Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Finn and Terence McKenna
Today marks the official beginning of the 3.0 track of the Psychedelic Salon. The main difference between Salon 3.0 and the earlier podcasts from the salon is that this 3.0 track on Patreon.com will be where you will hear the programs three months before they appear on the “classic salon” feeds. So to mark this new beginning I am playing a recording of a Terence McKenna weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute that, as far as I know, has never been published before.
Date this lecture was recorded: June 23, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What is history? What is it that is acting on us to propel us, in such a short time, out of the matrix of organic nature and into a matrix of our own creation, the world of culture, and epigenetic coding systems, and the human imagination as created by the modality of language. What is it that is pushing us in this direction?”
“We fell into history. We became neurotic. We are, in a sense, the children of a dysfunctional relationship that we have forgotten all about.”
“I’ve had to come to term with the fact that bad drugs have been a major part of the human story.”
“The psychedelics are not ancillary. They’re not peripheral. They’re not secondary. They are the way to propel ourselves into these higher dimensional phase spaces. Eventually we will drag our computers with us.”
“What we see in our visions is not hallucinations. What we see in our visions is the higher truth.”
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Transcript
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This program was originally posted on the Psychedelic Salon’s first-run Patreon feed
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three months ago. As you know, I’m publishing new Salon 1.0 programs first on Patreon
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as a way to thank my supporters there. Additionally, for only $1 a month,
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they can also join me every Monday evening for a live edition of the Salon,
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where we sometimes jointly interview featured speakers whose conversations I also publish on the podcast from time to time.
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Now, here is the program from which you heard a preview three months ago. Linguistic Bobchicks. L-V-E-S-H-I-N-G-S-O-N-G-E-R-D-E-L-I-C-S-P-A-C-E.
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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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And today I’m launching this, the first of the official Psychedelic Salon 3.0 tracks,
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with a Terrence McKenna talk that I haven’t been able to find
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anywhere else in the net so far.
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This talk was given on June 23, 1989,
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and it was the end of his first month as a scholar-in-residence
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at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
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As far as I know, this, well, I guess this may be
00:01:21 ►
the only copy of this talk that survived.
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As you’ll hear in just a moment, Terrence led this weekend workshop just as he was beginning a new phase in his public speaking career.
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And it was just after he’d finished writing a new book.
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And one of the things that he says in this talk, well, it sounds almost as if it’s a plug for the upcoming Imagine Convergence that’s going to be held in March of next year.
00:01:46 ►
I am trying to raise it into consciousness with your help
00:01:51 ►
so that we can see how such disparate things as planetary crisis,
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shamanism, hallucinogenic plants,
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higher dimensional mappings of complex phase spaces,
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how all of these things somehow feed into each other and create a position,
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a new position from which to carry out a critique of planetary life and society,
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which is what we need.
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I find that to be an interesting synchronicity,
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because here is what the homepage of the Convergence website has to say about the conference,
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and I quote,
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The shift of the ages is unfolding on planet Earth.
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Change is happening at such a rapid pace, it’s hard to make sense of it all.
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Decisions made today are determining the very survival of future generations.
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The Imagine Convergence is gathering changemakers, intellectuals, innovators, and cultural creatives
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to explore cross-disciplinary solutions to these global complexities.
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Together, we are weaving narratives for a future paradigm.
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End quote.
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You know, it’s really too bad that Terrence is no longer with us, because he would certainly
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fit right into the mix of speakers who will be appearing at the Convergence this coming
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March 21st through the 24th.
00:03:23 ►
Bruce Dahmer and I are going to be among those speakers,
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and, well, we hope to see you there.
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Along with those, by the way, who are able to make it,
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we will continue the work of weaving many diverse narratives
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into a, well, maybe a more coherent path toward the future.
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Now, if you’re wondering whether this talk is still relevant
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almost 30 years after it was given,
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well, in about four minutes from now,
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we’re going to hear Terence say, and I quote,
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we meet, as we always have,
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in an atmosphere of deepening planetary crisis, end quote.
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And this was said in June of 1989,
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when the Tiananmen Square Massacre
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was still fresh in everybody’s mind.
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I’ll let you add your own
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list of events that have taken place over the 30 years that have deepened our planetary crisis
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since then, but my guess is that, well, like me, you think the situation maybe has only become
00:04:17 ►
worse since then. Now, one little note about this recording. When I first came across it,
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I, well, I couldn’t figure out why it’s never been released,
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as many of Terrence’s other Aslan workshops were.
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But as you’ll hear as the recording progresses,
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from time to time in the background,
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there’s some electronic interference that makes its presence known.
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And you’re going to hear a few clicks from time to time,
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but at one point,
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I thought that the person sitting next to Terrence must have been farting.
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And after investigating the sound, however, I found that it too was electronic interference.
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Of course, the teenage boy that still lives in me can’t help smiling at the thought that it
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actually was farting that I heard.
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I’m sorry about that. I’d better play the recording now before I dig myself in even deeper. So here’s Terrence McKenna on a Friday evening at the end of June in 1989.
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Well, first of all, as is always appropriate, I want to thank Esalen Institute for providing a forum for this kind of interchange.
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There are very few places and fewer and fewer places in the country where an absolutely unconditional discourse can take place. And they not only
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tolerate what I do here, they encourage what I do here. I’ve been here since the first of the month
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as the Scholar in Residence, which is a new program at Esalen
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where they bring in people who have been here many times before
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and just let them live for a month here
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and interact chiefly with the people who work here.
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So I’ve been warming up for you for a good three weeks,
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and I think I’m ready.
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I hope I’m ready.
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I don’t know.
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I think tomorrow, when we let it settle out,
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I will get feedback from each of you,
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because so many people are not here right now.
