Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: June 24, 1989.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Culture is a mirror of the mind.”
“What are we when we begin to take off our cultural clothing? What kind of world will be build in the pure imagination?”
“History is a kind of psychedelic trip. That’s what it is. It’s the big trip.”
“This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object. I just call it a transcendental object to keep those issues out of it when we try to think of it as an at tractor. No, it’s a mind. It’s an organizing entelechy. It is THE mind. It’s probably the mind that you call your mind.”
“When you go into these high dose places you are seeing a local map of this thing toward which all creation moves, at least this is my take on it.”
“It’s just cognitive activity. It’s all that the psychedelic experience is. It’s accelerated cognitive activity. … I think that the glory of human beings is cognition.”
“What psychedelics lead to is appropriate activity. Appropriate activity is the way to be straight with the psychedelic vision.”
“I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought.”
“The thing which pervades the psychedelic experience is this sense of weird, sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort. I don’t even claim that the psychedelic experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience, somewhere between moral rectitude and Buddha.”
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Transcript
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This program was originally posted on the Psychedelic Salon’s first-run Patreon feed three months ago.
00:00:07 ►
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,
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where we sometimes jointly interview featured speakers whose conversations I also
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publish on the podcast from time to time.
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Now here is the program from which you heard a preview three months ago. Linguistic Watches. L.B. Shams.
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today by thanking all of my supporters over on Patreon.
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As you know, that’s where I’m now releasing these complete podcasts three months before I make them available on the original Salon RSS feeds. And while I was able to resist doing
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this for over 13 years now, well, I’m forced to admit that now that I’m in my late 70s, I’m going
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to need a little more income in addition to the Social Security if I’m going to be able to continue
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living a comfortable life.
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And that’s why I’m now publishing these podcasts in full on the first-run Patreon feed.
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Also, each Monday night, I host a live version of this salon for my supporters on Patreon.
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And tomorrow night, our guest will be Matt Palomary, who you’ve heard from several times here in the salon.
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And he’ll be able to answer all of your questions about ayahuasca,
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about being a professional writer,
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and maybe he’ll even share a few stories about some of our adventures in years gone by.
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Now, one other thing that you should know about is that early bird tickets
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for the Imagine Convergence conference that will take place on Orcas Island this coming March,
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those tickets are now on sale.
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As you know, this conference is about presenting ideas for a future paradigm,
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and will be a gathering of changemakers, intellectuals, innovators, and cultural
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creatives. And while I’m looking forward to meeting some of the people that I’ve been
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following online for years now, people like Charles Eisenstein and Julia Butterfly Hill, well,
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I think that you will also enjoy meeting and visiting with some of the people that you’ve
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heard from here in the salon. In addition to myself and Bruce Dahmer, you’ll also get to
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meet Paul Stamets and Dr. Charlie Grobe. Now, from my perspective, one of the things that makes this
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conference unique, in addition to the wide diversity of topics that will be covered, is that most of us are going to be living and eating together during the conference, and there won’t be any distractions from a nearby big city.
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It’s basically going to be an intimate, extended family gathering.
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Now, I realize that you may not be able to make it yourself due to work or other commitments, but have you thought about this?
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We are now entering the holiday season and, well, a truly incredible gift that you could give to someone would be a ticket to this conference.
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Tickets are on sale with early bird pricing right now and I’ll link to their website in today’s program notes, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com.
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will find at psychedelicsalon.com. You know, if ever there was a time to connect with others who are as concerned about the future of our planet as we are, and who have positive attitudes about
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ways in which we can proceed into this unknown realm that lies just ahead, well, this is the
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place to be. I’ll be there, and in fact, I’m bringing my oldest son. Hopefully, we’ll be able to meet you there as well.
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And now for today’s program, which is the fourth installment of a June 1989 Terrence McKenna workshop.
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And we’ll be picking up where we left off last week.
