Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Pedaling toward expanded awareness!
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1995
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Nothing is unannounced.”
“[A psychedelic truth:] Nothing lasts.”
“The lie of Western psychology is that something is stable… . And because of this lie we are in a state of perpetual anxiety because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts.”
“The central truth of being is the felt presence of immediate reality. That’s all you will ever have.”
“I think this ability to accept the inevitable passing and coming to be of phenomenon is what psychedelic wisdom is really about.”
“Community is the enemy of authoritarian organization.”
“They don’t hand out rights around here. The only people who have any rights are people who demand them.”
“Don’t people understand that the essence of sophistication is tolerance?”
“I think Americans are paranoid of nature.”
“This is very important work. Whether we succeed or fail, it would be tragic to not make the effort, because I think we really align ourselves with the Gaian intent when we bring these things to the community and share them.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And to begin, I want to send my best wishes and thank yous to Samuel G., once again for his donation to the salon,
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and to Drew K., who also made a donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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On top of that, I want to thank longtime major supporter of the salon, Marjean M., without whose help over the years I couldn’t have done without.
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So thank you one and all for your support of these podcasts.
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And that also goes out to my supporters on Patreon,
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who are helping me to keep these podcasts coming to you without interruption.
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Now, before I play today’s Terrence McKenna talk for you, I want
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to pass along a few things that I’ve been thinking about. You see, last week one of my friends, who
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I haven’t seen for several years, was able to spend a couple of days here with me, and a lot has
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transpired from our reunion. The main headline being that I’ve decided to come out of my retirement
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from speaking at conferences and participate in the
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First Imagine Conference, which is going to be held next March. And I’ll be telling you more
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about this as we get closer to the event, but it got me to thinking about how many friends I’ve
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gained from going to conferences and festivals. In fact, many of the people that you’ve heard
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from here in the salon are friends that I’ve made at events like this.
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So, if you can’t make it to next month’s Lightning in a Bottle Festival at Lake San Antonio in California,
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or if you can’t make it to the Imagine Festival this coming September,
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then I hope that you can make it to the first Imagine Conference in March of 2019.
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I won’t be at the Lightning in the Bottle or the Imagine Festival, but if all goes well,
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I hope to meet you in person next March at the Imagine Conference. Or, in case you forgot,
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on the first Monday of each month, you can join me virtually in a Zoom conference.
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One way or another, I hope one day to see your smiling face as we swap stories.
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see your smiling face as we swap stories. Now let’s get on with today’s program. And today brings us the final installment of the Terence McKenna class that he taught at CIIS in April of
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- And this may be one of the clearest instances of how difficult it was, even for somebody like
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Terence McKenna, to predict the future back then,
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even the relatively near future. And you’ll understand what I mean in just a moment,
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when you hear Terrence McKenna singing the praises of HD television, something that we
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all take for granted today. Yet back in 1995, it was a big deal. In fact, I clearly remember the
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first time that I saw HDTV myself. It was
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such an intense moment that I can still remember where I was and who I was with at the time.
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I could hardly take my eyes off of it. So now let’s listen to Terrence McKenna’s
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first impression of HDTV, among, well, among a few other things.
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among a few other things.
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Well, I don’t know about HDTV.
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It seems slow coming.
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I saw it in Frankfurt, and I was shocked.
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Have you seen it?
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It’s not at all what I expected.
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I expected, you know, the hype is, it’s just like a movie.
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It’s that clear.
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High-definition television is an entirely different way of doing TV.
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Well, it’s much weirder than film.
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It’s a window.
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It’s freakishly three-dimensional.
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I mean, you can’t tear your eyes off of it.
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You can’t believe how intensely real it is. In fact, it’s sort of hyper-real in some way.
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To the issue of virtual reality, I don’t know, I was a speaker at Seagraph last August, and at one point I turned to Brenda Laurel and I said, I think we can stop hyping virtual reality, it appears to have attained lift-off speed because, you
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know, Softimage, Disney, they were all there with mega-million-dollar outlays and they
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haven’t yet figured out how to deliver it, but it may be cheap.
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It may come over the wire. It may cost you a quarter.
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It may not be the fantasy of the virtual reality salon in your house.
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It may just simply come over the wire.
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I think the economics of it may delay or accelerate it,
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but that the appetite for it is so great that it is for sure on its way.
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What’s holding it back is the technology,
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because the demands that we make of our hardware when we move to VR are incredible.
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I mean, look at these eucalyptus trees blowing in the wind out here.
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Look at how each leaf has a unique reflective index of its own which is changing in time.
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Think of the computational energy that would have to be brought to bear to convincingly reproduce that in a VR environment. I mean, it’s orders of magnitude more computationally demanding
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than anything currently being done.
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However, you know, it’s said of the computer, well, it’s said of the automobile,
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if it had evolved at the same rate as the computer,
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a car would now go 375,000 miles an hour on a nickel’s worth of gas
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and cost you 200 bucks.
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So we shouldn’t assume at all that we’re reaching the limits,
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the potential limits of the computer.
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I’d say we’re probably about halfway there.
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There is right now a fiber optic experimental line
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between the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota
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that is able to transfer 630 gigabytes per second.
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That’s the Encyclopedia Britannica in under a thirtieth of a second.
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That’s bandwidth.
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That can handle anything.
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We just have to run that experimental cable into every city and home on the planet,
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and then we’ll have it.
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You know, McLuhan had an interesting idea.
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McLuhan’s a weird character because a very advanced thinker,
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but a convert to Catholicism so
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forth and so on he finally concluded that electricity is the physical descent
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of the Holy Ghost into history that as the planet as our cities turn to light
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and everything is linked together informationally, that this is the enfolding presence of the third person of the Trinity.
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And, you know, since electricity is a fairly mysterious item anyway,
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who is to say not?
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In practical terms, it may lead to something very, very much like that,
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It may lead to something very, very much like that, a gathering of us all together in cyber,
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hyper, shamanos space.
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Yeah?
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Why don’t you describe the primal focus?
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Sure, I’ll describe it briefly. I’ve tried to stay off it because I tried to keep this botanically focused. For those of you who don’t know it, I have other burdens to bear other than my psychedelic advocacy.
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I am the purveyor of a theory of history which has many different aspects about it, and I’ve used some of the terms like novelty, ingression of novelty, concrescence,
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but I believe that I have discovered or was told a mathematical algorithm
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that allows us to replace probability theory with a waveform
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that predicts where in time novelty will cluster
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and where in time very probable events should be assumed to concentrate.
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It’s a very neat mathematical theory.
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It’s all very solid and so forth and so on.
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But it has, as all theories do, what I call a hard swallow built in.
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To illustrate what I mean, the hard swallow in normal cosmology is called the Big Bang.
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You know, if you can believe that, you’ll believe anything.
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This is the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.
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Notice that whether that’s true or not, it’s the limit case for credulity.
