Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Minoan Crete
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Addiction to natural substances, with the exception of tobacco, is something you really have to work at.”
“There is something really insidious about synthetic drugs, about concentrating what is a vegetable essence, and very diffuse. Opium was no problem until morphine came along.”
“One of the things I think we have to disabuse ourselves of is that science knows anything about these things. The human studies were never done.”
“You may have the notion that we are a minority that feels this is important and there is a majority that feels that it’s unimportant. That isn’t the case. We are a minority who feels this is important, and there is a majority that knows nothing about it whatsoever, has no data, and no realization of what it is.”
“People such as ourselves, we are the cutting edge of neuro-psychopharmacology, because the content is the frontier, and these scientists know very little about it.”
“The official version of what can happen with these hallucinogens is very limited. There was never stress on content. The individual content of the psychedelic trip was treated like the ravings of a psychotic. In other words, it was never examined from the point of view that this person might be a reliable witness.”
“What does it mean that the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs naturally in the human brain? What does it mean that the most powerful of all natural hallucinogens is the shortest acting?”
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Transcript
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This program was originally posted on the Psychedelic Salon’s first-run Patreon feed
00:00:06 ►
three months ago. As you know, I’m publishing new Salon 1.0 programs first on Patreon
00:00:12 ►
as a way to thank my supporters there. Additionally, for only $1 a month,
00:00:17 ►
they can also join me every Monday evening for a live edition of the Salon,
00:00:22 ►
where we sometimes jointly interview featured speakers
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whose conversations I also publish on the podcast from time to time.
00:00:29 ►
Now, here is the program from which you heard a preview three months ago. Linguistic Archit. L-V-E-C-H-I-N-G-S Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:52 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:56 ►
And I want to welcome all of our new salonners to this Salon 3.0 first-run podcast being streamed on Patreon.
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Salon 3.0, first run podcast being streamed on Patreon.
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As you know, in three months, this entire program will also be streamed on my original salon feeds.
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And I’ll put a little sample of this podcast up there this week as well.
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That way, should the rest of our fellow salonners not want to wait until February of 2019 to listen to this entire Terrence McKenna talk,
00:01:25 ►
well, it’ll only cost them a dollar a month.
00:01:30 ►
And that also includes admission each and every Monday evening to the live version of this salon.
00:01:33 ►
That’s right, every Monday night at 6.30 p.m. Pacific Time,
00:01:37 ►
the Psychedelic Salon goes live.
00:01:39 ►
And each Monday around noon,
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I send a personal email to all of my supporters on Patreon,
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and that’s where they’ll find the link for that night’s live salon.
00:01:49 ►
Although our numbers are still small, well, we’ve still had fellow salonners from Russia,
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Uruguay, Slovenia, New Zealand, England, Australia, several other countries,
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and, well, from all over the states join us.
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And you’re free to just call in by phone and lurk if you like.
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You know, it’s just a nice friendly chat around our little electronic fire,
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and I hope that you make it once in a while.
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In fact, tomorrow, November 19th,
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our guests in the live salon will be Michael McCoy and Jeff McGee,
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two filmmakers who have just completed a three-year odyssey
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following Peter Gorman around
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the jungle and in other adventures, and well, they documented it with over 400 hours of video.
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And the film’s a little shorter than that, though. They’ve actually neatly edited it down to about
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an hour and a half. So, if you are interested in jungle adventures, well, I hope you’ll tune in
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tomorrow night.
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Now, when the cassette tape recording of Terrence’s lecture ran out last week,
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well, it left us with a little cliffhanger.
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So you can imagine my trepidation when I digitize the next tape in the series,
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and I hope to see if there was continuity.
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Well, what I’m going to do right now is to play that end of the recording from last week, and then I’ll follow it with today’s tape.
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And suddenly, sites where no walls were built for 2,000 years,
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walls begin to rise all over the world.
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And it’s clear that there are now haves and have-nots.
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And now, imagine my pleasure when the following came up on the next tape of the June 1989
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Terence McKenna Workshop at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California.
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And the pastoral civilizations that are devoted to the great goddess retreat behind high walls.
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In 6500 BC, these chariot people sweep down and they destroy Chatal Yuyuk.
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That ends it. That ends the goddess, the great goddess,
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as the unchallenged icon of the human image of the sacred in the
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Middle East. Now there are a series of goddesses then, but progressively through time their consort
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becomes more and more important. And then by the time you get to what I was taught in school were the great early civilizations,
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Sumer, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt.
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By the time you get to those civilizations, it’s a total ego trip, a god-king.
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Everybody has hierarchically oriented themselves toward the ruler,
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who is the visible manifestation of God.
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He owns everything and it’s always a he.
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So what has happened here is that in the absence of the mushroom,
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agriculture rather than pastoralism,
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city building rather than nomoralism, city building, rather than nomadism,
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and the aggrandizement of the ego
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have put themselves in place.
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And then the last remnants of Chattal
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go to Minoan Crete,
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where they carry on for a few millennia a unique islanded uh partnership
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society but what’s going on throughout the rest of the world is this ego uh male dominator style
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of which we are the inheritors and the perfectors because there are other wrinkles which come along through time.
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This clash between these wheeled chariot vehicle people
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and these pastoralists creates then the Indo-European amalgam,
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which is the inspiration for the Avestan literature,
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the inspiration for the Rick Vedas.
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And what I want to say is
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that at this point begins
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a frantic search for substitutes
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for the original connection
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to the goddess.
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And what also begins is
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the sense of abandonment,
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the sense of existentialment, the sense of existential
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embeddedness in history
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the sense of loss of control
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and
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plants like
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Amanita muscaria, Wasson’s
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candidate for Soma
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Pagamon harmala
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David Flattery’s
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candidate for Soma
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this book that I
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asked Kamran to look at
00:06:47 ►
some of the rest of you may be interested
00:06:49 ►
this is the most recent
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important book
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about drugs to be published
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it’s called Haulma
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and Harmaline
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and it’s by David Flattery
00:07:01 ►
it’s Middle
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Near Eastern Studies publication number 21.
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You can order it
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from UC Press
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on your credit card
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if you need a copy.
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And it will argue
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that Soma was not
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Amanita muscaria,
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that it was Pergamon harmala.
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And it makes a strong case.
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I mean, I regard now
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the whole question
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as totally reopened.
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Gordon Wasson was a lovely person and a great explorer,
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and his accomplishments in the Oaxacan highlands
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can never be gainsayed or naysayed,
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but he was slightly overeager on this Amanita Muscaria
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business
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throughout the world
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this dominator model
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triumphed
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the only place where it didn’t triumph
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in our cultural
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in the threads
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that lead into our cultural
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heritage was in
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Minoan Crete and in Minoan Crete
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and in Minoan Crete
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the mysteries continue to be practiced
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but over thousands of years
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it retreated into ritual
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and then mere symbol
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one of the peculiar features of Minoan religion
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is what is called pillar worship
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the aniconic pillar that occurs in the center of every Minoan shrine
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I believe is the aniconic image of the mushroom
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in the same way that the Shiva lingam becomes an aniconic image of the male sexual organ the the an iconic image in
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Minoan religion is an image of the mushroom in the late phase of Minoan
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religion there is no question that opium was the drug of choice and in fact the
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linear the the linear B tablets that Michael Ventress deciphered they
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couldn’t believe their eyes
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when they saw what the scale of the opium production
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well if you know anything about opium and junk
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you know it is what you take for pain
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cultural pain, group pain, personal pain
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the drugging of late Minoan culture
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is I believe a response
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to the slow death of the partnership society even at that it is from Minoan
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religion that the mystical wellsprings of Greek religion spring the the pantheon of the Thracian Greeks they were pretty hard-headed
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types the the mystical element in Greek religion the orthic element the
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Dionysian element the celebration of Persephone and Demeter and all of that, those are Minoan threads
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brought in to Greek religion.
