590 - Understanding Chaos at History’s End

Program Notes

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Mushroom ManLogo for the Palenque Norte LecturesPhoto by Lorenzo

Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.

Today we continue with a workshop that Terence McKenna led at the Esalen Institute in June of 1989. Although he begins with an exploration of ideas surrounding the use of sound during psychedelic experiences, he also tells some great stories, including one of my favorites. I’d only heard it once before, and for me it’s the funniest story I’ve heard him tell, and this is a new version that you won’t want to miss. Additionally, this may be one of the earliest talks in which Terence addressed the issue of global climate change. Also, for the first time I remember hearing it, Terence talks about his ideas concerning the concept of exo-pheromones.

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Language is sound that stimulates ideas.”

“Interesting, the world wide reliance on sustained tone in spiritual exploration.”

“The ego is a neurotic response to separateness, and you cannot maintain your ego in the presence of strong hallucinogenic plant patterns of usage.”

Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

This program was originally posted on the Psychedelic Salon’s first-run Patreon feed three months ago.

00:00:06 ►

As you know, I’m publishing new Salon 1.0 programs first on Patreon as a way to thank my supporters there.

00:00:14 ►

Additionally, for only $1 a month, they can also join me every Monday evening for a live edition of the Salon,

00:00:21 ►

where we sometimes jointly interview featured speakers whose conversations I also

00:00:25 ►

publish on the podcast from time to time.

00:00:28 ►

Now here is the program from which you heard a preview three months ago. Linguistic Chicks. L-U-V-E-S-S-I-N-G-U-S-E.

00:00:52 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:56 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:59 ►

And I would like to begin today with a couple of announcements.

00:01:03 ►

First of all, since I’m posting this on November 11th, my wife and I would like to wish a happy Veterans Day to all of us veterans.

00:01:08 ►

You see, both my wife and I are military veterans as well.

00:01:13 ►

But to be honest, I’ve never really been able to think of this day as Veterans Day,

00:01:18 ►

because during the first 12 years of my life it was called Armistice Day,

00:01:22 ►

and it commemorated the formal end of World War I hostilities.

00:01:27 ►

When I was in school, I was taught that World War I ended on the 11th second of the 11th

00:01:33 ►

hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

00:01:38 ►

Actually, I’ve always wondered who came up with that hour-minute-second idea, because

00:01:43 ►

it always sounded kind

00:01:45 ►

of superstitious to me.

00:01:47 ►

Back in the 1950s, when I was in grammar school, we also sold little cloth poppies around this

00:01:53 ►

time, and this was in remembrance of the sacrifices that were made by the women and men in uniform

00:01:59 ►

during World War I, and I believe the tradition started in England, if I’m not mistaken.

00:02:04 ►

World War I, and I believe the tradition started in England, if I’m not mistaken.

00:02:10 ►

Now, one of the frequent visitors to our home when I was a boy was my godfather, who was also a World War I veteran.

00:02:13 ►

Floyd Bates was his name, and I wrote a short bit about him in Volume 1 of my Chronicles,

00:02:19 ►

which you can download for free, by the way.

00:02:21 ►

Anyway, every November, Bates would bring over a bag of poppies for me

00:02:26 ►

to take to school and sell, along with a can to collect some donations. Since I was the only one

00:02:32 ►

in my small Catholic grade school who sold poppies each year, I was allowed to go from classroom to

00:02:38 ►

classroom and solicit donations in exchange for a poppy. Well, this was a really poor school, and so I never collected more

00:02:46 ►

than a few odd coins. But I gave a lot of poppies away to my friends to wear on the 11th. So when I

00:02:52 ►

returned home, I would have to take some of my own precious savings and add it to the donation jar

00:02:58 ►

to make up for all the poppies that I gave away. And by the way, I didn’t do this because I was a good guy. I did it simply because

00:03:05 ►

it made me feel good. Feel good about myself. And well, until right now, I’ve never told anyone

00:03:12 ►

about having done that. It’s been my little secret all these years. However, since Bates and my

00:03:18 ►

parents are all now long gone, well, I don’t have to fess up to them. So it’s okay if you know.

00:03:24 ►

well, I don’t have to fess up to them, so it’s okay if you know.

00:03:29 ►

Wow, where did that come from?

00:03:30 ►

Let me restart.

00:03:37 ►

Today is Veterans Day, and tomorrow will be the premiere of a film that I mentioned two weeks ago.

00:03:45 ►

It’s titled From Shock to Awe, and it is about healing military veterans with the use of psychedelic medicines.

00:03:52 ►

Did you know that over 2.5 million Americans have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001?

00:03:57 ►

And almost 20% of them have already been diagnosed with PTSD.

00:04:01 ►

To give you an idea of how serious this problem is,

00:04:07 ►

every day another 22 vets suffering from PTSD commit suicide.

00:04:13 ►

And these veteran suicides are nothing new. They’ve been taking place, without coming to the forefront of our awareness, since before the American War in Vietnam. And fortunately,

00:04:19 ►

there are now several psychedelic medicines that have been shown to have potential, at least,

00:04:24 ►

there are now several psychedelic medicines that have been shown to have potential, at least,

00:04:30 ►

to lessen the intensity of the symptoms of PTSD that these women and men are going to have to carry forward with them for the rest of their lives. From Shock to Awe premieres tomorrow,

00:04:37 ►

November 12, 2018, across the U.S. with a special one-night event titled Coming Home,

00:04:45 ►

with a special one-night event titled Coming Home Beyond Veterans Day.

00:04:50 ►

And that event includes several theatrical screenings in over 25 cities,

00:04:53 ►

followed by a live Q&A with the cast and the filmmakers.

00:04:57 ►

Additionally, the film launches a social impact campaign aimed at empowering people with information

00:05:00 ►

and opening a dialogue about the trauma of PTSD.

00:05:04 ►

I’ve been fortunate to have seen an early screening of this movie, and I can attest

00:05:09 ►

to the fact that it makes a very powerful point about the depth of despair that people

00:05:15 ►

suffering from PTSD must endure.

00:05:18 ►

And I hope that you will be able to see this important film for yourself.

00:05:23 ►

And there’s another movie that I’d like to tell

00:05:25 ►

you about as well. It’s titled More Joy, Less Pain, and it combines several storylines. For one,

00:05:32 ►

it presents one of the most in-depth, up-close, and personal explorations of the psychedelic

00:05:37 ►

medicine sapo that I’ve seen yet, anyhow. And the other main psychoactive preparation that’s

00:05:43 ►

featured in this film is ayahuasca.

00:05:46 ►

The storyline tying these jungle medicines together is about the man that Terence McKenna

00:05:51 ►

once called the most knowledgeable white man in the jungle. And that man is Peter Gorman,

00:05:57 ►

the former editor of High Times Magazine, and someone who’s been featured here in the salon,

00:06:02 ►

well, several times with his interviews of elders like Dr. Albert Hoffman.

00:06:07 ►

And, by the way, if you haven’t heard that interview,

00:06:11 ►

it’s in podcast number 280, which I published on September 2nd in 2011,

00:06:16 ►

and, in my opinion, it’s a real classic.

00:06:19 ►

For example, during this telephone interview,

00:06:22 ►

Peter actually puts Dr. Hoffman on hold to take another

00:06:25 ►

call. And that incoming call happened to be from Laura Huxley. Fortunately, that whole exchange was

00:06:33 ►

recorded and is part of the podcast. My favorite part of Peter’s interview with Hoffman, however,

00:06:38 ►

is the part where the good doctor gets Peter to pay him a fee for the interview.

00:06:44 ►

where the good doctor gets Peter to pay him, pay him a fee for the interview.

00:06:51 ►

I don’t want to be a spoiler here, but I, well, I think that’ll give you a chuckle or two yourself.

00:06:54 ►

Now, getting back to the point that I was trying to make,

00:06:59 ►

the filmmakers of More Joy, Less Pain stopped by for a visit yesterday.

00:07:10 ►

They were on their way to Los Angeles where, almost right at this very moment, they are screening their film for a select audience as they prepare it for entry into several film festivals.

00:07:16 ►

And to give you a little more information about this film and about Peter and the medicines,

00:07:19 ►

Michael and Jeff are going to be with us here one week from tomorrow,

00:07:28 ►

that’ll be November 19th, 2018, for the 6.30 p.m. Pacific Time live version of this psychedelic salon.

00:07:33 ►

As you know, every Monday night at the same time, I host a live version of the salon.

00:07:37 ►

And from time to time, we have guests visiting us.

00:07:40 ►

And some of those conversations, well, they might also turn into podcasts,

00:07:45 ►

as did the recent live salon with David Nichols, which you heard a few weeks ago in podcast number 586. And I should also let you know that the new Salon 3.0 track

00:07:52 ►

on my Patreon feed is growing by leaps and bounds. In the past seven days, almost 50 new supporters

00:07:58 ►

have joined me on Patreon. And in addition to hearing these podcasts on the Salon 3.0 track three months early,

00:08:06 ►

well, they also get to join us in the live version of the Salon every Monday.

00:08:10 ►

So, if you have an extra dollar to spare each month, we’d love to have you join us as well.

00:08:16 ►

Now, for today’s talk, we are returning to the August 1989 Terrence McKenna Workshop

00:08:21 ►

that we heard the introduction to last week.

00:08:26 ►

Terence McKenna workshop that we heard the introduction to last week. And as you’ll hear now,

00:08:32 ►

the workshop begins with a demonstration of some ancient wind instruments that were brought back from South America by Terence’s close friend Ken Symington. And as you will learn, sound apparently

00:08:39 ►

played an important role in, well, at least one of the ancient civilizations that filled the Americas before

00:08:45 ►

the European invasions.

00:08:47 ►

So now here is Terence McKenna opening the Saturday morning session of his August 1989

00:08:53 ►

workshop at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California.

00:09:07 ►

so to sort of truncate all this profanity Ken will explain what these things are

00:09:13 ►

and then we’ll play with them just for a few minutes

00:09:17 ►

and that will settle our breakfast and settle our minds

00:09:21 ►

and to set us up for what is to come.

00:09:26 ►

Ken, what can you say about these?

00:09:29 ►

This is Ken Symington, the best psychedelic CEO on the West Coast.

00:09:37 ►

Ex-CEO.

00:09:38 ►

Ex-CEO.

00:09:41 ►

Well, Terrence is always talking about the influence of sound on the brain,

00:09:46 ►

so I thought that this would be a good thing that he would want to try.

00:09:49 ►

These are replicas of chimu pots,

00:09:52 ►

and they were made in northwestern Peru

00:09:56 ►

from about 1000 B.C. to about 1000 or 1500 A.D.

00:10:02 ►

So they’re very, very old,

00:10:04 ►

and they found these things all over excavations in Peru,

00:10:09 ►

and the net result is nobody knows what they were used for.

00:10:14 ►

But they’re hollow pots.

