Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
The Baths at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“My techniques are all shamanic and involve perturbing the senses and dissolving ordinary states of mind through psychedelics. So my techniques are shamanic, but my method is rational and analytical. So I use shamanic techniques to go into shamanic places and then attempt to study them scientifically using reason.”
“To me, the New Age is typified by an incredible credulity and an utter immunity to cognitive dissonance.”
“What I have done is I probe weirdness, but rationally. Most people who are attracted to weirdness want to convert, and believe it, and take it in, and exalt it. I don’t. I don’t want to believe anything. I hate ideology, all ideology. That’s why I’m so casual about the possible crushing of my own, because ideologies are a lesser resolution of our dilemma than we are capable of.”
“The truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does.”
“Culture is a flight from reality. ALL culture is a flight from reality.”
“Radical human freedom is what you were born for, and culture is a kind of placenta, which if you develop normally by around age twenty you have no need of it, and in fact you’ve recognized the toxic nature of it and are trying to put it behind you and get away from it.”
“All this computer revolution is is a shift to more lightweight building materials.”
“Enormous doses of fuzzy thought and ideology are usually known as religion… . And the claim that you can achieve, somehow, the paradox of being outside without ever leaving culture by using the cultural instrument of religion to make your way to the heart of the mystery. I reject this. I just think think it’s bunk.”
“Spiritual thirst can’t be culturally confirming, because it’s a rejection of culture. Culture generates spiritual thirst.”
“In the underground, then, an enormous database has been built up. No one knows as much about psychedelics as people in the underground, because they’re the people who have actually taken them, correlated that date, and kept track of it.”
“Psychedelics demand of us courage. Every single person who says they’ve done psychedelics several dozen times is a courageous person. You’re standing in the presence of fearlessness, because otherwise people turn away from it.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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And I’m very pleased to begin today by thanking David A.,
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who recently made a PayPal donation directly to the salon
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to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And I would also like to thank my two new supporters on Patreon,
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and they are Stan B. and Jonathan P.,
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which now brings me up to 88 patrons,
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whose names will be in the front of my next book as the supporters who are funding my work.
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And to all of the supporters of the salon and of my writing projects, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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Now today we’re going to begin listening to a part of Terrence McKenna’s Scholar-in-Residence gig at Esalen Institute early in 1996.
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And as far as I’ve been able to determine, this series of talks hasn’t appeared on the net so far.
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The set of tapes that I’m digitizing are labeled Unedited Participant Copy,
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and they were sent to me by Ian Wynn, whose book you’ll be hearing about in an upcoming podcast.
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But Ian was a young man in a traveling mode when this workshop took place,
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and he was one of the participants for that weekend.
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From what I gather, after previewing this recording, it was a very small group,
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and I think Ian was on a work-study program at Esalen at the time,
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so when he left, they gave him a copy of this unedited set of tapes. Now we’ve
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all listened to a lot of Terrence’s talks, and if you’re like me, you still enjoy hearing him tell
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some of his stories in a new way. So in just a moment you’re going to hear Terrence take off on
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his end of the millennium rap. Well, he takes off actually quite early in this talk on that,
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but so that you don’t think he just took off there
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without any preface, I should let you know that I cut out about 40 minutes in the beginning of this
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tape where they were going around the room and introducing themselves. And as they did so,
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Terrence would comment on some of the things that they said. In particular, there were quite a few
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people there who were really into the time wave and the potential for a 2012 event.
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It isn’t that these early exchanges between Terrence and those attending his workshop weren’t interesting,
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it’s just that some of what was said was rather personal, and it just didn’t seem right to make these remarks public without their okay.
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Anyway, keep in mind that this workshop was held in March of 1996,
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so there still was enough time between then and December of 2012 for there to be the possibility
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that Terrence’s prediction about 2012 could come true. Of course, we now know that this was a
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non-event, but don’t let that give you a jaded opinion of the discussion of those times. In fact,
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you can almost take some of what Terence predicts is going to happen in 2012 and wonder if perhaps
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he was just a decade or so off with the date that he picked. But, you know, I’ve been hearing
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predictions about the end times all of my life. Even though I’m now closer to my own end time
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than to my beginning time,
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not for a moment do I think that our species is even within a thousand years of fading out.
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Of course, I have no idea of what human life will be like in a thousand years, but I have a hunch
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that those who are still here will most likely be talking about end times just like we do today.
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At least some of them will be.
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Anyway, that’s probably something worth thinking about if you get a spare moment.
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But enough of my rambling.
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Let’s join Terrence McKenna on a March day in 1996
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as he begins a weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
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If you haven’t been to Esalen before,
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it’s an extraordinary place with an extraordinary history,
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an extraordinary morphogenetic field.
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The baths are open 24 hours a day.
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The massage staff is the best in the world.
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And to take advantage of all of these things know that you can cross a small
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bridge at the other side of the garden and there’s a whole other section of Esalen which is very
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beautiful and nicely landscaped and that’s the way to get down to the sea in front of that building
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which is obviously and is called the big house,
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there’s a system of stairways which take you down to the beach.
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So that’s highly recommended.
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Okay, I think that’s the basic thing.
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There’s always toast and jam and usually coffee and stuff like that
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in the dining room whenever it’s open.
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So if you miss a meal or if you get the munchies, that’s available.
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Oh, this one I’m pretty much up to speed on this one.
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Kathleen’s helping me out because usually I don’t know what I’m teaching.
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And if there’s no catalog in the room, then we’re sort of hung out to dry.
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But this one I’m highly motivated.
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And so I’ve been looking forward to it, the briefing for Descent into Novelty.
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What has made you highly motivated?
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Well, because there’s a plunge into novelty happening,
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or I’m claiming there is.
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So then we actually have something to look at
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and measure all this baffle garb against
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rather than the usual vapor.
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This is part of my life that I enjoy most,
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and it’s hard to carry the public into it because it’s so arcane, but this that really means. Because it’s deliberately ambiguous,
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because it refers to several things simultaneously.
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Any encounter with me that involves a discussion of psychedelics
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is in and of itself a briefing for a descent into novelty.
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That’s what psychedelics are.
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The ordinary structures and momentum and logic of the world is replaced by a very novel
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redaction of those things.
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So that’s one level of the meaning of the briefing for a descent into novelty.
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of the briefing for a descent into novelty.
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Another level of meaning is we are plunging,
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without the aid of my theory, toward the end of the millennium.
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And this will be used as a benchmark and an enormous kind of goad to certain agendas
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to complete themselves or launch themselves. And I’m sure
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as we approach the millennium, you can feel the built-in apocalyptic expectations of Judeo-Christian
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culture just swelling to burst at the seams. Well, I think anybody who didn’t have some kind of fairly strong model of what is going on would be scared to death.
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I mean, there is a sense of everything simply flying apart.
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I mean, we don’t know what it will be.
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World economic crash, Ebola outbreak, asteroid strike, climate change.
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But it just begins to multiply to the point
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where you get the feeling we may not know what’s coming, but God, something
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must be coming. So a thousand years is reaching its culmination and inevitably
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this civilization will be divided at this millennium. There will be the first millennium of industrial,
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post-medieval, so forth and so on,
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and then whatever comes after.
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And then a third sense,
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in which this is a briefing for a descent into novelty,
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and this requires a little backgrounding
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for those of you who aren’t
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familiar with the time wave theory which has now been referred to repeatedly this is an idea
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a mathematical formalism which i generated with the help of the logos that addresses the concept
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that of the dao a mysterious force which ebbs and flows
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through all things
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building structure up
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and tearing it down
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according to mysterious laws of its own
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takes that notion of Tao
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and attempts to demystify it
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in the sense of
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if Tao is a force
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which tears things down and builds things up,
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up and down can be directions on a Cartesian axis.
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So why not portray the Tao as the ebb and flow of a quality,
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a numerically quantifiable quality?
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Well, to cut to the chase, I’ve done this,
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quality. Well, to cut to the chase, I’ve done this, and it replaces the Newtonian assumption that time is a perfectly smooth Aristotelian surface with a much more complicated
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version of what time is. Time is a kind of landscape or a kind of topological manifold or surface over which events flow but subject to the contours of that surface. A river running through rocky gorges attains great speed and power,
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but when it flows out onto the flatlands, it loses that momentum.