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And that’s the last time
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that in our cultural line of development
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that there was access
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to the mystical tremendum.
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Wasson made an interesting case
00:10:27 ►
that what was used at Eleusis
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was ergotized beer
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as you know ergot is a smut
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that can grow on domesticated grains
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and ergotized beer would be heavy
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with LSD-like alkaloids.
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As I read Wasson’s work to write this book for Bantam,
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I was frustrated.
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Why, if you believe ergotized beer was the mystery of Eleusis,
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why don’t you brew some ergotized beer and take it?
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And the answer is, I think that this would be pretty scary Eleusis operated for 2,000 years every September several thousand people
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were exposed to the mystery in an inner sanctum called the Telestereon. I find it hard to believe that you could give ergot beer
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to a couple of thousand people once a year
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and not have the mystery get a certain reputation for being dangerous
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because ergot is dangerous.
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If you, you know, in the Middle Ages
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there were outbreaks of ergot-infected rye.
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In fact, there was one outbreak in France in the 1100s where several thousand people died.
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Well, now there are arguments to this and people can say, well, there must have been a strain of ergot that produced psychedelic alkaloids in great quantity and didn’t produce toxins very much.
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Can anybody come up with a strain of claviceps?
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This is Ergot.
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Can anybody come up with a strain that won’t kill you if you miss the mark?
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He talks about it, but they never got down to uh the acid test you know they never
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brewed it up and did it now uh robert graves who was the guy who turned the watsons on to the idea
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of going to mexico to look for mushrooms he had an entirely different idea which Wasson mysteriously fails to even mention
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in his book on Eleusis
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I think he should have at least
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denounced the guy’s position
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and showed what was wrong with it
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what Graves argued was
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he said at these mystery sites
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they’re always drinking something
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and they always publish the recipe of what they’re drinking
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and the ingredients are always the same water rye sugar a couple of other things and he said that that this recipe was an Ogham.
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Do you know what an Ogham is?
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An Ogham is where you have a list and the first letter of each item in the list
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spells a word.
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It’s an old Irish trick.
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It’s a mnemonic trick.
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He said that the recipes for ergot were an Ogham.
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And if you arranged the ingredients
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you could always spell the greek word mykos mushrooms so he said you know all this stuff
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about barley and all that that’s just nonsense they were eating mushrooms. Evidence is thin, but there is some evidence.
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In A.B. Cook’s book, Zeus,
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there’s a picture of Tryptolemius,
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who is a figure in the Demeter mysteries,
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holding what seems very clearly to be a mushroom.
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Of course, the mushroom has a phallic aspect,
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and you do get disembodied phalli,
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both in Greek and Roman art
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so if it’s ambiguous you can’t tell
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is this an autonomous male member running around
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or is this a small pointed cap mushroom
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in any case
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whatever was being done at Eleusis
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that is the last contact
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we had with the mystery
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and by that time opium
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was a drug that was used in the ancient world
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we view opium as virulently addicting
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however it wasn’t noticed
00:15:04 ►
that opium was addicting
00:15:06 ►
until 1600 when
00:15:08 ►
John Playfair in a
00:15:10 ►
book of his mentioned
00:15:12 ►
the addiction syndrome
00:15:13 ►
it was used for 3000 years
00:15:16 ►
with nobody noticing that you could
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get hooked on opium
00:15:19 ►
so the virulence of the addiction
00:15:22 ►
is somewhat overstated
00:15:23 ►
I mean I myself have smoked opium many days and weeks in succession
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and then gotten on an airplane and flown to some benighted country
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where they didn’t have opium, and it was no problem.
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I mean, you just forget it.
00:15:39 ►
Addiction to natural substances, with the exception of tobacco
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is something you really have to work at
00:15:49 ►
but the abandonment
00:15:53 ►
of this partnership society in Africa
00:15:55 ►
set us up with a longing
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an itch that we have to scratch
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and this is why
00:16:04 ►
we are the addictive creatures that we are why i said
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last night we are the children of a dysfunctional relationship to the past we were literally torn
00:16:16 ►
from the bosom of a relationship that held down pathology in our species because the ego is a pathological state,
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extreme ego inflation.
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Once the medication was withdrawn,
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once the plant was no longer accessible,
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we developed all kinds of substitutes
00:16:43 ►
and all kinds of neurotic expressions of this situation of incompleteness that we feel in ourselves.
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And this has gone on until the present day.
00:17:02 ►
I can talk some about that this afternoon,
00:17:04 ►
the way in which, for instance,
00:17:11 ►
the fermentation of fruit juices and of honey to make mead created the alternate path of alcoholic intoxication.
00:17:17 ►
But you see, beers and wines can never be more than 17% alcohol by volume because when a fermentation process
00:17:30 ►
reaches 17% alcohol, the alcohol kills the organism that is doing the fermentation. So
00:17:37 ►
unless you have a technique for distilling alcohol, you cannot make it stronger than 17% well we don’t know exactly there seem to
00:17:49 ►
be notable exceptions to this where we don’t quite understand what’s happening for instance the Roman
00:17:56 ►
historian Pliny describes Roman wines so strong that when they were thrown onto fires they burned this seems to indicate
00:18:08 ►
some kind of distillation process and it has been speculated that with a simple bell-shaped
00:18:15 ►
apparatus you could put wool in the top of it and very laboriously wring distilled alcohol out of wool
00:18:25 ►
but the standard method of putting it into
00:18:28 ►
a condenser to get it out was not developed
00:18:32 ►
until an alchemist Raymond Lull
00:18:35 ►
figured this out
00:18:37 ►
in the 15th century or in the
00:18:40 ►
14th century once he had figured it out
00:18:44 ►
Lull believed that he had discovered
00:18:46 ►
the alchemical elixir of life
00:18:48 ►
on the basis of his invention of distilled alcohol
00:18:52 ►
and his drinking of a large amount of it
00:18:55 ►
he proclaimed the eminent end of the world
00:18:59 ►
he felt that when you have dope this good
00:19:02 ►
can Christ be far behind
00:19:04 ►
and he urged other people uh friends of his alchemical colleagues to also experiment with
00:19:15 ►
this at which they did very successfully and this is the basis for the cordials and the brandies and all of this stuff that we’re familiar with.
00:19:27 ►
There is something really insidious about synthetic drugs,
00:19:34 ►
about concentrating what is a vegetable essence and very diffuse.
00:19:43 ►
Opium was no problem until morphine came along morphine
00:19:49 ►
appears hardly a problem in the context of heroin heroin was invented to cure morphine
00:19:58 ►
addiction that was the idea with it coca you know, has been used for thousands and thousands of years without a problem. Cocaine very quickly develops into a problem. The enthusiasts of cocaine in the 19th century, Freud and his school, were riding on the great wave of optimism about cocaine
00:20:25 ►
that clustered around it when it was found to be a local anesthetic.
00:20:30 ►
The other thing is peculiar routes of administration have been created.
00:20:38 ►
The enema is a natural route of administration
00:20:40 ►
that was created by Amazonian Indians thousands of years ago
00:20:45 ►
because they had rubber
00:20:47 ►
and they figured out that they could
00:20:50 ►
avoid vomiting and toxicity
00:20:51 ►
by using enemas
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the hypodermic syringe
00:20:55 ►
was invented in 1856
00:20:58 ►
just a few years
00:21:00 ►
after the invention of morphine
00:21:02 ►
and just in time
00:21:04 ►
for the American Civil War
00:21:07 ►
and the Franco-Prussian War,
00:21:09 ►
just in time to inject a lot of morphine into wounded soldiers
00:21:15 ►
and then release them into the American and European population
00:21:19 ►
as morphine addicts.
