Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“Rational, and by that I mean statistically extractable expectations, seem to be superseded on these trips by a kind of magical connectedness. All kinds of strange things happen on trips that really happen! It’s not hallucinations. These things really happen. The ordinary laws of causality are obviated, and you become a magnet for the strange, the peculiar.”
“In some sense, when you take a plant it takes you… . So essentially when you take psilocybin you are experiencing all the previous psilocybin trips that ever were.”
“I’m not of the school that says what we need is a drug we don’t have… . I think that we have the substances we need. What we don’t have are the techniques and the intelligence to know what to do with them.”
“Cannabis is the rudder on your ship.”
“In a sense, learning what drugs you should and shouldn’t take is as big a task as deciding what kind of person you should or shouldn’t go to bed with.”
“I think if you go through life taking vast amounts of drugs of all sorts then you didn’t quite get it right. The idea is to find what works for you and then put the pedal to the medal. If it’s LSD, or whatever it is, these things have personality. It’s just like making a friendship, and some people are gonna want to be your friend, and some people are going to think you’re a jerk. And you don’t want to hang out with those people because they make you feel bad.”
“I don’t believe everything the mushroom tells me. I just treat it like everybody else. You can’t trust anybody one hundred percent.”
“I think one of the problems with education is that we are trying to use a print-created institution to educate electronically biased human beings. And it’s created a kind of speed bump against illiteracy.”
“When media becomes bias-less media becomes reality.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I’d like to begin today by first thanking Michael Y., and also thanking Casey H.,
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who once again made another donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:35 ►
So, thanks again, Casey and Michael. I really appreciate your help.
00:00:39 ►
Also, I want to give you a heads-up about coming Monday night, which will be April 2nd, 2018.
00:00:46 ►
And in case you missed it before, on the first Monday of each month, I’ll be opening up my Zoom.us video chat group to the entire salon.
00:00:55 ►
I’ll add the details about joining in today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com, and I hope that you’ll be able to make one of these little conversations.
00:01:04 ►
and I hope that you’ll be able to make one of these little conversations.
00:01:08 ►
I think that there were, oh, I guess about 10 of us for the last one,
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and, well, it’s a good way for us to get to know one another a little better.
00:01:16 ►
Now, Bruce Dahmer, Bernardo Kastrup, and I have a proposition for you.
00:01:21 ►
You see, yesterday morning I set up a Zoom meeting between Bruce and Bernardo,
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and it was the first time that they were able to exchange ideas in real time.
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A few years ago, I introduced them via email, and since then, they’ve exchanged ideas with one another through email after first reading each other’s papers, books, and watching each other’s
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videos. But this was their first opportunity to get together in person, as much as an online
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video conference can be called in person, I guess.
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I basically just lurked and listened to their very interesting exchange of ideas.
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And to tell the truth, when we had finished, my head was spinning with all kinds of new
00:01:56 ►
ideas that their conversation had raised.
00:01:58 ►
It was almost as if I’d taken one of our magic potions.
00:02:02 ►
But in wrapping up the conversation,
00:02:06 ►
they suggested that we set up some kind of a regular get-together like that
00:02:09 ►
and invite others to join us.
00:02:11 ►
So thanks to the cool features of Zoom.us,
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there are a lot of ways to do this.
00:02:17 ►
So we’re thinking along the lines
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of conducting a regular series of trialogues online,
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for free and in which others can chime in or ask questions.
00:02:27 ►
Now, since Bernardo is in Europe, we’re going to have to work out the details about the time of
00:02:31 ►
these conversations, and we may even have to do more than one to fit into the various time zones.
00:02:37 ►
However, all of this depends on there being enough interest from our fellow salonners to make it happen. So keep this in mind. Until further
00:02:46 ►
notice, on the first Monday of every month at 6 30 pacific time, there is a zoom.us conversation
00:02:52 ►
that’s open to anyone who wants to join. It’s free and it’s a lot of fun and you can just lurk too
00:02:58 ►
if you want. So I hope that you’ll join us next Monday, the 2nd of April, and help build a workshop-sized group that I can
00:03:06 ►
entice Bruce and Bernardo to join periodically for an evening of mind candy. Now, finally getting to
00:03:14 ►
today’s podcast, we’re going to pick up with Terence McKenna back in April of 1995, when he is
00:03:21 ►
puzzling over the question of how psychedelics lost their central place
00:03:25 ►
in the lives of societies that held them sacred
00:03:28 ►
and how the knowledge of their use became lost to us for so long.
00:03:34 ►
Does civilization lose a piece of knowledge that’s central to its functioning. Well, the only scenario I can come up with
00:03:46 ►
is an increasingly autocratic elite
00:03:52 ►
ordering everybody around
00:03:55 ►
until finally there is a populist revolt
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and those people and their books and their buildings
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are all put to death and burned.
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This may be a similar thing may have happened to the Maya.
00:04:07 ►
You know, the Mayan civilization, looking at the archaeological evidence,
00:04:13 ►
was an incredibly steep social pyramid.
00:04:17 ►
So steep that it’s conceivable the execution of a few thousand people.
00:04:24 ►
What you’ve got left are rainforest swidden farmers,
00:04:27 ►
and then they go and do what they’ve always known how to do.
00:04:33 ►
I don’t believe in the case of Soma that it could have been a matter of it being available and then slowly disappearing.
00:04:43 ►
I mean, the Rig Veda speaks of intoxicating hundreds of people a day.
00:04:49 ►
It speaks of the Soma gushing from the Soma presses in these enormous amounts.
00:04:57 ►
Well, clearly it was something easily available, obtained, and processed,
00:05:02 ►
and yet it died out completely
00:05:05 ►
and was not really replaced with anything else.
00:05:08 ►
So why?
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I think cultural institutions are more fragile than we imagine.
00:05:15 ►
And this brings up the issue of substitutes.
00:05:22 ►
In the scenario I told you yesterday about psilocybin in the Sahara and how it created a partnership paradise which then faded as the mushroom faded,
00:05:34 ►
as I try to imagine how that would have felt, I think probably what happened was at some point in the African past,
00:05:45 ►
the mushroom was everywhere on the grasslands.
00:05:50 ►
Whenever it rained, it appeared.
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It rained frequently.
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The cattle, the dung of the cattle was everywhere.
00:05:56 ►
The mushroom was everywhere.
00:05:57 ►
Well, then it began to dry up.
00:06:02 ►
And the first thing that would happen, and we’re talking millennia in each step the first thing that would happen
00:06:08 ►
is the mushroom would become seasonal then you would have great
00:06:13 ►
mushroom festivals once a year rather than
00:06:16 ►
continuous mushroom taking seasonal
00:06:19 ►
the next thing is as the drying continues
00:06:23 ►
it would retreat into the rain shadows of mountains seasonally.
00:06:28 ►
Now you have to make pilgrimages long distances seasonally to the mushroom place.
00:06:35 ►
Well, in parallel with this diminishing supply of mushrooms would logically be a rising anxiety about that.
00:06:44 ►
So what would you do?
00:06:45 ►
Well, you would create strategies for the preservation of it in times of scarcity.
00:06:52 ►
Smoking meat, burying eggs.
00:06:55 ►
Primitive Aboriginal peoples know how to do these things.
00:06:59 ►
The obvious method of preserving mushrooms,
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still used to this day in the Sierra Mazateca,
00:07:08 ►
in a world without refrigeration, is to put them into honey.
00:07:14 ►
Honey is an antiseptic medium,
00:07:19 ►
and the sugar in honey will draw water out of a fragile thing like a mushroom and tend to preserve it.
00:07:25 ►
The problem is if you’ve ever dealt with aboriginal honeys,
00:07:29 ►
you know they’re not like the stuff we get in the little plastic bears.
00:07:35 ►
Aboriginal honey is very watery.