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It spreads out. It meanders.
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Time is a similar kind of phenomenon.
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There are periods of great placitude and stability and continuity.
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Most of time has been like that.
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Change in most of time is something that stretches out
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over millions and millions of years.
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I’m speaking now, first of all, of astrophysical changes,
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planetological evolution, even biological evolution, which is orders
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of magnitude more rapid than geology, is nevertheless something which moves in a very stately fashion.
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Major mutations require hundreds of thousands, millions of years in some cases, to establish themselves.
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So most of time exhibits a fairly uniform placidity on the local scale, if you see what I mean.
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But for the past 25,000 years, or 50,000, or a million, depending on your sensitivity to turbulence, something else has been happening.
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Acceleration,
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connectivity, a
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complexification and densification of the matrix, and we are products of this.
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But it hasn’t, it isn’t a, it isn’t a smooth descent or ascent toward greater complexity. It’s a punctuated
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movement toward complexity or novelty, as I call it. There are steps back. There are setbacks.
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Sometimes they last millions of years. Sometimes they last minutes.
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And this leads me then, that’s enough background.
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So one reason this is called a dissent,
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briefing for a dissent into novelty,
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is because according to this theory,
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we are in a dissent into novelty.
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we are in a descent into novelty.
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A very dramatic descent began on the 25th of February, just a week ago.
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In the 20th century, there have only been two other periods that the theory defines as this novel.
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The first one is the period from October 1928 to October 1929, and the second
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one is from December 1940 to December of 1941. Now, interestingly, both of those purely formal
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mathematical predictions nail major upheavals of novelty in the 20th century.
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The first, the collapse of the world economy,
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culminating in the American stock crash of October 29. The second, World War II raging furiously all through 1940
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and then ending in December 41
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by the U.S. being dragged in with the Japanese attack.
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by the U.S. being dragged in with the Japanese attack.
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So the novelty theory is in the midst, as we speak, of a test.
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Is the novelty market soaring?
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Is novelty pouring into the system at a very fast rate. Now, some people thought that, you know,
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the dead would rise on the 25th of February.
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That isn’t how it works.
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Throughout the past couple of years,
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and I’m sure you are aware of it,
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we have been in a recidivist period in American politics and life,
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meaning a conservative era.
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And that has gotten more and more constipated
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and more and more self-congratulatory
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and more and more certain of itself
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and hence odious.
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And I believe we’ve crossed over the cusp
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and now that all is in a state of complete
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chaos and collapse
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there are many many things on the
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agenda for the next few months
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that could usher in enormous novelty
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although novelty usually
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arrives in the form of the unexpected. In other words,
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the source of the novelty might be a return of communism to power in Russia, or it might be
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what else is scheduled? An American election is scheduled.
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An Israeli election is scheduled.
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It could be that the Chinese will attempt to grab Taiwan
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and create World War III.
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Misjudgment could lead that direction.
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But it could be positive.
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Novelty has no morality
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an AIDS cure
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what else can I think of along those
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well some enormous technological breakthrough
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you know star flight
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or cold fusion or something like that
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I mean these things lurk as possibilities leaning into the
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continuum of space-time, always willing to be sucked into actualization if you can get the mojo
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right. So part of the briefing of a descent into novelty here is to ask and discuss the question,
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does it feel like we’ve come over a cusp? Does it feel
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like we’re in a situation of increasing novelty day by day by day? This will last on into early
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June. And then if not, if we all get together in midsummer and agree it was kind of a dud,
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didn’t really live up to expectations,
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well, then that’s real data for looking at the time wave.
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People are confused sometimes by exactly who and what I am, and that’s because in my personality, which is a humbler word than method,
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two things are united which are usually not found co-present.
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My techniques are all shamanic
00:17:16 ►
and involve perturbing the senses
00:17:20 ►
and dissolving ordinary states of mind through psychedelics.
00:17:25 ►
So my techniques are shamanic,
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but my method, not techniques,
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but method is rational and analytical.
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but method is rational and analytical.
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So I use shamanic techniques to go into shamanic places and then attempt to study them scientifically using reason.
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Say, what is this? How does it work?
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What is it made of?
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How do its parts relate to each other?
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And what is its inner dynamic and
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I this apparently though it seems fairly obvious to me is a fairly radical union
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of techniques scientists don’t explore psychedelics because somehow the the
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scientific mind must not be besmirched
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by contact and contamination with the things studied.
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But how the hell can you study psychedelics without taking them?
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Rats are not very satisfying, and graduate students still less so.
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So eventually, you know, you’re going to have to get your feet wet. Well, then they say, well,
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but that destroys your scientific objectivity. Well, not if it’s the only path to contacting
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the phenomenon that you’re attempting to study. So that has worked for me. I am not part of the new age in my own mind to me the new age is typified by an incredible credulity
00:19:10 ►
and an utter immunity to cognitive dissonance i mean you know you can believe that the world
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is ruled from the pleiades and you can believe that l ron hubbard God. There seems to be no end to the number of contradictions that the New Age can simultaneously entertain. But what I have
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done is I probe weirdness. But rationally. Most people who are attracted
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to weirdness want to convert and believe it and
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take it in and exalt it i don’t i i don’t want to believe anything i hate ideology all ideology
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that’s what i why i’m so casual about the possible crushing of my own because ideologies are a lesser resolution of our dilemma than we are capable
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of. The higher resolution lies in real feeling and real community and affection. Ideology has
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poisoned the last thousand years. All of these ideologies have ultimately done more good
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and done more bad than good
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Marxism, Christianity
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even at the risk of setting off a riot
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Freudianism, on and on and on
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the correct method I think is simply the phenomenological approach.
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Catalog data, seek patterns,
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draw conclusions,
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test them back against the original data.
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Now, most people who advocate that kind of an approach
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somehow come down.
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It brings them down.
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They say, well, this method then shows you that being is only this,
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and thought is only that, and love is merely this, and so forth.
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In other words, it reduces everything.
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It insults everything.
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I haven’t found that to be the case.
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I’ve found real weirdness. The world is strange,
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very, very, very strange. Not only, I mean, far stranger than I suppose, and orders of magnitude
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more strange than these cheerful workbench scientists and keepers of the faith of our culture, suppose, there are doorways,
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there are edges, there are passageways, but for every real one, there are 10,000 dead ends,
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cul-de-sacs, and cheap scams of one sort. So to go out as an ingenue into the world seeking to
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to go out as an ingenue into the world seeking to invest your belief
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in something, you will be instantly
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sucked into some screwy thing
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and your life force pulled from you
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and you will be used and abused
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as ingenues and naïves always are
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a much better approach is, you know, be tough. The truth does not require
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your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does. But the truth is fine, thank you, whether you believe in it or not.
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So what is gained by the truth if you believe in it?
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Nothing, I maintain.
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And you are diminished.
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You are diminished because by believing in something, you have precluded your freedom to believe in its opposite.
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you have precluded your freedom to believe in its opposite.
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You gave away the most precious existential currency in the universe.
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So, you know, I think it’s very good to be tough,
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to ask the hard questions,
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but to go a long way down the path with these claimants to secret knowledge, insight, lineage.
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But ultimately, you know, the hard questions have to be asked.
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And this is not a path toward dispelling the mystery from the universe.
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This is the way to get to the real gold in a hurry
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not become
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glamorized
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or subverted by the dross
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of the world
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well maybe that’s enough
00:23:58 ►
for this evening
00:23:59 ►
we will go over all of these things
00:24:01 ►
at the level of intensity
00:24:02 ►
that you are interested in
00:24:04 ►
it’s fine to get down to the how much how and when questions about the
00:24:11 ►
compounds and plants that is technique and that’s important because it’s fine
00:24:19 ►
to sit here talking about the psychedelic experience. This bears no resemblance to the psychedelic
00:24:26 ►
experience in any form whatsoever. So it’s very important that you leave here empowered,
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empowered to make your way into these places with confidence. And then the other thing to pay attention to is inevitably the way our
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ass-backward society works is it creates cults of personality and renaissance-stabilized points
00:25:00 ►
of focus on the celebrity personality who is the teacher, the guy who wears the microphone,
00:25:06 ►
or the woman who wears the microphone. What you can really take away from here, if you’re smart,
00:25:12 ►
is community of some sort. Probably someone in this room has what you need,
00:25:23 ►
and I guarantee you it isn’t me so don’t waste your time on me
00:25:27 ►
but that’s all there for you to sort out
00:25:33 ►
so techniques we can discuss
00:25:36 ►
the formation of community and association
00:25:39 ►
is your own business
00:25:41 ►
and then as much time as you want to spend
00:25:44 ►
on the what does it all mean, Mr. Natural,
00:25:48 ►
side of the question.