00:21:22 ►
That was the beginning of that
00:21:25 ►
it came out of the simultaneous wars
00:21:28 ►
on two continents
00:21:30 ►
coming into
00:21:32 ►
the 20th century
00:21:33 ►
amphetamines
00:21:36 ►
were invented in the late 19th century
00:21:38 ►
all of these synthetics
00:21:40 ►
and they seem to
00:21:42 ►
push our buttons
00:21:43 ►
in a way that these natural compounds don’t do
00:21:47 ►
and you get serious addiction syndromes
00:21:51 ►
especially when you use these new routes of administration.
00:21:56 ►
Well, simultaneously with all this development in pharmacology
00:22:00 ►
coming out of German successes in molecular chemistry
00:22:04 ►
in the 19th century,
00:22:07 ►
a vast amount of ethnographic data is being collected.
00:22:11 ►
The modern science of mythology and anthropology is born.
00:22:18 ►
So in the 20th century,
00:22:21 ►
we suddenly get a huge amount of anthropological data about strange plants
00:22:27 ►
being used by strange people in far-off corners of the world mescaline becomes very interesting Helen and Havelock Ellis and Clouvert
00:22:47 ►
all of these people
00:22:49 ►
in the 30s, 40s and 50s
00:22:54 ►
the mushroom story
00:22:55 ►
slowly breaks
00:22:57 ►
Albert Hoffman
00:22:59 ►
invents LSD
00:23:01 ►
it doesn’t really make itself
00:23:03 ►
known in the scientific literature
00:23:05 ►
until the late 40s.
00:23:08 ►
A very interesting thing
00:23:10 ►
about our particular area of interest
00:23:13 ►
that astonished me,
00:23:15 ►
all the talking I’ve been doing about it,
00:23:18 ►
is the brevity of the window of research.
00:23:24 ►
What I’m particularly interested in are the indole hallucinogens. brevity of the window of research.
00:23:27 ►
What I’m particularly interested in are the indole hallucinogens.
00:23:30 ►
Ibogaine is an indole hallucinogen.
00:23:33 ►
It wasn’t known before 1850.
00:23:36 ►
It wasn’t characterized by the turn of the century.
00:23:40 ►
It has never had any vogue
00:23:42 ►
as a social drug in the United States.
00:23:44 ►
It has never been used significantly in psychotherapy.
00:23:49 ►
No human studies have ever been done on it.
00:23:52 ►
That’s Ibogaine.
00:23:54 ►
LSD, the one member of the family that got a lot of attention,
00:23:58 ►
it was not announced in the scientific literature until 1947.
00:24:04 ►
It was not announced in the scientific literature until 1947.
00:24:12 ►
By 1967, it was illegal to do human studies on it in the United States. That’s a 20-year window, and that was the longest window any of these things ever got.
00:24:19 ►
Psilocybin was characterized by Hoffman in 55, I believe.
00:24:26 ►
By 67, it was illegal.
00:24:31 ►
DMT was discovered by the Czech chemist Zara in 56.
00:24:37 ►
By 66, it was illegal.
00:24:40 ►
And the amount of human studies that had been done in that time were very brief.
00:24:44 ►
So one of the ideas that I think we have to disabuse ourselves of
00:24:49 ►
is that science knows anything about these things.
00:24:53 ►
The human studies were never done.
00:24:56 ►
I was talking to somebody who was involved in all this stuff the other day
00:25:00 ►
and they were telling me they got a protocol to study LSD they were going to have
00:25:07 ►
a hundred subjects it was a big project set and setting was under control it was being run by
00:25:15 ►
sensitive psychedelic people it wasn’t the white coat and clipboard set was all set to begin on Monday morning.
00:25:30 ►
Saturday afternoon, Art Linkletter’s daughter takes LSD and drowns herself in a swimming pool.
00:25:32 ►
By Monday morning, the LSD project was dead in the water.
00:25:37 ►
So this thing, you may have the notion that we are a minority
00:25:44 ►
that feels this is important and there
00:25:48 ►
is a majority that feels that it’s unimportant that isn’t the case we are a minority who feels
00:25:55 ►
this is important and there is a majority that knows nothing about it whatsoever, has no data and no realization of what it is.
00:26:09 ►
An interesting case, an interesting example
00:26:11 ►
of how science misses the boat.
00:26:14 ►
I’ll tell this story and then I’ll let you go.
00:26:19 ►
DMT is a very powerful short-acting hallucinogen,
00:26:23 ►
the most powerful.
00:26:24 ►
We’ll talk more about it in terms of its content,
00:26:27 ►
but what I want to refer to here is
00:26:29 ►
you smoke DMT.
00:26:33 ►
This is how you do it.
00:26:34 ►
This is how everybody does it.
00:26:37 ►
Now, it can be shot,
00:26:40 ►
but I think that’s really a barrier.
00:26:43 ►
That’s something.
00:26:44 ►
I don’t think you should shoot anything because I just think, you know, I think that’s really a barrier. That’s something. I don’t think you should shoot anything
00:26:46 ►
because I just think, you know,
00:26:49 ►
it’s a way of transmitting diseases.
00:26:52 ►
It sets a funny psychology
00:26:54 ►
toward the integrity of your own body.
00:26:57 ►
And it’s just a kind of bad habit to get into.
00:27:04 ►
Nevertheless, scientists love to inject things into people.
00:27:10 ►
They love the injection.
00:27:12 ►
Why do they love it?
00:27:14 ►
Well, aside from the fact that you get to stick somebody,
00:27:17 ►
the reason they love it is because you can absolutely control the dose.
00:27:23 ►
You see the barrel of the syringe, you see that there’s 30
00:27:27 ►
milligrams of X there, you watch it go into the muscle, and you write in your clipboard,
00:27:33 ►
30 milligrams IM. What they object to about smoking is you can’t be sure that the person
00:27:39 ►
got the whole dose, you can’t be sure that the whole dose crossed the blood-brain barrier you can’t be sure nevertheless this is how people do DMT funny thing is
00:27:51 ►
when you shoot DMT it’s not as impressive it’s slower to come on it’s
00:28:00 ►
slower to come away from it It lasts about 45 minutes,
00:28:06 ►
and it’s a low hill,
00:28:12 ►
not this mind-shattering spike of activity that drops you down.
00:28:13 ►
So if you look up dimethyltryptamine
00:28:17 ►
in Goodman and Gilman or the Merck Index
00:28:20 ►
or the physician, whatever,
00:28:22 ►
it will say short-acting hallucinogen,
00:28:27 ►
45 minutes to one hour in duration.
00:28:31 ►
This is not what DMT is at all.
00:28:33 ►
DMT lasts 7 to 12 minutes
00:28:37 ►
and is spectacular.
00:28:39 ►
Well, finally now,
00:28:41 ►
a project is getting started
00:28:44 ►
to study DMT where the people will actually do it the way
00:28:49 ►
human beings do it for the first time science will lower itself to administering a drug in the
00:28:57 ►
manner in which it is actually used by the user in society but it’s taken 30 years to get them to understand
00:29:06 ►
something that simple
00:29:08 ►
so
00:29:08 ►
what this means is
00:29:11 ►
that people such as ourselves
00:29:14 ►
we are
00:29:15 ►
the cutting edge of
00:29:17 ►
neuropsychopharmacology
00:29:19 ►
because
00:29:20 ►
the content
00:29:23 ►
is the frontier,
00:29:25 ►
and these scientist types know very little about it.
00:29:29 ►
I mean, occasionally the most daring of them will take a trip.