00:07:39 ►
And what the consequences of this are is that the preserving medium, honey,
00:07:47 ►
itself has the capacity to transmute into a psychoactive substance, alcohol.
00:07:55 ►
So suddenly you see people of good intention trying to preserve their mushrooms,
00:08:01 ►
but unbeknownst to themselves, they’re turning into an alcohol cult because fewer mushrooms, more and more honey.
00:08:10 ►
Then, and as the supply continues to shrink, finally you give up on intoxicating everybody
00:08:19 ►
and you just say, we’re going to establish a professional class of people, shamans,
00:08:25 ►
and they will take the mushroom since we can’t all take it.
00:08:30 ►
So then you have knowledge of it retreating into a professional class.
00:08:34 ►
And in aboriginal society, these professional classes are always hedged about with secrecy.
00:08:42 ►
So then you actually have a situation where there is a body of cultural
00:08:45 ►
knowledge which not everybody possesses, in fact, which very few people possess. Well,
00:08:52 ►
at that point, through war, epidemic, schism, or natural catastrophe, you could lose that that core of experts and then you would simply be adrift.
00:09:06 ►
So it’s a very complicated issue
00:09:10 ►
and the history of each one of these things
00:09:13 ►
is fraught with these kinds of episodes.
00:09:18 ►
The other thing is,
00:09:19 ►
just to keep the complexity ever before you,
00:09:27 ►
styles of usage change.
00:09:35 ►
I mentioned that the 19th century Eita Shish, we smoke it,
00:09:43 ►
and it has very different impacts on our psychologies and our art and so forth and so on. Another example is a good example close to home, LSD.
00:09:49 ►
In the 60s, you couldn’t play the game unless you took 500 mics.
00:09:56 ►
These days, you split half a blotter.
00:10:00 ►
It’s probably 70 mics, and that is what people call an LSD trip.
00:10:06 ►
It’s half an order of magnitude smaller than what was being done 30 years ago.
00:10:13 ►
Well, so naturally, people say entirely different things about LSD now than they did then.
00:10:21 ►
The other thing that makes this very complicated,
00:10:25 ►
I mean, nature is not cutting you any slack here,
00:10:28 ►
is you can have a species of a plant genetically fairly defined
00:10:34 ►
and taxonomically fairly defined,
00:10:37 ►
and it can have a horrific number of variables bearing upon it.
00:10:42 ►
The favorite example here would be Amanita muscaria. More ink has been spilled over Amanita muscaria than almost any other plant I can think of. these ecstatic hymns of praise that fill the rick radius but when you actually
00:11:05 ►
take Amanita muscaria if you only get a bellyache you’re lucky this is not at
00:11:13 ►
all a reliable intoxicant well what’s going on here well here’s what’s going
00:11:19 ►
on Amanita muscaria, because of its genetic makeup, is subject to geographical variance.
00:11:27 ►
That means the Siberian Amanita, the New Mexico Amanita, and the Andean Amanita are experientially different creatures.
00:11:38 ►
So, geographical variation.
00:11:41 ►
Then, there is edaphically induced variation. Then there is edaphically induced variation. Depending on the soil
00:11:47 ►
and the mycorrhizal host, the chemistry of the mushroom
00:11:51 ►
will be different. Well then there’s brood differentiation.
00:11:56 ►
The first flush will have a different
00:11:59 ►
chemistry than the third, fourth, or fifth flush of the same
00:12:03 ►
organism. Again, this is where the guru may have a role to play.
00:12:10 ►
You shouldn’t take Amanita muscaria unless you are with someone who says,
00:12:17 ►
I have taken these mushrooms from this place at this time of year in this fashion and attain success.
00:12:27 ►
But if you just go out and eat the first Amanita Muscaria you find,
00:12:31 ►
your experience could range from nothing to a medical emergency.
00:12:36 ►
And very few people who have just gone out and eaten Amanita Muscaria
00:12:42 ►
have any kind of experience that could be mapped over an ecstatic hallucinogenic experience.
00:12:49 ►
But occasionally you will hear a story so wild
00:12:54 ►
that you can tell under certain very narrowly defined conditions
00:13:00 ►
this thing must be tremendously effective.
00:13:03 ►
But what those conditions are, we don’t know.
00:13:09 ►
Yeah?
00:13:10 ►
I think it was Watson that wrote about, I guess it’s a reg,
00:13:13 ►
maybe I’m talking about drinking the piss of Shiva and Soma and this whole thing,
00:13:19 ►
and his interpretation, maybe it was more than a interpretation, maybe more than interpretation, it showed that they would drink the urine of the animals
00:13:28 ►
and ate them up, like the
00:13:32 ►
antelope or the reindeer or the cows.
00:13:36 ►
That way it was purified of the toxins through the animals’
00:13:41 ►
systems, and they would drink a potion that was…
00:13:45 ►
Well, yes, I mean, I really respect Gordon Wasson,
00:13:52 ►
but in this particular area, I think he spread more confusion than light.
00:13:58 ►
It is certainly true that Amanita muscaria is a shamanic intoxicant of great age used among the Arctic peoples of Siberia
00:14:07 ►
in the Tunguska and Amur River Basin.
00:14:12 ►
And it is true that one of the great hazards of ammonitum taking in that area
00:14:22 ►
is that when you go out on a snowy night to take a whizz, these
00:14:27 ►
reindeer come and knock you over head first in order to get to the yellow snow because
00:14:34 ►
they’re so into it.
00:14:36 ►
But reindeer are not cattle, and there are no reindeer in India, and cattle don’t seek out mushrooms to eat them. The thing that to my mind breaks down
00:14:53 ►
Watson’s theory is, first of all, the inadequate intoxication. But second of all, you can tell from the Rig Veda
00:15:02 ►
that hundreds of people were being intoxicated with this stuff,
00:15:06 ►
that basically people were just lining up and passing through a line, and it was being ladled out.
00:15:12 ►
Well, Amanita muscaria has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch and spruce.
00:15:18 ►
That means it grows only in association with the roots of those plants.
00:15:23 ►
To this day, no mycologist has ever successfully cultivated it on the natch.
00:15:29 ►
So when you find it, it’s a rare thing.
00:15:33 ►
To find one or two is cause for rejoicing.
00:15:39 ►
To find half a dozen is a miracle.
00:15:41 ►
I’ve never heard of anybody finding more than that.
00:15:44 ►
I’ve seen other Amanitas in great
00:15:47 ►
abundance. If you’re an Amanita fan, check out Baker’s Beach in January. You all know where it
00:15:54 ►
is? It’s at the bottom of 25th Avenue. The number of Amanita pantherinas that come up in that sandy soil down there. You can literally gather a couple of grocery bags of it.
00:16:09 ►
But even at that, how far will a couple of grocery bags go
00:16:13 ►
if you have several hundred people to intoxicate?
00:16:16 ►
So I don’t see how it could possibly have been Amanita Muscari.
00:16:21 ►
I think a whole bunch of mistakes were made
00:16:25 ►
by Wasson
00:16:27 ►
and the people who followed him
00:16:29 ►
in arguing so strenuously for that
00:16:31 ►
Wasson himself admitted
00:16:33 ►
that he never obtained a satisfactory
00:16:36 ►
intoxication
00:16:37 ►
from Amanita
00:16:40 ►
so again
00:16:41 ►
you have to be aware of all of these variables
00:16:43 ►
and I think it’s fine to respect those who have preceded us into this
00:16:48 ►
lots of hard work has been done
00:16:50 ►
but on the other hand
00:16:52 ►
they’re just fallible career mongering human beings
00:16:57 ►
like all the rest of us
00:16:59 ►
and it never hurts to double check
00:17:02 ►
I mean what you haven’t confirmed for yourself,
00:17:05 ►
you should view as simply informed speculation.
00:17:10 ►
But you do need to check for yourself.
00:17:14 ►
Yeah.
