about nothing.
00:19:49 ►
It’s very clear to me that every abduction case around,
00:19:56 ►
except for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata,
00:19:59 ►
can be explained by one simple fact.
00:20:06 ►
People are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories.
00:20:09 ►
That’s all. That’s all.
00:20:13 ►
If you lose the ability to distinguish dreams from memories,
00:20:18 ►
you’ll have a very strange history to recite to people.
00:20:24 ►
And I think this is a cause by television.
00:20:26 ►
It’s caused by a number of things. I grew up during the 50s when movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still,
00:20:32 ►
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and so forth were coming out.
00:20:35 ►
And I distinctly remember a fever that I had when I was about 12
00:20:41 ►
in which I had a horrifyingly real dream of gray-faced, cat-eyed aliens
00:20:49 ►
who were doing something to me that I didn’t care for and so forth and so on.
00:20:54 ►
Well, if I were to be placed into the hands of an obsessive hypnotherapist,
00:20:59 ►
I guarantee you in two weeks we’d come out with the realization that it wasn’t a dream,
00:21:06 ►
that it actually happened.
00:21:07 ►
But that’s, and also the content, if you analyze the content of the abduction scenario,
00:21:18 ►
it’s pure paranoia.
00:21:20 ►
And I can get off on this, but I don’t really want to.
00:21:25 ►
The normal rules of evidence are not being applied.
00:21:30 ►
Here’s, let me go off on this just a little bit to say, you know,
00:21:34 ►
how do you live your life in the light of a universe that is strange and vast?
00:21:41 ►
Well, you can just believe anything anybody tells you, in which case, you know,
00:21:47 ►
fetal removal by extraterrestrials vies with your attention as you seek Elvis in the aisles
00:21:54 ►
of the local supermarket, as you worry about the fall of Atlantis and so forth and so on.
00:22:00 ►
But over time, there has been something evolved called the rules of evidence, colloquially
00:22:07 ►
known as how to tell shifts from Shinola. And the first thing is there should be an economy of
00:22:17 ►
explanation. This is called Occam’s razor. In other words, hypotheses should be no more complex than is necessary to explain whatever it is you’re trying to explain. geneticists from Zenebel Ganubi are moving secretly among us with a surgical agenda
00:22:47 ►
and also carry out unscheduled proctological examinations in the middle of the night.
00:22:55 ►
I mean, really now?
00:23:00 ►
And what I want to say about that is I got where I am, whether it is enviable or not,
00:23:08 ►
but I got where I am by being tough, not by being gullible.
00:23:15 ►
And so I’ve rejected vast amounts of things, not only dubious things,
00:23:22 ►
but I’ve probably tossed a few babies out
00:23:25 ►
with the bath water as well
00:23:27 ►
but ask tough questions
00:23:30 ►
make it make sense
00:23:33 ►
and be as they say in Hawaii
00:23:36 ►
be akamai
00:23:37 ►
be smart
00:23:38 ►
understand the subtleties
00:23:43 ►
and the potential degradation of language,
00:23:45 ►
and then trust only yourself.
00:23:50 ►
Trust only yourself.
00:23:52 ►
Photographs are useless.
00:23:54 ►
Anecdotes are useless.
00:23:56 ►
What happened to your best friend last weekend when you weren’t there is useless.
00:24:01 ►
You can entertain all that information,
00:24:10 ►
is useless. You can entertain all that information, but what you have to, given the slipperiness of language, given the limitations of the human organism, you have to stay with primary experience and extrapolate out from there.
00:24:22 ►
And if you have had fetal tissue removed, then you
00:24:27 ►
have to deal with it. But the testimony of
00:24:31 ►
700 people you don’t know doesn’t have to bother you
00:24:36 ►
at all. Yeah?
00:24:39 ►
In your dialogue with measuring,
00:24:43 ►
how do you see the big picture of the agenda?
00:24:48 ►
If this is an extraterrestrial force that catalyzes consciousness on the planet,
00:24:54 ►
what do you think is going to happen?
00:24:55 ►
You mean what’s happening?
00:24:58 ►
I think that nature, well, I mentioned this yesterday, that biology, let’s leave nature out of this for a minute.
00:25:08 ►
Biology is some kind of chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality.