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I should introduce myself.
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There may be people here who have never been
00:06:47 ►
exposed to this stuff. Some people come to Esalen and decide after they get here what
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they will take based on examining the catalog. And to those poor souls, we say, welcome and hang on.
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Well, I’ve been off the talk circuit for about six or seven months because I’ve been writing a book that was something I’d wanted to do for a long time.
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Now this evening really initiates the beginning of a new series of public lectures
00:07:29 ►
and travels. Those of you who are old timers to this material, if you look closely there
00:07:36 ►
are small new wrinkles. Those of you who aren’t familiar with it, this is the state of the art to my ability to put
00:07:46 ►
it across. Tonight I just thought I would go over the themes or the memes or the concerns
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that this weekend will orbit around. Looking at the number of people who are familiar with this kind of thing
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I assume that the
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dialogue or the
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event will be largely driven
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by questions
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because all these graduate students
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know that if they
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don’t ask questions I will just
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repeat myself and they’ve heard it
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already so
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feel free to ask questions.
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Feel free to interrupt.
00:08:31 ►
If you’re signaling that you want to interrupt and I’m not noticing you, I’m noticing you.
00:08:37 ►
I just have to somehow put it together in a certain way before I can stop and let you get in.
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So, you know, I do see you,
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but sometimes I get up ahead of steam
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and then I can’t pull out of the power dive immediately.
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Well, we meet, as we always have,
00:09:01 ►
in an atmosphere of deepening planetary crisis.
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Each time we meet, the planetary crisis appears to have been notched slightly tighter.
00:09:15 ►
What we now have in tatters behind us is any naivete that we may have built up about the potential for large masses of people to force nonviolent social change,
00:09:31 ►
we’ve had a thorough lesson in the foolishness of entertaining that idea in the last month.
00:09:40 ►
Even since the last time I spoke to most of you, the assessment of the state of the atmosphere,
00:09:49 ►
the amount of pollutants being pumped into it
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from tropical burning of forest and grassland
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has been drastically increased.
00:10:00 ►
They dangled the chimerical hope of cold fusion in front of us,
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and I didn’t even have time to publicly gloat over it
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before it was snatched away from us again,
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and we were returned back to the world of real energy politics.
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So, planetary crisis.
00:10:23 ►
And I’m going to talk a lot about this. What is happening in my own evolution as I try to refine this over and over for audiences like yourselves and try and write it now into book form for larger audiences, is a sense that what were disparate obsessions of mine
00:10:52 ►
were in fact a unified whole that only my unconscious mind fully grasped,
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and that slowly I am trying to raise it into consciousness with your help
00:11:07 ►
so that we can see how such disparate things as planetary crisis, shamanism, hallucinogenic
00:11:18 ►
plants, higher dimensional mappings of complex phase spaces, how all of these things somehow feed into
00:11:28 ►
each other and create a position, a new position from which to carry out a critique of planetary
00:11:39 ►
life and society, which is what we need.
00:11:49 ►
life and society which is what we need so i’m just going to run down this list of themes say a little bit about each of them and and then leave you to cook that overnight
00:11:58 ►
and then tomorrow and the next day we’ll try to tease this out. It’s, well, I’m either sinking into delusion
00:12:08 ►
or I’m figuring it out more and more.
00:12:11 ►
And what I need to know from you is which is it.
00:12:14 ►
I’d rather hear it from you than the New York Times book reviewer,
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let me tell you.
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So this is where we do the prototype.
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Okay, planetary crisis heads the list I can’t remember what this thing was called in the catalog
00:12:34 ►
but I write these things so many months in advance
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that it’s just a hook anyway
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what I have thought of this month’s dialogues at Esalen
00:12:44 ►
of which this will
00:12:46 ►
be the culmination and the distillation,
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is
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understanding the chaos
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at history’s end.
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Now there are different
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contradictions and
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and
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adumbrations
00:13:02 ►
of meaning in that.
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The old understanding of chaos was that it is that which cannot be understood.
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That’s what chaos means.
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It was thought of as the antithesis of cosmos,
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and in Greek these two things are perceived as opposites,
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chaos and cosmos.
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Cosmos means order.
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Chaos means disorder.
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However, taking a page from my friend Ralph Abraham,
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I sort of propose that we think of this as a meeting of the Henri Poincaré Anarchist International Brigade
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and take as our motto, chaos is order.
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This is the great truth under which anarchy has always marched,
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and I think it’s never truer than today.
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So the goal of the weekend is to understand chaos, to understand that which cannot
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be understood within the confines of the old paradigm. And then I called it understanding
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chaos at history’s end, to shock us into examining the notion of history’s end, into thinking about the possibility that
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this huge context in which we have been embedded for thousands of years now is in fact provisional,
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temporary, and about to be superseded by an entirely different order of being.
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And we’ll talk about how can this be, what could it be, and what can we do about it.
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You see, primitive as our level of epistemic description of the world is, nevertheless, if we were to arrive on this planet and find it exactly as it is,
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except empty of human life or artifacts,
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then with our chemistry, with our physics,
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with our biology, with our systems theory,
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we would feel comfortable with what
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we found.
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And we would say, this is a living planet, a planet with biological life on it, great
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herds of ungulate animals and climaxed rainforests and indemnified island biota and so forth.
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In other words, we can understand a planet covered with life,
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or at least we have the illusion of it.
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But what we confront in the phenomenon of our own planet
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is a planet covered by intelligence
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and swarming with information transfer that is not genetic but epigenetic in the form of books, codes, statuary, dance, ritual, electronic signal transfer, so forth and so on and sophisticated though we may imagine ourselves to be we have no basis for understanding
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the circumstances that we confront on our own planet you have to really be able to make a leap to believe that human spiritual emergence,
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the emergence of human consciousness as practiced by ourselves,
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is something that could emerge in 50,000 years out of selective pressure
00:16:59 ►
on a population of anthropoid apes.