00:17:15 ►
Yeah.
00:17:22 ►
Oh, you mean the pure compounds
00:17:27 ►
frankly
00:17:28 ►
in 30 years
00:17:31 ►
there has been very very little
00:17:34 ►
chemically purified psilocybin
00:17:36 ►
I once took a small white capsule
00:17:40 ►
that was said to be pure psilocybin
00:17:43 ►
it may have been.
00:17:45 ►
It was like a very warm and friendly flavor of LSD, but it didn’t have the voice.
00:17:56 ►
Now, there’s a famous story that when Hoffman isolated psilocybin, he then, to prove the
00:18:02 ►
isolation, he manufactured some, And then he and Wasson
00:18:07 ►
took it back with them to Watla, and they gave it to Maria Sabina. And she said, the
00:18:14 ►
spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill. But let’s face it, Maria Sabina was a sly
00:18:21 ►
old woman who really knew how to play on the gringo’s harp.
00:18:27 ►
And I don’t think it’s the last word that she said that.
00:18:31 ►
I mean, the implication may have been,
00:18:33 ►
and so why don’t you go back to Basel and leave us alone, for crying out loud.
00:18:38 ►
Haven’t you done enough good here?
00:18:43 ►
Yes, I mean, I don’t know quite what to make of this.
00:18:47 ►
Again, there are more questions than answers.
00:18:50 ►
But one of the things that you will quickly experience if you get into this,
00:18:56 ►
and most of you probably already know, is that rational,
00:19:01 ►
and by that I mean statistically extrapolatable expectations,
00:19:07 ►
seem to be superseded on these trips by a kind of magical connectedness.
00:19:14 ►
All kinds of strange things happen on trips that really happen.
00:19:20 ►
It’s not hallucination. These things really happen.
00:19:23 ►
It’s almost as though the ordinary laws of causality are obviated,
00:19:28 ►
and you become a magnet for the strange, the peculiar.
00:19:36 ►
And sometimes these synchronicities are trivial.
00:19:39 ►
Sometimes they’re the difference between life and death.
00:19:43 ►
As an example of the latter, I’ve told this story before,
00:19:48 ►
but one time years ago, Dennis and a girlfriend of his went up into the mountains behind Boulder
00:19:55 ►
and they took Argyria nervosa, Hawaiian baby wood rose.
00:20:02 ►
It was much stronger than they expected and it lasted much longer than they expected
00:20:08 ►
and so night fell. And behind Boulder, up around
00:20:13 ►
Netherlands, it’s 12,000 feet. I mean, when night falls, the temperature
00:20:19 ►
plummets. You’re immediately in a situation of crisis. Night fell. They were completely lost.
00:20:26 ►
They had no clue where they were or how to get back to the car, and it looked grim.
00:20:33 ►
And so they’re looking out over these valleys and mountains and so forth, trying to spot
00:20:38 ►
something.
00:20:38 ►
And finally, across the valley, they see what my brother assumes is a car come around the corner
00:20:46 ►
because they see the headlights.
00:20:49 ►
And so they descend down into this canyon.
00:20:54 ►
It takes them an hour.
00:20:56 ►
It’s pitch dark.
00:20:57 ►
They climb up the other side to arrive in a parking lot to find their car.
00:21:07 ►
Not only to find their car, but to find that the lights are on.
00:21:13 ►
Well, they had left the car some 12 hours before.
00:21:16 ►
The battery would have been run down if the lights had been on all that time.
00:21:22 ►
It means the lights, they saw the lights come on when they looked
00:21:26 ►
out across the valley full of fear, wondering where they were. So, you know, it’s just a
00:21:34 ►
story, unless you’re the person whose life was saved by this incident. And you can see
00:21:42 ►
then why aboriginal people would have this faith in the primacy of mind
00:21:47 ►
probably because mind is in fact primary and it’s only
00:21:52 ►
because we’ve locked ourselves down into a set of reductionist
00:21:56 ►
expectations that we live in a world so
00:21:59 ►
brutally under the aegis
00:22:04 ►
of laws like entropy and seriality and so forth and so on.
00:22:11 ►
Yeah.
00:22:13 ►
The thing that Scott just said is quite,
00:22:16 ►
that you and him had a disagreement about synthesizing masculine,
00:22:22 ►
saying that, similar to your question about synthesizing, I don’t know much has been made about this difference we had.
00:22:42 ►
I don’t recall the conversation and haven’t read the account of it.
00:22:47 ►
If Rupert’s theory holds any water, it’s the same thing and we can both still believe whatever we like to believe.
00:22:58 ►
I think that without argument, though, generally the plant experiences are richer,
00:23:08 ►
and it’s not difficult to see why.
00:23:11 ►
If you take mescaline, you have a mescaline trip. If you take peyote, you have a mescaline plus 13 other mescaline-like alkaloids,
00:23:19 ►
unholamine, unhololine, peyote, lofalfor,
00:23:24 ►
and there’s a whole spectrum of these things in there, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone, Naloxone between Sasha and I on that issue, where I might argue that there is a real difference
00:23:46 ►
is between drugs created yesterday in the laboratory and drugs that have a huge history behind them.
00:23:56 ►
Because I believe that in some sense, I mean this is not rationally defendable, but it’s an intuition,
00:24:07 ►
not rationally defendable but it’s an intuition. In some sense when you take a plant, it takes you.
00:24:15 ►
And you make a contribution to the high, a tiny, you know, it’s like you add one brick
00:24:30 ►
to the wall so that then when, essentially when you take psilocybin, you are experiencing all the previous psilocybin trips that ever were.
00:24:33 ►
That’s what the psilocybin trip is.
00:24:38 ►
So I remember once when I, years ago, the first time I did ketamine,
00:24:43 ►
my impression was it’s an empty vessel.
00:24:46 ►
It’s an unfurnished hotel.
00:24:48 ►
It’s a blank canvas.
00:24:52 ►
It’s a psychedelic experience, but it’s incredibly impoverished in that not enough people have done it
00:24:58 ►
to fill the space with stuff for the rest of us.
00:25:02 ►
Now, in a thousand years, ketamine may be a very rich experience because so many people will have carved
00:25:10 ►
their initials on that tree. But I think you know as we learn from the plants
00:25:16 ►
the plants learn from us and they adjust the content.
00:25:23 ►
So I’m not of this school that says what we need is a drug we don’t have.
00:25:31 ►
Somebody wrote an essay called What We Need is a New Drug, quoting the lyrics of the song.
00:25:39 ►
I think that we have the substances we need.
00:25:42 ►
What we don’t have are the techniques and the intelligence
00:25:46 ►
to know what to do with them.
00:25:48 ►
That is the act of the dream and they do seem to give completely different highs.
00:25:55 ►
Well, not if you take enough ayahuasca. If you take really a lot and sit and breathe
00:26:03 ►
and work with it for an hour or so. You can eventually get to a place
00:26:07 ►
where you just say, this looks like a DMT flash to me, but that’s a lip-numbing dose of ayahuasca.
00:26:16 ►
You know, harming has a slightly anesthetic effect, so if you take a dose of ayahuasca and your lips
00:26:22 ►
go numb, you are definitely topping out.
00:26:26 ►
That’s an effective dose.
00:26:28 ►
Many people have never felt that, but it’s a sign that you’re approaching the effective limit.
00:26:37 ►
Yeah?
00:26:37 ►
Are you familiar with the alleged CIA testing theory on people in a mental hospital in Mental Park in the 60s that came to be reported? The Langley-Porter experiments, yes.
00:27:05 ►
that these studies in New Mexico were going to be new studies.
00:27:06 ►
I’m not sure what came out of those.
00:27:10 ►
I can’t really answer in detail.
00:27:14 ►
Those were not pharmacodynamical studies.
00:27:17 ►
They were more like psychotherapeutic studies.