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I mean, if you can believe that, it’s a little hard to know what
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you would dig your heels in on. The hard swallow in my theory is that it seems to all calculate
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out to prove that we’re less than 18 years away from an event as dramatic as the Big Bang, but sort of the Big Bang in reverse,
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what I call the Big Surprise. That this process of boundary dissolution that we have been
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experiencing in our historical and cultural adventure is accelerating by a factor such
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is accelerating by a factor such that half of the history of the universe is going to unfold in the next 17 years. As much will happen, in other words, in the next 17 years as happened in the previous 17 or 20 billion years,
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or 20 billion years, that in fact history is the phenomenon which immediately precedes this event,
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sort of in the way that the dilation of the cervix is the phenomenon which immediately preced the transcendental object hidden in the protean depths of nature is about to shed all its foils and emerge in its hyperdimensional nakedness at the end of time. And it would be a mad thing to hypothesize, except that the mathematical algorithm allows
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very accurate predictions of the past. Now, at first that may sound silly, but notice
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it’s easy to predict the future. Who the hell can naysay it? It’s very difficult to predict
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the past because it’s already happened.
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So whether you were right or wrong or not is going to be immediately determinable. And
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I believe, based on this theory’s ability to describe the past, that we should take
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very seriously the idea that we are, in fact fact the carriers of a process of universal metamorphosis
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that is reaching its culmination.
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You may find that impossible to imagine that in 18 years the world will turn itself inside out,
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but I think if you sit with it a while, try to imagine that not happening.
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Try to imagine this world 500 years from now if we continue with business as usual and
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no vertical gain.
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It’s inconceivable.
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We have painted ourselves into some kind of a corner.
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I grant you my schedule is a little breathtaking, only 18 years,
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but I’ll bet you if my schedule were 100 years,
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you’d feel that it was uncomfortably long viewed.
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Sometime in the next little while, it’s going to be apparent to everybody
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that the human adventure is building towards some kind of
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quantized transition point. We are not going to wander in the miasma of techno-worship,
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male dominance, resource exploitation, and ever burgeoning human population forever.
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human population forever.
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It’s impossible.
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It’s a self-limiting exercise.
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And to the degree that we can educate ourselves and communicate with each other, we can hasten this process or at least make it easier for the planetary culture to go through.
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Yeah?
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for the planetary culture to go through.
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Yeah? So given that metaphor of preparing for another birth,
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would it be presumptuous to look at the plants coming into this North American culture
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as sort of like, like when I was getting raised for about four hours before I started getting flooded
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with visions and hallucinations of going into the other world
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and seeing that the plants in this culture and their reawakening in the last 30 years
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could be turning that momentum to help move us into this new birth process?
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Oh, I think so, because I think what we’re going to…
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History is ending, but time will continue.
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Well, what is time without history for human beings?
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Well, it’s the archaeon.
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We’re going back into the archaic,
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and apparently as central to the archaic as nuclear physics and economics is to our world,
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was shamanism and hallucinogenic plans.
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So I think we’re preparing to make a return.
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Nothing happens without a reason, and nothing is unannounced.
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This is something the mushroom told me.
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It’s a very interesting idea.
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Nothing is unannounced.
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If you are sensitive enough,
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you can never be taken by surprise because there is always the wave which precedes the
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actual arrival of the event. And a lot of people talk about the end of the world, but it’s almost entirely couched negatively.
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I feel that I am, without a doubt, the most optimistic person I have ever met or heard of.
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And yet, after I give some of my lectures, people come up to me and say,
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it was frightening. It was an appalling vision.
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You missed the point.
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I’m telling you, you know, God’s kingdom is 18 years away.
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How could you possibly interpret that as negative?
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You say, well, but aren’t you saying that everything will be changed and transformed and swept away?
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Well, yes, but, you know, that’s the way of it.
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You want a psychedelic truth, you know, that’s the way of it. You want a psychedelic truth?
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You know, 30 years of psychedelic voyaging, I can distill it for you.
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This is not a psychedelic truth.
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This is truth.
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Here it is.
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Yes.
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And you can learn this from drugs.
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You can learn it from life. you can learn it from life,
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you can learn it from death, you can learn it any way you like,
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but by God, you will learn it.
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Nothing lasts.
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Nothing lasts.
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Not your enemies, not your friends, not your youth,
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not your dreams, not your youth, not your dreams, not your fears, not your hopes, not even yourself.
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Nothing lasts.
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I mean, this has been said often, but felt rarely.
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You know, Heraclitus said, Pantetreia, all flows.
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Oh, yeah. All flows.
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And the lie of Western psychology is that something is stable.
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God’s nature, the equinoctial points, something lasts. And because of this lie, we are perpetually in a state of anxiety
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because the truth of our experience
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is nothing lasts. And yet the truth that our culture tells us is, you know, save your immortal
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soul, make a contribution, preserve, protect, conserve, stabilize, retain. It’s pointless.
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protect, conserve, stabilize, retain.
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It’s pointless.
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And so the central truth of being is the felt presence of immediate reality.
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That’s all you will ever have. And so the quality of the felt presence of immediate experience is what you want to impact and determine. And everything else is rumor, hearsay, hope, dream, memory, projection.
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But the felt presence of immediate experience, if that is not satisfying to you,
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you have to change your life. You have to change your life.
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You have to do something.
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And the fact that Western psychology and civilization is a vast exercise in delayed gratification,
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and the consequences of that are endless unhappiness and neurosis and fetish substitution and so forth and so on for reality.
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It should be liberating to know that nothing lasts, but instead it paralyzes with a sense of ephemerality
00:19:00 ►
when what it should do is empower an enormous sense of freedom.
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And I think this ability to accept the inevitable passing and coming to be of phenomena
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is what psychedelic wisdom is really about.
00:19:21 ►
Anybody, anything, hit me, yeah.
00:19:24 ►
Yeah.
00:19:23 ►
Anybody, anything?
00:19:24 ►
Hit me, yeah. Yeah.
00:19:28 ►
You mean my views on the web?
00:19:43 ►
Where did I learn my views? Well, Ralph Abraham, you should visit his website.
00:19:52 ►
It’s http://hypatia.ucsc.edu.org.
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usc.edu.org.
00:20:09 ►
Well, it’s basically just a URL,
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URL colon double backslash hypatia at usc.org.net,.edu.org.
00:20:24 ►
I’m sorry.
00:20:29 ►
It’s a funny question.
00:20:34 ►
I’m puzzled because I never thought of these as my views on the net.
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Aren’t these the views of the net?
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I mean, is anybody saying anything different?
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I mean, I assume this is what unites the faithful in the religion of net worship, but maybe I’m wrong.
00:20:54 ►
Well, that’s more alarming.
00:21:02 ►
The businessmen will, wherever there is a frontier, I mean, first come the explorers,
00:21:06 ►
then come the missionaries, then come the hookers and the businessmen.
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And we’ve got plenty of hookers and plenty of businessmen on the Internet now.
00:21:19 ►
I’m McLuhan enough to not so much be obsessed with the content.
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It’s not what is on the net that’s important.
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It’s the net itself. It’s what what is on the net that’s important. It’s the net itself.