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I mean, this is the great leap to faith
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that science asks us to take,
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to see ourselves as somehow emerging
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in an orderly fashion out of the background of nature.
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This is highly trying to credibility.
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And the more we study evolution, the more unlikely this scenario appears because evolution proceeds extremely slowly
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and in response to selective pressure from the outside.
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But something happened to us in the past million years that caused our previously stabilized brain size
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to double almost overnight. The coordination of bipedal motion, binocular vision, complex
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pack hunting systems of signaling, so forth and so on, is not entirely sufficient to be the unique
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construct in the natural world. Why is this? Number one, is this so? Or is it a product of
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misperception, ignorance, or false interpretation? Or if it is so, then what does that mean?
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What is history?
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What is it that is acting on us to propel us in such a short time
00:18:54 ►
out of the matrix of organic nature and into a matrix of our own creation, the world of culture and epigenetic coding systems
00:19:08 ►
and the human imagination as created by the modality of language.
00:19:16 ►
What is it that is pushing us in this direction?
00:19:22 ►
Well, mostly tonight I’m going to pose questions,
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and then we’ll work out or work toward answers tomorrow.
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One of the things that I think,
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I don’t know how many of you are sensitive
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to the subtler issues of evolutionary theory,
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but one of the things that I’ve come up against
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in writing this book I’m working on is
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that something very fundamental has been left out of the theory of human origins or the picture of
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the situation that surrounded human origins. And this was the impact of an omnivorous diet on the human genome.
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You see, we had been fruititarian arboreal primates
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who, because of climactic change on the African continent,
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were forced down onto the grasslands,
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which were spreading as the forest shrank.
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And a number of changes were in play at that point.
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But the one I want to mention here now is the fact that we began to experiment with our diet.
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We needed to expand our repertoire of foods.
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Well, most animals eat only a very few kinds of foods.
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The omnivorous adaptation is quite rare.
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Why?
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Because an animal with an omnivorous dietary habit
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is exposing itself to untold numbers of mutagens,
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toxins, and poisons in the environment.
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And exposing yourself to mutagenic influences
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is usually a bad evolutionary strategy
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because what it does is it causes mutation.
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It causes a sudden expansion in the number of mutations available for natural selection to do its work upon.
00:21:47 ►
selection is going to, that number is going to have a direct effect on a number which comes out of the equation over here, the number of successful mutations, true breeding mutations which
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actually confer an adaptive advantage. And one of the great puzzles about looking at human beings against the background
00:22:06 ►
of the other higher primates is why the uh hairlessness why the prolonged adolescence
00:22:16 ►
and why language what was the pressure on this and what we will talk about is the influence of
00:22:28 ►
psychoactive compounds in the early human diet, the kind of society that that may have put in
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place, which I will argue, and this is for me a step forward. I now am absolutely convinced that what is happening is that we had a relationship to psychoactive plants in prehistory
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that was so tight, so necessary to our own social organization and well-being,
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that for all practical purposes we have to think of it as a symbiosis,
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not simply that we used a plant,
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but that this plant became scripted into our life
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in a way such that when climatological change and migrations
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and this sort of thing broke up, made that relationship impossible.
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We fell into history. We became neurotic. We are, in a sense, the children of a dysfunctional
00:23:39 ►
relationship that we have forgotten all about. And I will talk more, I think,
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than I’ve ever talked about it before this weekend
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about addiction and bad drugs.
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Because in working on this book,
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I’ve had to come to terms with the fact
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that bad drugs have been a major part of the human story.
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What is it about human beings that sends them searching
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frantically through the natural world for a fix? And it’s an expanded adaptation. We don’t only plants and chemicals, we addict to each other, to ideas, to patterns of behavior, to things.
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We just addict. Actually, there’s nothing you can think of that humans do not form addictions to.
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And this peculiar tendency to have behavior patterns become locked in such a way that their disruption
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causes a negative feedback into the physical organism
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is something that we are very uncomfortable with.
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It’s only in the last hundred years that we’ve overcome our discomfort
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about the fact that we are sexual creatures and that we live a life of highly evolved and ever-present sexual fantasy.
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This was very, very hard for the Victorians to come to terms with.
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I mean, they, after all, put trousers on their piano stools.
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And you can imagine, if you’re coming from that to a full examination of the contents of the human psyche on the subject of sexuality, that’t be able to smoke pot and all this stuff.
00:25:45 ►
Clearly, we are in a state of high agitation over a part of ourselves that we can’t come to terms with and integrate,
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which is the fact that we are such addictive creatures. Well, I will try to convince you that this has to do with this trauma in prehistory
00:26:06 ►
when we underwent a withdrawal from the primary symbiote
00:26:13 ►
that was holding us in a kind of social equilibrium with nature
00:26:19 ►
that we now can only dream about and call paradise or a golden age.
00:26:27 ►
And I’ll give you the terms and the details on all of this tomorrow.
00:26:34 ►
The other thing, and remember I said these things may appear disparate and disconnected,
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but I now see them as a seamless manifold
00:26:45 ►
it’s written on my pad as unraveling the presence
00:26:52 ►
of the transcendental object
00:26:56 ►
now what this means is
00:26:59 ►
I don’t simply advocate the use of psychedelic
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plants because I think they make us feel good
00:27:07 ►
and break down social barriers and patterns of habit and so forth,
00:27:12 ►
although they do all that.