00:27:23 ►
They were giving mescaline to people and working with states of dysfunction, but they weren’t trying to understand the physiological parameters of it.
00:27:29 ►
Joe Adam and the guy who became the regent,
00:27:35 ►
Willis Harmon, all of those people were associated with those experiments.
00:27:42 ►
Mescaline was well studied during the 20s.
00:27:46 ►
I mean, if you’ve not read Heinrich Clouvert’s book on hallucination,
00:27:52 ►
it’s a very nice piece of work and done very early.
00:27:57 ►
And he actually tried to create a vocabulary of hallucination.
00:28:02 ►
I mean, it’s kind of silly, but he taught his subjects to identify colors by their place in the spectrum.
00:28:10 ►
So people would say, you know, spiked basketball moving at 4 o’clock, 700 nanometers shifting toward 800 nanometers and this sort of thing, which it doesn’t quite give you the flavor, I’m afraid.
00:28:31 ►
Yeah.
00:28:32 ►
We were in the plant culture and big plant culture and monoculture faculty today,
00:28:37 ►
and definition of hallucination came up.
00:28:38 ►
And Ralph Messner, who’s in the class, he was saying that for him,
00:28:43 ►
the distinction between a hallucination
00:28:45 ►
and something that isn’t there,
00:28:48 ►
and the experience that you have on psychedelics
00:28:50 ►
where you’re having people you’re talking about.
00:28:53 ►
What did I mention?
00:28:54 ►
Down here.
00:28:56 ►
Yeah, no, that’s worth talking about
00:28:58 ►
because I use the vocabulary in a specific sense,
00:29:02 ►
and if I don’t explain it, I’m really understood there is a definite distinction I mean most people who’ve
00:29:10 ►
never taken these things think well don’t you see colors and isn’t it like
00:29:16 ►
that there are three at least three discussable stages here first of all
00:29:23 ►
there’s what’s technically called hypnagogia.
00:29:27 ►
Hypnagogia is when you close your eyes and you see little lights and stars and drifting debris
00:29:35 ►
and that sort of thing. That’s hypnagogia. Then there’s what I would call, I guess,
00:29:46 ►
Then there’s what I would call, I guess, hallucinations.
00:29:48 ►
And there’s a spectrum.
00:29:54 ►
And it’s very interesting, when they simulate or talk about hallucinations,
00:29:57 ►
they only talk about the onset of hallucinations. When you take a psychedelic, here’s the timeline.
00:30:02 ►
Let’s say it’s psilocybin.
00:30:01 ►
Here’s the timeline.
00:30:03 ►
Let’s say it’s psilocybin. At one hour, you begin to feel the state of arousal, give or take a few minutes.
00:30:12 ►
Well, then when you close your eyes, there’s this black background that is typical of the baseline of consciousness.
00:30:33 ►
Well then, after a few minutes, there are these sort of amoeboid afterimage colored lights that come toward you and stream past you.
00:30:36 ►
And this is actually called streaming.
00:30:38 ►
This is how it’s referred to.
00:30:46 ►
And these things are either that afterimage violet or that afterimage chartreuse that we all know. And these things sort of come.
00:30:48 ►
And if you don’t take a sufficient dose, that’s it with theme and variation.
00:30:55 ►
And now we’re in the land of the famous geometric grids, floating shapes, this sort of thing.
00:31:03 ►
But that is not the payoff of psychedelics.
00:31:06 ►
The real payoff is visions.
00:31:09 ►
And visions are not dancing mice and rows of little candies doing calisthenics
00:31:16 ►
and all that detritus.
00:31:21 ►
Vision is something which has emotional content.
00:31:24 ►
Tritus, vision, is something which has emotional content.
00:31:31 ►
That’s why light shows and fancy computer graphics and all that, they stop short at this point.
00:31:34 ►
Because no matter how visually complicated something is going on a screen,
00:31:39 ►
if it doesn’t somehow touch your heart and your soul,
00:31:42 ►
then it’s just a complicated pattern of some sort.
00:31:46 ►
But if it also contains information specific to your circumstance, then it’s completely engaging.
00:31:54 ►
And that’s what I shoot for and consider the visionary trip.
00:32:01 ►
It’s coherent. It’s not like a dream. It’s not that coherent.
00:32:05 ►
It’s not a little story in which you appear in a strange circumstance with odd people.
00:32:11 ►
It’s not like that.
00:32:13 ►
But it is not simply a visual experience.
00:32:16 ►
The content is multidimensional and deeply mental and largely informational.
00:32:24 ►
And that’s the proof of the pudding.
00:32:29 ►
And there is no way to achieve it any other way that I’ve ever noticed.
00:32:38 ►
Relative to my remarks this morning about orgasm, and this is part of the clue,
00:32:43 ►
this morning about orgasm, and this is part of the clue,
00:32:53 ►
I’ve noticed that in the post-coital aura, if you want to put it that way, there are these blue and green lights streaming past, usually not for very long,
00:33:01 ►
maybe a minute’s worth after a completely satisfying sexual release.
00:33:07 ►
But it doesn’t go to the next level, which it always does do with the psychedelic.
00:33:14 ►
But the fact that they share that phenomenon for a moment suggests something.
00:33:20 ►
It suggests that…
00:33:21 ►
It’s both.
00:33:26 ►
And I used to think not.
00:33:28 ►
I used to think it was entirely dose.
00:33:31 ►
But I’ve realized from talking to people
00:33:33 ►
that what seems natural and obvious to me
00:33:36 ►
seems odd to some people.
00:33:39 ►
What you have to do
00:33:41 ►
is you have to look at the back of your eyelids
00:33:45 ►
with the expectation that you will see something.
00:33:50 ►
And it’s a plane in the field.
00:33:55 ►
Now, if you’re in front of the plane, that means you’re thinking,
00:33:59 ►
oh, I’m getting high, I feel weird, my agenda is this, I need to think about that,
00:34:04 ►
do I need to go to the bathroom, where is the water?
00:34:07 ►
Your attention is here.
00:34:10 ►
If your attention is beyond it, you also won’t see it.
00:34:16 ►
Like I’ve noticed, you can’t talk and see it at the same time.
00:34:20 ►
The act of verbalizing requires so much mental focus that you can’t see this stuff.
00:34:28 ►
So what you have to do is look at the back of your eyelids as though it were a flat surface
00:34:33 ►
and just keep looking at it and keep looking at it. And if there’s any flicker of color
00:34:40 ►
or light or movement, concentrate and keep looking.
00:34:46 ►
Concentrate and keep looking.
00:34:48 ►
And it usually doesn’t take more than a minute or two of that
00:34:52 ►
for it to completely open up in front of you.
00:34:56 ►
The other thing is I plead with it.
00:35:01 ►
I address it.
00:35:03 ►
And I say, do what you will. I’m entirely yours. Please don’t hurt me, but do with me what you will.
00:35:16 ►
And if that invoking, that announcing that you are ready is very important in this matter of the speech of the mushroom,
00:35:28 ►
the reason a lot of people don’t have that experience
00:35:31 ►
is because you have to initiate the conversation.
00:35:35 ►
You can be loaded for hours on mushrooms,
00:35:39 ►
and if you will never say, in the silence of your mind,
00:35:43 ►
it doesn’t have to be spoken, but you must say, hello.
00:35:48 ►
It will never directly address you.
00:35:51 ►
It’s shy.
00:35:52 ►
But if you will say hello, it’s there.
00:35:55 ►
It says, yes, and you’re off.
00:35:58 ►
And, you know, another thing, we’re so defensive and locked down.
00:36:07 ►
Another thing that’s very important, and all aboriginal people know this,
00:36:12 ►
is the importance of chant and song.
00:36:15 ►
If you get into a hard place, the western reflex seems to be to assume the fetal position and wait
00:36:27 ►
with the belief that in some hours, if you don’t go mad,
00:36:33 ►
this hell, whatever it is, will be lifted off of you.