00:25:16 ►
I said this yesterday, but I’m not sure I was understood. mean by that is the entire history of biology from the first naked DNA to this moment is a history
00:25:31 ►
of progressively taking more and more control of more and more dimensions. First primitive life life moved. It had no eyes. It simply felt its way. That means it was like two-dimensional life.
00:25:52 ►
It just feels its way down a linear creode of sensation, deprecating, eating, undergoing
00:26:00 ►
mitosis, and so forth and so on. But it’s a two-dimensional thing. Well, then life acquired light-sensitive chemistry,
00:26:09 ►
which it sequestered on the surface of its cells, driven by serotonin, interestingly enough.
00:26:15 ►
And this light-sensitive chemistry gave the idea of a gradient
00:26:19 ►
that organism had, however dimly, the notion here and there.
00:26:27 ►
And to have the notion of going from here to there,
00:26:32 ►
you have to add in the notion now and then.
00:26:38 ►
And what these notions being added in are dimensional vectors into the reality space. Well then the entire
00:26:46 ►
history of life from let’s say the cross-octeridgian fishes to homo
00:26:53 ►
habilis is simply the history of developing more efficient organs of
00:27:00 ►
motion in the three-dimensional world. Better eyes, better arms, better legs, mobility, motility, so forth and so on.
00:27:11 ►
Then, with the appearance of true human beings and language,
00:27:16 ►
an entirely new dimension, let’s call it the fourth dimension of time,
00:27:22 ►
begins to be invaded in a very subtle way.
00:27:26 ►
It’s that monkeys can’t tell stories to each other about past experiences or hoped-for denouements.
00:27:36 ►
Human beings can.
00:27:38 ►
That act of linguistic recollection is a small conquest of dimensionality.
00:27:47 ►
Well, once you invent writing, then all of the past can, in a sense, be kept in the present.
00:27:55 ►
The present is not a narrow slice of experience fading off into the past and the future.
00:28:01 ►
It becomes instead like a train moving into the future. The future is unknowable, but the past can be recollected and analyzed.
00:28:13 ►
And if the analysis is sophisticated enough, one can begin to triangulate outward toward the future. The history of science is the history of prediction. Well, what is prediction? It’s taking control of a previously
00:28:30 ►
uncontrolled dimension, the future. And I think that the rise of electronic technology, the rise of extremely complex language-using societies
00:28:45 ►
means that we’re about to go wholly in to the fourth dimension,
00:28:52 ►
the temporal dimension.
00:28:54 ►
And we see ourselves as distinct from our technologies.
00:28:59 ►
You see, like when you are in a car,
00:29:01 ►
you think, I am a human being driving a human invention.
00:29:06 ►
But there is a point of view from which, no, you are just a human being
00:29:11 ►
who has put on another level of humanness, which happens to have wheels under it,
00:29:16 ►
and is rolling along.
00:29:18 ►
In other words, genetics, that changes the stuff of our bodies.
00:29:23 ►
that changes the stuff of our bodies.
00:29:28 ►
Epigenetics, which we call ideology and technology,
00:29:32 ►
changes the environment in which our bodies operate.
00:29:38 ►
And I think we’re getting set basically to decamp into the imagination,
00:29:47 ►
that the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you’ve just acquired eyes.
00:29:50 ►
It’s something you’re seeing for the first time and then generating an appetite to go into.
00:29:55 ►
And this has been kicking around for 15 or 20,000 years.
00:30:00 ►
A shaman is a seer, is a prophet, is a higher dimensional mathematician.
00:30:09 ►
And they may not use tensor equations to express what they’re doing,
00:30:13 ►
but mathematics before symbols is experience.
00:30:17 ►
And so I really believe history is ending very soon.
00:30:33 ►
I cannot conceive of a hundred years in the future at the present accelerated rate of development.
00:30:43 ►
We have unleashed such novelty that I think we’re in the terminal phase of decamping from three-dimensional space. We are leaving the womb of Newtonian being for something else, the imagination.
00:30:50 ►
And the birth is tumultuous.
00:30:53 ►
An entire planet is at risk.
00:30:57 ►
And eventually, you know, toxemia seems to be setting in.
00:31:01 ►
We’ve used up all the nutritional resources in the womb. The walls are
00:31:06 ►
closing in. We’re suffocating. Our political systems don’t work. Our social systems are breaking down.
00:31:13 ►
If you’re a realist, a pessimist, then you just say, well, this is it, folks. This is the smash-up.