00:10:17 ►

And it has been found that if you blow on this end,

00:10:23 ►

and the air comes out of a little hole

00:10:25 ►

in this one, it creates a very peculiar sound.

00:10:29 ►

And I skipped describing it to you, but I’d like you to try it.

00:10:34 ►

And if you blow, and especially if you blow the 7, you begin to hear a lot of things,

00:10:40 ►

which are very peculiar sounds, and people who have been using them have found that it affects in some way their psyche.

00:10:48 ►

And even if it doesn’t affect your psyche,

00:10:50 ►

the effect of the sound is very peculiar.

00:10:53 ►

And you hear it right away.

00:10:55 ►

You begin to hear all kinds of different levels of sound.

00:10:59 ►

And you begin to hear it immediately.

00:11:01 ►

So if you’d like, if we could have,

00:11:04 ►

if Terrence will blow one and I will blow’d like, if we could have, if Terrence will blow

00:11:05 ►

one and I will blow one, and if we could have 500 people, we’ll just blow on them for about

00:11:11 ►

three, four minutes. And the effect is most noticed among the people that are blowing,

00:11:20 ►

but not only that. I think it, excuse me, I think it would help if you were to play all close

00:11:26 ►

yeah we’ll make a circle

00:11:28 ►

this is what’s called

00:11:30 ►

acoustical driving

00:11:31 ►

you’re familiar with it from drums

00:11:34 ►

but

00:11:35 ►

this is a technology

00:11:37 ►

of which we have nothing

00:11:40 ►

comparable this is an example

00:11:42 ►

of a culturally state bounded

00:11:44 ►

psychic technology comparable this is an example of a culturally state-bounded psycho psychic

00:11:46 ►

technology you have to imagine that

00:11:50 ►

you’re stoned on San Pedro or Ayahuasca

00:11:53 ►

and that we’re going to do it for

00:11:55 ►

several hours but we’re not can you

00:12:01 ►

stand up and dance when we’ve done it

00:12:04 ►

long enough, okay?

00:12:06 ►

Or something.

00:12:09 ►

Well, the important thing is you just start all at once,

00:12:12 ►

and obviously you’ll run out of breath.

00:12:14 ►

So you take it easy, you just take another breath and keep on going.

00:12:18 ►

You just blow right after the other.

00:12:20 ►

Don’t blow too hard because then the sound gets distorted.

00:12:23 ►

So you just blow naturally in it so you can get the whistle in. And then when you run out of breath, you

00:12:28 ►

take another breath, blow in. And that’s as simple as that. And we’ll see what happens.

00:12:35 ►

Why don’t we, why don’t you start and you come in and you and you and you and then we’ll

00:12:41 ►

all sustain the tone for a while.

00:12:43 ►

and you, and then we’ll all sustain the tone for a while.

00:12:52 ►

And this piercing sound continues for another four minutes.

00:12:56 ►

However, I felt that you would probably thank me for cutting it short.

00:13:08 ►

I think we can take it on the road.

00:13:12 ►

Well, that was pretty interesting.

00:13:14 ►

Where should we go for our hearing test?

00:13:17 ►

That’s what it sounded like. I had never done it before.

00:13:21 ►

Ken told me about it last night.

00:13:26 ►

Well, that’s pretty interesting.

00:13:39 ►

I don’t know how many of you have heard it, but when you smoke DMT, the sound that comes through, the previous association that I’ve always made to that sound

00:13:45 ►

is the standard hui, hui, hui of flying saucers

00:13:51 ►

in 1950s science fiction movies, you know, that…

00:13:55 ►

This is clearly the same kind of thing.

00:14:01 ►

And I don’t know what this rising

00:14:06 ►

I don’t actually know

00:14:07 ►

enough of the vocabulary of talking

00:14:10 ►

about sound to know

00:14:12 ►

how you distinguish and talk

00:14:14 ►

about this but it’s clearly

00:14:15 ►

very neurologically

00:14:18 ►

it’s almost like tintonitis

00:14:20 ►

or something ringing in the ears

00:14:22 ►

but much more

00:14:24 ►

intense the other thing that I hadn’t anticipated

00:14:28 ►

that surprised me is this is a natural sound in the ecosystem where it came from this is what the

00:14:40 ►

night insects sound like you know it sounds like this comes from

00:14:46 ►

the northeastern deserts of

00:14:48 ►

Peru that would be a San Pedro

00:14:50 ►

area where mescaline

00:14:52 ►

is what’s

00:14:54 ►

being

00:14:56 ►

used by the people

00:14:57 ►

but there’s fair evidence of trade

00:14:59 ►

back and forth between the Amazon

00:15:01 ►

and this area

00:15:04 ►

I think this would be dynamite if you were stoned.

00:15:08 ►

In fact, it might even be a bit much.

00:15:14 ►

This is one of these areas where I think, you know,

00:15:19 ►

probably in six weeks,

00:15:20 ►

weeks inspired

00:15:23 ►

hearing specialists

00:15:28 ►

neurophysiologists

00:15:30 ►

could figure out I mean what is

00:15:32 ►

this driving and why does

00:15:34 ►

it affect these drug states

00:15:36 ►

very very early this

00:15:38 ►

was discovered drumming

00:15:40 ►

is the classical

00:15:41 ►

way to do it but now

00:15:44 ►

an interesting thing about

00:15:45 ►

the Amazon cultural area

00:15:48 ►

is the humidity is so high

00:15:50 ►

that a stretched skin drum

00:15:54 ►

is impossible

00:15:56 ►

it can only maintain its stretched state

00:16:01 ►

for hours at most

00:16:03 ►

sometimes minutes

00:16:04 ►

so the drums of the Amazon are the huge kind of drums

00:16:10 ►

where you take a hardwood log and burn out the center over a period of weeks

00:16:16 ►

and then you get this very low resonance because of the cavity inside the log.

00:16:25 ►

This may be in a sense a substitute for the skin drum.

00:16:29 ►

I think it’s a much more effective one.

00:16:33 ►

The drumming has never particularly done it for me

00:16:36 ►

except that it induces a kind of state of withdrawal

00:16:43 ►

from sensory input from the environment.

00:16:46 ►

You know, you just kind of sink into it.

00:16:48 ►

So if any of you are experimentalists or headed for a career in medical research or something

00:16:56 ►

like that, these are the kinds of things that lie right on the surface that need to be looked into

00:17:05 ►

before we go deeper

00:17:07 ►

do things like this imply

00:17:12 ►

perhaps more advanced technologies

00:17:15 ►

what can you do with a synthesizer

00:17:19 ►

we don’t know what

00:17:21 ►

values they were trying to achieve with their sound, so we don’t know whether they regarded these as a perfect instrument for what they were trying to do or an unfortunate approximation. never know because the people who made these things did no writing but sound as

00:17:48 ►

the synergy of thought is you know a very general principle and it also has

00:17:55 ►

the very specific concrescence into language language is sound that

00:18:02 ►

stimulates thought so this is very interesting

00:18:07 ►

interesting the worldwide reliance

00:18:11 ►

on sustained tone

00:18:13 ►

in spiritual exploration

00:18:18 ►

I mean whether you get

00:18:19 ►

Tibetan chanting, Gregorian chant

00:18:23 ►

the keening that typifies Arabic music, the multi for creating a wall of sound

00:18:45 ►

onto which then mind is for some reason easily projected,

00:18:50 ►

almost as though there is a carrier wave necessary.

00:18:56 ►

We don’t know.

00:18:59 ►

I mean, there are hints in the ancient literature that a technology, a sensitivity to sound and resonance

00:19:11 ►

was part of a kind of lost science that existed in antiquity. This would be a point of view

00:19:20 ►

that would see Pythagoras not as the founder and discoverer

00:19:26 ►

of music and proportion

00:19:27 ►

and number but would rather see

00:19:30 ►

Pythagoras as rather a

00:19:32 ►

late manifestation

00:19:33 ►

of a way

00:19:36 ►

of knowing that

00:19:37 ►

involved

00:19:38 ►

sound and

00:19:41 ►

resonance and proportion

00:19:43 ►

and using interference patterns

00:19:46 ►

to create all kinds of effects

00:19:50 ►

in the human mind and the human body.

00:19:53 ►

So this is an example of a culture-bound technology

00:19:58 ►

directed toward affecting and driving a mental state.

00:20:06 ►

Can I ask a question?

00:20:07 ►

Sure.

00:20:08 ►

I’ve had an experience,

00:20:10 ►

something that’s been happening in the last couple of years,

00:20:12 ►

and some of my friends have had the same thing,

00:20:14 ►

where there’s this tone that comes in here.

00:20:16 ►

You mean during the mushroom experience?

00:20:18 ►

No, just walking around during the day,

00:20:20 ►

and it’ll come in like a real high-frequency tone,

00:20:23 ►

and it almost sounds exactly like that

00:20:25 ►

it feels like it goes to the middle of your head

00:20:27 ►

and I don’t know if it’s something people talk about

00:20:30 ►

but it doesn’t seem to be something wrong with my ear

00:20:33 ►

because some of my other friends have been having the same thing

00:20:37 ►

it seems to be happening more and more often

00:20:39 ►

well as we get older

00:20:41 ►

I mean you all know about this stuff called tintinitis, right?

00:20:50 ►

This is literally ringing in the ears.

00:20:52 ►

If you’ve ever gotten into a deep flu or something, an abused aspirin,

00:20:59 ►

if you take six hours or ten aspirin over a 12-hour period,

00:21:05 ►

your ears will ring like crazy.

00:21:08 ►

I mean, you can’t even hear what people are saying to you.

00:21:11 ►

Quinine.

00:21:12 ►

This was the big problem with quinine until chloroquine

00:21:17 ►

and these more fancy things like fancidar were invented for malaria.

00:21:24 ►

like fancidar were invented for malaria.

00:21:29 ►

Yes, British colonial administrators condemned themselves to a life of gin addiction

00:21:33 ►

and ringing ears in order to be in these quinine zones.

00:21:39 ►

There is a whole medical literature on tintinitis.

00:21:43 ►

I don’t quite understand what it is.

00:21:48 ►

Another phenomenon that I don’t think has been described in the literature

00:21:52 ►

that puzzles me, and it’s hard to talk about or confirm with people

00:21:57 ►

because it’s extremely brief and ephemeral,

00:22:01 ►

but since this is a sophisticated room full of travelers,

00:22:05 ►

maybe there can be feedback on this.

00:22:08 ►

I’ve noticed this thing in mushrooms above five grams

00:22:13 ►

where there is what I call the zinger.