00:36:38 ►
Well, this is the worst thing you could possibly do in that situation.
00:36:42 ►
If you get into a place that is difficult, sit up,
00:36:48 ►
gulp air and sing. And the reasons for this are obvious on different levels. First of
00:36:56 ►
all, it’s an assertion of your existential right to be. You don’t just whimper and fold, you sit up, you sing.
00:37:12 ►
Second of all, it oxygenates your brain.
00:37:19 ►
And mental, though these places may be, they have some root in matter and physiology. Flood your brain with oxygen and the demon, whatever it is, will be washed away or at least transformed.
00:37:29 ►
And so, you know, by techniques of invocation, of chant, of song, of concentration, self-discipline,
00:37:38 ►
and I don’t mean rigorous self-discipline, nothing like what yoga demands. I just mean, you know, pull yourself together for God’s sake and pay attention to what’s going on. the rudder on your ship.
00:38:05 ►
If you come into a place that you don’t care for,
00:38:10 ►
just take a hit of cannabis and then do your chanting
00:38:14 ►
and you will move through it.
00:38:16 ►
But don’t clench.
00:38:18 ►
Realize that you are an energetic system
00:38:21 ►
and the addition of cannabis or oxygen or water is going to change the situation.
00:38:29 ►
So take responsibility.
00:38:32 ►
And then finally, you know, you have to discipline your hind brain.
00:38:38 ►
In the presence of the strange and the overwhelming, the primate locks into a fight or flight syndrome. But
00:38:49 ►
it’s an adrenal, it’s an adrenaline release. And adrenaline is a very short-acting compound.
00:38:59 ►
All you have to do is wait, and the fear will come and it will spike and if you don’t go mad
00:39:08 ►
and start screaming or tear your clothes off and run into the street but if you just sit
00:39:14 ►
it can’t sustain the spike.
00:39:16 ►
It chemically is impossible to remain petrified for very long. Eventually you just say, well, all right, so I’m terrified, so what about it?
00:39:29 ►
And then you begin to drift down. So it’s not an easy thing, but it can be mastered.
00:39:37 ►
And it’s mainly practical attention. The more exotic techniques, mantra, yantra, physiologically unlikely positions, and so forth,
00:39:52 ►
that all works as well.
00:39:54 ►
But I think just breath and sound and cannabis and intent will carry you through most difficulties.
00:40:05 ►
Yeah. I have a question about cannabis. intent will carry you through most difficulties. Yeah?
00:40:06 ►
I have a question about cannabis.
00:40:09 ►
When I was younger, I smoked very easily, readily, at any time,
00:40:14 ►
whether I was sitting in class or playing soccer or any time.
00:40:19 ►
And it would feel very good and calming, and I’d just kind of be alone.
00:40:22 ►
And after a while, and now I can barely talk anymore because I get really kind of sketched out.
00:40:29 ►
And that was kind of annoying, but a little bit like that.
00:40:32 ►
I’m just wondering, would you feel uncomfortable with yourself in social situations?
00:40:37 ►
You don’t know what to do?
00:40:38 ►
Yeah, like even when I’m alone, it’s like I have to be, I can’t just sit.
00:40:43 ►
I usually like end up, I don’t know, wanting to wanting to go outside and run up a hill.
00:40:51 ►
Well, I mean, I think our responses change over life, not only to drugs but to other things.
00:40:59 ►
I think also you have to find what works for you.
00:41:02 ►
Also, you have to find what works for you.
00:41:12 ►
I know people who take LSD in small amounts very often because they say they can work better on it.
00:41:14 ►
I tried it.
00:41:15 ►
I tried to.
00:41:18 ►
I felt I wasn’t getting enough work done, and they said,
00:41:23 ►
oh, well, you’ll be able to do 12 hours of work a day if you just take 50 mics after breakfast.
00:41:26 ►
I couldn’t do it.
00:41:27 ►
I mean, it sketched me out.
00:41:33 ►
I found myself pacing the floor and, you know, just it was madness.
00:41:41 ►
I, on the other hand, can, before breakfast, smoke enough cannabis that most people would simply go back to bed, and that sets me up for hours and hours of work.
00:41:48 ►
So you sort of have to learn yourself.
00:41:52 ►
These people who are these enthusiasts for detour, they’ve got to be some different kind of person than I am,
00:42:00 ►
because they genuinely take pleasure in something which would just drive me right up my tree.
00:42:07 ►
So one of the things that you have to honor in this domain, more than in most human endeavors, is our human uniqueness.
00:42:19 ►
I remember years ago I took a course. It was a funny course, too.
00:42:25 ►
It was called Forensic Pathology, if you can imagine.
00:42:29 ►
And it was taught by, if you can imagine, Sasha Shulgin.
00:42:35 ►
Forensic Pathology, right?
00:42:37 ►
So one of the things he did in this class is he brought in a little vial of some substance.
00:42:43 ►
And there were 500 people in this class.
00:42:46 ►
It was at Cal.
00:42:47 ►
So we passed it around.
00:42:50 ►
No big deal.
00:42:51 ►
You sniff it, a kind of a nondescript odor,
00:42:54 ►
pass it on to the next person.
00:42:55 ►
Out of the 500 people,
00:42:58 ►
three had an incredibly violent reaction to this stuff.
00:43:11 ►
And then Sasha explained there is a known gene for reacting to this thing.
00:43:20 ►
People who have this gene are 50,000 times more sensitive to this substance than people without it.
00:43:25 ►
Well, just extrapolate that range to every substance in nature,
00:43:32 ►
and you will see why, in a sense, learning what drugs you should and shouldn’t take is as big a task as deciding what kind of person you should or shouldn’t go to bed with,
00:43:39 ►
what kind of investments you should or shouldn’t make.
00:43:41 ►
In other words, it’s a lifetime task of mistake-making,
00:43:46 ►
learning, self-observation, and correction.
00:43:50 ►
And what’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander.
00:43:56 ►
And you have to honor your individuality.
00:43:59 ►
The shamans say, you know, if the plant wants you, it will take you.
00:44:04 ►
You will know if there is a lock and key fit.
00:44:09 ►
And I think part of late adolescence is drug experimentation for this purpose.
00:44:18 ►
I think if you go through life taking vast amounts of drugs of all sorts,
00:44:24 ►
then you didn’t quite get it right.
00:44:28 ►
The idea is to find what works for you and then put the pedal to the metal.
00:44:35 ►
And if it’s LSD or whatever it is, because the things have personalities.
00:44:44 ►
It’s like making a friendship.
00:44:46 ►
And some people are going to want to be your friend and some people are going to think
00:44:51 ►
you’re a jerk and you don’t want to hang out with those people because they make you feel bad.
00:44:59 ►
Yes, in one of my books I said if you’re thinking of taking a substance, you should ask yourself three questions.
00:45:06 ►
First of all, does it occur in a plant?
00:45:11 ►
Because that tells you that at least it is not toxic to organic systems.
00:45:17 ►
Does it occur in a plant?
00:45:20 ►
Second question, does it occur in a plant with a history of human usage?
00:45:26 ►
If the answer is yes, then you have your human data sample.
00:45:30 ►
If people somewhere have been taking this plant for millennia,
00:45:34 ►
then you know that it doesn’t cause blindness, miscarriages, madness, tumors, so forth and so on.
00:45:42 ►
so forth and so on and the third and narrowest gate is
00:45:45 ►
does it have an affinity
00:45:48 ►
a relationship to ordinary brain chemistry
00:45:52 ►
because you don’t want to insult
00:45:54 ►
the physical brain, you don’t want to damage
00:45:58 ►
yourself in this enterprise
00:46:00 ►
psilocybin will pass this test
00:46:04 ►
stretching the rules a bit
00:46:09 ►
LSD will pass this test
00:46:11 ►
in other words LSD is a relative of compounds
00:46:14 ►
that have been used for a long time
00:46:17 ►
whether or not it’s a constituent of brain chemistry
00:46:20 ►
is debatable
00:46:21 ►
but now the interesting thing about applying this test
00:46:24 ►
you might say oh well what a downer.