00:27:14 ►
But I believe that perception itself tends to take the shape of its vessel.
00:27:26 ►
You know, the alchemists visualized mind as mercury,
00:27:30 ►
and mercury being a liquid will always flow to the lowest level
00:27:35 ►
and take the shape of the vessel.
00:27:37 ►
And I think that in the potential multiple-dimensional space of being mind has flowed to the lowest levels of the vessel
00:27:51 ►
and that what happens when we perturb the mind brain system with hallucinogenic uh indoles is
00:28:01 ►
uh it’s as though we were to vaporize the mercury and instead of taking the shape of
00:28:08 ►
the vessel at its lowest levels as a liquid the mercury fills the vessel as a pressurized gas
00:28:16 ►
and what this experience is is uh a seeing of higher dimension literally, not metaphorically.
00:28:28 ►
This is what has to be understood,
00:28:31 ►
that you literally are seeing a higher dimension to reality.
00:28:39 ►
And Ralph Abraham was here yesterday suggesting that
00:28:44 ►
because the world is such a complex system, it has many, many variables.
00:28:53 ►
Dimension, which seems like a word that people shrink from because it has some aura of mathematics about it, is not a difficult concept at all.
00:29:03 ►
Think of a dimension simply as a variable.
00:29:08 ►
So if I tell you that we have eight variables, then we have an eight-dimensional phase space
00:29:16 ►
in which whatever we’re talking about is going on. Well, obviously the number of variables in the natural and human world is very high, so the degree to which we can perturb the mind out of its slovenly tendency to flow to the lower orders of the phase space, then we get a fuller picture of reality.
00:29:49 ►
Because it seems quite reasonable to me to say
00:29:54 ►
that what we call reality is a lower dimensional slice
00:30:01 ►
of a higher dimensional phase space,
00:30:05 ►
and we slice this higher dimension with the knife of language,
00:30:11 ►
well then we get a cross section,
00:30:14 ►
like slicing through an agate or slicing through a fruit.
00:30:18 ►
Then we see the interior of it,
00:30:21 ►
but we do not see the seed from which it came the tree which grew it the death
00:30:30 ►
of that tree in other words the temporal dimension to name but one is not visible in the lower
00:30:37 ►
dimensional slice made by the knife of language so we have to either create a higher dimensional language or use more than one language
00:30:48 ►
at once or create some other strategy for handling all these variables what shamanism is
00:30:57 ►
is a person who can go into these higher dimensions and understand enough of what they’re seeing
00:31:07 ►
that for them it functions as a map
00:31:10 ►
of the lower dimensional world
00:31:12 ►
into which they are going to return.
00:31:16 ►
Many of you have heard me say
00:31:18 ►
a shaman is someone who has seen the end.
00:31:22 ►
Well, this is just a kind of cute way of saying
00:31:26 ►
that the shaman has experienced the temporal dimension as a totality.
00:31:32 ►
The shaman has seen the beginning and the end.
00:31:37 ►
And that’s what gives the shaman his or her peculiar psychic equilibrium.
00:31:43 ►
Because they’re not like you and me
00:31:45 ►
groping along down here in four-dimensional space
00:31:50 ►
trying to figure it out.
00:31:52 ►
For them, it’s all of a piece
00:31:56 ►
and this feeds back into their personality
00:31:59 ►
as a tremendous kind of authenticity.
00:32:03 ►
Well, we need to shamanize to save the planet. We need to create
00:32:10 ►
higher dimensional mappings of our world and the crisis in which we are in, in order to plot a way
00:32:18 ►
out of the cul-de-sac that the phonetic alphabet, monotheism,
00:32:31 ►
and print-created linear monoculture has shoved us into. So the psychedelics are not ancillary, they’re not peripheral, they’re not secondary.
00:32:38 ►
They are the way to propel ourselves into these higher dimensional phase spaces.
00:32:44 ►
Eventually we will drag our computers with us,
00:32:47 ►
but you can’t push the computer first
00:32:49 ►
because the computer must be programmed by people who have seen these things
00:32:56 ►
and know what they are shooting for.
00:32:59 ►
What this process will inevitably become
00:33:03 ►
is pressure on the evolution of language.
00:33:09 ►
Because you see, even though in the last few minutes I’ve presented it to you in a kind of imperative mode,
00:33:17 ►
where I’m saying this is what we need to do, this is what we should do, this is what we will do,
00:33:23 ►
as a matter of fact, this is what we should do, this is what we will do. As a matter of fact, this is what we have been doing, and for a very long time as well. In fact, the entire progress of biology and culture, anthropology, can be seen as a kind of conquest of dimensionality that has occurred at an ever-accelerating rate
00:33:48 ►
so that the earliest organisms were just literally groped their way through life.
00:33:55 ►
They couldn’t see light or darkness.
00:33:58 ►
They rubbed up against something, and that’s how they knew it was there.
00:34:02 ►
And then, through evolutionary selection,
00:34:05 ►
light-sensitive pigmented spots appeared on the surfaces of these things
00:34:11 ►
and that gave them a gradient of sensation
00:34:14 ►
that told them the difference between light and darkness.
00:34:18 ►
Well, a further coordination of this ability,
00:34:22 ►
a further differentiation of this light-dark gradient
00:34:26 ►
gives eyes and the visual world.
00:34:30 ►
At the same time that this is happening, organs of motility are evolving.
00:34:38 ►
Well, now, meaning that so animals can move around more freely.
00:34:42 ►
They’re not like algae or something stuck on rocks.
00:34:45 ►
Well, notice that when an animal that can move
00:34:49 ►
is already a master of a whole set of dimensions
00:34:58 ►
that are completely invisible to a creature which cannot move.