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It’s what it is.
00:21:32 ►
It’s the fact that if you want to find something out, you now can. It’s the greatest democratization of information that’s ever occurred.
00:21:37 ►
I mean, the head of the CIA under Jimmy Carter didn’t have intelligence as good as I do
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because I can go on to the net and access these various databases.
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So the thing that is so empowering about the net, I think,
00:22:01 ►
is Tim Leary had a slogan back in the 60s.
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He used to tell his audiences,
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find the others.
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Find the others.
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Well, how do you find the others?
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In the 60s, you put a flower in your hair
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and headed for San Francisco.
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Today, you go on to the net and go to the well, and you can find the others.
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It doesn’t matter how obscure, peculiar, or bizarre your interest is,
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I guarantee you, you can find 10 or 15 people who passionately share this thing.
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And that empowers you.
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And it builds community.
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And community is the enemy of authoritarian organization because community springs from the heart.
00:23:01 ►
Authority springs from theory.
00:23:04 ►
springs from the heart, authority springs from theory.
00:23:12 ►
Keeping us in a decommunal state is a major part of the agenda of anybody controlling us. That’s why the Internet is so terrifying to people, because obviously it strengthens dissidence.
00:23:30 ►
And, you know, just last week this stupid thing happened in Congress, the Digital Decency Act.
00:23:41 ►
Ask yourself, how many times have you been told that child pornography, bestiality, so forth and so on,
00:23:45 ►
is being purveyed to thousands of people on the net.
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Then if you have any experience of the net, you realize that that’s like thinking of San Francisco as that one corner at Broadway and Columbus where they peddle girly mags.
00:24:01 ►
That’s just a part of San Francisco.
00:24:04 ►
It’s a complex civilization.
00:24:06 ►
We have all kinds of people.
00:24:07 ►
Everybody should be able to do what they want.
00:24:10 ►
But to define San Francisco that way would then lead you to the conclusion,
00:24:15 ►
well, maybe we better seal off San Francisco
00:24:18 ►
and clean up this hideous evil that’s breaking loose.
00:24:22 ►
This is what’s being done on the web.
00:24:24 ►
The public is being manipulated by major media to restrict the web and to get regulation and to put cops on every node and so forth and so on. And this is very bad. It should be resisted. It probably will succeed. I don’t think it will destroy the web. I think it will be a speed bump.
00:24:46 ►
But please know that a war is going on for your loyalty in this issue,
00:24:54 ►
and don’t allow, you know, pornograph phobes and people like that to stampede you into the idea that the web is a tremendous social evil
00:25:09 ►
poised at the souls of our children.
00:25:12 ►
My God, you have to have $10,000 of equipment and an engineering degree to make your way into these places.
00:25:19 ►
I don’t think there are too many 8-year-olds wandering around traumatized by what they’re finding at alt.pix.erotic.
00:25:29 ►
It seems idiotic to me.
00:25:33 ►
Yeah.
00:25:36 ►
In terms of the DEA, there are a lot of discussions going on because the government seems to condition a lot of our lives around usage of the sexual
00:25:46 ►
acts of violence. There’s been discussions going on in the Bay Area about how to deal with it.
00:25:52 ►
Some people are advocating going public, coming out, and I like to not disagree with other
00:25:58 ►
people who are advocating a person and the challenge in having another case of Congress that’s separate and structured.
00:26:06 ►
And I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about the general socialization
00:26:12 ►
that has to do with the governmental…
00:26:15 ►
On that issue?
00:26:16 ►
Yes.
00:26:18 ►
It’s a complicated thing because there are two levels.
00:26:22 ►
There is, first of all, the drug problem we are told we have,
00:26:28 ►
which is too many people are taking too many bad drugs and committing crimes in order to obtain
00:26:36 ►
money to buy drugs or committing crimes in order to transport, manufacture, and deal drugs,
00:26:43 ►
in order to transport, manufacture, and deal drugs,
00:26:47 ►
and this has dehumanized our society, and it’s a terrible scourge,
00:26:50 ►
and we have to do something about it.
00:26:53 ►
That’s level one of the drug problem. What you are not told is that governments are the chief offenders.
00:27:00 ►
Most drugs in the world are either produced by governments
00:27:04 ►
or produced with the connivance of governments.
00:27:08 ►
And our little bailiwick, the psychedelics, don’t even figure in this issue because not enough money is being made.
00:27:20 ►
The only psychedelic that ever made anybody any money was LSD. And on a scale where we’re
00:27:27 ►
talking about methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin, the fortunes made off of LSD were minuscule.
00:27:35 ►
The drug thing is a con. Governments need vast amounts of untraceable cash, they believe,
00:27:46 ►
amounts of untraceable cash, they believe, because they turn it over to their secret police agencies who then pursue secret agendas where they try to control events by illicit
00:27:55 ►
and non-sanctioned means.
00:27:58 ►
And by that I mean rigging elections, murdering labor leaders, hounding liberal editors into retirement, smearing people, so forth and so on.
00:28:11 ►
The hard drug markets of this world are entirely in the hands of governments.
00:28:17 ►
You know, somebody pulls a stunt in Kuwait and we’re there in a moment. We send troops to Haiti, but these mysterious jungle warlords in Burma seem untouchable.
00:28:36 ►
Nothing can be done.
00:28:38 ►
They’re beyond the reach of any army, any aerial bombing campaign.
00:28:43 ►
It’s just mysteriously indestructible, these warlords in Burma.
00:28:49 ►
Well, it’s because they are the producing end of an illicit, world-griddling organization
00:28:57 ►
whose purpose is to deliver drugs to the market.
00:29:09 ►
drugs to the market. And I believe that the CIA got into this game because, you could almost say, for good reasons from their point of view. The CIA in the middle 60s, as well as the rest of
00:29:16 ►
the American establishment, was confronted with the spectacle of black people determined to burn down the core of every city in America until they got social justice.
00:29:30 ►
The decision was made to bring hundreds of tons of chemically, pharmaceutically pure China white number three
00:29:39 ►
heroin into those ghettos and just basically dump it on the ground and see what happens.
00:29:44 ►
And it totally broke the back of black radicalism
00:29:49 ►
and turned everybody into a junkie or a gangster somewhere in that system.
00:29:56 ►
Well, then when we lost the Vietnam War,
00:30:00 ►
the way the geopolitical thing came down was Khomeini got the heroin industry,
00:30:07 ►
and China White was traded in for Iranian Brown, a lower grade of heroin.
00:30:14 ►
Well, since Khomeini is not a nice man in our pantheon,
00:30:19 ►
heroin suddenly became highly repressed.
00:30:25 ►
But at the same time, as the Vietnam War wound down,
00:30:31 ►
these insurgencies in South America were being started up,
00:30:36 ►
and cocaine was brought onto the scene.
00:30:38 ►
And I can remember in like 73, 74, a particular cover of Time magazine,
00:30:48 ►
cocaine, the new drug of choice.
00:30:52 ►
And it was just this far short of an endorsement.