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Now in about ten minutes, you’re going to hear Terrence go on a roll when he gets talking about the Eschaton and the end of history.
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Today, of course, that sounds quite insane, like the ranting of an end-of-the-world prophet of doom or something.
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But as you listen to it, try to travel back in time to 1989. It’s going to be hard for some of
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you because you were really little kids then. But back then, when 2012 was still a distant
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glimmer on the horizon,
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back then, before it became obvious that there would be no end-of-the-world 2012 event,
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well, then his rantings made a lot more sense.
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I’m not saying that many people bought into his predictions.
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In fact, Terrence often said that we shouldn’t take him seriously.
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But as you listen to this rap,
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see if you can figure out just what it was that made the lectures of Terence McKenna so compelling
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that here 30 years later we are still fascinated by them
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so now here once again is Terence McKenna
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The vegetable mind is reconnected to the vegetable mind
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is reconnected to the human mind
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which then is given the integrity
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to control the machine mind
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everything epigenetic
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becomes hardwired
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it becomes quasi-genetic
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the whole thing is then seen as an expansion
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of the genetic
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repertoire by an infusion of epigenetic information and human beings as agents
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in that cause in that process are released into some kind of dimension of
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their own making culture is a mirror of the mind to this point it’s been very crude
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because to this point we have been
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very crude, very incapable
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only able to do low definition
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models of mind
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but with psychedelic drugs
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with dynamical
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mathematical theories
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at the frontiers of mathematics
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with very high speed computational engines
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computer graphics, all of this stuff
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a mirror of the mind is coming to be
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culture is more and more reflecting what we are
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we are going to be the horrified witnesses
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of the revelation of the true nature
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of the human soul. We are going to find out what everybody else only wondered about, which is,
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who are we really? What will we do with ourselves when we are freed from the constraints of gravity,
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freed from the constraints of gravity, energy, and yes, morality and politics.
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What are we when we begin to take off our cultural clothing?
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What kind of world will we build in the pure imagination?
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The engineering fantasies of those who would build spacecraft the size of Manhattan, hollow worlds with tilled fields and swaths of rainforests and savanna in their sides.
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That is the first step,
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the imaging of the mother world
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to prove that one cognizes the situation.
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But human beings are creatures of art,
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and whether this art is erected in massive
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structures in orbit around
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Jupiter or whether it is
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erected in some kind of
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fractal and syntactical
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electronic simulated
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space that is somehow
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quantum mechanically sustained
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it doesn’t matter
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the point is the liniments of the imagination,
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the projection of human hope and creativity,
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and the psychedelics are the way in which this has always been done,
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up to now, unaided.
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What we know of culture, what we have of of culture has come to us in this way i mean
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without psychedelics we’d still be flipping over cow patties on the plains of africa looking for
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beetles uh what what we have been given through this symbiotic relationship, is slow but widening access to hyperspace.
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We call it culture.
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But we are having difficulty maintaining the illusion
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that it’s something we create
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as it moves faster and faster,
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clearly of its own accord.
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Something is loose on the surface of this planet
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that replicates information,
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that replicates it first genetically,
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then epigenetically through codes and signaling systems and languages.
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This thing is striving for some kind of self-reflection,
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some kind of self-definition.
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The motion of the continents are its playthings.
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The volcanism of the mid-Atlantic trench
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is, you know, a part of its breathing life.
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And we have been called forth into this process
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as catalysts of something.
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In the same way that you use bacteria to concentrate gold
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in the process of mining very gold-poor ore,
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the earth is using a species, a higher primate species,
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to concentrate information
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to concentrate symbolic structure
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in a part of the environment
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bees gather honey
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human beings concentrate and gather
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and elaborate symbolic structures
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why? we don’t know why
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except that when we look into the psychedelic dimension there seems to
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be this sense of a process that the earth is not devoid of teleology that
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there is some kind of purpose something is being maximized and great chances are
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being taken in order that this process of maximization be allowed to continue.