00:22:17 ►

And the zinger, it feels like a cosmic ray that your body is detecting

00:22:25 ►

it lasts only about that long

00:22:27 ►

it lasts a fraction of a second

00:22:29 ►

and it’s like an electrical reset

00:22:32 ►

of your whole body

00:22:34 ►

and it’s a zing

00:22:36 ►

and it goes through and it’s very intense

00:22:39 ►

and it lasts a fraction of a second

00:22:41 ►

and about the only thing you can say about it is

00:22:43 ►

it would probably be quite

00:22:45 ►

alarming if it lasted even slightly longer but it never does it feels like a high-speed particle

00:22:53 ►

just passed through your frontal lobes or something do any of you know what i’m talking about

00:22:59 ►

so this is not me advancing into senility. And I don’t know what that is.

00:23:07 ►

Because, again, if you had somebody fully wired up to an EEG and everything else,

00:23:15 ►

this would have to show up.

00:23:17 ►

This is clearly a gross neurological phenomenon.

00:23:20 ►

This is not a hallucination in the ordinary sense.

00:23:24 ►

Well, again again because no legal

00:23:26 ►

research can be done on human beings and mice cannot report these kinds of phenomena we’re just

00:23:33 ►

at sea and throughout the weekend whenever there’s an opportunity to indicate a place where

00:23:40 ►

experimental strategies might be helpful, I’ll try to mention

00:23:46 ►

it because my fantasy

00:23:48 ►

is that some of you

00:23:49 ►

are the neurophysiologists,

00:23:52 ►

neuropsychopharmacologists,

00:23:54 ►

psychotherapists of the

00:23:56 ►

future and that

00:23:57 ►

once you get your

00:23:59 ►

$5 million NIMH

00:24:01 ►

grant, you’ll remember what

00:24:04 ►

old Professor McKinney said and create protocols

00:24:09 ►

to look into some of these things I mean it is not for want of of experimental approaches that

00:24:17 ►

experiment floundered it was for want of courage on the part of the scientific community to carry out that kind of work. Obviously

00:24:27 ►

the people who built these things had no such qualms. They were going for it.

00:24:34 ►

Terence, can you say something? I’d like to address your comment. I basically grew up

00:24:41 ►

practicing the psychic, and my experience is that when you have those sounds coming in,

00:24:47 ►

what’s happening is your telepathic channels are being accessed and opened.

00:24:50 ►

And I think that that’s what those do as well.

00:24:53 ►

I worked with the pipes with Emily Conrad Dell about six years ago for the first time.

00:25:00 ►

And my sense is what they do, literally, is they open the auditory voice channels and telepathic channels,

00:25:08 ►

which all are in this general area of the skull, as well as doing some rattling of the teleceptors.

00:25:14 ►

And the phenomenon of suddenly hearing this high-pitched frequency when you don’t have a cold,

00:25:21 ►

you don’t have a sinus condition, and you’re not taking aspirin, generally, from my experience,

00:25:26 ►

has indicated that someone is accessing you to look out for something.

00:25:30 ►

And it’s a form of communication that comes in at this vibration level

00:25:34 ►

and you’re beginning to pick it up,

00:25:36 ►

but you can’t fine-tune it to hear it yet.

00:25:38 ►

Is it the pineal gland?

00:25:40 ►

It’s actually the hypothalamus.

00:25:43 ►

Do you mean that they’re accessing you in the sense that

00:25:46 ►

they’re leaving a message

00:25:48 ►

in your psychological electronic

00:25:51 ►

mailbox

00:25:51 ►

I never check mine

00:25:56 ►

I should go

00:25:57 ►

well

00:26:01 ►

for three months all that was there

00:26:04 ►

was ads for cheap blank

00:26:06 ►

tape

00:26:07 ►

00:26:08 ►

yeah

00:26:11 ►

there might be

00:26:14 ►

some parallel

00:26:15 ►

it’s a common way to deal with pain now

00:26:17 ►

is to create a sensation in another part of the body

00:26:20 ►

through an electronic

00:26:22 ►

instrument or something

00:26:23 ►

this could be just a way of

00:26:25 ►

distracting the mind while it’s in the process

00:26:28 ►

well or not so much

00:26:29 ►

distracting it but

00:26:31 ►

focusing it upon itself

00:26:33 ►

because I noticed

00:26:35 ►

you know Ken didn’t give

00:26:38 ►

a lot of instructions but I

00:26:40 ►

immediately closed my eyes

00:26:41 ►

leaned into it and there seemed to be

00:26:43 ►

a set of reflexes not specifically associated with just blowing on it yes anything

00:26:53 ►

which can lead us into these places and tone is very important I mean I wish I

00:27:02 ►

had a vocabulary for music because I’ve had experiences with music that were just so freaky that I couldn’t, I could discuss what had happened in terms of the quality of the

00:27:25 ►

shift but I remember a couple of years

00:27:28 ►

ago in in Hawaii a friend of mine had

00:27:32 ►

made recordings of African I’m sorry of

00:27:35 ►

Afghani tribal people and it is this

00:27:39 ►

it’s drums and high-pitched flutes it’s

00:27:43 ►

overkill on the shamanic instrument thing.

00:27:47 ►

It’s this hard-driving drum

00:27:50 ►

and then these wandering high-pitched flutes.

00:27:55 ►

And I could not stand to listen to it.

00:27:58 ►

It was so freakish in some way

00:28:03 ►

that I couldn’t talk about

00:28:05 ►

because I don’t have the vocabulary

00:28:06 ►

but even to this day

00:28:08 ►

when I listen to that music

00:28:10 ►

I hear behind it

00:28:12 ►

I hear into something

00:28:14 ►

and I felt

00:28:16 ►

that these guys were not human beings

00:28:19 ►

that nobody could do

00:28:20 ►

what they were doing

00:28:21 ►

that that was all a mask

00:28:24 ►

and that there was something coming

00:28:26 ►

out of you know the Caucasus Central Asia 2050 60,000 years old that was really bizarre yeah Keep in mind, too, any kind of clear tonal matrix,

00:28:48 ►

such as white noise or rushing water,

00:28:49 ►

which is a form of white noise,

00:28:55 ►

is a perfect background on which to hear voices.

00:28:56 ►

To project.

00:28:59 ►

Yes, although this is not white noise. This is almost the antithesis of white noise.

00:29:02 ►

I see it could serve the same purpose.

00:29:06 ►

Yeah.

00:29:07 ►

For those of you who don’t know,

00:29:09 ►

white noise is wide-spectrum sound.

00:29:13 ►

It sounds like this.

00:29:20 ►

You can always hear white noise

00:29:22 ►

if you need to on a trip

00:29:24 ►

by turning on the FM radio

00:29:27 ►

and off-tuning a channel

00:29:29 ►

if you don’t have automatic lock

00:29:32 ►

off-tune it

00:29:33 ►

and then to the side of a strong channel

00:29:35 ►

there will always be white noise

00:29:37 ►

I had a strange experience

00:29:41 ►

when I was in the Amazon

00:29:44 ►

there’s a Celtic saying that poetry is

00:29:50 ►

made at the edge of running water I think Robert Graves discusses this in

00:29:55 ►

the white goddess which if you’ve never read the white goddess that’s basic

00:30:00 ►

reading for psychedelic oh’s and so he talks about this Celtic saying

00:30:06 ►

poetry is made at the edge of running

00:30:08 ►

water well then I was in the Amazon and

00:30:11 ►

I was quite saturated with psychoactive

00:30:16 ►

tryptamines and I and there was a

00:30:19 ►

waterfall and I noticed that as I walk

00:30:23 ►

toward the waterfall my thoughts

00:30:26 ►

fell into rhyme

00:30:28 ►

and this is something

00:30:30 ►

I don’t write rhyming poetry

00:30:32 ►

it’s not my metier

00:30:34 ►

and I don’t suppose

00:30:36 ►

it was great poetry

00:30:38 ►

but it was pretty astonishing

00:30:41 ►

to not be able to

00:30:42 ►

break out of the rhyme scheme. I remember there were things like

00:30:47 ►

the clone’s mode is a stoned load. That was one of these things. And I went to the waterfall and I sat

00:30:58 ►

by it and as long as I would sit by it my most trivial thoughts would organize themselves into this doggerel, this

00:31:05 ►

rhyming cadence.

00:31:07 ►

Well, then when I left the waterfall,

00:31:10 ►

subject to the

00:31:12 ►

inverse square law,

00:31:14 ►

these rhymes

00:31:15 ►

fell away.

00:31:17 ►

Well, this is mighty,

00:31:19 ►

mighty peculiar. I mean,

00:31:21 ►

what’s going on here?

00:31:24 ►

First of all, what is is rhyme what is the thinking mind that it

00:31:29 ►

can slip from rhyming to prose and then what does this have to do with white noise you see I think a

00:31:37 ►

creative a psychedelically inspired acoustical and linguistic laboratory,

00:31:48 ►

could put pressure on these things. It seems as though the coding and encoding

00:31:51 ►

and the production and interpretation of these codes

00:31:55 ►

is very close to the surface.

00:31:59 ►

It almost seems as though there is no transformation of language

00:32:03 ►

that you can imagine that doesn’t happen on these things

00:32:08 ►

I mean I had a trip a few months ago

00:32:11 ►

where something happened that I had never seen happen before

00:32:15 ►

which was my thoughts were proceeding along in front of me

00:32:20 ►

and I was in pretty good shape

00:32:23 ►

and then you know the thing the

00:32:27 ►

news flasher in Times Square with the

00:32:30 ►

news running across well they my

00:32:32 ►

thoughts shifted into that it was like a

00:32:35 ►

teletype output it was printed and

00:32:39 ►

flowing along and so I’m no longer

00:32:41 ►

thinking my thoughts I’m reading my

00:32:44 ►

thoughts as they flow past my eye so I’m thinking that’s pretty weird and so I’m no longer thinking my thoughts, I’m reading my thoughts as they flow past my eye.

00:32:47 ►

So I’m thinking, that’s pretty weird.

00:32:49 ►

And then I notice that some of the words are misspelled.

00:32:57 ►

I am not a good speller, but I noticed that some of the words that I know how to spell were misspelled and then

00:33:06 ►

as I watched certain words no lot were so misspelled that they no longer I couldn’t figure

00:33:14 ►

out what they were well then I noticed more and more words were slipping into this mode and after

00:33:20 ►

about a minute and a half what was going by my perceiving mind was gibberish

00:33:26 ►

but printed gibberish

00:33:28 ►

and I had watched my own thoughts

00:33:31 ►

degrade into chaos

00:33:34 ►

on this ribbon

00:33:35 ►

and I just thought

00:33:36 ►

my God, what is this?

00:33:39 ►

Meaning works its magic

00:33:41 ►

and then it lifts its magic hand

00:33:44 ►

and meaning falls into chaos

00:33:47 ►

and it’s all showing it to me

00:33:48 ►

within the context of

00:33:50 ►

the phonetic alphabet

00:33:52 ►

weird stuff

00:33:54 ►

degradation of meaning

00:33:56 ►

visible degradation of meaning

00:33:59 ►

the babbling brook

00:34:01 ►

I used to have an English teacher

00:34:04 ►

who began each class by saying I’ll brook no babbling brook i used to have an english teacher who began each class by saying i’ll

00:34:07 ►

brook no babbling must have had the joyce meme

00:34:13 ►

well these things are very suggestive and very important to um the larger larger interpretation of all this stuff, which I’m trying to get to,

00:34:27 ►

because transformation of language is somehow critical. This is what these things are working

00:34:35 ►

on. This may be entirely the domain in which they operate when it’s sufficiently broadly defined,

00:34:45 ►

it always seems to present and offer metaphors about meaning.