00:35:02 ►
Let’s say a sea anemone.
00:35:04 ►
What do sea anemones know of the fear of flying?
00:35:09 ►
They don’t know anything about it
00:35:11 ►
because for them the world is not put together that way.
00:35:15 ►
But a gazelle coordinates itself in a higher dimensional space
00:35:21 ►
than the sea anemone.
00:35:23 ►
Similarly, once you reach the place in evolution
00:35:28 ►
where language appears,
00:35:32 ►
language is a way of destroying the primacy of the moment.
00:35:39 ►
In other words, pushing out from this very narrow domain called now
00:35:44 ►
into an anticipation of the future based on
00:35:49 ►
an extrapolation and analysis of the past this is a conquest of dimensionality adding variables
00:36:00 ►
you see and then when you go into the realm of epigenetic coding huge databases so that nothing
00:36:09 ►
is ever forgotten in a way the past ceases to fall away the past is co-present with the present
00:36:18 ►
in a world where there is high speed information and data retrieval. So similarly, in our present circumstance then,
00:36:28 ►
what we are pushing against is the envelope of the dimensionality of language.
00:36:38 ►
Language has hitherto been allowed to grow like Flopsy or Mopsy
00:36:46 ►
or one of them. In any case
00:36:49 ►
it has not been thought of
00:36:52 ►
as a process which could be guided
00:36:54 ►
by cultural engineering. But I think this
00:36:57 ►
has to be done if we are going to
00:37:00 ►
make the changes necessary to be
00:37:03 ►
made in the time that we have to make them so
00:37:08 ►
we’ll talk a lot about language and the evolution of language and what it actually is and then
00:37:16 ►
finally to bring it all together and to try and tie it up, we will try and understand how this symbiosis
00:37:28 ►
that was lost in prehistory
00:37:33 ►
can be regained from where we are
00:37:38 ►
without shattering the entire print-created,
00:37:44 ►
dominator, phonetic alphabet, Judeo-Christian shtich.
00:37:49 ►
Because, you know, we’re in this funny place.
00:37:53 ►
It’s like a cusp.
00:37:54 ►
I mean, visualize a surface which looks like a cross-section of a curling wave.
00:38:01 ►
Well, you walk up this surface and you get to the top of the hill and you walk here. Well, right here, this is the lip of the wave. Well, you walk up this surface and you get to the top of the hill and you walk here. Well,
00:38:07 ►
right here, this is the lip of the wave. You can’t walk any further. You fall down to a surface
00:38:15 ►
down here that is a completely different part of the manifold. This is called a cusp in dynamics.
00:38:23 ►
And you move along and it’s a smooth curve and a smooth
00:38:26 ►
curve and then there is a perturbation what renee tom and his school called a catastrophe and at the
00:38:35 ►
catastrophe point you fall off the manifold and you fall through god knows, and then you land somewhere else on the manifold. And this is how stock market
00:38:48 ►
crashes occur, how unexpected anythings occur, and it is the kind of situation that we are in.
00:38:57 ►
We cannot extrapolate the future hundreds and hundreds of years. That is the least realistic of all future scenarios.
00:39:07 ►
And anybody who talks about how we’re going to take care of X, Y, or Z
00:39:11 ►
in 100 or 200 years is just living with a 17th century model
00:39:18 ►
of how historical processes work.
00:39:21 ►
Because history, for thousands of years has pushed toward the kind of super
00:39:29 ►
self-transforming momentum that we now have we have we are up to takeoff speed and in fact
00:39:39 ►
the end of the runway is ahead of us we don’t have a choice about takeoff
00:39:46 ►
we have reached takeoff speed
00:39:48 ►
and now there is nothing left to do but grab the stick
00:39:52 ►
and pull it back and close your eyes
00:39:54 ►
and hope because if we don’t make that
00:39:58 ►
commitment to the planetary process
00:40:00 ►
the end of the runway is 35 years
00:40:04 ►
in front of us I mean that’s that’s it. There is no more.
00:40:08 ►
So there has to be a perturbation, a Ptolemanian catastrophe that hurls us into an entirely new
00:40:21 ►
cultural milieu. Well, I maintain that the catalysts for this
00:40:26 ►
have been present on the earth for eons
00:40:30 ►
and that culture has taken a vacation
00:40:34 ►
into dominator models
00:40:37 ►
and egocentric models
00:40:40 ►
and materialistic models
00:40:43 ►
and models which flatten and
00:40:46 ►
simplify and
00:40:48 ►
distort and
00:40:50 ►
suck life
00:40:52 ►
out of reality
00:40:54 ►
that you know
00:40:55 ►
we are seeing what the Faustian
00:40:58 ►
price we had
00:41:00 ►
to pay for the
00:41:02 ►
terrific understanding
00:41:04 ►
of matter
00:41:05 ►
that the tools of Greek science have betrayed into our hands.
00:41:10 ►
Yes, we can bring the power which lights the stars
00:41:15 ►
and ignite it in the deserts of our planet
00:41:18 ►
and if necessary ignite it over the cities of our real or imagined enemies. Yes, we can generate the bare-bottomed quark in machines a mile and a half across
00:41:30 ►
that use as much electricity as is produced in the entire United States for a few seconds.
00:41:37 ►
We have gained a tremendous facility over matter.
00:41:49 ►
facility over matter and in our naivete when we made that Faustian pact back there around the time of Thales we didn’t realize that the price would be to lose contact with our souls and this
00:41:58 ►
is what we have done and now we cannot find it and now now we need it. We need some kind of larger vector field
00:42:09 ►
into which to cast the human situation
00:42:13 ►
so that we can see a way out of the mess that we have created.