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History is, after all, it’s like an epileptic fit on the geological scale.
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I mean, you just fall down and kick around and then you die.
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Or you don’t.
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You get up and you feel better.
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And this is the dilemma that we confront
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we are in a fit, a 10,000 year fit
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of informational excrescence
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code transfer, syntactical elaboration
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everything is feeding back into everything else
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some kind of super autocatalytic hyper cycle is taking place in the realm of
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information leading toward what i call um the transcendental object at the end of history
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that in this higher dimensional space is the completion of this process as a kind of platonic fita
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compli and it is casting a lower dimensional shadow into process in other words history
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is the shock wave of some kind of eschatology the presence of history
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is this very transient phenomena
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that occurs immediately surrounding the
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ingression of the transcendental object into
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ordinary space time
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and we sense this thing
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it drives our religions
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it fills our psychedelic visions
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it inspires our messiahs
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all of them
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because what people do is
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they section the cone
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they section the hyper-dimensional object
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with the language skills of their historical time and place
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and then they come back with a story
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about what it is
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Buddha says this Mohammed says this Christ says this these are lower
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dimensional slices of this transcendental object at the end of
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history what it is cannot be known it exceeds description it is translinguistic
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it is the confounding
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of language and yet
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language in an effort to describe
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it seeks greater
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and greater differentiation
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greater and greater
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approximation
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to this object
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so that then technological
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innovation, religious ontology outbursts of poetry painting
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dynamic personalities all of these processes are
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lower dimensional
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Slices lower dimensional processes driven by the presence of this transcendental object. So then what shamanism is is
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of this transcendental object so then what shamanism is
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is leaving the plane
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leaving the plane
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and grokking this higher dimensional mapping
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of what we call the here and now
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and then you see into it
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to as great a degree as you can assimilate to as great a degree as you
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can create the language for it and that’s why it’s pressure on language why the memes have to be
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artificially constructed why i push with concepts like self-transforming machine elves you know that’s a chunk of the place we get it
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out over here and we let it go and watch it dance around and we all like it so we
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remember it if the simile is too outlandish it will be forgotten and then
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it goes back to that other place so the effort is to sort of try and burst
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the dam of hyper-dimensional language.
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This is another way of thinking
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of the transcendental object.
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You see, the notion is a simple one.
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It’s that if the word can be made flesh,
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the flesh can be made word that’s it that there is some kind of
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emanation into phenomenal existence the word becomes flesh there are the
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declensions of being that you get in Hindu philosophy and you know the
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tattvas and all of this stuff, the big bang, the condensation,
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the appearance of phenomenal beings,
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of phenomenal existence,
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and then the appearance of self-reflecting consciousness,
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which constitutes the turning point.
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And then the epigenetic coding begins
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of what has previously been genetic,
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and everything begins to funnel toward this
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teleological omega point and a few tens of thousands of years before the omega point is
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reached there is a stirring in the primates they feel the eerie nearness of the thing, and this eerie feeling of nearness of the other
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slowly acts as a vector on the animal mind
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and points it toward the transcendence,
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and sexuality and the hallucinogenic plants
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and all this stuff feed into this thing,
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and we begin the quest.
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We don’t even know that we’ve begun the quest,
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but the disruption of the unquestioning animal
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here and now-ness is finished.
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That’s over.
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And the itch must be scratched.
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The restlessness comes in,
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and we begin to elaborate culture certain things please us
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certain things do not we begin to have a notion of an ideal we don’t know where this notion of
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an ideal comes from well it’s coming from this intuitive higher dimensional mapping of this object which is acting like an enormous attractor
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throwing out a field of attraction that reaches out a million years and begins
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to pull us toward it and now we’re very near this thing with the whole last
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thousand years has been just a flirtation with the you know this wild dance with the coming
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and going of the mystery i mean people throw up gothic cathedrals then they tear them down
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then we have alchemy then science trashes that all of this stuff this frantic elaboration of ideas indicates that we are now in the ineluctable
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and unbreakable grip of this huge attractor and as it pulls us toward it it compresses information
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it compresses the phenomenon of culture it speeds things up you You see, history is a kind of psychedelic trip.