00:29:35 ►
But the great names that you associate with the psychedelic movement,
00:29:42 ►
with certain notable exceptions,
00:29:44 ►
are fairly cautious
00:29:46 ►
users
00:29:47 ►
I mean people who have their names written all over
00:29:50 ►
this stuff when you actually
00:29:51 ►
pin them down they say
00:29:53 ►
well I took psilocybin four times
00:29:56 ►
and I took
00:29:58 ►
X and Y a few times
00:30:00 ►
this doesn’t
00:30:01 ►
it’s not to take it
00:30:04 ►
and prove that you can survive it it not to take it and prove that you can survive it it’s
00:30:06 ►
to take it and embrace it and be part of
00:30:10 ►
it so science must stand aside unless
00:30:14 ►
it’s willing to get its feet wet this
00:30:17 ►
still belongs to courageous individuals
00:30:21 ►
who are willing to put their body mind system on the line and then
00:30:27 ►
draw conclusions from it so in trying to inspire you to do research to think
00:30:35 ►
about ways in which whatever your specialty if you’re a medical researcher
00:30:40 ►
and neurophysiologist a therapist therapist, a chemist, an anthropologist, a linguist, whatever you are,
00:30:47 ►
don’t be in awe of science. Science has nothing to say here. Science is a puppy dog lagging behind
00:30:57 ►
the train. This is an issue where the people are forcing the focus.
00:31:06 ►
Well, I think that’s enough.
00:31:08 ►
The time slipped by.
00:31:10 ►
You weren’t violent enough in insisting on interrupting and asking questions.
00:31:15 ►
We’ll go through more of this.
00:31:17 ►
This is the basic notion that I want to put across,
00:31:21 ►
that a disturbed symbiosis in prehistory
00:31:25 ►
is what makes
00:31:27 ►
the hallucinogens
00:31:28 ►
so important in the present
00:31:31 ►
because now,
00:31:32 ►
knowing what we know,
00:31:34 ►
we can restore
00:31:35 ►
that symbiosis.
00:31:37 ►
We can take up
00:31:38 ►
where we left off
00:31:40 ►
at Eleusis,
00:31:41 ►
at Chatal Hiuyuk,
00:31:43 ►
and at Jericho.
00:31:44 ►
We can reclaim what has been lost since Eden
00:31:49 ►
we’ll meet here at 4
00:31:52 ►
thank you
00:31:54 ►
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applause applause applause applause applause applause okay is it working for you Paul?
00:32:07 ►
well this morning I made sort of a
00:32:11 ►
three dimensional rational
00:32:14 ►
argument from anthropological
00:32:18 ►
and archaeological and pharmacological
00:32:21 ►
data toward
00:32:23 ►
trying to convince the listener
00:32:26 ►
that hallucinogens were involved
00:32:31 ►
in the origins of human consciousness,
00:32:34 ►
that behind the abandonment of that
00:32:37 ►
lies our neurotic relationship to nature,
00:32:41 ►
and so forth.
00:32:43 ►
So it was like an analysis of the phenomenon
00:32:47 ►
of millennia of hallucinogenic drug taking
00:32:53 ►
and then millennia of being away from it.
00:32:56 ►
What I thought might be,
00:32:59 ►
this is sort of the case that we have to make to our critics.
00:33:04 ►
This is the information that has to be marshaled and argued from
00:33:08 ►
if we are serious about a psychedelic theory of the origin of consciousness.
00:33:15 ►
But what I thought it might be interesting to talk about this afternoon
00:33:20 ►
is something which is, I think, dearer probably to each of us as an individual
00:33:28 ►
which is just maybe to talk a little
00:33:32 ►
about the actual phenomenology of these states
00:33:36 ►
and what seems to be going on
00:33:40 ►
there
00:33:41 ►
in writing this book that I’ve been working on
00:33:46 ►
I’ve seen how the image
00:33:49 ►
of the unconscious perceived
00:33:51 ►
through drugs has been
00:33:54 ►
it’s like an archetype that has been
00:33:58 ►
evolving over at least three or four
00:34:01 ►
hundred years and the strong
00:34:04 ►
formative influence
00:34:06 ►
on the archetype
00:34:09 ►
of the psychedelic
00:34:10 ►
experience comes from
00:34:12 ►
two directions
00:34:13 ►
it comes from the hashish
00:34:16 ►
vision
00:34:17 ►
and the opium dream
00:34:20 ►
these are the two
00:34:22 ►
sources of pre
00:34:24 ►
20th century psychedelic insight
00:34:27 ►
that the western mind had access to
00:34:30 ►
well
00:34:31 ►
for reasons too complex to go into
00:34:35 ►
here, hashish did not
00:34:38 ►
have a vogue in Europe
00:34:41 ►
the way opium did
00:34:44 ►
it was left for Americans
00:34:46 ►
to seriously explore hashish
00:34:50 ►
as a vehicle for visionary hallucination,
00:34:54 ►
specifically Bayard Taylor,
00:34:57 ►
who in a book called
00:34:59 ►
In the Lands of the Saracen
00:35:00 ►
wrote a marvelous account
00:35:02 ►
of eating hashish in Damascus in 1840
00:35:05 ►
I mean it’s just a scream
00:35:07 ►
and of course the irreproachable Fitzhugh Ludlow
00:35:12 ►
who ate hashish and attended
00:35:15 ►
Yale teas for young ladies
00:35:18 ►
as a freshman at Yale in 1853
00:35:22 ►
and describes having to excuse himself
00:35:25 ►
from various faculty
00:35:27 ►
student functions when
00:35:29 ►
as he puts it the wallpaper began
00:35:32 ►
to crawl and Chinese
00:35:33 ►
mandarins burst from the umbrella
00:35:36 ►
stand then I
00:35:37 ►
made my departure least I
00:35:40 ►
betray myself
00:35:41 ►
the
00:35:43 ►
earliest recorded instance of someone concerned about losing their cool.
00:35:51 ►
But the stronger of these two currents of thought was the opium dream.
00:35:57 ►
And the opium dream laudanum was tincture of opium an alcoholic extract of opium
00:36:07 ►
and everybody was into this stuff
00:36:10 ►
from about 1795 through
00:36:13 ►
much of the 18th century
00:36:16 ►
not only the great names associated
00:36:20 ►
with it Coleridge and De Quincey
00:36:22 ►
but Byron and Shelley
00:36:25 ►
all of these people dabbled in opium
00:36:27 ►
well what comes out of the English romantic imaginations
00:36:32 ►
contact with the reveries of opium
00:36:34 ►
is a world
00:36:37 ►
of desolated ruins
00:36:40 ►
and pale women
00:36:43 ►
wailing beneath a demon moon
00:36:46 ►
and black oceans sucking
00:36:49 ►
at crumbling rock where mordant
00:36:52 ►
vegetation tumbles down to
00:36:55 ►
storm whipped shores right this is
00:36:58 ►
the romantic imagination and it has
00:37:01 ►
this morbid stillness
00:37:04 ►
the stillness of Morphea
00:37:07 ►
the stillness of the god of dreams
00:37:10 ►
and this influences the gothic conception in literature
00:37:14 ►
so forth and so on
00:37:15 ►
when
00:37:18 ►
this thing about the history
00:37:22 ►
of how people image drugs and drug states reminds me, I will digress briefly, of a thing that happened to me that always amused me.
00:37:35 ►
I was on an ocean liner headed for the Seychelles from India in 1969.
00:37:41 ►
And we were furiously smoking hash, smuggling hash
00:37:46 ►
eating hash
00:37:47 ►
and there was a South African mercenary
00:37:50 ►
on this boat
00:37:51 ►
and he didn’t know anything about
00:37:53 ►
cannabis but he was very interested
00:37:56 ►
so he was questioning me
00:37:58 ►
about
00:37:59 ►
about hashish
00:38:02 ►
and he asked this
00:38:03 ►
wonderful question question he said
00:38:05 ►
is it law a seance?