00:34:54 ►

And I think some of you have been present

00:34:57 ►

when I’ve told the story about the time years and years ago

00:35:01 ►

when I was in the habit of taking LSD

00:35:06 ►

and then smoking DMT on the top of it.

00:35:09 ►

I don’t recommend this.

00:35:11 ►

This is a young, you have to have a young body for this

00:35:15 ►

or be crazy or something.

00:35:18 ►

But anyway, this was a strategy I used with the LSD

00:35:23 ►

in order to prolong the DMT flash.

00:35:27 ►

Well, in a particular instance, it was Christmas vacation in Berkeley,

00:35:32 ►

and the house I was living in, everyone had left,

00:35:36 ►

and no one was due back for a week,

00:35:38 ►

so I had perfect confidence that I could do this and not be interrupted.

00:35:43 ►

So I took the LSD.

00:35:45 ►

An hour and a half later, I got the DMT pipe,

00:35:48 ►

and I did it, and it did prolong it,

00:35:51 ►

and it was spectacular,

00:35:52 ►

and I won’t say too much about that.

00:35:54 ►

But right in the middle of it,

00:35:56 ►

the woman who lived upstairs

00:35:58 ►

returned unexpectedly from Christmas vacation

00:36:01 ►

and ran up the rickety front steps and started beating on the glass door and just shaking the house.

00:36:11 ►

Well, I’m a basically paranoid person anyway.

00:36:15 ►

I mean, if I’m 300 miles up the Yagwes Yasu in Colombia and I’m out in the jungle smoking a joint and a twig snaps

00:36:25 ►

the first thing I do is

00:36:27 ►

hide my goat

00:36:29 ►

and then see what’s going on

00:36:31 ►

00:36:33 ►

when this

00:36:35 ►

beating on the front door began

00:36:38 ►

I suffered

00:36:39 ►

probably a minor coronary

00:36:42 ►

thrombosis

00:36:43 ►

and I jumped up off my bed

00:36:46 ►

I was propelled off my bed

00:36:49 ►

and landed on my feet in the middle of the room

00:36:53 ►

and then to my horror and disbelief

00:36:56 ►

realized that I had somehow

00:36:59 ►

ruptured the plane

00:37:01 ►

and that this stuff had all come with me

00:37:05 ►

and these self-transforming elf machine

00:37:09 ►

hyper-dimensional things

00:37:11 ►

that I call the tykes

00:37:13 ►

were in the room with me

00:37:16 ►

and it was no longer behind closed eyes in dark and space

00:37:20 ►

they were interposing themselves between me

00:37:23 ►

and the bookcase and the window and everything there

00:37:26 ►

and turning me around

00:37:28 ►

and there was a machine

00:37:32 ►

hovering in the air

00:37:34 ►

one of these DMT Fabergé carved ivory eggs

00:37:38 ►

with the inner locking and all colors

00:37:40 ►

and jewels and metal and liquid crystal thing

00:37:44 ►

in the air

00:37:45 ►

and it had a projecting facet coming off of it

00:37:50 ►

and this thing was ratcheting

00:37:53 ►

with this clicking sound

00:37:55 ►

and every time it would ratchet

00:37:57 ►

and it was doing this very quickly

00:37:59 ►

a small plastic chit

00:38:02 ►

triangular chit,

00:38:06 ►

would be hurled off of this thing.

00:38:09 ►

And each chit had a character on it,

00:38:14 ►

a letter in an alien language.

00:38:18 ►

And these things were flying across the room

00:38:21 ►

and hitting the wall and bouncing off the ceiling.

00:38:23 ►

And the whole room was full of these flying letters in this alien language,

00:38:30 ►

these squealing elves running around.

00:38:34 ►

And I was spontaneously speaking in some kind of glossolalia,

00:38:41 ►

which was itself causing objects to condense in the room.

00:38:46 ►

And it was just, you know, it was too much, clearly.

00:38:51 ►

And I was able to go to the door of the room, slide open the door.

00:38:57 ►

By then, this woman had found her keys and was standing in the living room.

00:39:01 ►

I took one look at her.

00:39:01 ►

standing in the living room I took one look at her

00:39:03 ►

I spoke a very

00:39:05 ►

high volume paragraph

00:39:07 ►

in Martian B

00:39:09 ►

and slammed

00:39:11 ►

the door and just went back

00:39:13 ►

and put my head in the corner

00:39:15 ►

well it was an

00:39:17 ►

extreme example

00:39:19 ►

of its involvement

00:39:21 ►

with this linguistic domain

00:39:23 ►

it’s always trying to say something

00:39:26 ►

about coding and symbols and sounds

00:39:30 ►

and language and intentionality.

00:39:34 ►

This lies very, very close to the surface

00:39:38 ►

in these places.

00:39:40 ►

So if you should ever find yourself in these places,

00:39:43 ►

experiment with meaning and voice and song and acoustical driving

00:39:50 ►

as we did here this morning.

00:39:54 ►

I think that’s really the fertile dimension.

00:39:58 ►

And I mentioned the white goddess.

00:40:00 ►

What Graves is saying in there is that there was a kind of

00:40:06 ►

poetic

00:40:08 ►

language

00:40:09 ►

in our racial past

00:40:11 ►

in our species

00:40:13 ►

past that there is a

00:40:15 ►

kind of language which is in the bone

00:40:18 ►

it isn’t

00:40:19 ►

culturally conventionalized

00:40:22 ►

you don’t have to take

00:40:24 ►

three years to learn it as an infant.

00:40:27 ►

It simply proceeds out of animal organization.

00:40:31 ►

Well, it may well be that

00:40:33 ►

that language is the only language

00:40:36 ►

in which we can really communicate our feelings

00:40:39 ►

and that our blocked access

00:40:44 ►

to communication of feelings has to do with the fact that we’re using a lower dimensional language to try and describe them.

00:40:54 ►

They are, after all, rage, lust, disgust,

00:41:07 ►

it’s much more complicated than that.

00:41:11 ►

Well, we sort of got out in front of ourselves here this morning,

00:41:15 ►

but it’s okay.

00:41:17 ►

Now you’ve seen the end.

00:41:18 ►

So now you’re all shamans.

00:41:20 ►

So now we’ll go back into the matrix what i would like to do is go through this

00:41:32 ►

historical scenario some of you may groan inwardly because you’ve heard it before but there’s more

00:41:40 ►

data and my goal is to make it as tight as rhetorically tight as possible

00:41:48 ►

so that it can resist attack which is sure to come because what I want to say

00:41:56 ►

ultimately is that the program of understanding human origins that begins with Darwin

00:42:05 ►

in the 19th century

00:42:07 ►

has only proceeded

00:42:09 ►

about halfway.

00:42:12 ►

What outraged the Victorian mentality

00:42:16 ►

so much

00:42:17 ►

was the suggestion

00:42:19 ►

that human beings are descended

00:42:21 ►

from the apes,

00:42:24 ►

the anthropoid, proto-hominid, primate line.

00:42:28 ►

This is now fairly well accepted,

00:42:32 ►

and to my mind, to a degree, too accepted,

00:42:36 ►

because the Darwinian scenario cannot account for the emergence of mind

00:42:41 ►

over so short a span of time.

00:42:45 ►

Either something has been left out

00:42:47 ►

00:42:49 ►

we’re on the wrong track

00:42:52 ►

entirely so

00:42:53 ►

I will go over this

00:42:55 ►

some of it fairly quickly

00:42:57 ►

parts that I’ve lectured a lot in the

00:43:00 ►

past and then some of it more

00:43:01 ►

slowly new stuff

00:43:04 ►

that I’ve unearthed in the process

00:43:06 ►

of writing this book for Bantam I

00:43:10 ►

believe what I’m about to tell you but

00:43:15 ►

notice that whether you believe it or

00:43:17 ►

not it is a political argument for our

00:43:23 ►

position for the position that psychedelics, especially psychedelic

00:43:28 ►

plants, had a tremendous impact on human origins and are shaping the human present and future.

00:43:38 ►

It begins, like so many things that have happened on this planet with climatological change.

00:43:48 ►

Glaciation, which has happened, I don’t know,

00:43:52 ►

six, eight times in the last three or four million years,

00:43:57 ►

is a new phenomenon in the life of this planet.

00:44:02 ►

Glaciation wasn’t happening

00:44:05 ►

when the dinosaurs were around

00:44:07 ►

it wasn’t happening in the Devonian

00:44:11 ►

it is something new

00:44:13 ►

so after 5 billion years of existence

00:44:16 ►

the planet earth brought forth a new phenomenon

00:44:20 ►

the repetitious descent

00:44:24 ►

of glacial ice from the

00:44:25 ►

poles. Now this probably

00:44:27 ►

has to do with an accumulating

00:44:30 ►

planetary instability

00:44:32 ►

and we’ll talk

00:44:34 ►

about this more. There

00:44:36 ►

is an accumulating planetary

00:44:38 ►

instability.

00:44:40 ►

The last hundred

00:44:41 ►

million years have been

00:44:43 ►

the most dynamic in the history of the Earth since its formation.

00:44:49 ►

Of that 100 million years, the last 10 million has been the most dynamic.

00:44:55 ►

Of that 10 million, the last million.

00:44:58 ►

Of that million, the last 10,000.

00:45:02 ►

So the planet is fluctuating.

00:45:04 ►

Now we’re on the scene. We are causing planetary

00:45:08 ►

fluctuations of a sort never before seen. I don’t know how many of you saw the article 1987 was the warmest year in 44 million years, they estimate.

00:45:31 ►

And 1988 was slightly warmer.

00:45:36 ►

Now, the scientists are waiting for a trend to establish because they can’t believe

00:45:46 ►

that with such a short amount

00:45:49 ►

such a small data sample

00:45:51 ►

you can make these extrapolations

00:45:54 ►

nevertheless it’s anecdotally

00:45:56 ►

understood in the scientific community

00:45:59 ►

that we are now in a process

00:46:02 ►

of human generated

00:46:04 ►

planetary changes.

00:46:07 ►

Well, we emerged in a context of planetary change.

00:46:13 ►

For a very long time, the warm tropics of the Earth

00:46:18 ►

were covered by climaxed rainforests.