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That’s what it is.
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It’s the big trip.
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And what we’re approaching, you know,
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is the place where the previous structures
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that have been able to maintain a metaphor
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as the pressure of this thing built in the collective psyche are going to
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suffer meltdown and we’re just going to
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have to admit you know yes the earth has been
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invaded by archangels pentagon
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sources now confirm
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you know it’s the end of the world
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basically but the world that ends
00:18:23 ►
is
00:18:24 ►
this lower dimensional slice somehow
00:18:31 ►
there is a subsuming into this higher
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dimensional object all time on this
00:18:37 ►
planet flows toward this one point this
00:18:42 ►
is I grant you a peculiar idea but to show you how language, culture,
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and media work on ideas to make something seem odd or ordinary, let’s look at the ordinary
00:18:56 ►
version of reality that straight people profess. Straight people believe white, Anglo-Saxon, well-educated science types, believe that the universe began with what is called the Big Bang. What this is, is you are asked to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothing in a single instant. this is the scientific explanation of where the universe
00:19:28 ►
came from it sprang from nothing in a single instant and in an and was originally an object
00:19:36 ►
so dense that it was smaller than the inner orbit of the electron around an atomic nucleus and out of that eensy beansy very highly
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energetic extremely heavy i mean in other words this has got to be a fairy tale i mean if you
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can’t prove it it certainly is a fairy tale i mean it just piles one preposterous notion on another
00:20:05 ►
in an effort to solve all intellectual problems
00:20:09 ►
in one stroke of suspension of disbelief.
00:20:14 ►
Well, what I’m proposing is also a singularity,
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a singularity where everything is pulled
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into a kind of ultimately complexified,
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super-dense state of connectedness.
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But the singularity that I propose emerges out of a very complex situation,
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i.e. the evolving cosmos as we know it,
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which as we see has many states of chemistry, energy levels ranging from that of
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quasar to flashlight battery, so forth and so on. It seems more likely to me that a singularity
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would emerge out of a background of complex event systems than that a singularity would emerge out of absolute primal nothingness.
00:21:07 ►
And so when you look at these two theories, you know, you can pick whichever one suits your aesthetic,
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but the notion that one is preposterous and the other the stuff of reason and empiricism is just nonsense.
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At every end of the scale, we are surrounded by myth. of reason and empiricism is just nonsense.
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At every end of the scale we are surrounded by myth.
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And so I think that
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this kind of a singularity
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solves a lot of problems for us.
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It explains the evolutionary thrust
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of development on this planet.
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It locates human history in nature
00:21:51 ►
as a force that has been called out of nature by natural processes on the planet.
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It reassigns human beings a role
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in the unfolding of the planet
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other than its simple flat-out rape and destruction and it places ahead
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of us an object of hope because the transcendental object that is doing this is pleasant to
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experience i mean i don’t want to make a moral judgment on it, but it is God’s love or something like that.
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It is real.
00:22:28 ►
And I think this is what history moves toward.
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This is the intuition of religion
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that is so severely flawed and compromised
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by the limitations of religion
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and the deals that it cuts.
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Well, maybe we should stop for a couple of minutes and stretch and then have questions.
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It doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t make sense, period, probably.
00:22:57 ►
So are there questions, comments, clarification? Yes.
00:23:02 ►
I wanted to ask you on your DMT experience study,
00:23:05 ►
the way you were describing it,
00:23:08 ►
it sounded as if other people had experienced similar types of beings as you had,
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or was that your personal experience?
00:23:19 ►
No, I would say I get pretty good results.