00:38:20 ►
sort of
00:38:21 ►
this question told me a great deal about him
00:38:26 ►
and didn’t give me a lot of hope
00:38:28 ►
that he would turn into a hardened hash head
00:38:30 ►
so see what this is saying is that our images
00:38:34 ►
of the transcendental realm
00:38:37 ►
that we inherit from the past inevitably color
00:38:40 ►
whatever manifestation of it we encounter
00:38:43 ►
in the future so for him the transcendental realm meant table tapping
00:38:48 ►
parties that his mother used to hold in Jayburg
00:38:52 ►
so this prompted the question
00:38:54 ►
is it like a seance
00:38:56 ►
that’s right
00:38:59 ►
so
00:39:01 ►
coming into the 20th century
00:39:06 ►
that was it, the hashish and the opium thing
00:39:09 ►
well then Freud
00:39:11 ►
and behind him Jung began to look
00:39:15 ►
at the products of pathological fantasy
00:39:19 ►
and the products of folklore
00:39:21 ►
and alchemy
00:39:23 ►
and the
00:39:25 ►
aroused imagination
00:39:27 ►
in its many manifestations
00:39:29 ►
in religion and shamanism
00:39:31 ►
and they proposed
00:39:33 ►
then there was a widening
00:39:35 ►
of the notion of this
00:39:37 ►
other realm
00:39:38 ►
and
00:39:39 ►
as LSD was
00:39:43 ►
developed this was what was behind, this was what was in the minds of most of the people who were dealing with LSD.
00:39:51 ►
They saw it as a searchlight that could be turned on to illuminate the dark regions of the unconscious.
00:40:00 ►
And I suppose if you were Freudian and you used LSD you searched for Oedipal traces
00:40:06 ►
and all this stuff and if you were a Jungian
00:40:09 ►
you were seeing alchemical motifs
00:40:11 ►
and transformative motifs drawn from
00:40:14 ►
folklore and that sort of thing
00:40:17 ►
well this worked for LSD
00:40:21 ►
for reasons that we maybe
00:40:24 ►
don’t have to talk about
00:40:26 ►
my take on it would be
00:40:28 ►
that it has
00:40:30 ►
LSD
00:40:32 ►
is like a mirror
00:40:33 ►
it’s like a perfect mirror
00:40:35 ►
it magnifies whatever is held
00:40:38 ►
up before it
00:40:39 ►
but unlike
00:40:40 ►
some of these other
00:40:43 ►
indole hallucocenogens
00:40:45 ►
which are demagogic
00:40:49 ►
in their wish to convey information
00:40:52 ►
LSD is like perfect mind, perfect mirror
00:40:57 ►
and the mushroom is like a street corner preacher
00:41:01 ►
who’s just haranguing you with some visionary epic.
00:41:05 ►
So LSD was a fortuitous or a synchronistically important choice then
00:41:16 ►
because it confirmed that Freudian and Jungian expectation
00:41:21 ►
and they reported remarkable success with the treatment of neurosis
00:41:26 ►
and so on
00:41:27 ►
what then
00:41:30 ►
came on after
00:41:32 ►
the
00:41:32 ►
all of these things were made illegal
00:41:36 ►
in the 70s
00:41:38 ►
was a
00:41:39 ►
much larger population began
00:41:42 ►
to be exposed to psilocybin
00:41:44 ►
not to psilocybin the compound, but to mushrooms.
00:41:48 ►
And it’s a very interesting point that the people who took psilocybin
00:41:55 ►
around the Harvard psilocybin project in the 60s
00:42:01 ►
were completely unprepared for the difference
00:42:06 ►
between that and fresh mushrooms
00:42:09 ►
the difference is considerable
00:42:12 ►
and there is no rational reason from a scientific point of view
00:42:16 ►
why this should be
00:42:17 ►
so it’s confounding
00:42:19 ►
psilocybin and the mushroom should be the same thing
00:42:25 ►
otherwise you must be a mystic of some sort
00:42:29 ►
because you’re hypothesizing that
00:42:31 ►
there’s something better about the mushroom
00:42:34 ►
nevertheless this seems to be experientially
00:42:37 ►
confirmable so that the establishment picture
00:42:41 ►
of psilocybin was flawed
00:42:44 ►
in the literature in fact fact, the literature of
00:42:48 ►
hallucinogenic drugs up to 1970, let’s see, all revolves around the notion that hallucinogenic
00:42:58 ►
drugs are more or less like LSD, last half as long as LSD
00:43:05 ►
or twice as long as LSD.
00:43:07 ►
It’s all measured against this.
00:43:10 ►
They were completely infatuated
00:43:12 ►
for some reason with LSD,
00:43:14 ►
as was the entire culture,
00:43:16 ►
probably from the pharmacological point of view,
00:43:19 ►
because it was active in the nanogram range,
00:43:23 ►
in the range of millions of a gram. This is still to this day
00:43:27 ►
astonishing that any drug should be active in the
00:43:32 ►
nanogram range and that a hallucinogen
00:43:35 ►
should be active for me confirms the quantum mechanical
00:43:40 ►
connection of consciousness because so little
00:43:44 ►
matter is in play
00:43:46 ►
in that situation where you take 500 gamma,
00:43:52 ►
one five thousandth of a gram.
00:43:55 ►
It’s pretty amazing.
00:43:57 ►
So the official version of what can happen
00:44:03 ►
with these hallucinogens is very limited.
00:44:07 ►
And there was never stress on content.
00:44:11 ►
The individual content of the psychedelic trip was treated like the ravings of a psychotic.
00:44:18 ►
In other words, it was never examined from the point of view that this person might actually be a reliable witness if
00:44:26 ►
you read the literature of what psychedelic drugs do like if you read a book like Hoffer and Osmond’s
00:44:33 ►
book how the synaginous classic in the field you will get the idea that what these drugs do is they cause pictures before the eyes
00:44:48 ►
colored shapes, moving grids
00:44:51 ►
lattices, spontaneous laughter
00:44:55 ►
confusion
00:44:59 ►
anxiety and hysteria
00:45:03 ►
this is the range
00:45:05 ►
what they’re not telling you is
00:45:08 ►
what it feels like to be in a situation
00:45:12 ►
where you experience spontaneous laughter
00:45:14 ►
anxiety, little pictures and hysteria
00:45:18 ►
all at once
00:45:19 ►
you see
00:45:21 ►
it’s a complete dissolving
00:45:26 ►
of your personality
00:45:28 ►
of the boundary constraints
00:45:30 ►
everything
00:45:31 ►
and so then what was offered
00:45:34 ►
after Freud and Jung
00:45:36 ►
by Aldous Huxley and people like that
00:45:39 ►
to model it
00:45:40 ►
was some kind of confirmation of eastern philosophy
00:45:44 ►
it was embraced that way and it was
00:45:48 ►
said that we should read meister eckhart and the upanishads particularly the manduki upanishad
00:45:55 ►
and that we should sleep with the tibetan book of the dead at our elbow and that a lot of thought given to ego loss and the white light and this kind of thing.
00:46:08 ►
Well, this now, to me, seems fairly superficial.
00:46:14 ►
In a way, it spawned a whole renaissance in Far Eastern studies,
00:46:18 ►
but those people are not very psychedelic.
00:46:22 ►
And the people who use those metaphors
00:46:24 ►
seem not to be present in the field anymore
00:46:27 ►
so then in the 70s
00:46:32 ►
I tried to launch a meme
00:46:35 ►
based around the idea
00:46:38 ►
that these things were extraterrestrial pheromones
00:46:42 ►
that they were in fact
00:46:44 ►
highly engineered
00:46:46 ►
message units from
00:46:48 ►
intelligent species that by some
00:46:52 ►
strategy had penetrated this sector
00:46:55 ►
of the space-time cosmos with a technology
00:46:58 ►
that allowed them to essentially engineer
00:47:01 ►
a virus-like information-bearing
00:47:05 ►
biomechanical device which could be
00:47:09 ►
bled into the ecology of a planet
00:47:12 ►
and would summon out of that planet
00:47:14 ►
intelligent organization after a million years
00:47:18 ►
or so. And I’m still not entirely
00:47:21 ►
uncomfortable with this idea.