00:46:27 ►
Everything’s getting tossed out.
00:46:29 ►
No, the strongest stuff remains.
00:46:33 ►
DMT passes this test with flying colors.
00:46:36 ►
It’s already in your brain just as you sit here.
00:46:39 ►
It has a long history of human usage in many parts of the world,
00:46:44 ►
and it occurs in many, many species of plants.
00:46:47 ►
And it is the strongest hallucinogen known.
00:46:52 ►
So this is a reasonable test to apply.
00:46:56 ►
That’s to avoid, basically, danger and damage.
00:47:00 ►
Then once you’ve done that, you have to figure out of those candidates remaining,
00:47:05 ►
who is your friend, who you have an affinity for.
00:47:11 ►
Whether it’s a friend that’s available, that’s a friend that’s available,
00:47:15 ►
that’s the only thing that’s down there.
00:47:18 ►
I don’t really know anything about it.
00:47:22 ►
thing about it. I do think it’s puzzling when
00:47:28 ►
you feel that the initial conditions have been recreated but the
00:47:31 ►
results you get are completely different and
00:47:35 ►
astrology then offers itself as an explanation.
00:47:40 ►
Well, the last time you did it, the moon was in Taurus. Now
00:47:43 ►
it’s in something else.
00:47:46 ►
Again, this is something that could be looked at.
00:47:49 ►
Is there a time?
00:47:55 ►
I don’t believe everything the mushroom tells me.
00:47:58 ►
I just treat it like everybody else.
00:48:01 ►
You can’t trust anybody 100%. But the mushroom does seem to have the idea that
00:48:07 ►
it’s good when the moon is in Scorpio. I just
00:48:12 ►
experientially noticed that, that things seem
00:48:15 ►
to go better in the psychedelic realm when the moon
00:48:20 ►
is in Scorpio. I’m a triple Scorpio.
00:48:26 ►
Hey, is in Scorpio. I’m a triple Scorpio. Hey.
00:48:29 ►
Well, they’re probably smoking
00:48:31 ►
canik-canik
00:48:32 ►
and
00:48:33 ►
aboriginal
00:48:37 ►
tobaccos and various
00:48:39 ►
things. You know, it’s a
00:48:41 ►
very odd thing.
00:48:43 ►
You talk about cultural evolution and that sort of thing. Did you, it’s a very odd thing. I mean, you talk about cultural evolution and that
00:48:46 ►
sort of thing. Did you know that smoking was unknown in Europe and Asia until it was brought
00:48:53 ►
from the New World at the time of the Spanish conquest? Rome never smoked its opium. It put it in wine. Opium was never smoked in China until after tobacco was introduced.
00:49:09 ►
In fact, the smoking of opium in China arose largely as a result of trying to drive out tobacco smoking as a habit.
00:49:25 ►
This method of drug delivery, which you would assume was paleolithic,
00:49:31 ►
was unknown to the civilization that we evolved in. The New World seems particularly expertise in these dimensions.
00:49:37 ►
For example, enemas are one of the very few things that have entered our culture
00:49:45 ►
as a cultural contribution unique to the Amazon basin.
00:49:52 ►
Enemas, they had rubber.
00:49:55 ►
They had natural rubber.
00:49:56 ►
And they discovered that some substances were so toxic
00:50:01 ►
that you didn’t want to put them into your stomach,
00:50:04 ►
but that they would be active if you would directly insert them.
00:50:09 ►
And so the enema was invented millennia ago in South America,
00:50:15 ►
but was a mad idea from the point of view of European medicine until it was tried.
00:50:21 ►
And then, of course, it became the rage.
00:50:27 ►
until it was tried and then of course it became the rage and there are then successive rages of upper colon focus that sweep through our society every once in a while.
00:50:34 ►
Yeah?
00:50:35 ►
You can expand on the idea and think about it in a way about the plan and the model for
00:50:42 ►
consciousness and for culture.
00:50:50 ►
Yeah, that was an essay that originally appeared in Whole Earth Review,
00:50:53 ►
I think called Plant, Plan, Planet.
00:50:57 ►
And what I was trying to say there was there is a great deal to be learned from emulating plants,
00:51:05 ►
especially in the culture crisis that we’re in.
00:51:07 ►
First of all, plants, they have to deal with their toxic byproducts
00:51:15 ►
because they can’t move away from them the way we do and move into new niches.
00:51:21 ►
Plants are homeostatically self-regulating. Plants are small solar factories, essentially.
00:51:32 ►
Plants do all their work at temperatures below 115 degrees. Notice that we do, our technologies Our technologies operate at 600 degrees and up and then produce all kinds of heavy metal toxins and poisons and this sort of thing.
00:51:53 ►
Also, in a sense, the dowel-like passivity of plants,
00:51:59 ►
the way in which they accept their circumstances.
00:52:04 ►
the way in which they accept their circumstances.
00:52:13 ►
Essentially, an animal is an organism that can move away from the circumstances of its own being.
00:52:19 ►
And so for all of these reasons, plants seem like an excellent model for the kind of future that we should be building.
00:52:23 ►
We want to go to lower energies. We want to go to
00:52:27 ►
more organic starting and ending materials in industrial processes. We want to create
00:52:37 ►
a kind of integrated homeostatic cohesion in our society. In all these cases, and a
00:52:44 ►
cohesion in our society. In all these cases and a solar based society
00:52:48 ►
in all these cases the plants provide the model
00:52:52 ►
they’ve been showing how to do these things very efficiently
00:52:56 ►
for a very long time.
00:52:59 ►
Yeah.
00:53:01 ►
Are you familiar with Rick Thomas and
00:53:05 ►
Roth when they get together on the
00:53:07 ►
full archetypal
00:53:08 ►
psychology that is
00:53:11 ►
related to the planet
00:53:13 ►
and how doing people’s
00:53:16 ►
transit to shark seems to be
00:53:18 ►
the only predictor
00:53:20 ►
of the very value to
00:53:21 ►
predict the kind of journey or
00:53:23 ►
experience that you have depending on the moment they get to do it. I heard that from Rick.
00:53:30 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:53:31 ►
I haven’t actually looked at the data.
00:53:35 ►
The only reason astrology is not scientifically respectable
00:53:40 ►
is because no one can hypothesize how the coupling takes place.
00:53:45 ►
In other words, how can the transit of Mercury be coupled to an event system on this planet?
00:53:54 ►
But don’t despair.
00:53:57 ►
We know that the sun radically affects the weather on the Earth,
00:54:04 ►
but no coupling system has ever been proven for that either.
00:54:08 ►
It’s just the statistical correlations are so overwhelming
00:54:12 ►
that it’s impossible to ignore.
00:54:16 ►
I think probably the key to understanding astrology
00:54:23 ►
is you’re going to have to go outside of astrology to understand it,
00:54:29 ►
to something like fractal resonance.
00:54:33 ►
The reason the pattern in the stars is repeated in the pattern of your life
00:54:39 ►
is because there’s only one pattern to begin with.
00:54:43 ►
It isn’t that the stars cause you to be the way you are
00:54:47 ►
any more than that you cause the stars to be the way they are.
00:54:52 ►
There is not a causal relationship here.
00:54:55 ►
What there is is a series of adumbrations and reflections.
00:55:03 ►
This is a great discovery that has been made in the past ten years,
00:55:09 ►
one of the greatest intellectual steps ever taken by human beings.
00:55:14 ►
A new law of nature is now discernible, and I can state it for you.
00:55:21 ►
It’s that nature is self-similar across scales. Do you understand what that means?