00:25:51 ►
And we’ll dig into all of this
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at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.
00:25:56 ►
Thank you very much.
00:25:57 ►
Get some sleep or go to the baths or do both.
00:25:59 ►
Or go to the rave.
00:26:04 ►
Okay, well before I get into my spiel,
00:26:08 ►
does anybody have anything they want to say this morning
00:26:12 ►
which can range from your…
00:26:14 ►
have snorers in your room
00:26:17 ►
to some profound objection
00:26:20 ►
or illumination of what went on last night?
00:26:23 ►
Just a semantic question as to why descent into novelty
00:26:29 ►
rather than asset into novelty.
00:26:33 ►
I mean, this seems to be a pejorative implied.
00:26:38 ►
This question comes up.
00:26:45 ►
There are several reasons originally,
00:26:48 ►
and then I’ve invented new ones since.
00:26:52 ►
The time thing quantifies novelty,
00:26:56 ►
but it quantifies it,
00:26:57 ►
you could almost say it quantifies it negatively,
00:27:00 ►
because the maximum of novelty
00:27:02 ►
has a numerical value of zero.
00:27:06 ►
So how I pictured this was I actually picture the space-time continuum
00:27:13 ►
like a landscape, a topology.
00:27:16 ►
Well, then I think of time as a fluid medium of some sort.
00:27:22 ►
Well, naturally, a fluid medium finds its equilibrium at the lowest energy
00:27:27 ►
point in the system. So the river flows toward the sea. This question of energy flows and what
00:27:36 ►
is pejorative and what is not, I’ve learned, is a completely culture-based value. There are tribes in the Amazon for whom rivers begin
00:27:47 ►
where they meet another river,
00:27:50 ►
obviously,
00:27:51 ►
and they end where they peter out
00:27:54 ►
among some springs and swamps
00:27:56 ►
up in the mountain.
00:27:58 ►
To them, this is perfectly obvious
00:28:00 ►
that that’s how rivers work.
00:28:02 ►
To us, it’s inconceivable.
00:28:04 ►
The thing goes the other way
00:28:06 ►
if I had
00:28:10 ►
turned the wave on its
00:28:12 ►
upside down
00:28:14 ►
then instead of having
00:28:15 ►
maximum novelty quantify
00:28:18 ►
at zero it would have simply
00:28:20 ►
quantified at some arbitrarily
00:28:22 ►
large integer in the
00:28:23 ►
700,000 range.
00:28:26 ►
So it lacked elegance.
00:28:28 ►
So for all of those reasons, I chose to have novelty be a descent rather than an assent.
00:28:39 ►
And then later I incorporated things like dynamics and chaos theory
00:28:47 ►
and that sort of thing into the model.
00:28:50 ►
Well, then what you get is sort of the idea
00:28:53 ►
that the zero point in time is like a dwell point or an attractor.
00:29:00 ►
And so all the processes in the epigenetic landscape are being channeled, is one way to think of it, or pulled, is another way to think of it, or pushed, is another way to think of it, toward this certain point in the system.
00:29:27 ►
complicated. All I’m saying is if you release a marble up near the rim of a bowl, it’s easy to predict where it’s going to come to rest when it’s still. It’s going to come to rest at the bottom
00:29:32 ►
of the bowl. That’s the place where the minimum energy of the system is fulfilled.
00:29:40 ►
Okay, anything else out of last night? It’s still possible to raise the issue of snoring.
00:29:47 ►
Don’t feel we’re so far from the dock that you can’t jump back.
00:29:53 ►
I have a friend who’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s,
00:29:56 ►
and when Richard was here this week, he told me that
00:30:00 ►
Ayahuasca is being found to be very good for Parkinson’s.
00:30:09 ►
And if you know anything about that, I’d like you to talk about it.
00:30:12 ►
I don’t know anything about it except that I know who to ask,
00:30:14 ►
which would be my brother Dennis.
00:30:19 ►
But I’ve heard that this is true, that they’re getting a remarkable remission of the symptoms with it.
00:30:27 ►
It’s really part of a whole frontier, you know,
00:30:31 ►
that Prozac has to do with.
00:30:34 ►
And I just a month ago went through a horrific series of migraines,
00:30:39 ►
and so now I know all about sumatriptan,
00:30:42 ►
which is a magic bullet for migraine,
00:30:46 ►
but a DMT-related drug that also, like Prozac and like ayahuasca,
00:30:53 ►
all of these things target these serotonergic systems,
00:30:59 ►
different 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors in the brain.
00:31:03 ►
5-hydroxytryptamine receptors in the brain and it seems like a whole new
00:31:07 ►
and much friendlier family of drugs
00:31:11 ►
are going to emerge out of this
00:31:13 ►
and some of them are going to have application
00:31:15 ►
to psychological situations
00:31:17 ►
and some are going to definitely impact stuff
00:31:21 ►
like migraine and Parkinson’s.
00:31:23 ►
I don’t know why it took them so long to look at the 5-HT family of receptors
00:31:28 ►
because it’s been pretty obvious to psychedelic heads for 30 years
00:31:34 ►
that of the major neurotransmitter systems in the brain,
00:31:38 ►
that seemed to be the one whose affects lie closest to observable consciousness.
00:31:45 ►
After I got out of here last night, I was reviewing my performance
00:31:50 ►
and I realized that of the many descents into novelty that were indicated,
00:31:56 ►
the one which was left out,
00:31:59 ►
which is sort of the overarching architecture of the whole thing,
00:32:03 ►
of the overarching architecture of the whole thing is that life itself is a descent into novelty
00:32:08 ►
toward the complete singularity that defies all anticipation
00:32:13 ►
or is very difficult to come to terms with.
00:32:17 ►
People find it quirky that I would propose the end of the world
00:32:24 ►
and they find it highly improbable
00:32:26 ►
and feel very good about being able to reject it as improbable.
00:32:31 ►
But have you noticed how abstract all that is
00:32:34 ►
in relationship to the inevitable fact of your own death?
00:32:39 ►
I mean, there is an end of the world built into your cosmology,
00:32:43 ►
the end of your world, which is after all
00:32:47 ►
the only world you know. So it may be that the planet will swing a hundred billion times
00:32:57 ►
around the planet before the consummation of time, but that doesn’t mean that you have permission not to contemplate final end states
00:33:07 ►
because you’ve got an appointment with one out there somewhere, 10 minutes or 50 years
00:33:14 ►
in the future.
00:33:16 ►
So that little sobering parenthesis can be put around all of these other descents into novelty.
00:33:26 ►
The historical descent, the analogy to the historical descent
00:33:30 ►
produced by the psychedelic experience.
00:33:35 ►
And that’s what I wanted to talk a little bit about this morning,
00:33:39 ►
is maybe it isn’t clear in everyone’s mind
00:33:42 ►
what this historical acceleration and descent into complexity,
00:33:49 ►
what that might conceivably have to do with one’s personal relationship to psychedelics.
00:33:56 ►
Well, it’s hard to see the connection, I think, if you have a psychological model
00:34:05 ►
of what the psychedelic experience is.
00:34:08 ►
And by that I mean one school of thought about psychedelics
00:34:14 ►
is that it basically takes up the vocabulary
00:34:19 ►
of Freudianism and Jungianism
00:34:22 ►
and says there is a part of our mind
00:34:24 ►
which we are ordinarily not in contact with
00:34:28 ►
which is composed of thwarted desires
00:34:33 ►
unexamined memories
00:34:36 ►
so forth and so on
00:34:37 ►
and when we take psychedelics
00:34:39 ►
somehow all boundaries are dissolved
00:34:41 ►
and we confront this material
00:34:43 ►
and if it’s traumatic then the ordinary
00:34:47 ►
dynamics of psychotherapeutic curing cut in and so this becomes a kind of catalyst for psychoanalysis of some form. So that’s one model.