00:46:21 ►

And then this glaciation thing began

00:46:25 ►

and when ice concentrates

00:46:28 ►

at the poles

00:46:29 ►

grasslands appear in the tropics

00:46:32 ►

because there is restricted

00:46:34 ►

rainfall

00:46:34 ►

there are also theorists who hold

00:46:37 ►

that human burning then

00:46:39 ►

contributes to

00:46:41 ►

the appearance of the grasslands

00:46:44 ►

and stabilizes them Carl Sauer of the appearance of the grasslands and stabilizes them.

00:46:46 ►

Carl Sauer of the University of California at Berkeley,

00:46:50 ►

eminent geographer, takes the position that there are no natural grasslands on this planet,

00:46:57 ►

that all grassland is an artifact of human impact.

00:47:01 ►

artifact of human impact in any

00:47:04 ►

case

00:47:04 ►

our previous

00:47:07 ►

many millions of years

00:47:09 ►

had been spent in the trees

00:47:12 ►

as insect

00:47:13 ►

eating, fruit eating

00:47:15 ►

arboreal primates

00:47:17 ►

with a tribal habit

00:47:19 ►

a small but growing

00:47:21 ►

repertoire of pack signals

00:47:24 ►

and developing binocular vision a small but growing repertoire of pack signals,

00:47:29 ►

and developing binocular vision in order to coordinate this swinging from limb to limb mode that we had.

00:47:35 ►

When protein got tight, when pressure got on,

00:47:40 ►

we were forced out of the trees and onto the grasslands where we adapted an omnivorous dietary habit out of necessity

00:47:52 ►

because there was not enough to eat.

00:47:54 ►

So you either test new foods or die.

00:47:58 ►

This is the choice.

00:48:00 ►

Well, in that process, many creatures, many individual creatures become extinct.

00:48:08 ►

But certain fortunate individuals actually discover new sources of food.

00:48:15 ►

Okay, new sources of food.

00:48:19 ►

This gives them an opportunity, basically basically to continue existing. And I mentioned this last night.

00:48:27 ►

The problem with wide-scale testing of new foods in a species

00:48:32 ►

is plants evolve what are called secondary byproducts

00:48:38 ►

to protect themselves from insect predation to buffer incoming mineral salts to make themselves

00:48:52 ►

attractive to pollinator insects, a vast panoply of secondary byproducts are evolved in plants.

00:49:01 ►

Well, if you’re an organism testing plants as food,

00:49:05 ►

you’re going to be exposed to these things,

00:49:08 ►

and many of them have mutagenic influence.

00:49:11 ►

So a sudden shift from a very focused and specialized diet

00:49:19 ►

to a broadened diet will show up in the fossil record

00:49:23 ►

as a sudden evolutionary spurt because

00:49:27 ►

so many mutations are being offered up to the process of natural selection. Well, this

00:49:37 ►

happened to us and all kinds of changes went on in the human form, not only the brain changes

00:49:42 ►

of changes went on in the human form

00:49:43 ►

not only the brain changes

00:49:45 ►

which we’re interested in

00:49:47 ►

but for instance

00:49:48 ►

the loss of body hair

00:49:51 ►

why did we lose body hair

00:49:54 ►

why did we only

00:49:55 ►

retain it

00:49:57 ►

on erogenous zones

00:50:00 ►

and on the tops of our heads

00:50:02 ►

well the theory about the top

00:50:04 ►

of the head is

00:50:05 ►

that one theory

00:50:08 ►

not necessarily mine

00:50:09 ►

is that we evolved near the seashore

00:50:12 ►

and that mothers could keep hold of their babies

00:50:16 ►

by the hair

00:50:18 ►

and that so hair is something that

00:50:21 ►

we need to have in order that we don’t drift away from each other.

00:50:26 ►

As far as genital hair is concerned,

00:50:32 ►

the best guess anybody has been able to come up with

00:50:35 ►

is hair is a strategy for expanding surface area.

00:50:40 ►

Surface area is something that is important in a situation where

00:50:48 ►

chemicals are volatilizing

00:50:51 ►

into the air and the idea is that

00:50:54 ►

we retain genital hair in order

00:50:57 ►

to be able to pheromonally

00:50:59 ►

connect with each other

00:51:02 ►

this is a whole aspect of human relations that is not well understood

00:51:07 ►

that we are

00:51:08 ►

embedded in an ambiance

00:51:10 ►

of human pheromones

00:51:13 ►

that

00:51:14 ►

the smell of rage

00:51:17 ►

the

00:51:19 ►

smell

00:51:21 ►

of maximum

00:51:22 ►

security prisons

00:51:24 ►

all of these are odors of fear the smell of maximum security prisons.

00:51:34 ►

All of these are odors of fear, sexuality, desperation, so forth and so on. There are psychiatrists who claim to be able to diagnose schizophrenia by sniff.

00:51:43 ►

They just take a whiff of you and then they say you know you’re okay you’re

00:51:47 ►

not okay these same theorists claim that when you walk into a room everyone involuntarily takes a

00:51:58 ►

breath of air this breath of air is communicating to them on an unconscious level

00:52:05 ►

where it’s at in that room

00:52:07 ►

and you know when you walk into a room

00:52:09 ►

and there are two people in that room

00:52:12 ►

and one of them has just told the other to take a flying leap into hell

00:52:17 ►

there is what we call an aura of tension

00:52:21 ►

well this is very deep psychological cueing

00:52:26 ►

that we process on an unconscious level

00:52:28 ►

and much of it may be pheromonal.

00:52:31 ►

Most social animals regulate themselves with pheromones.

00:52:37 ►

Bees, ants,

00:52:40 ►

even these weird hairless mammals in Morocco that form these huge hives under the ground, they shed pheromones as well.

00:52:54 ►

If we are not a pheromonally regulated social species, we are probably the only one.

00:53:01 ►

And this bears directly on the hallucinogen question

00:53:07 ►

a professor of mine years ago

00:53:10 ►

Ralph Audie at UC Med Center

00:53:12 ►

his theory was that

00:53:15 ►

hallucinogens are what he called

00:53:17 ►

exopharamones

00:53:19 ►

a pheromone is a chemical message

00:53:22 ►

that is passed around within a species.

00:53:25 ►

He thought of hallucinogens as exo-pheromones, meaning they were message-bearing chemicals that moved between species.

00:53:35 ►

And I will more or less advocate that view in a slightly circuitous form.

00:53:42 ►

in a slightly circuitous form.

00:53:48 ►

Anyway, here are these monkeys on the ground testing foods,

00:53:55 ►

and these foods usher into mutagenically induced changes in the human’s body-mind system.

00:53:59 ►

Our loss of body hair, I mentioned that.

00:54:02 ►

The prolongation of adolescence,

00:54:06 ►

this is thought to be, which is called

00:54:07 ►

neoteny, this is something

00:54:10 ►

that is peculiar to the

00:54:12 ►

human species, not well

00:54:13 ►

understood, it’s thought

00:54:16 ►

that because we have culture

00:54:18 ►

we have to keep our children

00:54:20 ►

with us in order to

00:54:22 ►

teach them culture

00:54:23 ►

we don’t just turn them loose when they’re 18 months old

00:54:27 ►

and they can’t even take care of themselves.

00:54:30 ►

You know, a calf or a fawn stands up and walks

00:54:35 ►

four hours after birth.

00:54:37 ►

A human infant can take a very long time.

00:54:41 ►

So the prolongation of adolescence,

00:54:44 ►

the loss of body hair,

00:54:45 ►

all of these things may have been

00:54:48 ►

the effect of random mutations induced by diet.

00:54:53 ►

Remember that mutations are always random,

00:54:56 ►

but they are given cogency and order

00:54:59 ►

by then undergoing the process

00:55:02 ►

named by Darwin natural selection.

00:55:05 ►

That means the mutations which confer adaptive advantage are retained.

00:55:10 ►

The mutations which don’t confer adaptive advantage,

00:55:15 ►

those individuals are not successfully able to reproduce, and they die.

00:55:22 ►

and they die well I’ve

00:55:25 ►

how this relates to psychedelics

00:55:28 ►

is that one of the foods tested

00:55:30 ►

in that environment

00:55:32 ►

because there were large herds of ungulate animals

00:55:36 ►

developing at the same time

00:55:38 ►

and they clearly represented the major concentration

00:55:41 ►

of protein in the grassland environment

00:55:44 ►

I mean all that was there were a few poor cereals represented the major concentration of protein in the grassland environment.

00:55:49 ►

I mean, all that was there were a few poor cereals, a few root crops, and a lot of meat on the hoof.

00:55:55 ►

So there was tremendous pressure to be able to utilize that meat.

00:55:59 ►

And that meant not only an omnivorous diet,

00:56:03 ►

but a slow shift toward a carnivorous diet.

00:56:06 ►

Well, that meant trailing after these ungulate herds, probably driving lions and large predators away from fresh kills.

00:56:22 ►

how early human populations got meat before they had sufficient hunting strategies,

00:56:27 ►

weaponry, and language

00:56:28 ►

to coordinate their own live kills.

00:56:32 ►

Well, trailing along behind these ungulate animals

00:56:35 ►

on the African veldt

00:56:37 ►

is a perfect situation for encountering

00:56:40 ►

the coprophytic psilocybin mushrooms

00:56:43 ►

which grow in the manure of these animals and the

00:56:48 ►

mushroom is a very noticeable object in the grassland environment i mean i’ve seen them in

00:56:55 ►

the amazon the size of dinner plates well if you’re looking out over 20 acres of pasture

00:57:02 ►

you can see every mushroom of that size in the

00:57:06 ►

pasture I mean they just call you to them I mean they are totally anomalous

00:57:12 ►

and any I’ve seen in East Africa baboons they love to flip over animal cow pies dung because they find

00:57:25 ►

carrion beetles there

00:57:27 ►

insect protein

00:57:29 ►

well in the period

00:57:31 ►

I’m talking about insect protein

00:57:33 ►

was not so far behind

00:57:35 ►

us and even to this day

00:57:37 ►

in the Amazon certain

00:57:39 ►

groups of people up to 30%

00:57:42 ►

of their diet is insect

00:57:44 ►

protein I mean it’s very disconcerting to be chatting with a wetoto

00:57:50 ►

and have one of these big buprestids,

00:57:55 ►

these wood-boring, metallic wood-boring beetles about four and a half inches long.

00:58:00 ►

One of these guys with a tremendous metallic sound will slap against a tree and

00:58:07 ►

without missing a beat a we toto person will just reach out grab it rip the wing cases off and gnaw

00:58:15 ►

on it like a popsicle while they’re talking to you and may even offer you a chew they love to insert grass stems down into ant hills and then pull up the

00:58:31 ►

ants clinging to the grass stem and then put all the grass stems and the ants in a little calabash

00:58:38 ►

of water and grind it up with a stone and because ants are social insects and release pheromones,

00:58:47 ►

and because pheromones necessarily must be volatile to work,

00:58:52 ►

you get this weird, it’s like camphorated Kool-Aid.

00:58:58 ►

And it’s, you know, insect pheromone Kool-Aid refresher.

00:59:04 ►

Delicious.