00:55:29 ►
It explains why an atom looks like a solar system and why they both look like a galaxy,
00:55:38 ►
because nature is self-similar across scales. It means that, you know, if a certain architectural conceit works on one level, nature will use it on any other level where it seems appropriate.
00:55:56 ►
And so on many, many levels, the same patterns repeat. And so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if in the next while we got the equivalent
00:56:08 ►
of astrology, but quantumology. Quantumology, where instead of calculating downward from
00:56:18 ►
the stars to the context of human fate, you calculate upward from the atoms to the context of human fate. You calculate upward from the atom to the context of human fate.
00:56:28 ►
And if you keep calculating, you can go from quantumology to astrology and leave out sociology
00:56:35 ►
and show that these things are reciprocal reflections of each other. Then the mystery
00:56:41 ►
and the woo-woo of astrology, I think, would just simply disappear
00:56:45 ►
and be replaced by an of course, how could it be otherwise kind of understanding.
00:56:52 ►
Yeah.
00:56:56 ►
Well, you know, somebody said the thing that has changed least in Western civilization
00:57:02 ►
in the last 300 years is the classroom.
00:57:08 ►
I mean, this could be 1500.
00:57:12 ►
You know, I mean, everything else has changed, but what do we do?
00:57:19 ►
We come with sharpened pencils and sit and listen to elderly, lecherous professionals and to try and stay out of their clutches long enough to get a degree, and then we go out and play the game.
00:57:27 ►
I think that this is somewhat a field,
00:57:32 ►
but something very profound is happening in the way in which we modern people process information.
00:57:42 ►
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Marshall McLuhan,
00:57:45 ►
but McLuhan argued that an equally profound transition occurred with the introduction of print.
00:57:53 ►
Print is not simply writing that’s easy to read and reproduce.
00:57:59 ►
Print is an entirely different creature than anything that had been produced before. It has qualities
00:58:08 ►
that no other medium has. Specifically, it’s linearity, it’s uniformity, it’s interchangeability.
00:58:17 ►
And what I mean by that is that every A, every capital A, looks like every other capital A. They are interchangeable.
00:58:25 ►
When a friend of yours writes you a note, you look at it.
00:58:32 ►
That’s the precondition to reading it.
00:58:35 ►
When you open a book, you immediately read it.
00:58:39 ►
You don’t look at it at all.
00:58:40 ►
Very few people puzzle over how the A is sitting there on the page with
00:58:46 ►
that white back. No, we just read. And the difference between looking and reading is
00:58:54 ►
very great. McLuhan called it the contrast between a manuscript culture, which is ear-oriented,
00:59:02 ►
and an eye-oriented visual culture.
00:59:06 ►
Well, now what’s happening to us, and I was telling somebody about this at the break,
00:59:11 ►
is the rise of the image.
00:59:14 ►
The image is in the ascendant.
00:59:17 ►
Ever since the invention of photography, let’s say, in the middle 19th century, followed by color photography,
00:59:26 ►
followed by color lithography, followed by moving pictures,
00:59:31 ►
followed by television, followed by the Internet, VR, stereograms, and all the rest of it.
00:59:38 ►
Something is happening.
00:59:40 ►
Our culture is forcing our visual education,
00:59:45 ►
and I think one of the problems with education is that we are trying to use a print-created institution
00:59:53 ►
to educate electronically biased human beings,
00:59:58 ►
and it’s created a kind of a speed bump of illiteracy.
01:00:03 ►
a kind of a speed bump of illiteracy.
01:00:07 ►
One of the things that is put against your generation,
01:00:10 ►
you Generation Xers here,
01:00:12 ►
is that you’re not literary.
01:00:14 ►
You’re not a literary culture.
01:00:18 ►
And it’s true, don’t deny it.
01:00:20 ►
None of you can quote Milton.
01:00:30 ►
But I also think it’s a temporary thing. Your children will not be like you. Your children will be fully visually literate. They will have assimilated this new medium and operate under its
01:00:39 ►
aegis while you are in a transition phase. And so the kind of dumbing down of culture that has had to occur
01:00:49 ►
as we go from a fully literate culture to a fully electronic culture
01:00:54 ►
is, I think, transitional.
01:00:57 ►
I mean, everybody says people learn everything from TV.
01:01:01 ►
Kids know every star, every show, every plot, and say, why do they know that
01:01:07 ►
junk when they can’t memorize the sequence of U.S. presidents? Well, make a good enough
01:01:14 ►
TV show about it, and they probably will. Not that I’m a fan of TV, but I am a fan of
01:01:21 ►
the visual image, and I think TV betrays it to some degree.
01:01:27 ►
HDTV may correct that, but it gives psychedelics an interesting role
01:01:33 ►
because they are such stimulants to the visual imagination.
01:01:39 ►
It’s almost like they lead us deeper in this cultural direction
01:01:44 ►
that we have great appetite for.
01:01:46 ►
And now, you know, with CD-ROMs and multimedia and websites and all that,
01:01:54 ►
we just can’t wait to show each other stuff.
01:01:59 ►
Everybody’s building a website.
01:02:01 ►
Everybody wants to invite you over to see their latest visual creation.
01:02:08 ►
And I think that language itself is headed in this direction. That our language is literally becoming more colorful,
01:02:17 ►
more sparkling, more engaging, and it’s because it’s becoming more visual
01:02:25 ►
and eventually it may be an entirely visual exercise.
01:02:29 ►
The rise of icons is an interesting example of this.
01:02:33 ►
But now wherever you go in the world, if you will push yourself just a little bit,
01:02:39 ►
you can understand what’s going on because signage is so iconographic.
01:02:45 ►
It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Germany or France or Argentina or where you are.
01:02:50 ►
The signage is in an international language of visible symbols that unite us all.
01:02:57 ►
You see, the thing is, the word is ambiguous to a far greater degree than the image.
01:03:03 ►
And so when we communicate in words, we communicate incompletely.
01:03:10 ►
If we communicate in images, it’s much closer to fulfilling the intent of communication,
01:03:18 ►
which is to erase the boundaries between the messenger and the the message is being sent to.
01:03:27 ►
Yeah.
01:03:29 ►
I feel like the
01:03:33 ►
because there was a time when people didn’t read and they had to get their
01:03:37 ►
information by one image or.
01:03:41 ►
But if you were to fulfill them like a a picture worth a thousand words,
01:03:45 ►
looking at your 180 messages,
01:03:49 ►
if you just wanted to see a visual image,
01:03:51 ►
then you could have done that quickly.
01:03:53 ►
No, that’s why I called my book, one of my books,
01:03:56 ►
The Archaic Revival.
01:03:58 ►
Because, you see, I really think,
01:04:00 ►
the thing that McLuhan was trying to say was
01:04:04 ►
that every medium, be it print, he even treated the electric light as a medium.
01:04:12 ►
Every medium has a hidden agenda, which the users of the medium are not aware of until it’s too late. For instance, in his discussion of the automobile, it was invented to convey people from place to place. In practical terms, what it was, was a bedroom away from home.
01:04:44 ►
sexuality much earlier than they would have because of the automobile.
01:04:49 ►
That wasn’t its intent, but that was its effect.
01:04:57 ►
Similarly, McLuhan says you could never have the concept of the citizen if it was not preceded by the invention of movable type, because the citizen is an interchangeable social unit
01:05:04 ►
the way a letter is an interchangeable unit in topography.
01:05:09 ►
Also, the linearity of Western thought is a product of the fact that when we communicate in print,
01:05:17 ►
we arrange our thoughts in lines.
01:05:20 ►
That isn’t done in some languages, but in ours it is. Well, then we impute that quality of our communication method to reality itself.