00:42:18 ►
Well, I maintain the only way this can be done
00:42:23 ►
is by a return to the situation in prehistory.
00:42:29 ►
This is what I call the archaic revival,
00:42:31 ►
that history is to be seen as the peregrination of a kind of prodigal son,
00:42:38 ►
and that now the peregrination must end.
00:42:43 ►
The prodigal son son who is western humankind
00:42:47 ►
and the epistemic tools
00:42:50 ►
that we have developed
00:42:51 ►
must now return
00:42:53 ►
to the human family
00:42:55 ►
outside of history
00:42:57 ►
which means the people
00:42:58 ►
who have been in the rainforests
00:43:01 ►
and on the arctic tundra
00:43:02 ►
they never left it
00:43:04 ►
they kept the knowledge of this hyper
00:43:07 ►
dimensional phase space but for them it was always a domain of magic mystery and uncertainty
00:43:19 ►
we actually bring something new to it I am not saying that we must simply return to the old ways,
00:43:29 ►
that I think we have something which can enrich the old ways,
00:43:35 ►
that what we have learned about languages,
00:43:38 ►
about mathematics particularly,
00:43:41 ►
this is what we perfected.
00:43:43 ►
Our pride is not in our science which is destructive toxic
00:43:47 ►
and childish our pride is in our mathematics which is an intimation of the trans-dimensional
00:43:55 ►
object that is outside of historical phase space and that casts an enormous flickering shadow over the human enterprise.
00:44:06 ►
It is through mathematics, through, first of all, the probability theory,
00:44:12 ►
more recently things like fractals and dynamic modeling,
00:44:18 ►
it is through these things that we are able to give a kind of empirical grounding to our visions.
00:44:29 ►
Because what we see in our visions is not hallucinations.
00:44:34 ►
What we see in our visions is the higher truth.
00:44:39 ►
And we have never faced this.
00:44:41 ►
In fact, this is what we repress.
00:44:49 ►
Hallucinations are devalued. The phenomena of the mind are called subjective. This is a knock. You know, when you call something subjective, it means
00:44:57 ►
it’s inconsequential or it’s a matter of opinion. We don’t realize the primacy of mind so our value systems are in need
00:45:09 ►
of reconstruction I think what lies ahead for us as a planetary culture once
00:45:15 ►
the agenda of the archaic revival is fully in place, as it must inevitably be,
00:45:27 ►
is a culture reared in the imagination
00:45:32 ►
that this is what the appetition for completion
00:45:37 ►
in the realm of epigenetic coding
00:45:41 ►
and art and engineering
00:45:43 ►
and thought and poetry all this will coalesce
00:45:48 ►
into a domain of art this is what hyperspace is you see novelty becomes so
00:45:57 ►
congressed that there can be no more of it in historical space-time, and so it begins to pour into an orthogonal dimension nearby
00:46:10 ►
in the same way that matter in the center of a black hole
00:46:14 ►
forces its way into another universe.
00:46:17 ►
At a certain level of compaction of the novelty,
00:46:23 ►
it can go nowhere else but into a new dimension.
00:46:28 ►
Anticipating this is not easy because we are constantly operating in this lower dimensional slice.
00:46:36 ►
But as a community of many minds that have taken many snapshots of this other world,
00:46:48 ►
made many journal entries, scrawled many crude maps of the terrain,
00:46:54 ►
I think we can put it all together and begin to get a feeling
00:46:59 ►
for what this thing is, for how it works,
00:47:04 ►
for how it works,
00:47:09 ►
for how it can feed back into the historical crisis.
00:47:17 ►
I have the faith that there’s no situation that can be viewed as a problem in which the solution is not immediately to be found present at hand.
00:47:32 ►
And, you know, before hallucinogens were called hallucinogens or psychedelics,
00:47:36 ►
they were called consciousness-expanding drugs or consciousness-expanding substances.
00:47:39 ►
If there’s any iota of truth in that notion that these things expand consciousness,
00:47:47 ►
then we have to have it because it is for the dearth of consciousness that we are going mad.
00:47:56 ►
We have the money.
00:47:58 ►
We have the technologies.
00:48:00 ►
We have the understanding of ecosystems and natural chemistry and the atmosphere.
00:48:09 ►
What we lack is the moral will to do anything about it.
00:48:14 ►
We are like frozen.
00:48:16 ►
We cannot seem to reach into the control mechanisms of ourselves as a species and have any impact?
00:48:26 ►
I mean, how do you get George Bush trotting on this agenda?
00:48:30 ►
It just doesn’t seem to be possible.
00:48:33 ►
Well, it’s slow work, but I think we’re making progress.
00:48:39 ►
Some of you may know the concept of mean, of a mean.
00:48:45 ►
Do you all know this idea?
00:48:48 ►
No.
00:48:49 ►
A meme is a smallest unit of an idea.
00:48:54 ►
It is to an idea what a gene is to protein.
00:48:59 ►
You need to understand about what we’re doing here.
00:49:02 ►
We’re spreading a meme.
00:49:07 ►
understand about what we’re doing here is we’re spreading a meme. These are the meme wars of the 90s that are looming. And at last I found an argument. Just like a gene, it can be copied
00:49:17 ►
by telling somebody something, by telling a bunch of somebody something or by repeating
00:49:26 ►
yourself this is how you copy a meme you spread a meme by leaving the copies of
00:49:32 ►
it around in the form of books and tapes and conversations well these means the the phase space of ideology
00:49:46 ►
can be conceived of as an environment
00:49:50 ►
just like a rainforest.