00:59:07 ►

Anyway, the mushroom was soon noticed

00:59:12 ►

and inculcated into the diet

00:59:14 ►

of these now pack-hunting,

00:59:18 ►

semi-carnivorous, highly omnivorous

00:59:22 ►

pack-hunting primates.

00:59:24 ►

Well, quickly quickly the first advantage that psilocybin

00:59:29 ►

confers on an animal or a human being is increased visual acuity this is just something which it does

00:59:38 ►

and roland fisher did experiments and showed this quite elegantly in the late 60s although that research too

00:59:47 ►

should be duplicated you know does it confer increased visual acuity do other things confer

00:59:55 ►

increased visual acuity how rare or common is this well in any case you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to know that if there’s a plant that gives you better vision, you’re going to be a successful hunter.

01:00:12 ►

Therefore, eating a plant which impacts on visual acuity is going to favor those animals using it.

01:00:21 ►

They are going to be better hunters.

01:00:24 ►

They are going to kill more meat. Their children are going to be better hunters they are going to kill more meat

01:00:26 ►

their children are going to have more

01:00:28 ►

food, women are going to

01:00:30 ►

find those hunters more

01:00:31 ►

desirable, therefore they will

01:00:34 ►

have many women

01:00:35 ►

many women means

01:00:37 ►

in a world where fairness

01:00:39 ►

operates, increased opportunities

01:00:42 ►

to copulate

01:00:43 ►

that means increased opportunities for

01:00:47 ►

conception that means more children that means

01:00:51 ►

successful reproductive strategy so that single aspect of psilocybin would feed back into the human experience as

01:01:00 ►

01:01:03 ►

Good as a good adaptation.

01:01:05 ►

It’s a good idea to eat mushrooms,

01:01:08 ►

especially if you’re a hunter.

01:01:10 ►

But they quickly discovered

01:01:12 ►

that if you eat more mushrooms,

01:01:15 ►

a general state of physiological arousal

01:01:19 ►

follows upon the increase in visual acuity.

01:01:23 ►

All CNS stimulants will cause a general kind of arousal.

01:01:28 ►

On one level, what that means is a kind of restlessness

01:01:33 ►

that is usually channeled by the organism into sexual release.

01:01:39 ►

So psilocybin at slightly higher doses promotes sexual activity.

01:01:41 ►

and at slightly higher doses promotes sexual activity.

01:01:44 ►

Again, this is a tremendous enhancer

01:01:49 ►

of the reproductive success

01:01:52 ►

of those individuals participating

01:01:55 ►

in this increased sexual activity.

01:01:59 ►

And there is very little doubt,

01:02:01 ►

just looking at the earliest stratum

01:02:03 ►

of religion that we possess that

01:02:06 ►

prehistoric religion was orgiastic and communal and so forth and so on i mean there may have been

01:02:14 ►

pair bonding and all that but clearly uh boundary dissolution through orgy and boundary dissolution

01:02:22 ►

through hallucinogenic plant use are were i think in the minds of these

01:02:27 ►

early people it’s so commingled that they couldn’t even be uh teased apart is that the phrase

01:02:35 ►

at higher levels than that at higher levels than the level at which psilocybin induces sexual arousal

01:02:46 ►

and restlessness and that sort of thing

01:02:49 ►

it breaks out into the trip

01:02:53 ►

hallucinogenic

01:02:54 ►

affects the higher cortical functions

01:02:58 ►

and this then

01:03:01 ►

is this thing about which we

01:03:04 ►

sophisticated as we are and with 10,000 years of history behind us, we are in awe of this, of what happens above 20 milligrams of pure psilocybin.

01:03:19 ►

For all our sophistication, we are no more able to come to terms with that than these pack hunting proto

01:03:26 ►

hominid ancestors of ours so you see it was a very gentle three-step seduction increased visual

01:03:35 ►

acuity pays back in more food more women more children slightly higher doses pay back as increased sexual activity. That also means more access to women, more children, more reproductive success. And then at a third and higher level, it feeds back as a transcendental experience with a peculiar bias toward language, toward spontaneous vocalization,

01:04:10 ►

toward neurological perturbation that expresses itself through small mouth noises,

01:04:20 ►

through the modulation of sound.

01:04:22 ►

You see, we are uniquely set up

01:04:25 ►

to modulate sound.

01:04:29 ►

We can do it for hours

01:04:31 ►

without exhausting ourselves.

01:04:34 ►

I prove this in front of you

01:04:37 ►

every time we do one of these things.

01:04:40 ►

I mean, what other human activity

01:04:42 ►

could we sustain at this level

01:04:45 ►

and then we don’t even discuss,

01:04:48 ►

are you exhausted from giving your talk?

01:04:51 ►

Are you kidding?

01:04:52 ►

No, it’s just talk.

01:04:53 ►

We all do it.

01:04:54 ►

And yet, you know, there’s a lot of muscle work going on here,

01:04:57 ►

a lot of breath work.

01:05:04 ►

so I think that the primate situation in the trees

01:05:10 ►

set us up for code use

01:05:13 ►

and pack signaling

01:05:15 ►

and we observe arboreal primates to this day

01:05:18 ►

with complex repertoires of pack signals

01:05:21 ►

and then the hunting situation on the veldt

01:05:25 ►

further pressure on pack signaling of PAC signals. And then the hunting situation on the veldt,

01:05:27 ►

further pressure on PAC signaling.

01:05:30 ►

But by the time we get down onto the veldt,

01:05:32 ►

an interesting thing has happened.

01:05:36 ►

There is a division of labor now

01:05:40 ►

because women who are recognized to be of smaller stature

01:05:42 ►

and smaller bladder than men,

01:05:47 ►

are therefore maladapted to hunting,

01:05:51 ►

because hunting requires a certain degree of physical strength,

01:05:56 ►

bladder control, so forth and so on.

01:05:59 ►

So there was a spontaneous division of labor.

01:06:03 ►

Also women, by having children,

01:06:06 ►

and probably these women we’re talking about

01:06:08 ►

always had at least one or two hanging off of them,

01:06:12 ►

they were not highly mobile.

01:06:14 ►

So it fell to them to stay near the camp,

01:06:18 ►

to prepare the food,

01:06:20 ►

but more importantly to gather the food.

01:06:46 ►

And this is an area that we haven’t talked that much about to hunt you must find kill gut and return to camp with the game it is I don’t I don’t want to denigrate it as much as I have in the past because it gets people’s hackles up.

01:06:49 ►

I mean, there is an art to hunting,

01:06:52 ►

to knowing the lay of the land,

01:06:56 ►

to positioning your people downwind and to moving game toward them and so forth.

01:06:59 ►

But I submit to you that the linguistic pressure

01:07:04 ►

on early proto-Hominids in our line,

01:07:07 ►

the linguistic pressure would really have been on the women.

01:07:11 ►

Well, now why is this?

01:07:13 ►

It’s because the task that naturally evolved for the women was to gather the food.

01:07:22 ►

to gather the food and what this means

01:07:24 ►

is extremely

01:07:26 ►

careful differentiation

01:07:28 ►

of minute

01:07:29 ►

physical differences

01:07:31 ►

we’ve lost touch with this

01:07:34 ►

in the last couple of hundred years

01:07:35 ►

because first metal engraving

01:07:38 ►

and then photography

01:07:40 ►

made it unnecessary

01:07:41 ►

to create absolute

01:07:43 ►

languages for describing plants but if

01:07:48 ►

for instance you look at a an 18th century botany book or even a modern

01:07:53 ►

botany book every plant has what is called the taxonomic description and the

01:07:59 ►

taxonomic description is will appear to you if you’ve never seen one as though it is written

01:08:06 ►

in another language. I mean

01:08:09 ►

it reads like this

01:08:11 ►

leaves crenolate, gloubescent

01:08:15 ►

apical bracts rotated

01:08:18 ►

laterally, trichomes present

01:08:21 ►

what this is is an extremely

01:08:24 ►

technical language

01:08:26 ►

for describing minute differences in structure.

01:08:30 ►

And this is what you have to be able to do

01:08:33 ►

if you’re going to gather plants for food.

01:08:36 ►

You have to be able to say to someone,

01:08:39 ►

it’s the little plant with the red berries

01:08:42 ►

and the white peeling bark with the gray underside to the leaves and the roots shallow.

01:08:50 ►

This is a complex linguistic exercise.

01:08:53 ►

You are distinguishing this plant from all others in the environment.

01:08:58 ►

Not only are there physical distinctions to be made, there are edaphic factors.

01:09:03 ►

This means soils.

01:09:06 ►

Is it in laterite? is it in sand, is it

01:09:08 ►

in loam, is it in limestone

01:09:09 ►

there are seasonal factors

01:09:12 ►

and there

01:09:14 ►

may even be factors that we as

01:09:16 ►

moderns have lost touch with

01:09:18 ►

factors involving the

01:09:20 ►

feng shui, the geomantic

01:09:22 ►

energy of the land

01:09:24 ►

so women were under tremendous pressure

01:09:27 ►

to develop advanced vocabularies, which they did.

01:09:32 ►

And to this day among native peoples,

01:09:35 ►

what anthropologists always mention

01:09:37 ►

without trying to seem sexist

01:09:41 ►

is the chattering of women.

01:09:44 ►

Women chatter.

01:09:46 ►

Women are more socialized than men.

01:09:50 ►

Women are more comfortable with women than men are comfortable with men or women.

01:09:56 ►

I mean, women talk about internal states.

01:10:00 ►

They talk about feelings.

01:10:02 ►

They talk about all kinds of things.

01:10:06 ►

states, they talk about feelings, they talk about all kinds of things. I think that language was probably early on a prerogative of those who gathered food in order to make all these distinctions.

01:10:15 ►

Okay, so then what came to be out of this confluence of forces was what I call following Rian Eisler

01:10:26 ►

the earliest partnership

01:10:28 ►

society

01:10:29 ►

it was a society

01:10:31 ►

of pastoralists

01:10:33 ►

because once it was

01:10:35 ►

understood that cattle could be

01:10:38 ►

domesticated it was much

01:10:40 ►

more efficient to domesticate

01:10:42 ►

cattle than to hunt

01:10:44 ►

because cattle then could provide meat as needed

01:10:49 ►

rather than the feast famine cycle of the hunters milk then comes into the picture which is not

01:10:56 ►

something you get a lot of if you hunt and kill wild cattle and the mushroom by domesticating the cattle

01:11:05 ►

the mushroom supply was also

01:11:08 ►

ensured

01:11:09 ►

and human beings, cattle

01:11:12 ►

and mushrooms

01:11:13 ►

poured themselves together

01:11:15 ►

into a unique confluence

01:11:18 ►

01:11:19 ►

mutually reinforced

01:11:21 ►

need and intentionality

01:11:23 ►

that we call symbiosis.

01:11:26 ►

This is where there is mutual benefit

01:11:29 ►

to all parties.