00:30:57 ►
It was all about movie stars were doing it
00:31:00 ►
and everybody was doing it, a huge picture of lines on the cover.
00:31:05 ►
That’s a decision to sell.
00:31:08 ►
That’s an ad campaign, a very high-profile ad campaign.
00:31:12 ►
Well, I think I said to you yesterday, in the international drug trade,
00:31:16 ►
the real cost of these drugs is in transporting them
00:31:20 ►
because you have to pay somebody to bring 10 kilos of heroin into the
00:31:26 ►
United States, unless you know fools, you’re going to have to pay them 50,000,
00:31:33 ►
a fraction of the worth of that heroin. But nevertheless, if you haven’t sold it yet,
00:31:38 ►
it may be tricky to get that kind of scratch together. Well, that’s for 10 kilos of junk.
00:31:45 ►
You have to pay $50,000 to transport it.
00:31:48 ►
But if you have a C-130, you can bring 50,000 pounds of heroin,
00:31:55 ►
and it will cost you far less per unit volume.
00:32:10 ►
So the CIA had all these airplanes and they simply diverted them to the drug trade. You probably have been following this recent scandal involving the U.S. Forest Service.
00:32:15 ►
Has this been in the papers here? It’s been well rehearsed in Hawaii.
00:32:19 ►
Well, as you know, the U.S. Forest Service uses C-130s to drop fire-retardant chemicals on forest fires.
00:32:28 ►
When the Air Force was downsizing three years ago, the Forest Service requisitioned 15 C-130s.
00:32:39 ►
By manipulating paperwork and painting out serial numbers and painting on other serial numbers,
00:32:46 ►
only three of those C-130s ever reached the Forest Service.
00:32:51 ►
The other 12 mysteriously disappeared.
00:32:55 ►
Do you know what a C-130 looks like?
00:32:57 ►
Do you know how hard it is to lose one of those puppies?
00:33:01 ►
Twelve of them disappeared without a trace.
00:33:04 ►
Well, guess where
00:33:06 ►
and guess what they’re lugging back and forth
00:33:09 ►
now the CIA itself is addicted to the money
00:33:13 ►
the original impulse
00:33:15 ►
break the back of black radicalism
00:33:18 ►
has been replaced by a more obvious impulse
00:33:21 ►
make a lot of money
00:33:23 ►
where do you get a quick billion dollars if you need it in a hurry?
00:33:29 ►
It’s called you take a floater on drugs.
00:33:32 ►
That’s what you do.
00:33:33 ►
And the amount of money is so great that anyone can be corrupted.
00:33:40 ►
These boats that come up from Columbia that lie off the coast of Florida,
00:33:44 ►
the so-called motherships,
00:33:47 ►
a guy with a fast cigarette boat can make three trips to and from one of those motherships on a cloudy night.
00:33:56 ►
The standard pay for one of those trips, which takes about 40 minutes, is $125,000.
00:34:03 ►
40 minutes is $125,000.
00:34:09 ►
You can make $375,000 a night doing this,
00:34:11 ►
and you’re not a player.
00:34:12 ►
You’re not a kingpin.
00:34:14 ►
You’re not a major figure.
00:34:16 ►
You’re a totally disposable peon.
00:34:21 ►
So imagine how much money there is to be made at the top. Who can refuse a $10 million bribe?
00:34:28 ►
You know, people come in and say, listen, we’d like to give you $10 million
00:34:32 ►
and we’ve bought a house for you in the highlands of Malaysia and a Ferrari
00:34:37 ►
and we’d just like you to go and live there and do whatever you want.
00:34:41 ►
And the choice is a bullet in the head.
00:34:45 ►
So which would you prefer?
00:34:46 ►
We’re perfectly at ease either way, so you figure it out and call us back.
00:34:54 ►
Nobody can resist that kind of thing.
00:34:58 ►
So we’re in a situation where we are being radically manipulated by governments
00:35:07 ►
a situation where we are being radically manipulated by governments because they are addicted to a style of piratical rogue capitalism that is just simply the greatest windfall ever
00:35:13 ►
imagined. I mean, there has never been anything like the modern illicit drug trade in the
00:35:21 ►
history of the world. Ten years ago, the drug trade and the international arms trade were on a par with each other.
00:35:31 ►
Today, the international drug trade makes ten times as much money as the international arms trade.
00:35:38 ►
And there’s no end in sight.
00:35:42 ►
Some of you may know Bobby Faust in New York. He’s an interesting guy. He has an idea. He says that he advocates something which he calls civil obedience. He says not civil disobedience, but civil obedience. He says everybody who smokes pot should take their pot on a certain day and march down to the cop shop and demand that justice be done.
00:36:27 ►
did that, the courts would be so clogged, the entire madness of the whole thing would be exposed for everyone to see, and it would just be impossible to enforce.
00:36:35 ►
That’s a strategic idea.
00:36:37 ►
It might work.
00:36:39 ►
From observing American society as long as I have, it’s very clear to me they don’t hand
00:36:44 ►
out rights around here.
00:36:47 ►
The only people who have any rights are people who demand them. And you can look at how black
00:36:54 ►
people broke free in the 60s. You can look at how the gay community got itself together in the 70s
00:37:02 ►
and 80s. And apparently, unless you’re willing to stand up for what you are,
00:37:08 ►
you’re going to be forever stigmatized.
00:37:12 ►
It was, you know, black people, they couldn’t escape it.
00:37:17 ►
The reflectivity of their skin marked them.
00:37:21 ►
But it was very, very courageous for gay people,
00:37:27 ►
marked them. But it was very, very courageous for gay people, many of whom were way in the closet and doing well in straight society, to risk all that and say, no, look, this is what’s going on.
00:37:35 ►
This is who I am. Now, if there’s a problem, it’s your problem, not my problem. And homosexuality was a crime in many states, in most states, just as drugs are. So I
00:37:49 ►
think really, if we’re serious, we’re going to have to risk something. We’re going to have to
00:37:55 ►
risk our jobs, our reputations, perhaps some of our friendships, and just say, look, this is what it is. Now, if you don’t like it, don’t do it.
00:38:08 ►
But don’t legislate for the rest of us.
00:38:12 ►
Society is a very complex enterprise,
00:38:15 ►
and what’s good for you may not be good for me.
00:38:18 ►
And if it’s to be done in mass action, that’s better.
00:38:22 ►
We all feel better if we march in a group than if we march alone.
00:38:27 ►
But we drug people are incredibly, we fold too easily, I think.
00:38:35 ►
I think we feel great shame on some level about what we’ve done.
00:38:41 ►
I mean, it’s very hard to stand up to a really straight person
00:38:45 ►
and say, yeah, no, no, I didn’t try it.
00:38:51 ►
I just did it ten minutes ago.
00:38:55 ►
We’re not talking about my wild college days.
00:38:59 ►
We’re talking about 35 seconds before I stood in your presence.
00:39:04 ►
And see, I’m not falling down.
00:39:07 ►
I’m not about to commit murder.