00:35:06 ►
And then another model is
00:35:10 ►
that this is a parallel world
00:35:15 ►
of some sort that we encountered.
00:35:18 ►
That’s closer to what I’m proposing,
00:35:21 ►
but what I’ve come to rest with in this
00:35:24 ►
is a kind of mathematical model
00:35:27 ►
that consciousness like certain chemical systems has two states of crystallization
00:35:37 ►
there is the mundane mind which basically has evolved in a carnivorous hunting monkey
00:35:45 ►
as a threat detection device
00:35:49 ►
and it is extraordinarily focused on nearby three-dimensional space and time
00:35:56 ►
because it’s from there that some threat, an enemy, a saber-toothed tiger, something
00:36:03 ►
and so the mind has evolved as an aura of threat detection around the body.
00:36:11 ►
But that is a kind of utilitarian application of it.
00:36:18 ►
In the same way that water takes the shape of any vessel that it’s poured into,
00:36:24 ►
Water takes the shape of any vessel that it’s poured into.
00:36:27 ►
Mind, too, is a kind of fluid and takes the shape of any vessel it’s poured into.
00:36:31 ►
So in the ordinary circumstance of consciousness in three-dimensional space,
00:36:36 ►
consciousness fills the three-dimensional space-time continuum
00:36:41 ►
and returns a description of it to the animal body. But if you will still
00:36:47 ►
the body and remove the threat by posting guards at the front of the cave and moving back to where
00:36:55 ►
the furs, the women, and the children are, in other words, if you will raise your comfort level considerably, and then take these neurochaotic substances,
00:37:11 ►
in other words, things which produce a perturbation
00:37:14 ►
in ordinary brain states,
00:37:16 ►
then the perturbation becomes a kind of energy
00:37:20 ►
that dissolves this threat detection architecture of consciousness.
00:37:28 ►
And within all that, there is the phoenix of hyperspace,
00:37:32 ►
which is what’s called shamanic consciousness.
00:37:35 ►
And shamanic consciousness is not bounded by three-dimensional space and time
00:37:41 ►
and can move through the many levels of the universe
00:37:45 ►
at the speed of thought
00:37:48 ►
and it is not a body
00:37:49 ►
centered consciousness, usually these
00:37:51 ►
states occur when for all
00:37:54 ►
practical purposes the body appears
00:37:56 ►
deeply asleep or dead
00:37:58 ►
I mean it’s in trance
00:38:00 ►
you’re traveling
00:38:01 ►
so
00:38:04 ►
mind is apparently
00:38:06 ►
a tool for the
00:38:08 ►
exploration of the dimensions
00:38:11 ►
that are built into nature
00:38:14 ►
and what shamanism is
00:38:18 ►
if you analyze it
00:38:20 ►
from this point of view
00:38:22 ►
it becomes much more rationally apprehendable
00:38:25 ►
think about the classic
00:38:27 ►
characteristics
00:38:31 ►
of shamanism
00:38:32 ►
shamans
00:38:34 ►
are weather prophets
00:38:37 ►
this is very important
00:38:40 ►
to be able to predict the weather
00:38:42 ►
shamans can
00:38:44 ►
predict the movement of game
00:38:46 ►
and so they are directly linked
00:38:49 ►
into the nutrition acquisition survival equation
00:38:53 ►
of the human group that they represent
00:38:56 ►
and shamans have incredible insight
00:39:00 ►
into somebody’s pilfering
00:39:02 ►
from somebody’s food cache
00:39:04 ►
the shaman can get right to the heart of this social problem
00:39:08 ►
and set it right.
00:39:11 ►
And then finally, shaman’s cure
00:39:13 ►
with quite impressive success rates
00:39:19 ►
in a world devoid of antibiotics, surgery, x-rays, and so forth and so on.
00:39:24 ►
They do very well.
00:39:26 ►
So all of this seems to verge on the edge of magic.
00:39:32 ►
They seem to have a different relationship
00:39:33 ►
to space, time, and energy than ordinary people.
00:39:38 ►
How do they do it?
00:39:40 ►
Well, if you imagine that the mind can unfold in a higher spatial dimension,
00:39:48 ►
then yesterday and tomorrow are no more distant than today.
00:39:54 ►
And all locked boxes have an open door in them.
00:40:09 ►
and the end state of all processes in time can easily be discerned.
00:40:11 ►
So really what a shaman is,
00:40:13 ►
is someone with four-dimensional perception
00:40:15 ►
who carefully chooses their patients for recovery.
00:40:20 ►
And doctors will tell you,
00:40:22 ►
part of being a good doctor
00:40:24 ►
is to know what patients to treat
00:40:27 ►
because there is an empathy there
00:40:31 ►
and there has to be a certain kind of linkage
00:40:34 ►
so I don’t think in principle
00:40:37 ►
there is a violation of physics involved
00:40:41 ►
there is simply a violation
00:40:43 ►
or a broadening of the definition of what
00:40:48 ►
perception is well then the question becomes how to reach these states yeah
00:40:54 ►
sure
00:41:04 ►
the vessel that it’s put in, because I deal a lot with people who are in the process of dying, who have lost the person that they love most in the world. So I deal with people
00:41:08 ►
that are really pushed up against the edge of the most traumatic experiences in their
00:41:13 ►
life. And what I find to be so rewarding and valuable about working with people in that
00:41:17 ►
state is that all the facades drop away, all the bullshit, all the defenses, and what’s left is just this raw, core, pure
00:41:26 ►
essence of genuine being. And it makes me realize how unfortunately rare it is to encounter
00:41:33 ►
that. And you talk about getting safe from the tigers. I mean, we don’t have tigers that
00:41:40 ►
we have to protect ourselves from, but dear God Almighty, we have so many other things
00:41:45 ►
that we’re so involved in protecting ourselves from
00:41:48 ►
that we’ve got these layers and layers and layers and layers of defense
00:41:51 ►
that keep us from being in touch with,
00:41:54 ►
I think those shamanic ways of being
00:41:57 ►
are our natural human resource that we all have.
00:42:01 ►
And the great sadness and the heartbreak for me
00:42:03 ►
is that we’re so out of touch with it that we’re wasting the greatest aspect of being alive. And instead, we fill
00:42:11 ►
our minds with this absolute, dear God, dribble. I mean, don’t we? I mean, what are the things
00:42:17 ►
that we think about most of the time? It’s a dribble. And, I mean, we’re very lucky here.
00:42:23 ►
It’s very pretty and everything’s very nice and we can have pleasant conversation.
00:42:27 ►
But to really get to the core issues of what we’re doing here and why we’re here
00:42:32 ►
and what we could be using this experience for is such a contrast to me
00:42:36 ►
that I welcome this kind of conversation.
00:42:39 ►
Well, see, the problem is, I think, that culture is a flight from reality. Yes, it is. All culture is a flight from reality
00:42:45 ►
all culture is a flight
00:42:47 ►
from reality so to the degree
00:42:50 ►
that you are
00:42:51 ►
normal whether you’re
00:42:53 ►
Wetoto or Manhattanite
00:42:55 ►
or Parisian but to the degree
00:42:58 ►
that you are normal
00:42:59 ►
that means you are very successfully
00:43:02 ►
taking part
00:43:04 ►
in the flight, the cultural flight from reality.
00:43:07 ►
You are supporting the mass hallucination and paying dues into it.
00:43:13 ►
And it’s difficult in an age like now where there’s so much stress on ethnicity and community and roots and all that to preach this, to preach that culture is not your friend.
00:43:27 ►
It’s a trap. It’s a limit.
00:43:30 ►
But really, radical human freedom is what you were born for.
00:43:37 ►
And culture is a kind of placenta,
00:43:40 ►
which if you develop normally by around age 20,
00:43:44 ►
you have no need of it,
00:43:45 ►
and in fact you’ve recognized the toxic nature of it
00:43:49 ►
and are trying to put it behind you and get away from it.
00:43:53 ►
That is the rationale for many people living in cities,
00:43:57 ►
in large virtual environments of steel and glass
00:44:02 ►
with no contact to the natural world.
00:44:07 ►
And their justification for that is, oh, well, there’s culture.
00:44:11 ►
Where else am I going to…
00:44:12 ►
Good point.