01:11:32 ►

What human beings gained,

01:11:34 ►

I’ve spent some time telling you,

01:11:36 ►

what cattle gained from this deal

01:11:39 ►

was increased reproductive success,

01:11:43 ►

protection from predation

01:11:45 ►

greater likelihood of continuous food supply

01:11:49 ►

so forth and so on

01:11:51 ►

what the mushroom gained from this

01:11:53 ►

is not entirely clear

01:11:57 ►

it does become semi-domesticated then

01:12:01 ►

and an interesting thing that we’ll see again and again

01:12:04 ►

in talking about these hallucinogenic plants is how many of them are related to domesticated plants I mean the ergot of rye even you could stretch it to include the intoxicating mead made from honey. Bees are a domesticated creature

01:12:27 ►

very early in the Middle East.

01:12:30 ►

So there’s something a little eerie

01:12:33 ►

about the way these hallucinogens cluster

01:12:36 ►

right where we will find them.

01:12:38 ►

This isn’t true in all cases.

01:12:41 ►

Peyote, Banisteriopsis capi,

01:12:46 ►

Tabernanthei iboga but in the

01:12:48 ►

major cases that have impacted

01:12:50 ►

human beings it has been

01:12:51 ►

because they were associated

01:12:54 ►

with foods

01:12:55 ►

okay this

01:12:57 ►

partnership society

01:12:59 ►

that had this long association

01:13:02 ►

with these plants

01:13:03 ►

and this orgiastic religious thrust

01:13:10 ►

was producing a completely different ratio of psychic dominance

01:13:16 ►

in the individual members within the society

01:13:20 ►

than we have in our society.

01:13:22 ►

Specifically, what was being held down was the ego.

01:13:27 ►

The ego is a neurotic response to separateness.

01:13:39 ►

And you cannot maintain your ego in the presence of strong

01:13:46 ►

hallucinogenic plant

01:13:48 ►

patterns of usage

01:13:49 ►

we saw this in the 1960s

01:13:53 ►

it isn’t

01:13:55 ►

writ in adamantine

01:13:56 ►

that if a million people

01:13:58 ►

take LSD

01:13:59 ►

a third of them will want to

01:14:02 ►

join communes

01:14:04 ►

you know

01:14:05 ►

and yet this is what we saw

01:14:07 ►

somehow it had an impact on images of community

01:14:12 ►

it mitigates against separateness

01:14:16 ►

well it does this in a way

01:14:17 ►

which is very easy to understand

01:14:19 ►

if every Saturday night throughout your entire life

01:14:23 ►

you and the 70 people in your tribe

01:14:27 ►

have gathered into the longhouse

01:14:29 ►

and taken a strong hallucinogen

01:14:32 ►

which dissolves all boundaries

01:14:35 ►

floods your mind with vision

01:14:38 ►

impels the whole group into group sexual activity

01:14:42 ►

and so there’s just you know energy being shed on every level

01:14:47 ►

it’s very hard on sunday morning to come out of that and get together your projects your wants

01:14:56 ►

your needs so forth it’s a tremendous force for social cohesion. And I believe that the so-called dominator ego

01:15:06 ►

was not able to form in that situation.

01:15:11 ►

Think of the ego as a kind of a tumor

01:15:14 ►

or a calcareous deposit in the personality,

01:15:19 ►

which, if you keep taking large supplies of plant hallucinogens,

01:15:24 ►

this ego can never form.

01:15:26 ►

Just as it’s about to form or start taking hold,

01:15:30 ►

here comes another dose of ego-dissolving hallucinogens,

01:15:34 ►

and it goes away.

01:15:36 ►

So we were kept from our lower nature

01:15:42 ►

by our symbiotic relationship to the mushrooms they were actually enforcing the

01:15:50 ►

impossibility of the formation of the ego well now is there anything in the world that we can

01:15:57 ►

look at that that would support a wild-eyed argument like that is there any instance where a pathological condition

01:16:06 ►

is being masked by

01:16:09 ►

plant use

01:16:10 ►

well it so happens there is such an example

01:16:14 ►

would I have set myself up like that

01:16:17 ►

01:16:20 ►

Zaire

01:16:23 ►

there is a tribal group of people who appear to be very much like the tribes surrounding them.

01:16:33 ►

They don’t seem to have any particularly culturally distinguishing differences.

01:16:39 ►

They eat the same diet, so forth and so on.

01:16:42 ►

And this diet largely consists of plantains plantains as you

01:16:48 ►

may know are these huge rough bananas that you don’t eat raw because they’re too starchy you

01:16:54 ►

have to fry them you can you know they’re a Chicano food item and you can buy them in good

01:17:01 ►

markets and it’s a big food throughout the tropics.

01:17:05 ►

Well, this tribe in Zaire, which was eating this food,

01:17:09 ►

just like all the other tribes,

01:17:11 ►

a peculiar factor was noted,

01:17:15 ►

that when people from this tribe left it and went to the city,

01:17:21 ►

they inevitably and very quickly,

01:17:24 ►

like in the space of two or three months became mentally ill

01:17:29 ►

seriously mentally ill not most of these people or some of these people but every single one of

01:17:37 ►

these people that left the tribal group became ill well they were studied and people said it was a strong example

01:17:46 ►

of cohesive group values

01:17:49 ►

and these people were just made sick

01:17:51 ►

but they were made so sick

01:17:52 ►

that it didn’t look like a neurosis

01:17:54 ►

it looked like a problem

01:17:57 ►

of some sort

01:17:58 ►

well eventually it was understood

01:18:00 ►

that what was happening was

01:18:02 ►

these people have a defective gene

01:18:04 ►

for serotonin production and in the presence understood that what was happening was these people have a defective gene for

01:18:05 ►

serotonin production and in the presence of the diet that they were used to this

01:18:13 ►

this defective gene was completely masked as long as they were eating lots

01:18:20 ►

of plantain o’s they were getting lots of serotonin and they never developed

01:18:25 ►

any mental

01:18:26 ►

illness

01:18:26 ►

but when

01:18:27 ►

they left

01:18:27 ►

the group

01:18:28 ►

and went

01:18:29 ►

to the

01:18:29 ►

city

01:18:30 ►

they became

01:18:31 ►

crazy

01:18:32 ►

and this

01:18:34 ►

is our

01:18:34 ►

story

01:18:35 ►

this is

01:18:36 ►

our

01:18:37 ►

story

01:18:38 ►

we are

01:18:38 ►

a tribe

01:18:39 ►

of pastoral

01:18:41 ►

mushroom

01:18:42 ►

users

01:18:43 ►

and when we abandon the use of mushrooms

01:18:47 ►

we become neurotic

01:18:50 ►

as a historical phenomenon

01:18:52 ►

we become neurotic in a particular way

01:18:56 ►

the ego

01:18:58 ►

the ordinary use for the ego

01:19:03 ►

is that when I’m having lunch with you,

01:19:06 ►

I need to have an ego

01:19:07 ►

so I put food in this mouth,

01:19:11 ►

not that mouth.

01:19:13 ►

In other words,

01:19:14 ►

ego tells you who you are

01:19:16 ►

in the space-time locus.

01:19:18 ►

But it isn’t designed to tell you

01:19:21 ►

how great you are

01:19:22 ►

or how important you are

01:19:24 ►

or how central you are or how important you are or how central you are

01:19:26 ►

it’s just that part of your neurophysiological processing

01:19:30 ►

that locates you to a space-time locus

01:19:33 ►

a certain 140 pound deposit of meat

01:19:37 ►

that’s yours

01:19:38 ►

you can walk around in it

01:19:40 ►

but the ego is some kind of

01:19:44 ►

it has a tendency to grow uncontrollably it is a cancerous

01:19:51 ►

tumorous kind of psychic tissue that requires a lot of hallucinogens to hold it down Well, when climatological change got going in Africa,

01:20:07 ►

this partnership paradise was disrupted.

01:20:12 ►

And I think we’re all familiar with the story of Genesis.

01:20:19 ►

The story of Genesis is the story as told of a drug bust. Somebody was told that something was illegal

01:20:29 ►

and that person broke the law and ate the drug that was forbidden and then God was pissed off.

01:20:40 ►

And it’s very interesting why God was pissed off. If you read the story, you will see that God, thinking aloud,

01:20:50 ►

says, they will become as we are.

01:20:55 ►

They will become as we are.

01:20:58 ►

And so Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden

01:21:03 ►

and God set an angel

01:21:05 ►

at the eastern portal of Eden

01:21:08 ►

with a whirling sword

01:21:10 ►

so that no one could make their way back

01:21:13 ►

and our remote ancestors

01:21:16 ►

were condemned to a life of work and travail.

01:21:21 ►

Okay, my interpretation of this is,

01:21:23 ►

first of all,

01:21:24 ►

this is a story told by a dominator

01:21:27 ►

culture. It’s the Yawa culture, the volcano storm god Yawa. So it’s being told from a dominator

01:21:36 ►

point of view, but what it is, is it’s the story of the disruption of paradise and the fall into history

01:21:45 ►

and an abandonment

01:21:48 ►

and a movement eastward.

01:21:51 ►

So what I think is being talked about here

01:21:53 ►

is this original partnership paradise

01:21:56 ►

in the then much wetter central Sahara

01:22:00 ►

and the mushroom religion

01:22:04 ►

finally being disturbed by increasing aridity in this area

01:22:12 ►

so that the story of the fall from Eden and the fall into history is the story of the original partnership, symbiosis between human beings, cattle, and mushrooms.

01:22:29 ►

Okay.

01:22:30 ►

In the Middle East, what you see in the Nile Valley and in Palestine

01:22:37 ►

is that before 9,500 B.C., roughly,

01:22:45 ►

there is about 2,000 years where there is no habitation,

01:22:50 ►

either in Palestine or in the Nile Valley.

01:22:52 ►

This is, we’re talking thousands of years before Egypt.

01:22:56 ►

There’s a complete lacuna there.

01:23:00 ►

And then around 9,500,

01:23:03 ►

a new kind of people come into the Middle East.

01:23:08 ►

And no one knows from where, and the reason no one knows from where,

01:23:13 ►

is because they assume they came from what Maria Gambutas and her group call Old Europe.