01:05:33 ►
My hope is that through holography and virtual reality and HDTV and a deep awareness of McLuhanuhan that we could create what I would call a
01:05:47 ►
bias-less media. In other words, it would be a media that would do to you exactly
01:05:54 ►
what reality does to you instead of pushing you in some other direction and
01:06:00 ►
it would be then a return to the archaic. And it might be technically very sophisticated,
01:06:06 ►
but the final impression must be,
01:06:09 ►
I am not looking at a screen,
01:06:12 ►
I am not turning the pages of a book,
01:06:14 ►
I am not listening to earphones,
01:06:16 ►
I am really having this experience and it is really real.
01:06:22 ►
I’ve never heard the VR prophets talk about it as a biasless form of media,
01:06:29 ►
but I think that’s what we’re headed for.
01:06:31 ►
Well, when media becomes biasless, media becomes reality.
01:06:38 ►
And, you know, this is within reach now.
01:06:42 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:44 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:06:46 ►
one thought at a time. I definitely agreed with Terrence when he said,
01:06:53 ►
cannabis is the rudder on your ship. Like him, I not only use cannabis every day, I also used it
01:07:00 ►
on almost all of my psychedelic trips, with the exception of the ayahuasca ceremonies that I participated in.
01:07:07 ►
Personally, I would have liked to have had a few tokes during some of those experiences too,
01:07:11 ►
but it was frowned upon by the leader of our group, and well, I thought it best to follow his rules.
01:07:17 ►
Nonetheless, I am an ardent believer in the magic of cannabis use,
01:07:21 ►
and today you don’t have to look very far to find somewhat bias-less accounts of
01:07:26 ►
its use in many of today’s mainstream publications. And just to make it a little easier for you to
01:07:33 ►
follow some of this news, I’ve been editing the Psychedelic Salon magazine on Flipboard.com,
01:07:39 ►
and you can get to that through a link in today’s program notes. And while I’ve mentioned this in
01:07:44 ►
the past, well, it seems like this may be a good time to bring it up once again. Now, I don’t expect you
01:07:50 ►
to go out and read my entire magazine, mainly because, well, it would take you a lot of time
01:07:55 ►
to read it. There’s over 3,000 articles that I’ve posted there already. However, to give you a little
01:08:01 ►
idea of some of the stories that I’ve posted, here are a few headlines from the magazine that I hope you’ll find interesting enough to read for yourself.
01:08:10 ►
For example, did you know that employers in Maine can no longer test for cannabis use?
01:08:17 ►
This means that employers can’t fire, discipline, or refuse to hire people who test positive for marijuana consumption.
01:08:25 ►
As somebody who’s been forced to piss into a little cup several times before
01:08:29 ►
so that I could get a job, well, I can say that this news brings me great joy.
01:08:35 ►
My assumption being that this is the beginning of a national trend.
01:08:39 ►
In fact, the headline from a story in Bloomberg this month read,
01:08:43 ►
The coming decline of the employment drug test.
01:08:47 ►
Struggling to hire? Some companies are relaxing corporate drug policies.
01:08:52 ►
You see, for many years now, in Silicon Valley at least, it’s been an open secret
01:08:57 ►
that companies who didn’t drug test their employees have been able to hire and keep some of the best technical minds on the planet.
01:09:05 ►
Now, Terrence actually touched on this next headline in a talk that we just listened to,
01:09:10 ►
and the article from Quartz says,
01:09:12 ►
Scientists who want to study psychedelic mushrooms have to pay $7,000 per gram.
01:09:20 ►
Well, this is so stupid that I don’t even know what to say about it,
01:09:24 ►
other than I think that I should maybe get into the business of supplying psilocybin to government researchers.
01:09:30 ►
Now here’s a story that I didn’t need to read because I’m living it.
01:09:34 ►
This headline comes from The Guardian in the UK and reads,
01:09:38 ►
Is Cannabis the Answer to Older People’s Booze Problems?
01:09:43 ►
Well, before I found cannabis, I was seriously abusing alcohol.
01:09:48 ►
And I’m sure that if I’d kept up on that track that I was on,
01:09:51 ►
well, I would no doubt be dead from liver failure by now.
01:09:55 ►
Fortunately, I found cannabis, and today my alcohol intake is,
01:09:59 ►
well, it’s down to a couple glasses of wine in the evening,
01:10:02 ►
just before my bedtime toke of cannabis.
01:10:05 ►
One article in the magazine even discusses a study that’s been found
01:10:09 ►
that there is no link between cumulative cannabis use and kidney disease.
01:10:15 ►
Now, why we needed a study to determine that, I don’t know,
01:10:19 ►
because it’s never crossed my mind that using cannabis could damage my kidneys.
01:10:24 ►
But by reducing my alcohol intake, it seems to me that cannabis actually has contributed to my kidneys’ good health.
01:10:32 ►
Another story coming from the UK, but this time in the Independent, says,
01:10:37 ►
Microdosing LSD is not just a Silicon Valley trend. It’s spreading to other workplaces.
01:10:46 ►
just a Silicon Valley trend. It’s spreading to other workplaces. And this story also claims that microdosing started off as an underground practice in Silicon Valley. But from what I know and what
01:10:52 ►
I’ve experienced myself, microdosing LSD takes place all around the world, even though it’s
01:10:58 ►
mainly in high-tech shops. And then there’s a story that should get the attention of anyone
01:11:04 ►
who wants to come to the States for a visit.
01:11:07 ►
It comes from the Global News in Cannabis, and the headline is,
01:11:11 ►
Why telling a U.S. border guard that you’ve smoked pot could be dangerous, even once it’s legalized?
01:11:18 ►
As one Vancouver lawyer says in the article,
01:11:20 ►
If someone answers yes to a border agent’s question of whether they’ve smoked pot
01:11:25 ►
ever, Sanders says they’re basically turned around and told to go back to Canada and told that they
01:11:33 ►
are inadmissible for life. This is a lifetime ban. Did you catch that? It’s a lifetime ban,
01:11:39 ►
and this is going to be the case for a long time, is my guess. So, whatever you do, admit nothing about your drug use to American border guards.
01:11:49 ►
You may even remember a case several years ago
01:11:52 ►
when a Canadian citizen was banned entry to the U.S. for life
01:11:56 ►
because 20 years earlier he’d written an essay that said LSD wasn’t all that bad.
01:12:03 ►
So, thanks for the war on drugs, free speech is no longer
01:12:07 ►
the law of the land here. Now if you’re still living in one of the dark age states where
01:12:12 ►
cannabis is still illegal, you probably won’t be able to grok this, but there is an article on
01:12:17 ►
futurism.com that says the latest trend in online shopping is marijuana. And this is actually from an online research study in July of last year,
01:12:28 ►
where researchers typed each of several predetermined keywords into Google,
01:12:32 ►
hit search, and analyzed the first two pages of links.
01:12:37 ►
Of those links, 41% were to retailers offering mail-order marijuana.
01:12:43 ►
Now, for two-thirds of the searches, the very first link
01:12:46 ►
led to such a retailer. The study concluded that people aren’t just searching for weed online,
01:12:52 ►
they’re finding it. Now, for those looking for practical advice, besides a step-by-step joint
01:12:59 ►
rolling guide, my Psychedelic Salon magazine on Flipboard also has a story about how you can learn to stop a joint from canoeing
01:13:07 ►
and become the hero at your next smoke session.
01:13:11 ►
Then there’s the news coming out of San Francisco that in that lovely city, pot tourists can now smoke where they buy it.
01:13:19 ►
Only California now permits marijuana smoking at marijuana retailers who have specially designed lounges.
01:13:25 ►
And unsurprisingly, San Francisco is the trailblazer.
01:13:30 ►
It’s the only city in the state right now to fully embrace Amsterdam-like coffee shops,
01:13:35 ►
the iconic tourist stops in the Netherlands where people can buy and smoke marijuana in the same shop.
01:13:41 ►
So put a flower in your hair, come to San Francisco, and let’s share a joint or
01:13:46 ►
two. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.