00:44:14 ►
These are the same people who, when you suggest to them that their children watch too much TV,
00:44:20 ►
they say, but if they didn’t watch TV how would they learn about nature these
00:44:26 ►
wonderful programs it’s really funny that you have that take on the on the
00:44:33 ►
urban experience because you know I’ve since August been recently thrown into
00:44:37 ►
the American urban experience of Manhattan and what’s so interesting to
00:44:41 ►
me is how many people I need to say well I’m in Manhattan because I don’t have to participate in culture
00:44:46 ►
I’m in Manhattan because I can do my own thing
00:44:49 ►
and nobody cares, nobody pays attention
00:44:51 ►
I’m not violating the community that I grew up with
00:44:54 ►
I’m not violating my parents
00:44:55 ►
you can be lost in a sense, it’s a kind of jungle
00:45:00 ►
that’s interesting
00:45:02 ►
the word virtual was used here
00:45:05 ►
obviously you’re all aware there’s a lot of
00:45:08 ►
ballyhoo now about virtual reality
00:45:11 ►
and the critics of it say it will further artificialize
00:45:15 ►
and remove us from our roots
00:45:17 ►
there is nothing new happening here
00:45:20 ►
except that we’re going from stucco and steel
00:45:23 ►
and masonry to photons on a tube when they built
00:45:28 ►
err they were building a virtual reality and when they all marched inside and closed the gates
00:45:35 ►
they were inside a mental construction of human beings that was entirely artificial
00:45:41 ►
and we’ve been there ever since. And all this computer revolution is
00:45:47 ►
is a shift to more lightweight building materials.
00:45:52 ►
So the recovery of the natural state of human beings
00:45:57 ►
is, I think, somewhat chimerical.
00:46:01 ►
The only time you recover the natural state of human beings
00:46:04 ►
is in orgasm and in
00:46:06 ►
psychedelic apotheosis and then you know for fleeting moments you recover it and then you’re
00:46:14 ►
dropped back down through levels and levels of culture programming obligation matrix stuff
00:46:22 ►
matrix matrix anyway what i wanted to get to is
00:46:25 ►
how to do this
00:46:27 ►
how to get
00:46:28 ►
out of culture
00:46:31 ►
how to get out of three dimensional
00:46:34 ►
space how to get in
00:46:35 ►
to this super space
00:46:37 ►
well there are two main
00:46:39 ►
methods on the table
00:46:45 ►
and
00:46:46 ►
one is through
00:46:49 ►
no matter how you cut it
00:46:51 ►
some manipulation
00:46:53 ►
of the body
00:46:55 ►
maybe breath control
00:46:58 ►
maybe diet
00:46:59 ►
maybe extreme postures
00:47:02 ►
maybe some
00:47:03 ►
sexual technique,
00:47:05 ►
could be mantra, etc., etc.
00:47:09 ►
And strangely enough, often unaccompanied by substances, plants, or drugs,
00:47:17 ►
but almost always accompanied by enormous doses of fuzzy thought and ideology,
00:47:23 ►
usually known as religion
00:47:25 ►
so there is that path
00:47:29 ►
and the claim that you can
00:47:31 ►
achieve somehow the paradox of being outside
00:47:35 ►
without ever leaving culture
00:47:37 ►
by using the cultural instrument of religion
00:47:41 ►
to make your way to the
00:47:44 ►
heart of the mystery. I reject this. I just think
00:47:47 ►
it’s bunk. It’s an effort to close the loophole. It’s an effort to channel spiritual thirst in a
00:47:58 ►
direction that is still culturally affirming. But spiritual thirst can’t be culturally affirming
00:48:05 ►
because it’s a rejection of culture.
00:48:08 ►
Culture generates spiritual thirst.
00:48:11 ►
So then the other method on the table
00:48:14 ►
are psychedelics.
00:48:19 ►
Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet,
00:48:24 ►
his theory of poetry was that it could only be achieved
00:48:28 ►
by what he called a deliberate dislocation of the senses.
00:48:34 ►
And some of you may have seen a couple of years ago
00:48:38 ►
a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker,
00:48:42 ►
a bunch of businessmen sitting around
00:48:44 ►
a highly polished conference room table
00:48:46 ►
with a chart going down, down, down in the back, obviously the profits of the company.
00:48:53 ►
And the chairman of the board is saying to this little man who has obviously just said something,
00:48:59 ►
he’s saying, you’re right, Higgins, that a deliberate disordering of the senses worked for Rambo
00:49:06 ►
but would it work for us?
00:49:12 ►
probably not for Acme Corporation
00:49:15 ►
but it will work for us
00:49:17 ►
and the way it’s achieved is by
00:49:21 ►
dissolving the chemical stability that lies behind the mental and cultural stabilities.
00:49:30 ►
In other words, going to a very deep level, going to the molecular architecture of the brain itself,
00:49:39 ►
and then making changes.
00:49:41 ►
And for reasons mysterious and certainly
00:49:45 ►
worthy of discussion
00:49:47 ►
we are accompanied on this planet
00:49:50 ►
by dozens and dozens of plants
00:49:54 ►
that do this
00:49:58 ►
and do very little else
00:50:00 ►
in other words pose no problem
00:50:02 ►
to the physical integrity of the
00:50:05 ►
body or the long-term integrity of the culturally constructed normal mind but
00:50:12 ►
which for minutes or hours dissolve the three-dimensional threat detector
00:50:21 ►
construct of the mind and replace it with something else
00:50:26 ►
and then we can talk about
00:50:29 ►
what is the something else
00:50:31 ►
William James said of the newborn infant
00:50:35 ►
he said we are born into a blooming
00:50:38 ►
buzzing confusion
00:50:40 ►
which is a pretty good description of the first 30 seconds
00:50:44 ►
of a DMT flash
00:50:46 ►
it’s a blooming, buzzing confusion
00:50:49 ►
well, then is it simply that all reality is psychedelic
00:50:55 ►
but if you spend enough time in any reality
00:50:58 ►
it tends to mundane-ize?
00:51:01 ►
is that it?
00:51:01 ►
and if you could be high on DMT for four years,
00:51:05 ►
at the end of it you would navigate it
00:51:07 ►
the way a four-year-old child navigates this world?
00:51:12 ►
Perhaps.
00:51:14 ►
Probably so, although possibly not.
00:51:17 ►
You do come in with that kind of chaotic…
00:51:21 ►
Yeah, we do.
00:51:22 ►
But when you burst into the DMT space,
00:51:24 ►
you don’t arrive as the tabula rasa of the newborn infant
00:51:28 ►
you arrive with your husceral and your pythagoras
00:51:31 ►
and all the rest of it fully intact
00:51:33 ►
in your hip pocket
00:51:35 ►
if you need to use it
00:51:37 ►
well so long before written culture
00:51:41 ►
long before cities so forth and so on
00:51:44 ►
this potential for the dissolving and recrystallizing of the mind
00:51:51 ►
through the use of plants had been discovered.
00:51:54 ►
It may have been one of the very earliest discoveries of human beings.
00:51:59 ►
And I believe and argued in my book Food of the Gods
00:52:06 ►
that these things actually synergize
00:52:09 ►
high states of information processing and transfer
00:52:15 ►
that spoken language itself
00:52:19 ►
is a kind of overflowing of the cup of thought
00:52:23 ►
into the verbal circuitry
00:52:26 ►
that is occasioned by pushing the human envelope
00:52:30 ►
with the presence of psychedelic compounds.
00:52:35 ►
And the way this works in a shamanistic society
00:52:40 ►
is most aboriginal societies have located in their environment plants that are effective
00:52:50 ►
in causing this sort of state to occur and these will be inevitably with very few exceptions
00:52:59 ►
indole containing plants all of the interesting psychedelics,
00:53:06 ►
with the exception of mescaline,
00:53:08 ►
which is an amphetamine,
00:53:10 ►
and alpha-salvanorine,
00:53:11 ►
which is, I believe, an isoquinoline,
00:53:14 ►
everything is an indole.
00:53:16 ►
LSD, DMT, psilocybin, ibogaine.
00:53:21 ►
And it’s quite a small family.
00:53:24 ►
They are all serotonin antagonists, and they are all structural competitors for the bond site, the receptor site in the nervous system where all of this stuff goes on.
00:53:53 ►
I suppose we should talk or at least mention the fact that the use of these things is illegal in most societies and furiously suppressed in some societies.
00:53:55 ►
I don’t find this very interesting.