00:47:24 ►
I mean, there are reasons to wonder
00:47:26 ►
more recently
00:47:30 ►
a counter meme has come forward that offers
00:47:35 ►
another possibility that is that
00:47:39 ►
somehow the planet itself is an
00:47:43 ►
organized infilecki
00:47:45 ►
and that somehow we are within
00:47:48 ►
the geocognitive field
00:47:53 ►
of some kind of planetary mind
00:47:55 ►
that is orchestrating history
00:47:58 ►
well now notice what these two theories
00:48:01 ►
have in common, the Gaian mind theory
00:48:04 ►
and the extraterrestrial intervention theory.
00:48:08 ►
They are theories that come forward out of a need to account for the presence in the psychedelic experience.
00:48:20 ►
This is not something that LSD ever talked much about.
00:48:23 ►
This is not something that LSD ever talked much about. If people were encountering aliens,
00:48:27 ►
they were doing so in a highly idiosyncratic and non-repeatable way.
00:48:32 ►
I don’t think the flying saucer was a serious part of the original Haight-Ashbury ethos.
00:48:42 ►
I think the unicorn and the rainbow,
00:48:45 ►
but the flying saucer was a later understanding.
00:48:49 ►
It arose in the mid-70s with the mushrooms.
00:48:52 ►
I mean, it would be interesting to trace
00:48:54 ►
the evolution of these motifs.
00:48:56 ►
You know, the butterfly was in there too
00:48:58 ►
as a kind of unconscious understanding of metamorphosis.
00:49:03 ►
But what the extraterrestrial theory and the guy in mind theory
00:49:07 ►
are both trying to come to grips with
00:49:09 ►
that neither the Freudian nor the Jungian
00:49:12 ►
nor the romantic theory needed to take much account of
00:49:17 ►
is the presence of the alien mind.
00:49:21 ►
What is this?
00:49:24 ►
Well, I’m not sure
00:49:26 ►
I think this is really the question
00:49:29 ►
for high dose Trekkies
00:49:32 ►
to put to themselves
00:49:35 ►
why does it have
00:49:37 ►
why is the human mind haunted
00:49:40 ►
this is a way to put it
00:49:42 ►
why when we go in there are there these information bearing unbelievably peculiar familiar yet alien hyperdimensional creatures what are they you know several possibilities have been kicked around over the years are they a
00:50:11 ►
state of human development in the far
00:50:13 ►
flung future that is working with some
00:50:17 ►
kind of psychotronic technology to
00:50:20 ►
communicate with the ultra primitives of
00:50:23 ►
the 20th century through some kind of
00:50:26 ►
you know I mean this is possible but somewhat
00:50:29 ►
labored I think are they
00:50:32 ►
extraterrestrials able
00:50:35 ►
via again some unimaginable
00:50:38 ►
psychotronic technology to tear
00:50:41 ►
open a mental
00:50:44 ►
dimension in which they can communicate with us to tear open a mental dimension
00:50:45 ►
in which they can communicate with us?
00:50:49 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:50:51 ►
Are they another possibility
00:50:53 ►
that has a certain kind of eerie charm?
00:50:58 ►
Is that they are the grateful dead, if you will.
00:51:06 ►
They are the dead.
00:51:08 ►
It’s interesting how much shamanism worldwide focuses on the notion
00:51:13 ►
that shamans come and go from the land of the dead.
00:51:17 ►
Is there an ecology of souls in hyperspace
00:51:21 ►
that you can perceive for four and a half minutes on DMT and then the barrier
00:51:27 ►
between that dimension and this dimension closes over.
00:51:33 ►
I confess this idea, maybe because it’s recent, has a certain attraction to me.
00:51:41 ►
I know I’m warm when I have the, oh no, it couldn’t possibly be that response, which I have very strongly to this idea.
00:51:51 ►
It’s like it boggles my mind to think that because it’s heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, it doesn’t take heart to face the extraterrestrials you know
00:52:05 ►
you become Captain James Kirk of the
00:52:07 ►
Enterprise and you move
00:52:09 ►
toward this diplomatic rendezvous
00:52:12 ►
but the idea
00:52:13 ►
that it might be
00:52:15 ►
your dead family
00:52:17 ►
and that in fact what you are
00:52:19 ►
seeing is what you will become
00:52:21 ►
and that in fact this is
00:52:24 ►
an intimation of your personal immortality is just you will become and that in fact this is an intimation of your personal immortality
00:52:27 ►
is just hair raising
00:52:31 ►
and as someone pointed out
00:52:35 ►
hair raising is the quality
00:52:39 ►
that Robert Graves associates
00:52:41 ►
with the near approach of Leucothea
00:52:44 ►
Leucothea.
00:52:47 ►
Leucothea is the white goddess. The white goddess is the goddess of death.
00:52:52 ►
Many, many people come out of the DMT place and say, you know,
00:52:57 ►
it feels like death.
00:53:00 ►
There’s something about it.
00:53:02 ►
Yes, it does.
00:53:03 ►
It does.
00:53:04 ►
It feels like more than death it feels I had this
00:53:09 ►
trip recently which really alarmed me it was oh wow there was some kind of compression going on and I came out in the parlor of my grandfather’s house in a certain sunlit afternoon in 1948,
00:53:36 ►
and I was in my child’s body, and I was facing my circus my little circus of figures
00:53:46 ►
that I had
00:53:47 ►
and I had little tigers in cages
00:53:50 ►
where when you move the bars this way
00:53:53 ►
it’s a tiger
00:53:53 ►
when you move it this way
00:53:55 ►
it’s a lion
00:53:56 ►
and I had all this stuff
00:53:58 ►
and I was there
00:53:59 ►
and then I was there
00:54:01 ►
and I knew
00:54:02 ►
it was just freakish
00:54:04 ►
beyond belief and other people
00:54:06 ►
have said about DMT that you only have
00:54:09 ►
one trip on it and you go to it again
00:54:12 ►
and again and it’s a stitch in time it
00:54:16 ►
sews it all together and you flow back
00:54:19 ►
through these places but the feeling of not death exactly, but just
00:54:28 ►
the skewedness of it all, what was happening to time
00:54:32 ►
and space and mentality and association and my
00:54:36 ►
psychic relationship to all these intervening events, I mean it felt like
00:54:40 ►
time travel, it felt like the real thing, I would hate to have it
00:54:44 ►
be more real than that
00:54:47 ►
in contrast to the ordinary DMT flash where what happens is you break into this space where these things are that I’ve sort of facetiously called the tykes.
00:55:06 ►
The tykes are these childlike, self-transforming, jeweled basketballs
00:55:13 ►
that run around you and jump through you
00:55:18 ►
and are like autonomous portions of the surface of your own psyche or something.
00:55:25 ►
I mean, you can’t tell what is going on
00:55:27 ►
except that they are offering these things
00:55:31 ►
which are like toys or machines.
00:55:36 ►
They’re like these Chinese ivory balls that are carved with many levels.