00:31:20 ►
The party lasted 20,000 years and here comes the bill.
00:31:31 ►
But you might think that if you were a fetus trapped in a collapsing womb at transition,
00:31:38 ►
you could not conceive of the stockbroker, fashion designer or whatever,
00:31:45 ►
that you are going to be in another dimension, in another reality that you’re being born into.
00:31:49 ►
And I think our aspiration is the conquest of death.
00:31:53 ►
Our religions promise it, and if our gods can’t deliver,
00:31:56 ►
we’ll elbow them aside and do it ourselves.
00:31:57 ►
Thank you.
00:32:03 ►
And these things aren’t decisions made by a single person or even a group of people. They come from the bone.
00:32:05 ►
It’s who we are.
00:32:07 ►
We aspire to be magic.
00:32:10 ►
And we probably, given our track record, will achieve it.
00:32:14 ►
As I said yesterday, James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.
00:32:21 ►
It’s a humorous thing to say, but yes.
00:32:28 ►
I don’t really understand what you mean by that,
00:32:30 ►
like even for the first of the imagination,
00:32:32 ►
you mean like a star character where they have no body,
00:32:34 ►
and the guy like thinks he’s a real big cat?
00:32:38 ►
Well, one of the nice things about my position is I don’t have to entirely understand myself
00:32:42 ►
because I’m self-defined as a primitive.
00:32:47 ►
When we talk about decamping from Newtonian space and you’re asking me what would it look like,
00:32:55 ►
I’m as puzzled as you are.
00:32:58 ►
I don’t know.
00:32:59 ►
Is it nanotech?
00:33:01 ►
Are we going to become anti and all live in one acre of
00:33:06 ►
the rainforest? Are we
00:33:08 ►
going to
00:33:09 ►
find a way to completely
00:33:12 ►
transpose ourselves into the net
00:33:14 ►
and just shed our
00:33:16 ►
bodies the way we once shed
00:33:18 ►
the placenta that connected
00:33:20 ►
us? I once
00:33:22 ►
said the body is the
00:33:24 ►
placenta of the soul, but is that a religious statement or a technological goal?
00:33:31 ►
What do we mean the body is the placenta of the soul? And then people get really agitated because a lot of people,
00:33:38 ►
and I include myself among them, rather like the body. And you can imagine a debate in the Archeozoic Ocean
00:33:48 ►
when people of a very scaly and lantern-jawed type
00:33:55 ►
said, listen, we’re leaving for the land.
00:33:59 ►
You cannot live on the land.
00:34:01 ►
There’s no water on the land.
00:34:02 ►
The land is our whole being.
00:34:11 ►
We’re defined by the water, the joy of swimming, the great, you know, on and on and on.
00:34:27 ►
Well, some organisms turned their back on that. And so then we have the conquest of the land. It’s a big thing. It’s a big thing because what we’re being asked is what is humanness?
00:34:31 ►
What can you discard and still be human?
00:34:36 ►
Can we discard our bodies and still be human?
00:34:40 ►
Can we discard our ethics and still be human?
00:34:43 ►
I’d rather keep my ethics and get rid of the body.
00:34:46 ►
But, you know, we are sexual creatures.
00:34:51 ►
What is life, what is sex without a body, for crying out loud?
00:34:55 ►
How does that work and look?
00:35:00 ►
But it is really not ours to decide.
00:35:07 ►
We have grabbed hold of a tiger several billion years ago. Nature is a bootstrapping process, and it seems fairly unsentimental. You know, there’s no tears shed for the great
00:35:15 ►
sauropods that once stalked the planet. They were wiped out in an asteroid impact. That allowed the rise of the angiosperms and the mammals.
00:35:28 ►
We are the children and the inheritors of a planetary catastrophe.
00:35:32 ►
If this planet hadn’t been wrecked 65 million years ago, we’d still be here.
00:35:37 ►
We wouldn’t be here.
00:35:38 ►
Well, then what is our position on planetary catastrophe?
00:35:43 ►
We’re in the process of making one.
00:35:45 ►
Is it so that 65 million years in the future, an organism filled with love and justice and
00:35:52 ►
intelligence will look back at our skeletons in the shale and say, well, they had a good
00:35:59 ►
thing going, but if it hadn’t been for their extinction, we wouldn’t be here.