00:54:02 ►
I just think it has to do with the suppression of most effective means for getting out of culture.
00:54:05 ►
Sex itself would be illegal if they could find a way to make it so.
00:54:08 ►
It obviously seems to threaten the social order
00:54:11 ►
as much as psychedelics.
00:54:16 ►
So then if you’re interested in these things
00:54:18 ►
beyond the mere abstract acquisition of data,
00:54:24 ►
then there’s a lot of detail work ahead of you.
00:54:28 ►
You have to learn a lot about plants,
00:54:31 ►
a lot about aboriginal cultures,
00:54:34 ►
a lot about chemistry,
00:54:36 ►
and a lot about yourself.
00:54:39 ►
And then you bring all this together
00:54:41 ►
and search for a tool that works for you
00:54:45 ►
and you know human beings
00:54:48 ►
are
00:54:48 ►
highly variable
00:54:51 ►
I took a course years ago
00:54:54 ►
from Sasha
00:54:55 ►
and there were about
00:54:57 ►
500 people in this class
00:54:59 ►
it was a class in forensic chemistry
00:55:01 ►
of all things
00:55:02 ►
and at one point he brought in, in a test tube,
00:55:06 ►
a little compound that was passed around and sniffed.
00:55:10 ►
And out of 500 people,
00:55:13 ►
two had a violent physical reaction to this stuff.
00:55:18 ►
And then he told us the range of sensitivity in human beings
00:55:22 ►
to this compound is over three orders of magnitude.
00:55:27 ►
And so the person sitting next to you could be 10,000 times more sensitive to this chemical
00:55:33 ►
than you are. So you sort of have to learn the landscape of your own nervous system.
00:55:40 ►
Some people, there are powerful shamanic systems for example built on detourers
00:55:46 ►
tropanes the the things that occur in gyms and we’d and these are barrescent
00:55:53 ►
detours that you see used in landscaping with the beautiful pendulous fragrant
00:55:58 ►
flowers those contain powerful mind alter substances. I can’t take those things because I become delirious.
00:56:10 ►
It’s a useless state to me.
00:56:11 ►
I become confused.
00:56:13 ►
And many people, that’s their reaction.
00:56:16 ►
But maybe one in 50 has a different set of receptors for this
00:56:21 ►
and can hold presence and work through it
00:56:26 ►
so you need
00:56:28 ►
to study the classic
00:56:30 ►
shamanic
00:56:31 ►
hallucinogen using
00:56:33 ►
complexes in the world
00:56:35 ►
and they are
00:56:37 ►
without an effort to be
00:56:39 ►
exhaustive
00:56:40 ►
the psilocybin complex in Mexico
00:56:44 ►
based on many species of mushrooms occurring
00:56:47 ►
there, especially in the Sierra Mazateca. The ayahuasca complex in the Amazon basin,
00:56:55 ►
which is a combinatory thing made of two plants which synergize each other the iboga complex in western
00:57:06 ►
Africa which runs on ibogaine
00:57:08 ►
which is
00:57:11 ►
derivative of tabernanth iboga
00:57:14 ►
the peyote complex of the American southwest
00:57:17 ►
and then
00:57:20 ►
arguably not a psychedelic but since
00:57:23 ►
arguably we’ll include it,
00:57:26 ►
the worldwide presence of the cannabis complex in different manifestations.
00:57:34 ►
And then, of course, the entire issue of synthetic chemistry.
00:57:40 ►
It’s often been thought that I am some kind of monotheist about plants
00:57:46 ►
and denounce all synthetic chemistry.
00:57:49 ►
It isn’t from some kind of absolute.
00:57:52 ►
It’s simply that with synthetic chemistry,
00:57:55 ►
you don’t have the kind of database you have with a plant.
00:58:00 ►
Take a plant.
00:58:02 ►
Ayahuasca, probably been used 5,000 or 6,000 years.
00:58:07 ►
So we have our human data sample.
00:58:10 ►
We know that this doesn’t cause blindness, miscarriage, birth defects, madness, so forth and so on.
00:58:17 ►
A drug fresh out of the laboratory that you’ve had a good response from 12 people with is by no means suddenly safe.
00:58:28 ►
I mean, tens of thousands of people have to take this drug
00:58:32 ►
for many years before you can absolutely certify.
00:58:37 ►
And the other thing to remember is no drug is safe.
00:58:41 ►
You can kill yourself with water if you drink enough of it.
00:58:47 ►
Drugs are poisons.
00:58:53 ►
This is what they are. And the question is, you know, the judicious use of poisons elicits certain responses, but you definitely want to have this understanding. Well, so then
00:59:00 ►
there’s a vast literature about all this, an anthropological literature, a chemical literature,
00:59:10 ►
and to some degree a philosophical and analytical literature.
00:59:14 ►
Reading all these descriptions,
00:59:16 ►
eventually something attracts you.
00:59:19 ►
And then the question is how to do it.
00:59:23 ►
And the way to do it, I think, especially in the beginning,
00:59:27 ►
is in silent darkness on an empty stomach.
00:59:35 ►
You don’t want to see the culture psychedelically,
00:59:41 ►
put through a psychedelic filter.
00:59:43 ►
You want to see the ding on seash of it the thing
00:59:47 ►
in itself so you just want to put a black and silent screen behind it and people say well but
00:59:56 ►
won’t it be boring having obviously meditated no it’s not like that. People who are honest meditators will tell you that it’s the most boring undertaking in the world, that somehow it’s a metaphysic of boredom is what it is. The way you do psychedelics is you sit and you close your eyes, but notice that when most people sit and close their eyes,
01:00:28 ►
they fall inward.
01:00:31 ►
They have closed their eyes,
01:00:33 ►
so why should they continue to look outward?
01:00:37 ►
But I think it’s very important
01:00:39 ►
in the state of anticipation of the psychedelic,
01:00:42 ►
meaning before it comes on and as it comes on, to sit with
01:00:46 ►
eyes closed but looking. Simply imagine that there is a surface, a black surface, a foot in front of
01:00:54 ►
your face, and just watch it. And somehow this expectation of seeing is a permission to structures in the brain to begin to present. And then once, of course,
01:01:09 ►
the lock is made, it’s often difficult to turn it off. But getting the channel tuned in right at the
01:01:16 ►
beginning can be tricky. And all the techniques of unpsychedelic spiritual pursuit work in the presence of psychedelics.
01:01:28 ►
In my experience, it’s the only time they work.
01:01:31 ►
So in other words, pranayama, yantra, mantra,
01:01:35 ►
suddenly these things become as advertised
01:01:40 ►
rather than, oh, I’ve said it 10,000 times,
01:01:44 ►
I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere.
01:01:47 ►
So I think it’s very good to imbibe
01:01:50 ►
this knowledge of these spiritual techniques
01:01:53 ►
and have your mantras folded and ready at your elbow
01:01:57 ►
when you plunge in there.
01:01:59 ►
Yeah?
01:01:59 ►
A small digression.
01:02:03 ►
What about shamanic cultures?
01:02:06 ►
This is an interesting question.
01:02:09 ►
And in anthropology,
01:02:11 ►
it’s been a raging debate for 30 years or more.
01:02:15 ►
The definitive work on shamanism,
01:02:18 ►
or the great classic work on shamanism,
01:02:22 ►
is called Shamanism,
01:02:23 ►
the Archaic Techniques of ecstasy by mercia iliad
01:02:27 ►
and iliad was a romanian who educated in france and became a brilliant academic wrote one of the
01:02:38 ►
best books ever written on yoga yoga immortality and Wrote a book that changed my life forever
01:02:45 ►
called Cosmos and History.
01:02:48 ►
Many, many books.
01:02:50 ►
A great historian of religion.
01:02:52 ►
But when Iliad came to the phenomenon
01:02:55 ►
of intoxication in shamanism,
01:02:59 ►
he completely reverted
01:03:02 ►
to his European constipated male dominator,
01:03:07 ►
French structuralist roots,
01:03:10 ►
and he said narcotic, this was the word he used,
01:03:14 ►
which noticed the pharmacological imprecision of that.
01:03:18 ►
That right there tells you this person doesn’t quite
01:03:20 ►
at the front of the line.
01:03:23 ►
But he said narcotic shamanism is decadent.