00:55:41 ►
And you look at these things and the immediate emotion is
00:55:46 ►
astonishment bordering on heart attack and then they just take it away and then they show you
00:55:53 ►
another one and they’re showing you this stuff and trying to convey something well after having this experience a number of times
00:56:06 ►
I came to the conclusion which again
00:56:09 ►
was shocking to me that
00:56:12 ►
this is somebody’s idea
00:56:14 ►
of an environment that is reassuring
00:56:18 ►
to human beings
00:56:20 ►
this is the equivalent of a playpen
00:56:23 ►
where you hang brightly colored plastic things
00:56:28 ►
above the crib
00:56:29 ►
so that the baby will hit at them
00:56:32 ►
and learn hand and eye coordination
00:56:34 ►
so that when you come through into this place
00:56:38 ►
and there’s the elf hooray
00:56:39 ►
which is the thing which greets you as you come through
00:56:42 ►
there’s this yay
00:56:44 ►
and then they have you
00:56:47 ►
and they say okay now we have you
00:56:49 ►
okay don’t freak out
00:56:51 ►
don’t be amazed pay attention
00:56:52 ►
look at this look at this
00:56:54 ►
look at this and you’re just saying
00:56:56 ►
you know what
00:56:58 ►
happened a minute ago
00:57:01 ►
I was somewhere we were talking about
00:57:03 ►
a drug we were thinking of doing it, somebody had a match, now what is happening? And they’re saying forget about that, look at this, look at this, and they’re singing in this rhyming language which you’re in is conformational syntax
00:57:26 ►
that is contorting itself through these fractal regressions
00:57:31 ►
there’s no time, there’s no space
00:57:33 ►
these things keep moving in and out of your body
00:57:36 ►
they keep telling you they love you
00:57:38 ►
they keep telling you to pay attention
00:57:39 ►
to remember, to remember, to remember
00:57:43 ►
and at that point you’re just
00:57:45 ►
falling out of it, falling backward
00:57:48 ►
everything melts, everything collapses
00:57:50 ►
everything turns to slush, it falls away
00:57:53 ►
there’s eidetic revisionism
00:57:55 ►
and then you can’t remember
00:58:00 ►
and you say, what happened?
00:58:04 ►
what happened? You know,
00:58:05 ►
what happened?
00:58:06 ►
It’s not like being,
00:58:09 ►
it’s like being struck by lightning.
00:58:12 ►
It’s like what this room would be like
00:58:14 ►
if a fighter plane came through the roof.
00:58:16 ►
It’s that all hell breaks out
00:58:19 ►
for like three and a half minutes
00:58:21 ►
and you cannot make any sense whatsoever of it.
00:58:24 ►
You cannot correlate it to a drug.
00:58:27 ►
A drug? Are you kidding?
00:58:29 ►
The other thing is, it hasn’t affected you.
00:58:32 ►
You are yourself.
00:58:34 ►
You are saying, you know,
00:58:36 ►
holy shit, what is this?
00:58:39 ►
You’re not blurred.
00:58:40 ►
You don’t have all kinds of problems.
00:58:41 ►
But what has happened is,
00:58:44 ►
the sensory input has gone hyperspatial
00:58:48 ►
100% just zing
00:58:51 ►
and there you are
00:58:53 ►
and this doesn’t fit
00:58:57 ►
into any of these models
00:58:59 ►
about the cheerful probing of the layers
00:59:02 ►
of the unconscious racial or personal.
00:59:05 ►
This is a breakthrough into some kind of parallel continuum,
00:59:10 ►
somewhere, somehow, that is so beyond the paradigm
00:59:15 ►
of the cheerful men in white coats who run our world
00:59:20 ►
that it just absolutely, as I said, makes your hair stand on end.
00:59:27 ►
This is repeatable this is not I’m not leading a flying saucer cult where we wait in cornfields with high hopes all you have to do is
00:59:36 ►
have the guts to you know push the button and the floor you’re sitting on will disappear and you will fall through into this place how do they
00:59:46 ►
keep the lid on this stuff this is what lies behind this cheerful historical recitation of
00:59:54 ►
argument this morning that the human world is tangential to some kind of appalling mystery,
01:00:06 ►
unexpected,
01:00:09 ►
not even clear that this has anything to do with spirit and love and being good
01:00:11 ►
or any of that.
01:00:13 ►
It’s just some kind of weird thing
01:00:17 ►
that our languages, our culture,
01:00:20 ►
our religion, our perceptual biases
01:00:22 ►
have caused us to not see
01:00:26 ►
not see at all
01:00:27 ►
and so then we’ve constructed a fantasy world
01:00:31 ►
a world based on
01:00:36 ►
empiricism
01:00:37 ►
three dimensional linear rationalism
01:00:40 ►
and above all a world constructed on not getting stoned. They say, you know, just
01:00:47 ►
stay away from that. That is the edge of the world. There there be dragons. They’re right.
01:00:55 ►
They’re right. We are no smarter than the people of 13th century Europe who feared to sail west because they knew
01:01:05 ►
that the edge of the world lay there.
01:01:07 ►
I mean, the edge of our world,
01:01:09 ►
the defeat of the scientific paradigm,
01:01:12 ►
the absolute confounding
01:01:14 ►
of a thousand years
01:01:15 ►
of rational philosophy and science
01:01:18 ►
is experientially available
01:01:20 ►
to every one of us
01:01:22 ►
but for flimsy laws.
01:01:26 ►
Flimsy laws.
01:01:28 ►
Again, made by men who wear dresses.
01:01:30 ►
Wherever there’s bad stuff being done,
01:01:33 ►
these guys wearing dresses
01:01:34 ►
are to be found highly active.
01:01:37 ►
Why is this?
01:01:39 ►
Why is this?
01:01:40 ►
The church and the judiciary
01:01:43 ►
are, you know,
01:01:49 ►
in this weird lock on the evolution of the human mind. It has to do with new ideas. New ideas are bad news if you’re a control freak.
01:02:01 ►
They spell trouble, some kind of trouble. And it doesn’t
01:02:05 ►
even matter what kind of new ideas.
01:02:08 ►
I mean, to the Roman Catholic
01:02:09 ►
Church, Protestants loomed
01:02:12 ►
like, you know,
01:02:13 ►
a psychedelic revolution.
01:02:16 ►
The notion that people should
01:02:17 ►
seek in their own hearts for guidance
01:02:20 ►
from God. What kind of
01:02:22 ►
heresy is this?
01:02:23 ►
This is what we have the church fathers for.
01:02:25 ►
This is what we have ecclesiastical councils, great universities.
01:02:29 ►
God’s ways are obscure.
01:02:32 ►
The unaided human individual, uneducated,
01:02:35 ►
cannot be expected to know God’s ways.
01:02:37 ►
We will explain it to you.
01:02:40 ►
Well, Protestantism then was the cutting edge
01:02:43 ►
of something happening.
01:02:45 ►
Now, a somewhat different situation prevails.
01:02:48 ►
Each thing becomes its own antithesis.
01:02:52 ►
Each thing kills the thing it loves.
01:02:55 ►
So, what needs to be central in thinking about this I think is
01:03:05 ►
how unassimilatable it is
01:03:08 ►
how very very different it is to be stoned on DMT
01:03:12 ►
than it is to be sitting here in a room full of people
01:03:15 ►
talking about it
01:03:16 ►
that it’s different, lots different
01:03:20 ►
there’s nothing else in our spectrum
01:03:24 ►
of potential experiences
01:03:27 ►
that can come close to it
01:03:29 ►
well now DMT is interesting
01:03:32 ►
it occurs in the human brain
01:03:35 ►
naturally every single one of us
01:03:39 ►
is holding, the law has not yet dealt
01:03:42 ►
with this, but the fact of the matter is that we are elaborating DMT in our brains.
01:03:49 ►
Why? We don’t know.
01:03:51 ►
What does it mean that the most powerful of all hallucinogens occurs naturally in the human brain?