00:39:09 ►
I’m just like you are, except I have this different preference.
00:39:13 ►
And force that.
00:39:16 ►
And it’s the task of a generation.
00:39:20 ►
You know, the right wing, they understand far better than we do.
00:39:25 ►
I mean, when Pat Buchanan says it’s cultural war, he’s talking about us.
00:39:31 ►
We’re the counterculture.
00:39:33 ►
We’re the enemy.
00:39:34 ►
And the response of a desperate foe is an ever more desperate lashing out.
00:39:43 ►
And Christianity is not going to go quietly into that good night.
00:39:49 ►
It’s going to get nuttier as it approaches its terminal delirium.
00:39:54 ►
The killing of abortion doctors is a good example.
00:39:59 ►
What does that do for the right to life movement?
00:40:02 ►
It totally discredits them.
00:40:22 ►
that do for the right to life movement? It totally discredits them. It moves them from a position that is maybe different from yours, but arguable, to just nuts. We no longer have to make any kind of effort to sway those people or come to terms with them. They’re crazy people. And you would no more try to convert them to your point of view
00:40:26 ►
than you would try to convert somebody who pulled a gun on you in an alley.
00:40:31 ►
Yeah.
00:40:32 ►
What do you see happening with the DNC trade?
00:40:37 ►
I mean, obviously it’s probably not a trade right now
00:40:39 ►
because it’s very much a substance out there.
00:40:43 ►
So one would probably argue,
00:40:45 ►
he would argue that more people should use it
00:40:48 ►
and see it and this is very important.
00:40:52 ►
And do I think there’ll be more of it?
00:40:54 ►
Yeah, well, and how that will progress,
00:40:57 ►
I mean, will it become something, you know,
00:40:58 ►
like mushroom, mushroom is very well developed
00:41:02 ►
because it’s a very profitable type of thing
00:41:04 ►
and it seems to be a, well-developed, very profitable type of thing,
00:41:09 ►
and it seems to be, to a large extent,
00:41:14 ►
a money-driven type of occupation that people go into for money when they’ve got money.
00:41:19 ►
Well, yes.
00:41:20 ►
I mean, the mushroom thing is a little different
00:41:23 ►
in the sense that a dedicated mushroom grower
00:41:27 ►
who works day and night can produce maybe 10,000 hits of mushrooms in a year.
00:41:35 ►
A chemist working with sufficient material can produce millions of doses of a pure compound.
00:41:46 ►
I think the reason mushrooms have flourished in such an…
00:41:49 ►
Have you noticed how… Mushrooms have been around since 1975.
00:41:54 ►
Have you noticed how the press never writes about it,
00:41:59 ►
never interviews with underground mushroom growers,
00:42:03 ►
never exposes it, never talks about it.
00:42:06 ►
That’s, I believe, because to expose it is to inspire ever more people to do it.
00:42:14 ►
It’s very easy to do.
00:42:15 ►
You don’t have to have a lot of capital backing.
00:42:18 ►
You don’t have to have a degree in biochemistry.
00:42:21 ►
You don’t have to be able to handle explosive materials.
00:42:24 ►
In biochemistry, you don’t have to be able to handle explosive materials.
00:42:30 ►
It’s a very quiet, calm, cottage industry kind of thing.
00:42:37 ►
I think DMT, well, first of all, I know there’s more DMT around in the last year and a half than in the previous 20 years.
00:42:40 ►
I don’t know who’s making it or where it’s coming from, but I’m certainly grateful to them.
00:42:45 ►
I think there will be more and more.
00:42:48 ►
One thing about DMT that holds it back as a commercial commodity is, you know,
00:42:55 ►
if you sell somebody a gram, you may not see them for a year.
00:43:01 ►
If you sell somebody a gram of cocaine, they’ll be back eight hours later.
00:43:08 ►
The speed at which people consume their DMT once, I mean, I know somebody who has two
00:43:14 ►
grams of DMT, and I said, you’re not using it very fast. And he said, yes, well, I’m
00:43:20 ►
saving it for my grandchildren. I said, you’re not even married, for God’s sake.
00:43:21 ►
saving it for my grandchildren.
00:43:24 ►
I said, you’re not even married, for God’s sake.
00:43:31 ►
It’s more an act of love and dedication.
00:43:33 ►
But I think there are enough people out there who care more for hell-raising and outrage than money
00:43:37 ►
that we can depend on them to produce some of this stuff.
00:43:42 ►
And some people make it simply in order to have it for themselves,
00:43:46 ►
and then, of course, they overproduce by a factor of a thousand,
00:43:49 ►
so they might as well dump the rest of that stuff.
00:43:53 ►
But I would love to see a national…
00:43:56 ►
It’s always puzzled me why there aren’t four-inch headlines
00:44:02 ►
on every newspaper on the planet saying, you know,
00:44:07 ►
drug discovered which opens doorway to hyperspace.
00:44:14 ►
How can they keep it secret?
00:44:17 ►
How can it be a secret?
00:44:20 ►
I mean, we live in a culture where people regularly jump out of airplanes for recreational pleasure.
00:44:28 ►
That’s the kind of culture we live in.
00:44:31 ►
And yet, DMT has not made its way very deeply into that culture.
00:44:36 ►
I mean, if what people want is thrills, my God, are their thrills still untapped?
00:44:44 ►
However, I’ve noticed the surrender issue works here.
00:44:50 ►
I’ve talked to people who sailed solo around the world, climbed the north face of Everest,
00:44:58 ►
shot the rapids on the Mekong and so forth.
00:45:02 ►
They say, oh, well, you’re a real hairy-chested guy.
00:45:06 ►
Would you like to smoke some DMT?
00:45:08 ►
And, you know, absolutely ashen.
00:45:11 ►
No, absolutely not.
00:45:14 ►
Are you crazy?
00:45:15 ►
That’s dangerous.
00:45:18 ►
He said, well, what about the time you parachuted into Kilimanjaro
00:45:23 ►
at the 22,000 foot level.
00:45:26 ►
He said, well, I knew what I was doing.
00:45:29 ►
I was in, so, I don’t know, different thrills for different folks.
00:45:37 ►
Yeah.
00:45:39 ►
You wanted to mention briefly, and I can sort of flip it,
00:45:41 ►
and I love it, but that’s a very serious thing.
00:45:46 ►
See, here’s the legal history of how this all went down.
00:45:51 ►
In the middle 60s, it must have been around 67,
00:45:56 ►
somebody somewhere jumped out of a window on LSD and managed to kill themselves.
00:46:02 ►
Every newspaper in the country, if not the planet,
00:46:06 ►
did in-depth, detailed, background, you know, maps,
00:46:11 ►
how he walked to the balcony, the arrow, this whole thing.
00:46:16 ►
And LSD was legal at that time.
00:46:21 ►
So then there was a huge hue and cry about how it had to be made
00:46:25 ►
illegal. And this was in California.