00:23:22 ►
Of the people I have been able to turn on I would say
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half get
00:23:27 ►
elves
00:23:29 ►
and entities
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I don’t take responsibility
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you can’t know what’s
00:23:36 ►
going on I mean people botch it
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they don’t do enough they do it on
00:23:40 ►
grass they don’t
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it wasn’t made right
00:23:43 ►
all these parameters but people that I’ve been able to
00:23:48 ►
satisfy myself that it was done right about half get it and other not everyone gets it as strongly
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it seems to be a kind of archetype through which you cut deeper and deeper
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and the deeper you go
00:24:08 ►
the stranger it gets
00:24:09 ►
but it keeps its character
00:24:11 ►
for instance I saw
00:24:14 ►
one woman take DMT
00:24:16 ►
and she
00:24:17 ►
it looked to me like a
00:24:19 ►
sub-threshold dose
00:24:21 ►
it looked to me like an insufficient dose
00:24:23 ►
one way you can tell that people are in fact
00:24:26 ►
getting a sufficient dose is that there will be rapid eye movement under the eyelids it’s because
00:24:33 ►
they’re watching all this crazy stuff if you don’t see their eyelid their rapid eye movement
00:24:39 ►
happening then you have reason to wonder if they actually did enough well so i didn’t think this
00:24:46 ►
woman got quite enough so she came down and she said it was uh it was the saddest carnival in the
00:24:56 ►
world it was a sad carnival and this is the it’s the circus it has something to do with the circus the circus is the
00:25:09 ►
archetype of DMT what do we have in the circus well we have lions and tigers and beautiful women
00:25:17 ►
and slapstick comedy but an aura of darkness I mean the circus if any of you have seen les enfants du paradis
00:25:27 ►
in fact i’ve had lsd trips which were entirely about that movie and replaying it in my head and
00:25:34 ►
trying to understand it the archetype of the circus this is why fellini uses this god there
00:25:41 ►
are scenes in giulietta dispiri where she opens the triangular door and the burning
00:25:47 ►
bed is there i mean this these scenes are drenched with this tryptamine kind of consciousness other
00:25:56 ►
people say of dmt it’s it’s there are clowns it’s about clowns well these are progressive approaches
00:26:05 ►
to the self-transforming machine elves
00:26:08 ►
maybe I’ve done it more
00:26:11 ►
or maybe I just have some power of observation
00:26:14 ►
but I saw behind the mask
00:26:18 ►
of the clown
00:26:19 ►
and behind the mask of the meme
00:26:22 ►
and behind the mask of the marionette and behind the mask of the meme, and behind the mask of the marionette,
00:26:25 ►
and behind the robot mask,
00:26:27 ►
to more of what I feel must be the essence of the thing,
00:26:32 ►
because it was more replete with strangeness.
00:26:36 ►
It was more like, you know,
00:26:38 ►
we’re letting you see,
00:26:40 ►
we’re lifting the veil.
00:26:42 ►
So, the circus, does that do it for you?
00:26:47 ►
What about the relationship between mushrooms and DMT?