01:03:27 ►
Resort to drugs is decadent.
01:03:30 ►
Well, then Gordon Wasson,
01:03:32 ►
who was the discoverer of the mushroom complex,
01:03:35 ►
took exactly the opposite position
01:03:38 ►
and said shamanism in the absence of psychoactive plants
01:03:43 ►
is on its way to turning into ordinary priestcraft and religion.
01:03:50 ►
And in my experience, this is true.
01:03:56 ►
I mean, I agree with Wasson for the following reason.
01:03:59 ►
There is nothing intrinsically to be valued, I think, in suffering.
01:04:07 ►
is nothing intrinsically to be valued, I think, in suffering. I’m Buddhist enough to believe that there’s enough suffering without inviting or creating it. So when you lay the psychedelic
01:04:15 ►
path next to the non-psychedelic but effective path, it’s an ordeal. That’s how it’s done. You starve yourself. You go into the
01:04:29 ►
wilderness. You pierce yourself. You may, in fact, take plants that are not psychedelic,
01:04:35 ►
but that induce severe cramping or diarrhea or something like that. You may be flagellated. You
01:04:43 ►
may be covered with red ants. You may be hung
01:04:46 ►
upside down. You may be beaten senseless. I mean, clearly to my mind, what this evinces is a kind of
01:04:54 ►
desperation to attain these states. Almost no price is too great. And, you know and you start shedding blood in a tropical environment
01:05:06 ►
and you’re up for grabs
01:05:07 ►
for severe septicemia
01:05:09 ►
and all sorts of things
01:05:10 ►
so it’s a very heavy thing
01:05:12 ►
meanwhile these plants
01:05:15 ►
you prepare the concoction
01:05:18 ►
you take it
01:05:19 ►
there may be a little gastric distress
01:05:21 ►
there may be a little psychological distress
01:05:24 ►
but no matter how bad it gets
01:05:26 ►
six to twelve hours later
01:05:28 ►
you’re able to tell the story
01:05:30 ►
around the campfire
01:05:31 ►
and you have smoothly, cleanly
01:05:34 ►
cut to the center of the mandala
01:05:36 ►
and returned
01:05:37 ►
so I think if we
01:05:40 ►
are saying that
01:05:41 ►
entry into the shamanic world
01:05:44 ►
is to be achieved by technique,
01:05:48 ►
and all scholars of shamanism agree with this.
01:05:52 ►
Well, then, as you lay these techniques side by side,
01:05:56 ►
clearly the use of hallucinogenic plants is more sophisticated
01:05:59 ►
in the sense that we judge a Maserati to be more sophisticated than a Cochin 4.
01:06:07 ►
It simply goes faster, works smoother, is more comfortable, and gets you there in better shape.
01:06:16 ►
Now, some cultures are in the unfortunate position, not many, but some,
01:06:22 ►
of having no really effective hallucinogen
01:06:25 ►
in their cultural area.
01:06:27 ►
And in almost every case,
01:06:30 ►
they have found a way.
01:06:32 ►
And people will go to great lengths.
01:06:35 ►
I’m sure, as you know,
01:06:36 ►
an example of both a poor,
01:06:39 ►
in my mind, a poor,
01:06:41 ►
although there are people who would rise up
01:06:42 ►
in holy wrath over this,
01:06:44 ►
but the Amanita Muscaria cults of western Siberia among the Tunguska and Kamchatka people.
01:06:52 ►
I’ve taken Amanita Muscaria.
01:06:55 ►
I know many people who’ve taken it.
01:06:58 ►
It’s an extremely trying experience at best.
01:07:02 ►
experience at best and
01:07:02 ►
I don’t think you could
01:07:06 ►
build a religion of ecstasy
01:07:08 ►
around it unless you were in a
01:07:10 ►
desperately sensory deprived
01:07:12 ►
environment with no other
01:07:14 ►
intoxicants
01:07:16 ►
available
01:07:17 ►
to support my argument
01:07:19 ►
the Amanita cults collapsed
01:07:22 ►
almost immediately upon
01:07:24 ►
contact with vodka.
01:07:27 ►
So, in other words, in the minds of these Siberian shamans,
01:07:30 ►
these two vehicles laid side by side, their traditional mushroom and vodka.
01:07:36 ►
Vodka was to be preferred.
01:07:39 ►
People have made much of Amanita muscaria,
01:07:42 ►
but even its most enthusiastic proponents
01:07:46 ►
admit that they could never get off.
01:07:49 ►
So that’s a severe mark against one of these things.
01:07:54 ►
They must be effective.
01:07:56 ►
One of the things that has held up the development of this field,
01:07:59 ►
I briefly mentioned it yesterday,
01:08:01 ►
was the unwillingness of researchers to experience these things.
01:08:07 ►
You know, to go and live with an aboriginal people and see that every new and full moon
01:08:12 ►
they take something and the whole society goes through changes and then they talk of
01:08:19 ►
nothing else until the next time they take it and this is what they live for and you’re
01:08:24 ►
studying their language and their value system and all this and you don’t do it
01:08:29 ►
it makes no sense at all and yet until very recently if you were to do it your
01:08:36 ►
colleagues back at Miss Atomic University would whip their knives out
01:08:42 ►
and denounce you as unprofessional, going back to the bush,
01:08:47 ►
not good method, so forth and so on. So there’s been an enormous phobia about contacting this
01:08:55 ►
by academics. And so it’s been left to countercultures, to fringe people, to individual experimenters, to eccentrics of various types.
01:09:08 ►
And in the underground, then, an enormous database has been built up. Nobody knows as much about
01:09:18 ►
psychedelics as people in the underground, because they’re the people who’ve actually taken them,
01:09:25 ►
people in the underground because they’re the people who’ve actually taken them correlated the data and and kept track of it so we’re almost we have an official science of pharmacology
01:09:33 ►
and then we have this oddly developing subculture and you know it used to be, ten years ago I suppose, that a genuine shaman was a person in a traditional culture ministering to the needs of a tribal group somewhere. of people who I consider full-fledged shamans and full-fledged members of cyber-electric
01:10:09 ►
culture. I mean, shamanism is not necessarily a phenomenon of the upper river and off-road.
01:10:17 ►
So here are people, there are people who have all the tools of Western science and epistemology.
01:10:27 ►
They’ve been to Harvard.
01:10:28 ►
They’ve studied philosophy and science and all of mathematics.
01:10:33 ►
And they are fully empowered with the tools of archaic shamanism.
01:10:38 ►
They’ve been to these places.
01:10:40 ►
And strangely enough, in many cases,
01:10:44 ►
these are some of the most creative people
01:10:46 ►
in the culture
01:10:47 ►
I mean I don’t think he would mind me mentioning him in this context
01:10:52 ►
somebody like Mark Pesci
01:10:53 ►
who is you know a full on psychedelic techno pagan
01:10:58 ►
and the genius who created VRML
01:11:01 ►
which is going to let us all walk into cyberspace.
01:11:06 ►
High-tech and shamanic cultures are almost overlapping in this country.
01:11:14 ►
And I think it has to do with the fact that, and this is what I mentioned last night,
01:11:20 ►
talking about the toxicity of ideology, that we’re moving into a post-ideological world.
01:11:28 ►
We’re moving into a world
01:11:29 ►
where the bankruptcy of ideology is obvious.
01:11:33 ►
All ideologies are faiths.
01:11:36 ►
Even science can be demonstrated
01:11:38 ►
to be a faith that rests on certain revealed truths
01:11:42 ►
which are never questioned.
01:11:47 ►
To build a non-toxic future,
01:11:50 ►
we are going to simply have to solve
01:11:52 ►
many of our problems pragmatically.
01:11:55 ►
For instance, right now, we have many problems.
01:11:59 ►
AIDS, overpopulation, this and that.
01:12:01 ►
All of these problems could be solved
01:12:04 ►
except that we have one rule
01:12:07 ►
when we approach a problem the solution must make money there are many problems
01:12:15 ►
where the solution there is no solution that makes money so if you refuse any solution but that type,
01:12:26 ►
you’re up a river.
01:12:30 ►
Well, anyway, that’s a slight digression.
01:12:34 ►
Yeah, sure, lead me back.
01:12:40 ►
However, I will say that there are a few on my bookshelf,
01:12:41 ►
and that’s a horrible way to do it,
01:12:44 ►
and I agree with you, I really agree with you,
01:12:45 ►
but there are a few in my bookshelf.