01:04:01 ►
What does it mean that the most powerful of all natural hallucinogens is the shortest acting
01:04:08 ►
because you see the speed of recovery is a measure of the toxicity of a drug a drug or a compound or
01:04:18 ►
a plant that you can feel 24 hours or 48 hours later is toxic that’s what that feeling is if you have to you
01:04:28 ►
know lie around the day after a trip this is because there was a toxic trailing toxic edge
01:04:36 ►
to whatever you did DMT you are returned to the baseline of consciousness within 7 to 20 minutes, unfailingly.
01:04:47 ►
Well, this means then that the human brain is completely set up to degrade, depotentiate, deanimate, dealkalate this compound and shunt it into harmless byproducts like indolecetic acid.
01:05:09 ►
It means that the brain is familiar with this,
01:05:14 ►
has many pathways to deal with it and can degrade it quickly.
01:05:19 ►
So that’s an argument for safety.
01:05:23 ►
Well, this is beginning to work us into a corner.
01:05:26 ►
Here’s what we’re having to face,
01:05:28 ►
that the strongest hallucinogen
01:05:30 ►
is the shortest-acting hallucinogen,
01:05:34 ►
is the safest hallucinogen,
01:05:36 ►
and is the most natural of all hallucinogens.
01:05:43 ►
The reasons for not doing it
01:05:45 ►
are just disappearing right and left
01:05:48 ►
and yet it remains an absolutely
01:05:51 ►
taboo aspect
01:05:54 ►
of even the psychedelic culture
01:05:56 ►
because it succeeds
01:06:00 ►
where all else fails
01:06:02 ►
and it raises questions that are not psychological that are not philosophical
01:06:09 ►
it it seems to imply that our entire model of the world is not slightly flawed but absolute
01:06:21 ►
baloney that we are living in a dream.
01:06:26 ►
We are living in some kind of one-dimensional surface
01:06:29 ►
of some hyper-dimensional object
01:06:32 ►
and questions like,
01:06:34 ►
is there life after death?
01:06:36 ►
Are there extraterrestrial intelligences in the universe?
01:06:40 ►
What is the meaning of human history?
01:06:42 ►
Who am I?
01:06:43 ►
All of this is a product of lower dimensional
01:06:48 ►
language unable to conceive
01:06:52 ►
of this object
01:06:54 ►
which we are now in a position to explore
01:06:57 ►
this is some kind of thing
01:07:00 ►
which we are discovering
01:07:03 ►
it’s so large a discovery
01:07:06 ►
that it takes a century or so
01:07:09 ►
to even figure out what this is
01:07:12 ►
I mean while we’re dredging the Bermuda Triangle
01:07:16 ►
for flying saucers
01:07:17 ►
while we’re training our radio telescopes
01:07:21 ►
on Zeta Reticuli
01:07:22 ►
while we’re doing all this stuff
01:07:25 ►
looking for the message
01:07:27 ►
the message is exactly where you would expect to find it
01:07:31 ►
present in the human mind as
01:07:34 ►
the transmission of some kind
01:07:37 ►
of entity
01:07:40 ►
for which the laws of physics
01:07:43 ►
and the confines of matter
01:07:45 ►
mean nothing
01:07:46 ►
and life and death seem to be
01:07:51 ►
nothing
01:07:52 ►
two or three centuries ago this would have just simply been called
01:07:56 ►
God Almighty
01:07:57 ►
I don’t know
01:08:00 ►
I don’t think that it is the God
01:08:03 ►
that hung the stars like lamps in heaven
01:08:07 ►
that is a very large God
01:08:10 ►
the stars are vast
01:08:12 ►
but something is going on on this planet
01:08:16 ►
around the issue of biology
01:08:18 ►
something has broken through here
01:08:21 ►
some kind of higher order organizational process is in play that is larger
01:08:28 ►
than the human species, larger than the historical damage we have done to the planet. Something is
01:08:36 ►
going on. And I think that we are reaching the cultural stage where if we can sufficiently decondition we can understand
01:08:45 ►
what it is
01:08:47 ►
it’s something about
01:08:49 ►
the biological
01:08:52 ►
integrity of the planet
01:08:54 ►
and cognition
01:08:56 ►
and ourselves
01:08:58 ►
as instruments
01:08:59 ►
of something that wants to
01:09:02 ►
manifest itself
01:09:03 ►
through the release of energy
01:09:06 ►
and the control of matter in some form.
01:09:10 ►
I mean, it’s not clear whether we are preparing
01:09:12 ►
to build spacecraft the size of Manhattan
01:09:16 ►
that are going to go off to the stars
01:09:19 ►
and win an empire along the Milky Way,
01:09:23 ►
and that is our destiny,
01:09:24 ►
or whether we can go inward
01:09:26 ►
and place our entire world in a single grain of sand
01:09:31 ►
and leave that grain of sand on an Indonesian beach somewhere
01:09:35 ►
and just retreat from the planet
01:09:38 ►
into some other dimension that we will create.
01:09:42 ►
Perhaps we can build a module
01:09:45 ►
and bury it on the moon
01:09:47 ►
and then radio transmit ourselves
01:09:50 ►
into its interstices
01:09:51 ►
and live in a simulacrum of a real world
01:09:55 ►
forever as a penance for what we did to the planet
01:09:59 ►
I mean the scenarios are endless
01:10:03 ►
because the cultural dimension that opens ahead of us is the imagination.
01:10:10 ►
That’s what all this stuff is.
01:10:13 ►
That’s where all these things are living.
01:10:18 ►
It’s something that we have only a taste of.
01:10:22 ►
In terms of imagination, we are living in a one-dimensional world, but the curve,
01:10:29 ►
the curve of imagination’s ingression into the world of human culture could take a sudden
01:10:37 ►
asymptotic. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:10:48 ►
And so once again, the tape ends, leaving us with another little cliffhanger.
01:10:54 ►
But this time I feel more confident that the next tape will pick right up where this one left off.
01:10:59 ►
As you may know, while this podcast is my current offering from The Psychedelic Salon,
01:11:05 ►
and it will be podcast on the original channel three months from now,
01:11:09 ►
but in the meantime, each week I’ve been playing the introduction to these podcasts,
01:11:13 ►
along with a few sound bites from the program.
01:11:16 ►
Well, for the past 15 minutes of this talk we just listened to,
01:11:20 ►
I’ve been ready to select a few more of Terrence’s rousing words for the sample,
01:11:25 ►
but well, each phrase seemed to lead into yet a better one. But then he ran out and I missed my
01:11:32 ►
chance. So I guess I’ve got all the samples I’m going to have for this week. And by the way,
01:11:37 ►
that book by Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
01:11:44 ►
The Lands of the Saracen, is available for free at Project Gutenberg.
01:11:51 ►
And I’ve put the link directly to it in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
01:11:54 ►
You know, when I heard Terrence mention that early in his talk,
01:11:59 ►
well, it sounded something like, well, it’d be fun for me to read here at the end of today’s podcast,
01:12:03 ►
that little story about him doing hashish in Damascus.
01:12:08 ►
But after I downloaded the book and searched for the word hashish,
01:12:13 ►
I discovered that Taylor devotes an entire chapter to this experience,
01:12:18 ►
and actually in some ways it’s also reminiscent of Ludlow’s Tales,
01:12:19 ►
which were published a few years earlier.
01:12:22 ►
And for what it’s worth,
01:12:27 ►
if you are interested in stories about drug trips that went a little off the tracks
01:12:27 ►
well my supporters on Patreon recently read
01:12:30 ►
a story that I posted
01:12:32 ►
well it was about a time that I spent an evening
01:12:34 ►
at Disney World totally ripped on
01:12:37 ►
acid
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and this is a warning to our younger fellow saloners
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please don’t be as stupid as
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I was when I was young
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back when I was still in my 50s. Well, I guess I better get out of here before I
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reveal even more things that would be best if my grandchildren never found out.
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So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.