00:26:52 ►
High-dose mushroom psilocybin is 5-hydroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:26:58 ►
DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:27:02 ►
I’m not saying that psilocybin becomes DMT
00:27:06 ►
as it crosses the blood-brain
00:27:07 ►
barrier, there seems to be a problem
00:27:10 ►
there, which Shogun
00:27:11 ►
explained to me, but I didn’t quite understand
00:27:13 ►
it, but
00:27:15 ►
it’s something very, very close to DMT
00:27:18 ►
and at the peak
00:27:19 ►
of a high-dose mushroom trip
00:27:21 ►
you can come into a place where you
00:27:23 ►
say, I cannot tell the
00:27:26 ►
difference this looks like DMT
00:27:28 ►
to me for sure
00:27:30 ►
but instead of it
00:27:31 ►
appearing with crackling
00:27:33 ►
immediacy 15 seconds
00:27:35 ►
after you lay down the pike
00:27:37 ►
you work your way there over an hour
00:27:40 ►
and a half with breath control
00:27:42 ►
in absolute silent darkness
00:27:44 ►
ayahuasca same darkness ayahuasca same
00:27:46 ►
thing ayahuasca
00:27:48 ►
sufficiently pushed
00:27:50 ►
will usher
00:27:51 ►
into this place that is
00:27:53 ►
snap crackle pop land
00:27:55 ►
you know I mean just that electric
00:27:57 ►
immediacy but these are
00:28:00 ►
high doses
00:28:01 ►
five grams
00:28:04 ►
and up five dried grams and up five dried
00:28:05 ►
grams and up
00:28:06 ►
I don’t
00:28:10 ►
I feel that
00:28:11 ►
if you take
00:28:12 ►
more than
00:28:13 ►
ten grams
00:28:14 ►
your powers
00:28:15 ►
of reportage
00:28:16 ►
will be
00:28:17 ►
damaged
00:28:18 ►
and you’re
00:28:18 ►
useless to
00:28:19 ►
the rest of
00:28:20 ►
us
00:28:20 ►
so I
00:28:22 ►
don’t advocate
00:28:23 ►
more than
00:28:23 ►
that
00:28:23 ►
ten grams
00:28:24 ►
is a hell of a wallop i mean i don’t advocate that
00:28:29 ►
only if you’ve taken five and were bored to death you know but but it’s not about you know just how
00:28:40 ►
much can you bowl down i mean a friend of mine says his goal with mushrooms
00:28:46 ►
each time he takes them is to
00:28:48 ►
stand more of it
00:28:50 ►
and you can have this
00:28:52 ►
relationship to it
00:28:53 ►
because it does veil
00:28:56 ►
itself if all you can
00:28:58 ►
handle are leprechauns
00:29:00 ►
it won’t push
00:29:02 ►
too far beyond that
00:29:04 ►
but if it pours on leprechauns it won’t push too far beyond that but if it pours on leprechauns and you scream
00:29:07 ►
for more it can get rid of leprechauns and give you more i mean i have had you know conversations
00:29:14 ►
with it where i would say okay we’ve been looking at baroque altarpieces or we’ve been looking at
00:29:22 ►
kandinsky’s later period the mushroom and I
00:29:25 ►
it’s showing me this stuff
00:29:27 ►
and so then I say well
00:29:28 ►
you know
00:29:30 ►
what turns you on
00:29:33 ►
be a bit more yourself
00:29:36 ►
well God
00:29:37 ►
then it just begins to migrate
00:29:40 ►
and I say okay that’s enough
00:29:41 ►
more yourself
00:29:43 ►
because requested to reveal its inner nature it will begin to and I say, okay, that’s enough more yourself because
00:29:45 ►
requested to reveal its
00:29:47 ►
inner nature, it will begin to do
00:29:50 ►
so until you just say
00:29:51 ►
you know, I’m a
00:29:53 ►
human being, stop that
00:29:55 ►
this is as much as I feel
00:29:58 ►
capable of handling of
00:29:59 ►
your
00:30:00 ►
self
00:30:04 ►
image
00:30:04 ►
but this is all directly related to what you were telling us before your self-image.
00:30:09 ►
But this is all directly related to what you were telling us before in terms of the central sphere.
00:30:13 ►
Yes.
00:30:16 ►
This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object.
00:30:22 ►
I just call it a transcendental object
00:30:25 ►
to keep those issues out of it
00:30:27 ►
when we try and think of it as an attractor.
00:30:31 ►
No, it’s a mind.
00:30:33 ►
It’s an organizing intellect.
00:30:35 ►
It is the mind.
00:30:37 ►
It’s probably the mind that you call your mind
00:30:41 ►
is probably a small chunk of this mind.
00:30:49 ►
call your mind is probably a small chunk of this mind. Yes, when you go into these high-dose places, you are seeing a local map of this thing toward which all creation moves. At
00:30:57 ►
least this is my take on it.
00:30:59 ►
How do you feel emotionally about that?