00:36:05 ►
The very large scale is very large indeed.
00:36:09 ►
One of the things that’s so interesting about the visionary plants
00:36:12 ►
is that they give you a large, large picture.
00:36:17 ►
I think the vegetable mind views death in a different way.
00:36:24 ►
Vegetables are eternal in a sense.
00:36:27 ►
Through vegetative propagation,
00:36:29 ►
they can live virtually forever.
00:36:32 ►
Life lies very close to the surface in us
00:36:35 ►
and if it’s crushed out,
00:36:37 ►
we’re very alarmed.
00:36:39 ►
Our sense of uniqueness is so highly evolved
00:36:44 ►
that our own death becomes for us the most universal tragedy we can conceive of.
00:36:50 ►
That’s a serious ego dislocation I maintain.
00:36:55 ►
Yes? It takes us to the western, Newcomen kind of culture,
00:37:08 ►
some of these horrible things that never embraced this kind
00:37:12 ►
of way of life in the community. And, also,
00:37:16 ►
people who don’t have access to these technology, maybe
00:37:20 ►
they were probably not able to be playing through the last game.
00:37:24 ►
What are these things playing in the band? Well, nature has two impulses.
00:37:34 ►
In the particular case, the impulse is always toward equilibrium.
00:37:40 ►
Animal species seek to establish niches for themselves in ecosystems
00:37:45 ►
that can then be maintained indefinitely.
00:37:49 ►
Just the way you seek a job where you’ll then get money
00:37:54 ►
and without working too hard or eating too much excrement
00:37:58 ►
you’ll be able to maintain yourself indefinitely.
00:38:02 ►
If you look at all of nature right now,
00:38:06 ►
the human
00:38:08 ►
species is where the
00:38:10 ►
evolutionary cutting edge
00:38:12 ►
has become concentrated.
00:38:15 ►
And then if you look at
00:38:16 ►
the human species,
00:38:18 ►
the place where the changing
00:38:20 ►
novelty has been
00:38:22 ►
concentrated is in
00:38:24 ►
high-tech industrial democratic civilization.
00:38:29 ►
I don’t call it Western anymore because its leading exponent is Japan.
00:38:34 ►
But high-tech industrial democracies are the only social systems that are still evolving and changing. So I think they also serve who only stand and wait.
00:38:51 ►
These traditional societies perform the role very much of an animal species at equilibrium in an ecosystem.
00:39:01 ►
They preserve values related to stability and homeostasis. Meanwhile,
00:39:07 ►
in these places where these creative
00:39:11 ►
creodes have begun to cascade,
00:39:15 ►
novelty is what’s being explored.
00:39:18 ►
But the novelty feeds back and changes the context
00:39:22 ►
in which these equilibrium-seeking systems operate.
00:39:27 ►
The universe, I believe, is an engine for the production and conservation of novelty.
00:39:35 ►
The universe will sacrifice everything achieved to achieve something new.
00:39:44 ►
You can see that in looking at this asteroid impact 65 million years ago.
00:39:49 ►
I mean, this was a climaxed planetary ecosystem of tropical forests from pole to pole,
00:39:56 ►
filled with complex animals and ecosystems and many phyla represented.
00:40:11 ►
and many phyla represented, but it was all thrown away to make way for the mammals and the angiosperms.
00:40:13 ►
I mean, speaking teleologically.
00:40:19 ►
So I think novelty is what nature values above all else. And that, interestingly, leads on to the notion of an ethic for us,
00:40:26 ►
because that confers immediate central importance on the human enterprise.
00:40:33 ►
The orthodox view is that we’re a chance anomaly, an eccentricity in the cosmic game.
00:40:42 ►
But if the conservation of novelty is what the universe is about,
00:40:48 ►
then we are its pride and joy, its crown jewel, the firstborn son and heir apparent.
00:40:56 ►
And the other thing is this ingression or this movement into novelty
00:41:04 ►
has been going on since the beginning of the universe,
00:41:09 ►
but always ever faster, ever faster.
00:41:14 ►
So in the early universe, once things settled down after the Big Bang,
00:41:19 ►
it was dull for a long, long time.
00:41:23 ►
I mean, there wasn’t much happening.