01:23:20 ►

This is Greece, Mesopotamia, southern Turkey,

01:23:23 ►

where a very advanced civilization

01:23:25 ►

is in the process of getting going

01:23:28 ►

and if any of you are interested in this

01:23:31 ►

Gimbutas’ book, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe

01:23:35 ►

will just open your eyes to the world

01:23:38 ►

of 15,000 years ago

01:23:41 ►

but there are problems

01:23:43 ►

these people coming into the Middle East

01:23:45 ►

and the Nile Valley do not culturally

01:23:49 ►

match either skeletally

01:23:52 ►

or in the physical

01:23:54 ►

the flint what we would expect

01:23:58 ►

from a migrating group coming out of

01:24:01 ►

old Europe

01:24:02 ►

instead they have striking similarities with the

01:24:10 ►

people who were existing in the Central Saharan situation a couple of thousand

01:24:17 ►

years before these people are called not two fins and they are a mysterious

01:24:24 ►

people no one knows where they came from and they are much more

01:24:28 ►

advanced than anyone who preceded them well in the central Sahara there is this place called the

01:24:36 ►

Tsele Plateau where there are extensive rock paintings some of them showing shamans with mushrooms

01:24:46 ►

sprouting out of their bodies

01:24:48 ►

holding mushrooms

01:24:49 ►

there’s more than one

01:24:51 ►

such depiction

01:24:53 ►

of mushroom use

01:24:55 ►

so what I would like

01:24:57 ►

to say is that these

01:24:59 ►

Natufian people coming into

01:25:01 ►

the Middle East are the

01:25:03 ►

scattered remnants of the disrupted

01:25:06 ►

partnership

01:25:08 ►

Eden

01:25:09 ►

and in fact

01:25:11 ►

they build

01:25:13 ►

first under the

01:25:16 ►

in-cut

01:25:18 ►

escarpments of cliffs

01:25:20 ►

is where we find the

01:25:22 ►

Natufian sites at

01:25:24 ►

El Wad in Israel

01:25:25 ►

at Ein

01:25:27 ►

Ein Shalon

01:25:29 ►

01:25:30 ►

the Negev

01:25:33 ►

big

01:25:35 ►

overhangs

01:25:38 ►

and they built their camps in front

01:25:40 ►

of them well this is exactly

01:25:42 ►

the situation in which the late

01:25:44 ►

Tasseli people were building and the painting styles and the colors and the techniques

01:25:50 ►

are very clearly the same read Mary set gas prayed at Plato pre historian or

01:25:58 ►

James Mallard’s book chat alvia yuk a neolithic town in anatolia and you see you know that the even a kind of burnished

01:26:09 ►

ware called sudanese 3b that is comes from uh above the first cataract in egypt is found in

01:26:19 ►

the natufian graves in palestine, that’s the early Natufian wave.

01:26:26 ►

A thousand years later, by 8500,

01:26:30 ►

Jericho is being raised.

01:26:34 ►

And Jericho is the glory of the civilized world.

01:26:39 ►

There is nothing like it at 8500 BP.

01:26:43 ►

It is an advanced culture apparently springing out of

01:26:48 ►

nothing with a tower that was you know nothing like this has been seen

01:26:56 ►

previously it’s very clear that the not to fein people who were building under

01:27:00 ►

the rock shelves transformed themselves into the people at Jericho.

01:27:05 ►

A thousand years after Jericho,

01:27:09 ►

these same people have established

01:27:11 ►

a number of urban centers,

01:27:14 ►

the most important of which is Çatalhöyük

01:27:17 ►

on the Anatolian plain of southern Turkey.

01:27:21 ►

At 8500 BC,

01:27:32 ►

Çatal is what Mary Setgast calls a premature burst of complexity and brilliance. I mean, it is something. You should take a look at this book by Mellart. I mean, this 9,000 years old the pyramids lie 4,000 years

01:27:47 ►

in the future from when this thing

01:27:50 ►

was built and yet there is glass

01:27:53 ►

beadwork, there is sculpture

01:27:55 ►

there are elaborate burials

01:27:59 ►

there is, it was a

01:28:01 ►

Taos-like structure of adobe

01:28:04 ►

apartment buildings,

01:28:06 ►

many, many levels of habitation indicating sedentary lifestyle.

01:28:12 ►

In the adobe bricks we find large grain cereals that are now extinct,

01:28:19 ►

which indicate that these people had a whole cereal technology.

01:28:23 ►

We find animal pens. we know they had goats they

01:28:26 ►

had sheep they had cattle they had gold work and it was all a religion of women a religion of the

01:28:35 ►

great goddess it was I believe the last outpost that had any connection to this earlier partnership thing in africa and you know had we

01:28:48 ►

the the time and the wherewithal we could look at the pottery and the flint chipping and the

01:28:54 ►

charcoal dad i mean there’s plenty there to chew on to make the case eventually around 6500 BC, as Chatal Hyayuk is reaching its climax at what’s called Chatal 7F, that’s the level in the stratigraphy, wheeled chariot people sweep down from the Lake Van area, the Caspian Sea, the Zagros Mountains they have

01:29:25 ►

wheel chariots and they have domesticated

01:29:30 ►

the horse and an argument about when this happened

01:29:35 ►

is rampant but the date

01:29:38 ►

continues to be set back

01:29:41 ►

well the horse is the very antithesis

01:29:45 ►

of the cow

01:29:46 ►

the cow connects you into

01:29:49 ►

that which feminizes

01:29:52 ►

which nurtures

01:29:54 ►

pastoralists

01:29:56 ►

tend to confine themselves

01:29:57 ►

to a range

01:29:58 ►

they are semi-nomadic but they have a range

01:30:01 ►

what happens when you get on the back

01:30:03 ►

of a horse

01:30:04 ►

is you see that you

01:30:06 ►

can run away from the consequences of your actions. And you say, you know, why should we plant emmer

01:30:15 ►

wheat? Why should we hunt and gather food? We can plunder. We can take it away from the people who don’t have what we have we can take their women we can take

01:30:27 ►

their food we can take their land suddenly you get all over from Denmark to Iran from the central

01:30:38 ►

Ukraine to Morocco you get what is called the Tanged Point Technocomplex

01:30:45 ►

the Tanged Point Technocomplex simply means that

01:30:48 ►

suddenly there are vast amounts

01:30:51 ►

of chipped flint and arrowhead

01:30:54 ►

greater than at any other point in the

01:30:58 ►

entire Stone Age even though the Stone Age

01:31:01 ►

is now over and people have a bone

01:31:04 ►

antler and a primitive technology working

01:31:09 ►

in other materials this proliferation of these tanged points means war has come to the human

01:31:17 ►

world and suddenly sites where no walls were built for 2,000 years.

01:31:29 ►

Walls begin to rise all over the world.

01:31:35 ►

And it’s clear that there are now haves and have-nots.

01:31:40 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:31:43 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:31:49 ►

I’ll bet that I’m not the only one who is wondering what comes next.

01:31:55 ►

Well, unfortunately, I haven’t digitized that next tape yet, and it would set this podcast back at least a day if I stopped to do that right now.

01:31:58 ►

So we’ll just leave it as a cliffhanger where we’ll have to wonder if, since 1989,

01:32:04 ►

this world still is a world of

01:32:06 ►

haves and have-nots. What do you think? Well, I’m sure that I’m not the only one here who

01:32:13 ►

really enjoyed hearing Ken Symington’s voice once again. And it brought back some fond memories of

01:32:19 ►

times when, along with Matt Palomary and a few other friends, we also joined with Ken in making interesting sounds from ancient instruments.

01:32:28 ►

And for what it’s worth,

01:32:30 ►

I have learned more about navigating difficult psychedelic experiences from Ken Symington

01:32:35 ►

than from everyone else I’ve ever known, combined.

01:32:39 ►

And in case you are also a friend of Ken’s,

01:32:42 ►

from what I hear, he is still sharp as a tack

01:32:44 ►

and enjoying his latest

01:32:46 ►

version of retirement. Well, I hope that you enjoyed Terrence’s story about his holiday elf

01:32:53 ►

experience during his student days as much as I did. Maybe someone can remember in which podcast

01:32:59 ►

it was that he told this story once before, and in that telling, he also added the part where a policeman came to

01:33:05 ►

the front door for some reason, and Terrence was so ripped that he couldn’t figure out how to unlock

01:33:10 ►

the door so the cop could get in. So Terrence yelled through the door that he should shoot the

01:33:15 ►

lock off. I still get cracked up when I think about that scene. Now, here’s a little trivia

01:33:22 ►

tidbit that I think of every time somebody mentions the name of Charles Darwin, who of course is one of the people credited with discovering the theory of evolution.

01:33:31 ►

My guess is that, like me, when you think of Charles Darwin, you recall that black and white picture of a balding old man with a long white beard, and well, that’s the image of the man you associate with this important

01:33:45 ►

theory. Well, let me ask you this. Did you know that when Darwin left on the voyage of discovery

01:33:51 ►

that led to his theory, he was only 22 years old? As I recall, he was only 26 years old by the end

01:33:59 ►

of the voyage and was already well known for his new ideas. Of course, more than 20 years would pass from the end of that voyage

01:34:06 ►

until he published on the origin of species.

01:34:09 ►

My point is that the next time a young person in their 20s

01:34:13 ►

tells you about a new idea they have,

01:34:16 ►

well, maybe you should be paying closer attention to them.

01:34:19 ►

Physicists learned that many years ago,

01:34:21 ►

and, well, when it comes to music,

01:34:23 ►

I’m still listening to bands that I liked when

01:34:25 ►

both the band members and myself were in our

01:34:28 ►

twenties. You know,

01:34:29 ►

that may be the most creative decade of

01:34:32 ►

human life. So, if that’s

01:34:34 ►

where you are right now, well, dig in

01:34:36 ►

and press on, because we can

01:34:38 ►

really use some fresh new ideas.

01:34:41 ►

And for now,

01:34:42 ►

this is Lorenzo, signing off

01:34:44 ►

from Cyberdelic space.

01:34:46 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

590 - Understanding Chaos at History’s End – Part 2

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:06 ► §

00:00:14 ► §

00:00:21 ► §

00:00:25 ► §

00:00:28 ► §

00:00:52 ► §

00:00:56 ► §

00:00:59 ► §

00:01:03 ► §

00:01:08 ► §

00:01:13 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:22 ► §

00:01:27 ► §

00:01:33 ► §

00:01:38 ► §

00:01:43 ► §

00:01:45 ► §

00:01:47 ► §

00:01:53 ► §

00:01:59 ► §

00:02:04 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:13 ► §

00:02:19 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:26 ► §

00:02:32 ► §

00:02:38 ► §

00:02:46 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:58 ► §

00:03:05 ► §

00:03:12 ► §

00:03:18 ► §

00:03:24 ► §

00:03:29 ► §

00:03:30 ► §

00:03:37 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:52 ► §

00:03:57 ► §

00:04:01 ► §

00:04:07 ► §

00:04:13 ► §

00:04:19 ► §

00:04:24 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:37 ► §

00:04:45 ► §

00:04:50 ► §

00:04:53 ► §

00:04:57 ► §

00:05:00 ► §

00:05:04 ► §

00:05:09 ► §

00:05:15 ► §

00:05:18 ► §

00:05:23 ► §

00:05:25 ► §

00:05:32 ► §

00:05:37 ► §

00:05:43 ► §

00:05:46 ► §

00:05:51 ► §

00:05:57 ► §

00:06:02 ► §

00:06:07 ► §

00:06:11 ► §

00:06:16 ► §

00:06:19 ► §