00:31:01 ►
How do you feel emotionally about that?
00:31:05 ►
When you see the transcendental object?
00:31:09 ►
Well, it makes you weak. I mean, it just dissolves you emotionally.
00:31:12 ►
It is the peace which paths us understanding.
00:31:15 ►
This is the burning bush.
00:31:17 ►
This is, yes, grace.
00:31:20 ►
This is the descent of the Holy Spirit
00:31:26 ►
it’s all of those
00:31:28 ►
things
00:31:29 ►
it’s tremendously emotionally
00:31:32 ►
touching
00:31:33 ►
because
00:31:34 ►
there is an absolute confirmation
00:31:38 ►
of unity
00:31:39 ►
and also
00:31:41 ►
you are seeing it
00:31:43 ►
you are confirming that it exists
00:31:45 ►
your whole being is thrilled
00:31:48 ►
you say it exists
00:31:50 ►
it’s not a matter of conjecture
00:31:54 ►
or faith
00:31:55 ►
it exists
00:31:57 ►
this is very close to the religious ecstasis
00:32:02 ►
of Mother Teresa or Hildegard von Bingen or Meister Eckhart or Thomas
00:32:08 ►
Terhearn or any of those folks except that they were apparently exceptional personalities who
00:32:16 ►
achieved this after tremendous self-discipline and acts of great spiritual control.
00:32:26 ►
It’s a birthright, though.
00:32:29 ►
Why should it be restricted to mystics?
00:32:32 ►
It belongs to all of us.
00:32:34 ►
It is an essential part of yourself.
00:32:37 ►
You would no more want to miss out on this
00:32:39 ►
than you would want to miss out on sex
00:32:41 ►
or ice cream
00:32:43 ►
or anything that makes life worth living.
00:32:47 ►
This informs and empowers and enriches existence.
00:32:53 ►
The 20th century model is that life is a desert.
00:32:58 ►
You know, man has been abandoned by God.
00:33:01 ►
Life is a desert.
00:33:03 ►
All ethics are provisional.
00:33:06 ►
All values are culture-bound.
00:33:09 ►
Just bum, bum, bum, bum, wrapped.
00:33:13 ►
This is the modern situation.
00:33:15 ►
Everything is completely disensouled and dead and pointless.
00:33:19 ►
And then you discover, you know,
00:33:22 ►
that this is just a condition of culture along we,
00:33:25 ►
a state of mind,
00:33:27 ►
that the mystery is a right.
00:33:33 ►
And, you know, I don’t think it’s something
00:33:34 ►
to be done once or twice in a lifetime.
00:33:37 ►
I don’t think we should run it into the ground.
00:33:41 ►
I think every time you take a psychedelic,
00:33:43 ►
you should take enough that it frightens you
00:33:46 ►
that you are you should never grow confident in its presence it will destroy you that is the one
00:33:54 ►
thing it will not tolerate is cockiness I mean it just takes that funny word huh it just takes that and will not put up with it because it’s a sin
00:34:09 ►
against the goddess obviously it’s the sin of hubris it’s the sin of pride other comments
00:34:17 ►
you were going to talk about the dangerous the danger well the drugs I advocate
00:34:25 ►
I regard as not dangerous
00:34:28 ►
unless recklessly used
00:34:31 ►
psychedelics are not dangerous
00:34:34 ►
we’d love to convince ourselves they were dangerous
00:34:37 ►
then there would be no reason to take them
00:34:39 ►
the danger
00:34:43 ►
to my mind is
00:34:45 ►
and this is my personal opinion
00:34:47 ►
and you now come up against who I am
00:34:50 ►
and my hang-ups
00:34:51 ►
what I always fear is madness
00:34:54 ►
not death
00:34:56 ►
death, you know
00:34:58 ►
probably wouldn’t hurt my reputation at all
00:35:01 ►
but madness, madness would be a disgrace at this point. an embarrassment yes how embarrassing
00:35:26 ►
so uh but i i think you should gain confidence and and uh you know do it with a sitter i don’t
00:35:36 ►
like the term guide because these guides know nothing you know but a sitter is somebody who’s together enough to you know call an ambulance