00:41:24 ►
There weren’t even
00:41:25 ►
stars. There was just hydrogen aggregating. And then eventually there were aggregates
00:41:31 ►
of hydrogen so large that the pressures at the centers of those aggregates of hydrogen
00:41:37 ►
caused a new property to emerge, fusion. And fusion cooks out heavy elements like iron and sulfur and carbon
00:41:49 ►
and when carbon cooks out new emergence properties become possible molecular
00:41:55 ►
chemistry rather than simple atomic systems comes into play well then
00:42:00 ►
elaborate that for a few billion years and you get long chain polymers.
00:42:06 ►
They’re like super molecules and they have the quality or the ability to template and reproduce themselves.
00:42:15 ►
Well, so suddenly you get a whole new emergent domain in nature,
00:42:21 ►
the domain of the self-copying, self-replicating molecules.
00:42:26 ►
And then they begin to embed themselves in membranes and so forth.
00:42:31 ►
And then you get nucleated cells and then colonies of nucleated cells.
00:42:36 ►
And from there to advanced mammals, it’s just a matter of time and then the organs of locomotion seem to have been perfected.
00:42:51 ►
You know, the fastest animal in the world can run seven miles an hour, something like that.
00:42:56 ►
And so then the development seems to concentrate in the nervous system. The coordination no longer of space, but of information. Information
00:43:09 ►
becomes the new coinage. Advanced binocular vision systems evolve. Pack signaling systems
00:43:18 ►
evolve in social animals. And then at some point, the level of complexity is sufficient to cross the boundary
00:43:26 ►
into true language, true representation of the past in the present through symbolic activity.
00:43:35 ►
In each case, these stages are happening faster and faster and faster. Language is probably less than 100,000 years old. It may be
00:43:46 ►
half that age. Well,
00:43:48 ►
good grief. That’s
00:43:50 ►
less than
00:43:51 ►
3,000 generations in the
00:43:54 ►
past. Language.
00:43:56 ►
That’s yesterday.
00:43:58 ►
And yet, since
00:44:00 ►
the inception of language, look at
00:44:02 ►
what has happened.
00:44:04 ►
Urbanism, global conquest of the environment,
00:44:08 ►
mathematical conquest of nature.
00:44:12 ►
We can call down the fires that burn in the hearts of stars
00:44:16 ►
to the deserts of this planet, or if necessary,
00:44:20 ►
down upon the heads of our enemies.
00:44:24 ►
That’s an extraordinary feat for protoplasm to be able to undertake.
00:44:30 ►
Extraordinary.
00:44:33 ►
And so I think this accelerating novelty indicates that we are on the brink
00:44:39 ►
of just going down the novelty well and becoming as unrecognizable to ourselves
00:44:45 ►
as we would be to Tyrannosaurus Rex
00:44:49 ►
if it were introduced to us as the heirs to its struggle and dreams.
00:44:55 ►
Yeah.
00:44:56 ►
It’s one of the most interesting things to me
00:44:58 ►
in the landscape, and again, I’m just correcting Michael’s English.
00:45:08 ►
In the moment, all we thought talking about is what it’s going to look like. I think there was one line that said, September 21st, 2012,
00:45:12 ►
the 22nd may look like the 21st.
00:45:16 ►
There may be no change on the surface. It may look the same.
00:45:20 ►
I’m curious how that takes place. Because all the questions were,
00:45:24 ►
are we going to be walking around in a small yard,
00:45:26 ►
or are we going to be self-driven, things that you talked about yesterday,
00:45:29 ►
or is that day going to pass by and, I don’t know,
00:45:32 ►
there’s 1% of the field and 99% of the field,
00:45:34 ►
or is it going to be the 100% of the field, or is there going to be nothing?
00:45:39 ►
Well, one way it could happen is that as we get closer and closer to it, our ability to accept these strange things becomes broader and broader.
00:45:50 ►
So when the moment finally comes, yes, you are a self-dribbling jeweled basketball,
00:45:55 ►
but hey, it ain’t no big deal and you saw it coming years ago, so what?
00:46:03 ►
I don’t know.
00:46:05 ►
I vacillate on all of this because as a rationalist,
00:46:10 ►
I’m very puzzled by my intellectual burden of a completely irrational revelation.
00:46:17 ►
I would never have wished this upon myself.
00:46:20 ►
I’m much more comfortable as a fairly hard-nosed skeptical thinker.
00:46:26 ►
Yet I’ve spent so much time with this idea that I guess I have become infected with it.