00:46:30 ►
And the California State Legislature
00:46:32 ►
with almost no debate, with
00:46:35 ►
no professional witnesses,
00:46:38 ►
with no scientific evidence placed before them
00:46:41 ►
not only made LSD illegal,
00:46:44 ►
they made psilocybin, DMT, ibogaine, and figure
00:46:50 ►
this one out, bufotinin was made Schedule I.
00:46:54 ►
Now, get this, bufotinin is inactive in human beings.
00:46:58 ►
Why was it made Schedule I?
00:47:00 ►
Because two weeks before this debate took place, a paper was published suggesting that it might cause hallucinations in human beings.
00:47:11 ►
In other words, they just went through the scientific literature
00:47:13 ►
and anything described as a hallucinogen was poured in to this California drug bill.
00:47:22 ►
Well, and so then it was passed.
00:47:24 ►
Well, then six weeks later, somebody jumps out of a window somewhere else.
00:47:29 ►
This time, it’s not even clear drugs are involved, but the mere suggestion that they might have
00:47:35 ►
been involved is enough to create a national debate, and the Congress, rather than hold
00:47:42 ►
hearings and adduce scientific evidence,
00:47:50 ►
says just take the California statute and federalize it.
00:47:52 ►
And so that was done.
00:48:01 ►
So what the consequences of this are is in the case of a drug, a substance like psilocybin,
00:48:07 ►
no scientific evidence has ever been offered to any legislative body saying there was anything wrong with it. It was specifically made illegal simply because
00:48:14 ►
it causes hallucinations. No health risk is involved. Nothing was known about psilocybin
00:48:21 ►
at that time. So that’s the first attack on these laws. They were not
00:48:25 ►
properly formulated
00:48:27 ►
in the first place.
00:48:29 ►
They were not based on reality
00:48:32 ►
or social need.
00:48:34 ►
Second of all,
00:48:35 ►
DMT, it is now
00:48:37 ►
subsequently become
00:48:39 ►
known, is an ordinary
00:48:41 ►
constituent of human metabolism.
00:48:44 ►
How can you make possession of this substance illegal
00:48:49 ►
when every man, woman, and child on earth is holding?
00:48:53 ►
It’s like the ultimate catch-22.
00:48:56 ►
We are all criminals all the time.
00:48:59 ►
They don’t have to throw pot around your apartment.
00:49:02 ►
They can just draw blood from your good right arm,
00:49:05 ►
and there’s the damning evidence right there.
00:49:09 ►
So in the light of all this silliness,
00:49:12 ►
it would seem logical, I think,
00:49:15 ►
to go back and have a scientific review
00:49:19 ►
and a complete revision of the scheduling of these drugs.
00:49:24 ►
Look at the scheduling anyway.
00:49:26 ►
Schedule 1, what is it?
00:49:30 ►
Compounds with absolutely no medical use whatsoever.
00:49:37 ►
Cannabis is in there, even though it’s the preferred treatment for glaucoma
00:49:41 ►
and for chemotherapy to suppress nausea in chemotherapy.
00:49:48 ►
Heroin is in there.
00:49:51 ►
And then all psychedelics.
00:49:54 ►
You move to Schedule II, and the first thing that jumps out at you is cocaine is Schedule II.
00:50:03 ►
Marijuana is considered to be a more dangerous and devastating drug than cocaine.
00:50:08 ►
Why?
00:50:09 ►
Because, by the rules of the game,
00:50:11 ►
cocaine is used in certain medical procedures to anesthetize the optic nerve sometimes
00:50:17 ►
and to anesthetize nerves in the throat for certain forms of surgery.
00:50:22 ►
So because it has this obscure medical use, it’s
00:50:26 ►
Schedule 2. And this doesn’t make any sense at all. These drug laws have never been rationally
00:50:35 ►
put in place. The original stigmatization of cannabis was carried on by the Hearst newspapers because they spent a huge amount of money buying Canadian forest for newsprint
00:50:50 ►
just as the hemp industry was beginning to develop as a supplier for paper.
00:50:56 ►
And when they realized that they had badly invested in Canadian timber,
00:51:01 ►
they decided that they would put the hemp industry out of business.
00:51:06 ►
And so they discovered that it’s marijuana among those wily, dark-skinned folks south
00:51:13 ►
of the border who are so unclean and peculiar, and they began to attach it to a stigmatized
00:51:21 ►
racial group and managed to hound it out of existence.
00:51:26 ►
This game has never been played fairly.
00:51:29 ►
It has always been played to benefit markets, capitalists, and producers.
00:51:37 ►
It has never been handled in a rational and scientific manner.
00:51:42 ►
in a rational and scientific manner. And it should be because there’s very little doubt that the future holds
00:51:48 ►
an endless cornucopia of psychoactive drugs.
00:51:53 ►
This thing I told you about yesterday, salvorin alpha.
00:51:57 ►
What’s to become of this?
00:52:00 ►
I have some friends who have a church and a bunch of pagan folk
00:52:06 ►
and I told them about this and they immediately filed it as a sacrament of their church.
00:52:13 ►
Now they couldn’t have done this if it were illegal but it’s at the moment legal
00:52:19 ►
and so they proclaimed it a sacrament of their church and are using it ritually and hope that when
00:52:26 ►
it inevitably becomes illegal, they will be in a position to argue that it was legal and
00:52:31 ►
they used it as an exercise of religious freedom and now it can’t be taken away from them.
00:52:37 ►
But the existence of something like Salvorian Alpha tells, there may be hundreds of psychoactive drugs of all types,
00:52:46 ►
and we just simply need a rational process that serves who?
00:52:53 ►
That serves the user, not the producer, the purveyor.
00:52:58 ►
But these are medicines.
00:53:00 ►
They should be subject to the same standards of purity and so forth as the pharmaceutical industry.
00:53:08 ►
And what’s always put against drugs is that they’re unclean and dirty.
00:53:12 ►
But that’s because they’re made in illicit, clandestine labs that have been forced underground by witless government policies.
00:53:21 ►
And now, you know, it’s not even a matter of debate.
00:53:26 ►
We’ve got the Dutch data.
00:53:34 ►
We know that when you legalize drugs, people don’t immediately start smoking reefer 24 hours a day and committing acts of public fornication. That hasn’t happened anywhere.
00:53:40 ►
That’s a fantasy of the Christian right wing. No, all that happens when you
00:53:45 ►
legalize drugs is that people continue to do what they’ve been doing, whether they use
00:53:51 ►
drugs or not. So it’s a shell game. And if any of you ever reach positions of policy
00:53:59 ►
making or influence on policy making, I hope that you will try to input into this process
00:54:07 ►
and rationalize it,
00:54:09 ►
because it’s one of the great unregulated scams on the planet,
00:54:14 ►
and millions and millions of people are being victimized.
00:54:18 ►
Third world poverty is being exacerbated.
00:54:22 ►
Criminal syndicalism is flourishing.
00:54:26 ►
Ordinary law-abiding people are being criminalized.
00:54:31 ►
People are being made to feel guilty
00:54:34 ►
about simply trying to understand their own spiritual yearnings
00:54:40 ►
and their own place in the cosmos.