00:49:54 ►
So these memes run around
00:49:57 ►
and furiously compete with each other
00:50:00 ►
and natural selection
00:50:03 ►
acts upon the competing populations of means and some die
00:50:10 ►
and some occupy niche after niche and adapt themselves so that they’re comfortable with
00:50:18 ►
managers and psychiatrists and priests and go-go dancers,
00:50:27 ►
and that’s a successful meme. It’s making itself useful to everybody.
00:50:31 ►
For instance, there is the meme of a free press,
00:50:35 ►
the idea that free press is a good thing.
00:50:38 ►
This meme is now very popular and spreading wildly.
00:50:42 ►
At the same moment, the meme of Marxism is shriveling and
00:50:49 ►
melting and just dissipating in the presence of the free press meme. Clearly, the Marxist meme
00:50:57 ►
cannot compete in an environment where free press memes are running around. And I believe that in the same way that natural selection upon genes
00:51:10 ►
produced levels of integrated organization and beauty
00:51:15 ►
that human beings can never hope to surpass,
00:51:18 ►
such as a rose or an orchid or a volcano,
00:51:24 ►
a rose or an orchid or a volcano,
00:51:30 ►
that if we simply launch our means into the environment of ideological competition,
00:51:35 ►
that natural selection will do its work.
00:51:39 ►
Some of you may remember last fall I went around
00:51:42 ►
saying the best idea will win.
00:51:46 ►
Well, this is why.
00:51:48 ►
I mean, I usually get the end first and then the mechanism follows.
00:51:52 ►
This is why the best idea will win.
00:51:56 ►
So the obligation on us is to communicate.
00:52:02 ►
You know, the caterpillar in Alice in Wonder wonderland says say what you mean and mean what
00:52:08 ►
you say i do and i think this is excellent advice for all of us we want to spread memes
00:52:17 ►
among ourselves this is the opposite of safe sex we want to people say enthusiasm is infectious well so is understanding it can be
00:52:28 ►
taught it can be shared it can be replicated and i believe and i hope not erroneously that
00:52:39 ►
the psychedelic meme is going to have another replay. It almost died in its form as an LSD rock concert
00:52:52 ►
that would wrest power from the establishment and beat it over the head with it. In that form,
00:53:00 ►
the psychedelic meme met very large fish that were completely capable of gobbling it down,
00:53:08 ►
and its population shrank accordingly.
00:53:12 ►
And it almost was in the background.
00:53:15 ►
But mutation has now taken place in the psychedelic meme.
00:53:22 ►
It has a new face and a new form. It no longer exhorts crowds of hundreds of
00:53:29 ►
thousands of people to march out of their offices and universities and copulate in the streets.
00:53:35 ►
Now it meets in small groups like this and urges psychotherapists to consider the possibility that shamanism might have a model
00:53:46 ►
that would be useful in delivering mental health care to people.
00:53:51 ►
The meme has grown smarter.
00:53:53 ►
The meme has adapted itself to the larger environment of competing memes,
00:54:00 ►
and at the same time, memes which were suppressing the psychedelic meme
00:54:06 ►
have themselves grown old, tired, slightly atrophied in their responses,
00:54:15 ►
slightly exhausted with their own successes.
00:54:19 ►
So as we go through this weekend, I want you to think of it
00:54:25 ►
as I do very
00:54:27 ►
consciously as a
00:54:30 ►
process of meme
00:54:31 ►
replication and
00:54:33 ►
infection and the
00:54:35 ►
idea is that when we’re done each
00:54:37 ►
one of you is to be a
00:54:39 ►
kind of ideological typhoid
00:54:42 ►
Mary who will
00:54:44 ►
go back to Cleveland and Kokomo and wherever
00:54:49 ►
and talk to people
00:54:52 ►
and get people replicating this meme,
00:54:58 ►
wondering and thinking
00:55:00 ►
because I’m convinced on a level playing field
00:55:03 ►
in the presence of a free press,
00:55:06 ►
this thing has a great potential to just break away and remake the world.
00:55:15 ►
And the reason that it has that potential is because the situation is now very desperate.
00:55:22 ►
Even the establishment memes are willing to negotiate if there’s a possibility that there are any new answers here. The establishment feels much less confident of its own meme than it did in the 1970s. So what I’m going to present to you over the weekend is an argument from prehistory toward posthistory
00:55:49 ►
that tries to make sense of what fell between,
00:55:53 ►
which was this lightning strike of religions, inventions, works of art,
00:56:11 ►
religions, inventions, works of art, outbursts of poetry, cruelty, genius, mysticism, and humanity that precedes our fusion with the transcendental cultural object which we will create,
00:56:19 ►
which we will summon out of the collectivity of human imagination and the Gaian mind that rules the planet so
00:56:30 ►
ably and so well.
00:56:33 ►
For the moment, however, I urge you to have a soak in the baths and get some sleep and
00:56:41 ►
we’ll meet here tomorrow morning at 10 a.m.
00:56:44 ►
Thank you very much.
00:56:46 ►
I hope you enjoy.
00:56:56 ►
It’s a little bit early.
00:56:57 ►
If anybody has any questions, other people should feel free to leave.
00:57:02 ►
A lot of people have come a long way.
00:57:05 ►
But is anybody just absolutely burning with a question?
00:57:09 ►
Or can you cook it?
00:57:11 ►
Yes?
00:57:11 ►
At some point, I’d like to hear your thoughts on people.
00:57:17 ►
I have thoughts on people from my generation
00:57:19 ►
who have been experimenting with expanding drugs.
00:57:22 ►
Now I have a child and children
00:57:25 ►
that I know that are in their teens and their twenties
00:57:27 ►
that have done the same thing.
00:57:30 ►
And the connection between us as people
00:57:34 ►
and what I see happening to them
00:57:40 ►
and their awareness of what is going on
00:57:43 ►
on a whole other level of consciousness
00:57:45 ►
that I didn’t have.