00:46:32 ►
It now seems to me as reasonable as anything else.
00:46:35 ►
There is, unremarked by science, a universal tendency toward complexity through time.
00:46:46 ►
It’s a law as real as the law of the speed of light or the segregation of genes,
00:46:52 ►
but science has never said that because science is, as practiced out of the 19th century,
00:47:00 ►
is militantly anti-teleological.
00:47:03 ►
century is militantly anti-teleological.
00:47:10 ►
In other words, it denies any end goal, any goal, any purpose, any predefined end state.
00:47:14 ►
Science just thinks the universe is a random walk. But I think it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain that idea in the face of the evidence.
00:47:23 ►
There are too many choices.
00:47:24 ►
that idea in the face of the evidence. There are too many choices.
00:47:29 ►
If you have a protein of several thousand atoms, it has 10 high 16 folding configurations it can choose from.
00:47:34 ►
If it worked through those things by trial and error,
00:47:39 ►
it would take the life of the universe for that molecule to figure out its minimum
00:47:44 ►
energy configuration and assume it.
00:47:47 ►
So there is a kind of logic or there are constraints that we aren’t aware of that push processes toward completion.
00:47:57 ►
And I think the new sciences of chaos theory, dynamics, complexity, fractals, strange attractors,
00:48:04 ►
are going to deliver this into
00:48:06 ►
our understanding.
00:48:09 ►
It’s a very exciting time.
00:48:11 ►
I mean, we’re taking the first intellectual steps toward the real re-understanding of
00:48:16 ►
nature since at least the invention of the calculus and probably the invention of Greek
00:48:22 ►
mathematics.
00:48:23 ►
Yeah.
00:48:23 ►
the invention of Greek mathematics. Yeah.
00:48:24 ►
.
00:48:30 ►
.
00:48:40 ►
. all connected on some level, but that makes it, you know,
00:48:45 ►
you will start and then it’s just like poplar,
00:48:47 ►
and all of a sudden everyone…
00:48:50 ►
Like a chain reaction.
00:48:52 ►
Yeah.
00:48:53 ►
Well, you put your finger on it.
00:48:55 ►
The key word is connectedness.
00:48:58 ►
I’m very interested in the philosophical,
00:49:02 ►
if you want to put it that way,
00:49:03 ►
implications of the World Wide Web and the Internet.
00:49:08 ►
I mean, the Internet is a fascinating thing.
00:49:11 ►
You can’t see it.
00:49:13 ►
Therefore, if you’re not into it, the world appears to have remained the same.
00:49:18 ►
Nothing has changed.
00:49:20 ►
And yet, actually, the largest human artifact ever created has sprung into being in the last five years.
00:49:31 ►
It’s as big as this planet and nobody controls it. It has no central control.
00:49:39 ►
No one can decide that it shall be this or shall be that. There are certain areas under limited control.
00:49:47 ►
Well, but what does the Internet do?
00:49:49 ►
Well, it connects us together.
00:49:52 ►
It broadens and deepens and makes more immediate the cultural database that we’re all swimming in.
00:50:04 ►
the cultural database that we’re all swimming in. And I think that probably it is a model for, not a model,
00:50:12 ►
but it is an anticipation of this transcendental object at the end of time.
00:50:18 ►
I mean, I have said in these lectures, you know,
00:50:21 ►
my idea of the future perfect state is a world of 500 million human
00:50:27 ►
beings of all races, genders, sexual persuasion, so forth and so on. 500 million well-fed,
00:50:36 ►
healthy people living mostly in warm climates, largely naked, very little physical cultural manifestation, but if you could project
00:50:48 ►
yourself into one of these people’s minds or bodies, you would see that when they close
00:50:55 ►
their eyes, there are menus hanging in space.
00:51:00 ►
Those menus are there because at age three, there was a surgical implant behind the eyelids
00:51:07 ►
of something like a very small contact lens
00:51:10 ►
and that is the philosopher’s stone
00:51:15 ►
that is the culmination of 10,000 years of technical evolution and engineering dreams
00:51:22 ►
and what it boils down to is a little black disc
00:51:25 ►
that’s surgically implanted behind your eyelid,
00:51:28 ►
and that’s your interface to the culture.
00:51:32 ►
And you can move into the net,
00:51:34 ►
which is, of course, virtually implemented.