00:54:43 ►
and their own place in the cosmos.
00:54:50 ►
It’s a tragic situation, and it’s retarding cultural transformation.
00:54:51 ►
Yeah?
00:54:59 ►
Are other countries more lost about this than we are?
00:54:59 ►
Oh, yeah. Is North America particularly able to recover?
00:55:02 ►
Oh, absolutely.
00:55:03 ►
I mean, Germany, for example, I’ve been coming and going from Germany for seven or eight years.
00:55:10 ►
It’s always been loose.
00:55:12 ►
I mean, you could always sit in a reasonably sleazy restaurant after dinner
00:55:18 ►
and make a spliff and hand it around and nobody would say anything.
00:55:23 ►
And now the hemp laws have been declared unconstitutional.
00:55:30 ►
They’re more liberal than I would be in Germany.
00:55:33 ►
In other words, they say that you can possess a gram of heroin every 24 hours
00:55:39 ►
without legal consequences.
00:55:42 ►
That seems to me a little loose.
00:55:45 ►
I mean, maybe I’ve known more junkies than the head of the German Supreme Court,
00:55:49 ►
but it seems a little loose.
00:55:52 ►
You can possess up to 40 grams of hashish for your own personal use,
00:55:57 ►
and you can grow up to 12 plants without stigma.
00:56:03 ►
And it’s interesting.
00:56:11 ►
without stigma. And it’s interesting, I was in Germany in May of this year and this law had just been passed six weeks before and I was staying in Berlin and Berlin, like San Francisco, has many residential districts that are high and narrow,
00:56:19 ►
three-story houses. You could look down these streets and there are all these balconies.
00:56:26 ►
And just peeking above every balcony were the heads of the allowed 12 cannabis plants per person.
00:56:35 ►
And you could see that the entire city of Berlin was just slowly turning green.
00:56:43 ►
And while I was there, I saw an interview with the chief of police,
00:56:47 ►
and he said, yeah, we love this new cannabis law.
00:56:52 ►
I’ve been able to assign resources to real crime problems,
00:56:57 ►
and look at our statistics on how few stolen car deals there have been.
00:57:03 ►
The police are now freed to do what they should be doing,
00:57:06 ►
which is maintain public order,
00:57:08 ►
not messing around with what people are doing in the confines of their own minds.
00:57:14 ►
If it weren’t for Europe, I think this situation would be frozen out forever.
00:57:19 ►
But we will eventually be humiliated into liberalizing our drug laws.
00:57:24 ►
That’s all. You know, we are,
00:57:27 ►
I had always traveled all over the world, but I’d never really been to Europe until
00:57:33 ►
about eight years ago. And when you go there, you discover what, some people say it was
00:57:40 ►
de Tocqueville and some people say Charles de Gaulle. But someone said, America, it’s a footnote on European civilization.
00:57:50 ►
And you go there and you discover, oh, this is where it all came from.
00:57:56 ►
This is where they invented all of this stuff.
00:57:58 ►
What peculiarly complicates our situation is Europe is a genuinely secular society and the
00:58:08 ►
concept of a Christian right-wing being able to dominate the political agenda
00:58:15 ►
those kind of thing conceivable to them I mean they have they have Christian
00:58:19 ►
fundamentalists of course but the, a testament to their tolerance,
00:58:31 ►
not a knife poised at the heart of political dialogue the way it is in this country. We have allowed ourselves to become too rigidified in this meddling sort of neo-Lutheran attitude toward each other.
00:58:50 ►
I mean, don’t people understand that the essence of sophistication is tolerance?
00:58:55 ►
Tolerance, that’s all.
00:58:58 ►
Robert Frost once said,
00:58:59 ►
the secret of happiness is learning to enjoy people you don’t approve of.
00:59:05 ►
The secret of happiness is learning to enjoy people you don’t approve of. And I would add, and the second secret is learning to enjoy foods that you don’t approve of.
00:59:12 ►
Yeah?
00:59:13 ►
I have a point I feel I want to make.
00:59:16 ►
This is also the only country in the world where the practice of herbal medicine
00:59:20 ►
put in Europe is called herbal therapy.
00:59:22 ►
The only place where it’s believed, it’s not just a psychoactive bomb which is suppressed,
00:59:26 ►
it’s the use of anti-insurgency by an ordinary person
00:59:31 ►
for one who hasn’t been given or borrowed.
00:59:34 ►
I think Americans are paranoid of nature.
00:59:39 ►
Our history is one of conquest.
00:59:42 ►
And though we slaughtered a lot of Indians, we never tell it that way.
00:59:47 ►
We say we tamed the frontier.
00:59:50 ►
And so nature herself is set up as the enemy of American destiny.
00:59:57 ►
And that’s why the incredible artificiality of our culture
01:00:01 ►
and our incredible anxiety in the face of chaos.
01:00:07 ►
We’re order freaks.
01:00:08 ►
That’s why it’s so disturbing to people to imagine that people around them might be stoned
01:00:16 ►
because they don’t know what stoned is.
01:00:20 ►
So that terra incognito becomes frightening to them.
01:00:25 ►
We’re a very infantile society.
01:00:28 ►
I had some German friends visit me in Hawaii, and they wanted to go to the beach.
01:00:33 ►
And so we all went down to the beach, and we’re laying out the towels and everything,
01:00:38 ►
and my friend whipped her top off.
01:00:42 ►
I said, you can’t do that here.
01:00:48 ►
And she said, you’re not serious. And I said,
01:00:53 ►
well, didn’t you know that you can’t go topless on American beaches? And she said, well, I’d heard that, but I just didn’t believe it. I thought they meant some American. I said,
01:00:58 ►
no, this is over the top. Well, I can’t imagine that that will change before the end of the world.
01:01:07 ►
This society is so rigid that, you know, the sight of a tit shakes the entire social edifice from foundation to top.
01:01:18 ►
That’s how paranoid, how clenched, how fragilely balanced the American enterprise is.
01:01:25 ►
It’s a craziness.
01:01:27 ►
It’s a cultural craziness to people who come from outside of it.
01:01:32 ►
They can’t believe it.
01:01:35 ►
And so she put her top on, but just shaking her head, you know, oh.
01:01:39 ►
Because up to that point, she thought it was just sort of like Europe, but exotic and interesting.
01:01:44 ►
But suddenly she realized, oh, no of like Europe but exotic and interesting.
01:01:45 ►
But suddenly she realized, oh no, these people are cannibals and best watch what you say
01:01:51 ►
and do.
01:01:52 ►
Yeah?
01:01:53 ►
I was curious if you’ve ever tried that toast given by a vegetarian.
01:01:58 ►
And if you’re a vegetarian, and it shocks many people,
01:02:06 ►
and my riposte is simply,
01:02:09 ►
the most intelligent beings I’ve ever met are plants,
01:02:14 ►
so why shouldn’t I eat meat?
01:02:18 ►
You want me to chow down on a turnip in good conscience?
01:02:22 ►
You can’t be serious.
01:02:25 ►
What was the other question?