00:57:47 ►
Yes, I will talk about this.
00:57:49 ►
I mean, I have two children of my own.
00:57:51 ►
They’re both within range of my stentorian voice at this moment,
00:57:56 ►
so there are no secrets.
00:57:59 ►
But this is a real question in a society
00:58:02 ►
that has completely lost any contact with tradition.
00:58:06 ►
How do you pass this thing on?
00:58:08 ►
I mean, we all feel it to be tremendously important to our well-being.
00:58:15 ►
It’s very much like sex.
00:58:16 ►
I mean, how do you pass that on to your children?
00:58:18 ►
You’re not going to be there when they do it,
00:58:21 ►
but you hope that you set them up for it.
00:58:27 ►
there when they do it but you hope you know that you set them up for it yes and all the rest of you should feel uh free to follow this woman’s example if there are areas that you want concentrated on
00:58:35 ►
uh feminism fractal mathematics all of these things have a part to play in it. Why guide me? Because I can always use it.
00:58:46 ►
I enjoy these things most
00:58:49 ►
when they are driven by the questions
00:58:53 ►
that it all raises in the audience.
00:58:57 ►
It should be interactive and it should be very good.
00:59:00 ►
It’s coming out of the collective
00:59:03 ►
and we all are both antennas to and broadcast stations for
00:59:09 ►
the collective. One other thing I just might say, I suppose it’s obvious, but from my point of view,
00:59:18 ►
the importance of these meetings, much of it rests in how you relate to each other i mean look around you we cannot be
00:59:28 ►
told from the rest of them we look just like the rest of them so the only way we can never
00:59:36 ►
recognize each other is by self-selecting ourselves and crowding into a room to hear one of our number speak these forbidden truths.
00:59:48 ►
So take this opportunity to get to know the other people who cared as much as you did
00:59:54 ►
about this to be here, because I’m sure you can, without any aid from me, plan all kinds
01:00:01 ►
of mischief among yourselves after you leave here.
01:00:08 ►
Got it?
01:00:09 ►
Okay.
01:00:10 ►
See you in the morning.
01:00:12 ►
Oh, Richard, yeah.
01:00:13 ►
Have you seen Dead Poets Society?
01:00:15 ►
No, but I’m told I should and I shall.
01:00:18 ►
You did.
01:00:19 ►
I shall.
01:00:20 ►
Have you seen Baron Munchausen?
01:00:22 ►
Yes.
01:00:23 ►
You should and shall.
01:00:26 ►
Okay, we’ll see you in the morning.
01:00:28 ►
Enjoy Esalen.
01:00:30 ►
You can get, I don’t know if they told you this in orientation,
01:00:34 ►
but down by the big house is a staircase that goes down to the beach.
01:00:40 ►
They aren’t really afraid of the sea here.
01:00:43 ►
There is a way down to the beach and it’s spectacular.
01:00:47 ►
There’s a little round house with a dolphin
01:00:50 ►
made out of albalone shells on top of it
01:00:53 ►
as you go down toward the bridge over the river.
01:00:56 ►
That is a meditation chapel.
01:00:59 ►
You can go there and meditate anytime.
01:01:01 ►
It’s open to everyone.
01:01:04 ►
I’m just mentioning these two places
01:01:07 ►
because they’re good to know about
01:01:08 ►
and they’re not particularly stressed.
01:01:11 ►
Don’t miss this walk down to the beach,
01:01:14 ►
down this staircase.
01:01:15 ►
I mean, it’s really spectacular over there.
01:01:19 ►
You go across the bridge,
01:01:21 ►
through the garden,
01:01:23 ►
down the hill,
01:01:24 ►
across the bridge, and then garden, down the hill, across the bridge,
01:01:25 ►
and then you’ll see a large house.
01:01:28 ►
That’s called the big house.
01:01:31 ►
Go there and then just go around to the other side of the big house
01:01:35 ►
as though you were exploring its gardens.
01:01:37 ►
And there are a series of descending levels that will channel you down to the beach.
01:01:43 ►
And we’ll begin here at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.
01:01:47 ►
Thank you all for coming.
01:01:49 ►
It’s a pleasure to see so many old friends and new friends.
01:02:02 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:05 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:09 ►
Before I forget to mention it,
01:02:11 ►
if you’re interested in re-listening to the Scholar in Residence workshops
01:02:15 ►
that Terrence did in the weeks preceding this weekend workshop we just listened to,
01:02:20 ►
at least listen to the introduction of,
01:02:22 ►
well, you’ll find them beginning with my podcast number
01:02:25 ►
- I think there are probably about eight podcasts in that series, and since I posted
01:02:32 ►
them back in the summer of 2012, well, that’s probably been long enough for you to have forgotten
01:02:37 ►
most of what was said. So a re-listen could maybe give you a few more new ideas. Who knows?
01:02:46 ►
a free listen could maybe give you a few more new ideas. Who knows? Well, that does it for today’s podcast, and next week I’ll be playing the next segment of this 1989 Terrence McKenna workshop.
01:02:53 ►
And, along with you, I’m really looking forward to hearing what was on people’s minds almost 30
01:02:58 ►
years ago, back when, well, when they thought the world was coming to an end. Not all that
01:03:04 ►
different from where we are today, I guess.
01:03:06 ►
Anyway, welcome to the very first of the Psychedelic Salon 3.0 podcast,
01:03:11 ►
and you should know that you are one of only 150 fellow saloners who are here right now,
01:03:17 ►
and you have become an integral part of the inner core of the salon.
01:03:21 ►
Thanks a million for being here. I really appreciate it.
01:03:25 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. you