00:51:37 ►
It’s not text. It’s not even hypertext.
00:51:41 ►
It’s a three-dimensional, non-material world
00:51:44 ►
ruled by the laws not of physics, but the imagination.
00:51:49 ►
And I call this turning the body inside out. This is what the cultural enterprise is for.
00:51:55 ►
We want to live in the imagination with the body as a freely commandable object in the imagination.
00:52:06 ►
In other words, replace the laws of physics with the laws of dream or imagination.
00:52:14 ►
This is culturally within our reach right now.
00:52:18 ►
I mean, if it were as important as piling up nuclear stockpiles
00:52:21 ►
or screwing people over in a hundred different ways.
00:52:25 ►
We’d have it in five years, not 17.
00:52:28 ►
As it is, we’ll probably have to wait 17 years.
00:52:32 ►
But the fact that we can make a model like that,
00:52:36 ►
that’s a bridge from where we’re sitting to a spiritually transcendental realm
00:52:41 ►
that’s within reach, is, I think, very positive.
00:52:44 ►
Now all we have to do is fill in the blanks. transcendental realm that’s within reach is, I think, very positive.
00:52:47 ►
Now all we have to do is fill in the blanks,
00:52:52 ►
keep taking psychedelics so that our engineering standards stay high,
00:52:57 ►
so that we stay focused on the goals that we’re trying to maximize, and then try to promote the idea that anxiety is inappropriate.
00:53:05 ►
Anxiety poisons the will to action.
00:53:09 ►
And I really think that this is going to be the task of the high-tech alternative culture
00:53:19 ►
is to provide an optimistic vision.
00:53:22 ►
Because you see, the people who run the world are becoming more and more panic-stricken.
00:53:29 ►
Because a world is ending.
00:53:32 ►
Their world is ending.
00:53:35 ►
The world of the shell game and the international corporation
00:53:38 ►
and the propagandized passive electorate and all these things that have been…
00:53:44 ►
That game is ending.
00:53:46 ►
And there is no substitute vision being discussed at the upper echelons of the control mechanism of this society.
00:53:57 ►
It’s coming from the grassroots.
00:54:00 ►
The people at the top are too paralyzed with the poisons they’ve imbibed by feeding at the trough of the old order.
00:54:08 ►
They can’t think their way out of their dilemma.
00:54:11 ►
In fact, they have to pay guys with ponytails just to turn on the machines in the morning.
00:54:16 ►
They’re so distant from the things they rule, you see.
00:54:22 ►
Yeah?
00:54:46 ►
Yeah. or fear eventually goes away of the other. Which if you have a boundary, there is another.
00:54:50 ►
And in terms of what men do,
00:54:56 ►
if women are more other for men than vice versa,
00:54:58 ►
then on a hallucinogen,
00:55:03 ►
a man can get to a place where he observes and goes beyond the boundaries to know that it’s not the other.
00:55:06 ►
And if a woman is in that place, what I, from my own personal experience and from other people talking to me,
00:55:14 ►
and so women kind of find their voice in the way of the world to say, well, okay,
00:55:20 ►
you have to have all this experience with the other.
00:55:24 ►
okay not to have all this experience with the other. And, um, and at some
00:55:28 ►
point, I think it’s accelerating, my mother was born in 1921
00:55:32 ►
and was very conservative,
00:55:36 ►
had come to the point where she was 73 years old or whatever and had this 77 year old
00:55:40 ►
wife on the dinner, and he burst out laughing and said, well I’m living
00:55:44 ►
in the city, you’re living in your mother’s city.
00:55:46 ►
And I kind of like to hear what you would say
00:55:52 ►
about in terms of otherness and how psychedelics can,
00:55:58 ►
what the dissolving of the boundaries does
00:56:00 ►
and how we carry that to other people.
00:56:02 ►
Yeah.
00:56:03 ►
Well, first of all, it’s important in all these discussions to remember
00:56:11 ►
there is nothing on earth as much like a woman as a man.
00:56:17 ►
The next species over, whatever it is, the difference is enormous.
00:56:23 ►
over whatever it is, the difference is enormous.
00:56:31 ►
The other thing to remember is if you believe in evolutionary theory, then this has always amazed me.
00:56:35 ►
Women are the creation of choices made by men.
00:56:42 ►
Men are the creation of choices made by women.
00:56:47 ►
The aesthetic difference is striking.