01:02:27 ►
Oh, the toad foam.
01:02:28 ►
I have been vegetarian for long periods in my life.
01:02:38 ►
Now I sort of follow the hippie philosophy that your body knows what it wants, even if
01:02:44 ►
it’s a snicker.
01:02:49 ►
The deeper wisdom of the body.
01:02:53 ►
As far as toad foam, it isn’t toad skin.
01:02:57 ►
So we don’t have to worry about the fate of the toad.
01:03:00 ►
The toad is not sacrificed in this process unless your milking technique is excessively vigorous.
01:03:12 ►
The substance is 5-methoxy-DMT, and many people like it.
01:03:18 ►
I don’t prefer it simply because it’s just like BMT except there’s no vision.
01:03:27 ►
And that’s a little like saying it’s just like the Philadelphia Philharmonic,
01:03:32 ►
only there’s no orchestra.
01:03:36 ►
But it is a huge tryptamine-like feeling.
01:03:40 ►
Because it’s not been studied, the toxicology of it is not well understood,
01:03:47 ►
and I’ve seen people get pretty uncomfortable with it.
01:03:51 ►
I’ve never seen anybody vomit on DMT.
01:03:54 ►
I have seen it repeatedly on 5-MeO.
01:03:57 ►
One piece of information about 5-MeO, which don’t draw any conclusions, but it’s worth knowing,
01:04:04 ►
it’s fatal to sheep.
01:04:07 ►
I mean, if you inject sheep with 5-methoxy-DMT, they fall down and their little legs shake in the air,
01:04:15 ►
and that’s all she wrote.
01:04:17 ►
Well, we’re not sheep, but if you think you might be one, I would suggest that you don’t try this stuff.
01:04:27 ►
Well, I think we’re at the end of the road here. I feel a little guilty that there wasn’t more hard botany,
01:04:33 ►
but I feel confident that David and Ralph and the other people participating in this
01:04:40 ►
course will get this to you. There’s a great deal to be learned.
01:04:46 ►
There’s a great deal of camaraderie among the people who do this work.
01:04:51 ►
I think most people who work in this field feel that we’re struggling
01:04:56 ►
at the frontier of the envelope of human potential
01:05:00 ►
and that great good is potentially here,
01:05:05 ►
and that part of the saving of the planet and the saving of humanness
01:05:12 ►
involves saving these plants and the shamanic dimensions that they throw open to us.
01:05:20 ►
Gaia wishes to communicate, and these are the channels of communication
01:05:25 ►
by which she reaches us through and around our own fears and silliness.
01:05:34 ►
And to the degree that we can rescue this tradition, save these species,
01:05:40 ►
legitimize this research, and carry ourselves deeper into the endless riches of the world of the spirit
01:05:48 ►
to the degree that we do these things,
01:05:50 ►
I feel we’ve advanced the universal project of bringing the good to manifestation.
01:05:59 ►
So I wish you all luck in your professions.
01:06:02 ►
I hope that you take your chosen field by storm.
01:06:06 ►
If any of you need to reach me, come through a friend or through the CIIS front office.
01:06:15 ►
David usually knows where I am.
01:06:17 ►
If you think I can help you by introducing you to someone or pointing you toward a reference
01:06:23 ►
or in any other way, feel free.
01:06:28 ►
This is very important work.
01:06:33 ►
Whether we succeed or fail, it would be tragic not to make the effort
01:06:40 ►
because I think we really align ourselves with the Gaian intent
01:06:44 ►
when we bring these things to the community and share them.
01:06:49 ►
Thank you very much.
01:07:00 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:07:03 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:07:08 ►
Even though I was way out at the end of the psychedelic line back in 1995, I did hear about Bobby Foss’ idea for a civil obedience day.
01:07:25 ►
back there and I would fantasize about how great it would be if hundreds of thousands of us showed up at our local police stations all at the same time and demanded that they enforce the law when
01:07:31 ►
they saw us all smoking a joint. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, protests like this have actually
01:07:37 ►
taken place in some communities. Now, I think that Terrence was correct back then in saying
01:07:43 ►
they don’t hand out rights around here. The only people who have any rights are people who demand them.
01:07:49 ►
Well, fortunately, with the advent of cannabis deregulation around the country today, I don’t think that Terrence would still say, and I quote, we drug people fold too easily, end quote.
01:08:07 ►
fold too easily, end quote. But I also think that a lot of credit for us not folding anymore begins with people like Terence McKenna, who were fearless about speaking out about the
01:08:12 ►
importance of these wonderful substances back when it really wasn’t very safe to do so.
01:08:17 ►
As Terence said, it’s the task of a generation. And did you catch that very clear statement that Terence made about, well, it’s about seven minutes into this talk.
01:08:28 ►
I’ll repeat it for you, and I quote,
01:08:31 ►
Half of the history of the universe is going to unfold in the next 17 years.
01:08:37 ►
As much will happen, in other words, in the next 17 years, as happened in the previous 17 or 20 billion years, end quote. This, I think,
01:08:49 ►
is perhaps McKenna’s most direct and forceful quote about what, at least in April of 1995,
01:08:56 ►
he believed was a potential 2012 event. By the time, of course, that I first attended one of
01:09:02 ►
his workshops, which was in 1998, he had finally begun to soften his stance somewhat.
01:09:09 ►
But as we just heard, in 1995 at least, Terence McKenna was most definitely expecting a major event, one that he proclaimed would be as disruptive as a Big Bang and it would take place yet in his lifetime.
01:09:26 ►
take place yet in his lifetime. So, I think that we have to be honest here and admit that it’s possible for those who haven’t benefited from many of Terrence’s other stimulating ideas
01:09:32 ►
that, well, yes, it wouldn’t be completely unfair to say that at one point in his public life,
01:09:39 ►
Terrence McKenna was preaching that the end is near. Now, I doubt if any of us thought of him like that at the time,
01:09:46 ►
and I hope that history doesn’t tag him with that label, because, well, he was about significantly
01:09:52 ►
more than that one wild idea. But just to lighten things up a bit here, I’m thinking that had Terence
01:09:59 ►
predicted this massive event taking place in 2112, based on the current state of accelerated change taking
01:10:07 ►
place in the world, that, well, many of us could be buying into that idea right now.
01:10:13 ►
Because, well, it’s almost 100 years away. So the takeaway lesson here is that if you’re going to be
01:10:20 ►
a prophet, then be sure that whatever it is that you predict is not going to take place until
01:10:25 ►
well after your death. By the way, if you want to hear Terrence’s later views about the net and the
01:10:32 ►
world wide web, you may want to go back to podcast number 19 and podcast number 20 and re-listen to
01:10:38 ►
them, because they’re recordings of a two-hour conversation that I was fortunate to attend,
01:10:43 ►
where Terrence and Ralph
01:10:45 ►
Abraham discussed the web in an open forum at the Omega Institute in upstate New York
01:10:50 ►
during the summer of 1998. Well, that’s going to do it for today, and so this is Lorenzo
01:10:58 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.