01:12:46 ►
Franklin Merrill Wolfe would be one.
01:12:49 ►
Gopi Krishna would be another.
01:12:52 ►
Yogananda, from people that I’ve met that spent time with him,
01:12:53 ►
might be a third.
01:12:55 ►
I feel better about the first two.
01:12:57 ►
There are people in history
01:12:59 ►
that really seem to be beatific.
01:13:03 ►
Well, you know, Aldous Huxley said
01:13:04 ►
a very interesting thing about psychedelics,
01:13:07 ►
and I think it addresses this.
01:13:09 ►
He said of psychedelics, he said,
01:13:11 ►
it is a gratuitous grace.
01:13:14 ►
Now, what does this mean?
01:13:15 ►
It means it is neither necessary
01:13:19 ►
nor sufficient for salvation.
01:13:24 ►
It is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation,
01:13:30 ►
but it certainly helps.
01:13:34 ►
So taking psychedelics doesn’t make you a superior person.
01:13:40 ►
This interests me very much
01:13:42 ►
because I’ve now been at this for 30 years.
01:13:45 ►
And your original question, are we better people, fascinates me.
01:13:51 ►
Because if we are not better people for doing this, then we’re just another cult.
01:13:59 ►
We’re like the Mormons or Shoko Asahara.
01:14:03 ►
Or it’s just we have this closed system of belief.
01:14:06 ►
We do this thing.
01:14:07 ►
We say it makes you better.
01:14:09 ►
It’s no different from Ladihan or Mantrayana
01:14:12 ►
or some other practice.
01:14:14 ►
It’s just our practice is fairly radical,
01:14:17 ►
and we claim it makes us better people.
01:14:21 ►
Well, yeah, and what I’m saying is
01:14:24 ►
rather than take the thing in itself and say,
01:14:28 ►
does this make us better or not, what is the set of to-dos that does make us better?
01:14:34 ►
What is that set? How do we do that? What’s the manual look like?
01:14:38 ►
Well, my argument in favor of that it does make us better and here’s how,
01:14:45 ►
is that love is obviously the highest human ideal.
01:14:53 ►
I mean, that’s like a cliche to say that,
01:14:54 ►
but love is the highest human ideal.
01:14:57 ►
Well, love consists, it seems to me,
01:15:02 ►
largely of boundary dissolution,
01:15:06 ►
that we become, we merge with the thing loved,
01:15:11 ►
we soften our boundaries,
01:15:13 ►
and of course primate sexuality has to do with penetration,
01:15:19 ►
all sexuality except some fish,
01:15:21 ►
usually there’s some shared sharing of space and so so forth. Well these psychedelics in that sense then are inherently
01:15:31 ►
Amorous or inherently sexy because that’s what they do
01:15:36 ►
they dissolve boundaries between you and other people and other things and as a
01:15:43 ►
primate when the boundary is dissolved,
01:15:45 ►
what you feel is love.
01:15:48 ►
Or, if you’re traumatized by bad upbringing,
01:15:52 ►
and childhood abuse, and who knows what,
01:15:54 ►
when the boundaries dissolve, what you feel is fear.
01:15:59 ►
But if you are not damaged,
01:16:02 ►
the proper response is love.
01:16:06 ►
And I think through the psychedelics, if you have fear,
01:16:08 ►
and we all do, believe me,
01:16:10 ►
because it’s terrifying to shed the old carapace,
01:16:17 ►
but beyond the fear lies the love,
01:16:21 ►
if you can persist through it.
01:16:22 ►
And so really the demand that psychedelics make on us,
01:16:29 ►
and this may be another reason why perhaps we tend to be better people, that’s all I would say,
01:16:35 ►
is psychedelics demand of us courage. Every single person who says they’ve done psychedelics several dozen times is a courageous person.
01:16:49 ►
You’re standing in the presence of fearlessness because otherwise people turn away from it.
01:16:55 ►
And I think courage is probably a good value.
01:16:58 ►
It probably makes you a good person to hike in the woods with or have an affair with or whatever so it makes us courageous and it
01:17:07 ►
dissolves boundaries which let in love or fear and the fear that they let in can be transformed
01:17:15 ►
in the psychedelic state through an inner alchemy into love that’s why you know the most dramatic personality transformations I’ve ever seen
01:17:26 ►
including my own
01:17:28 ►
have been psychedelically
01:17:30 ►
induced and just happen on the dime
01:17:32 ►
you go into it
01:17:34 ►
person A and 12 hours later
01:17:36 ►
you come out and you are not that
01:17:37 ►
it doesn’t always work like that
01:17:39 ►
but nothing else ever
01:17:42 ►
works like that
01:17:43 ►
so But nothing else ever works like that.
01:17:54 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:17:59 ►
Well, it’s always nice when somebody calls you courageous,
01:18:05 ►
but I’m not sure that the word fearlessness should also be used in that context that Terence just used it in.
01:18:12 ►
As I understand it, courage is a willingness to confront things like pain, danger, or uncertainty.
01:18:21 ►
And in that context, I suppose that it is a safe assumption that the majority of psychonauts do have a fine degree of courage.
01:18:26 ►
But in my own case, well, I can’t say that fearlessness was also one of my traits. The truth is that on almost every deep psychedelic experience that I’ve had,
01:18:32 ►
it was preceded by a significant amount of fear for several days leading up to it. In fact,
01:18:38 ►
my opinion is that if you aren’t scared shitless just before you begin a mushroom trip,
01:18:43 ►
well, then you probably aren’t planning on taking a big enough dose.
01:18:48 ►
As Jonathan Ott often said,
01:18:50 ►
Beware the dreaded underdose.
01:18:53 ►
Now, I also have to point this out,
01:18:56 ►
because unless you were fortunate enough to attend one of Terrence’s workshops in person back in the 80s and 90s,
01:19:01 ►
you may not have even thought about this.
01:19:04 ►
But at one point,
01:19:05 ►
when he was talking about community, he said, probably someone in this room has what you need.
01:19:12 ►
Now, back in the 80s and 90s, before the internet took hold, finding connections to psychedelic
01:19:18 ►
circles was extremely difficult, particularly if you lived in a place like Florida, as I did.
01:19:27 ►
difficult, particularly if you lived in a place like Florida as I did. So back in July of 1998,
01:19:33 ►
at a workshop in upstate New York at Omega Institute, I was thrilled when I heard Terrence say the same thing. And before that weekend was over, I made several good connections,
01:19:38 ►
including the person who got me to go to Burning Man for the first time.
01:19:42 ►
Back then, the main reason that people went to see Terence
01:19:45 ►
McKenna may have been the bard himself, but making good connections into the worldwide
01:19:49 ►
psychedelic community was a very close second. Another thing that caught my attention was,
01:19:55 ►
just near the end of this talk, when Terence was speaking about Iliad and shamanism,
01:20:00 ►
he said that Iliad, and I quote, wrote a book that changed my life forever called Cosmos
01:20:07 ►
in History, end quote. I think that may be the first time that I ever heard Terence mention that book.
01:20:14 ►
For sure, I don’t remember him saying it changed his life forever. Now, Terence doesn’t say when he
01:20:20 ►
first read that book, but I can tell you when I read it, because I still have my copy of that
01:20:26 ►
Cosmos in History. It was in the spring of 1963, and I was an electrical engineering student at
01:20:32 ►
the University of Notre Dame. At the time, all engineering students there had to take 12 hours
01:20:38 ►
of non-technical courses. The one that I chose had to do with ancient religions. And while I no longer remember much about my physics, mathematics, and engineering courses,
01:20:49 ►
I still have clear memories of some of those ancient religion classes.
01:20:53 ►
And, in fact, Cosmos and History is the book that first set me on a path that led me away from all organized religions.
01:21:01 ►
So, I guess I too should count it as an important book in my life.
01:21:05 ►
I’m not sure when Terence first read this book, but I can say with certainty
01:21:09 ►
that when I read it, Terence was only 17 years old. So it seems fair to me to say that Terence
01:21:17 ►
got a lot more out of that book than I did. At least he understood it much earlier in his life
01:21:22 ►
than I did. But that’s another story.
01:21:25 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:21:30 ►
Be well, my friends.