00:56:49 ►
I mean, apparently men prefer smooth, gentle, nurturing, curvaceous forms,
00:57:00 ►
and apparently women, their aesthetic is fulfilled by a rougher cut.
00:57:07 ►
We are reflections of the desires of the opposite gender
00:57:11 ►
because we’ve been subject to selection in the sexual process that way.
00:57:16 ►
As far as everybody is struggling to keep up with the evolution of the culture.
00:57:22 ►
I experienced the same thing. I mean, my father is a very conservative character,
00:57:27 ►
and he’s now 80,
00:57:32 ►
and he seems to go out of his way to be outrageous.
00:57:37 ►
And it’s maybe the one good thing television is doing
00:57:42 ►
is that straight people, and by that I don’t mean non-gay, I mean in the sense of non-psychedelic,
00:57:49 ►
straight people can’t escape from the weirdness of the culture.
00:57:55 ►
No matter who you are, you have to look at this stuff.
00:57:59 ►
It’s in your face, and eventually you bend.
00:58:02 ►
It’s in your face, and eventually you bend.
00:58:11 ►
So approaching the other is a process of redefining yourself to be more acceptable to it.
00:58:13 ►
There’s a coming to meet. It becomes more familiar as you become more familiar with it.
00:58:20 ►
But the truly other, what Rudolf Otto called the totally other, is other in principle.
00:58:27 ►
It’s like the archetype of the other, and it can’t be assimilated.
00:58:32 ►
But wherever the other is particularized in a person, a work of art, a place,
00:58:38 ►
it can be approached through a process of templating yourself to it.
00:58:44 ►
through a process of templating yourself to it.
00:58:47 ►
We become what we behold,
00:58:51 ►
no matter how bizarre what we behold may be.
00:58:55 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:58:59 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:03 ►
We become what we behold.
00:59:08 ►
So says Terence McKenna, and so have said many philosophers who have come before him.
00:59:12 ►
I can remember the first time that I heard that thought expressed,
00:59:15 ►
and it was expressed as, we become what we think about.
00:59:19 ►
That was back in a philosophy class at college, and the guy sitting next to me whispered,
00:59:22 ►
My God, I’m going to become a woman.
00:59:26 ►
guy sitting next to me whispered, my God, I’m going to become a woman. Need I mention that the college I was attending was an all boys school at the time. So did you enjoy some of
00:59:33 ►
Terrence’s flights of fancy? I always liked listening to his rap about the body being the
00:59:38 ►
placenta of the soul. Somehow, well, somehow that thought just seems more warm and fuzzy the older I get
00:59:46 ►
now before I go there is one more thing that if you’re like me
00:59:51 ►
you’ll enjoy thinking about
00:59:53 ►
in the talk that we just listened to
00:59:55 ►
we heard Terence talking about the supposition
00:59:58 ►
that there may be atoms in our bodies
01:00:01 ►
that had their origin in other star systems
01:00:03 ►
and have percolated to island earth.
01:00:06 ►
And we’ve all heard that many times before from a wide range of sources. I think that we can safely
01:00:12 ►
say that that is a psychedelic thought. Another such thought that I just learned of is from the
01:00:19 ►
last paper that Stephen Hawking published just before he died. And while that paper is way out of my league mathematically,
01:00:26 ►
the headline is that it provides a way to discover
01:00:29 ►
if there actually are other universes that are parallel
01:00:33 ►
to the one we now seem to be experiencing.
01:00:37 ►
However, there is yet another possibility that you may want to explore,
01:00:41 ►
and that comes from one of our fellow saloners, Bernardo Castro,
01:00:46 ►
who we heard from several times here in the salon.
01:00:49 ►
Well, last month, Scientific American magazine
01:00:52 ►
published a paper of Bernardo’s that’s titled
01:00:55 ►
Thinking Outside the Quantum Box,
01:00:58 ►
How the Mind Can Make Sense of Quantum Physics
01:01:01 ►
in More Ways Than One.
01:01:03 ►
Now, since I don’t want to be a spoiler here,
01:01:05 ►
I’ll leave it to you to read this interesting essay for yourself,
01:01:08 ►
and I’ll link to it in today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:01:13 ►
But if you enjoy thinking about what we call reality,
01:01:17 ►
then this essay is for you.
01:01:20 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:01:24 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.