00:35:47 ►
or just calm you down basically uh somebody told me a wonderful story which you should know because
00:35:55 ►
you might you know draw comfort from it uh sky was very pretty experienced he’d taken fairly high
00:36:02 ►
doses of mushrooms before and he took a six gram dose
00:36:06 ►
on a saturday evening in his apartment in la and this heart thing began to develop
00:36:15 ►
that he identified as a fibrillation or something so he tried to hold it back and keep not notice and not notice. It kept getting
00:36:26 ►
stronger and stronger. It never lets you do that, by the way, the not noticing. It’s a
00:36:32 ►
paradox. You didn’t take this to not notice. So eventually he becomes thoroughly
00:36:40 ►
alarmed and he tries to call a couple of his friends well it’s saturday night nobody’s
00:36:45 ►
home so then just this tremendous sense of abandonment settles over this guy his friends
00:36:52 ►
aren’t there when he needs them he’s going to die here in his apartment and be found days later so
00:36:58 ►
forth and so on and he gets this ball rolling see so finally he despairs he’s a psychotherapist an MD
00:37:06 ►
blah blah everything he despairs he
00:37:09 ►
calls 9-1-1 so they come they get him
00:37:14 ►
they rush him to the hospital they put
00:37:18 ►
him in a ward they any by the time all
00:37:21 ►
this has happened and he’s gotten all
00:37:24 ►
this attention and probably a little, and he’s gotten all this attention,
00:37:25 ►
and probably a little second all,
00:37:27 ►
he’s feeling pretty good about it all.
00:37:30 ►
So then he says to the guy on duty,
00:37:33 ►
he says,
00:37:34 ►
I feel like I have to tell you,
00:37:38 ►
I took psilocybin mushrooms.
00:37:41 ►
Do you think that that brought this on?
00:37:50 ►
And the guy said no you had an anxiety attack we get people with this all the time we don’t know anything about psychedelic drugs
00:37:55 ►
so you know it it isn’t the drug you have to worry about. It’s yourself. You have to discipline your hind brain.
00:38:07 ►
You have to be able to say,
00:38:09 ►
listen, shut up.
00:38:11 ►
We’re going to come through this.
00:38:13 ►
Just shut up about it.
00:38:15 ►
Because it’s saying,
00:38:16 ►
but don’t you think we should call somebody?
00:38:18 ►
And… we shouldn’t treat it with such levity
00:38:32 ►
because it is a serious issue
00:38:34 ►
I mean I’ve been in many circumstances
00:38:36 ►
where vital signs seem to have fallen
00:38:40 ►
so low in my own perception
00:38:43 ►
that I just was saying to myself keep breathing keep
00:38:49 ►
looking keep breathing keep looking and i felt you know that we i was in a submarine five and a half
00:38:57 ►
miles down easy does it through here breath attention breath attention because you have the feeling that if you don’t
00:39:08 ►
keep your attention on your breath you will simply stop breathing well now it’s interesting people
00:39:15 ►
who don’t worry much about psychedelics you tell them a story like that and they say well isn’t
00:39:22 ►
that the bit that you take these drugs and you think you’re dying
00:39:25 ►
and then you get straight and then you don’t die and then you’re really happy isn’t that what it’s
00:39:31 ►
supposed to do i thought that was what it was about well in fact if you go back into the literature
00:39:36 ►
in the 1960s the tibetan book of the dead crowd was saying you will be flung from hell to paradise and back again on about a
00:39:47 ►
40-minute schedule for several hours and they prepared themselves for these bad trip situations
00:39:55 ►
by anticipating it and I I don’t really think there’s that much to it I think your mind is very fragile in that state
00:40:05 ►
and you know a bad thought
00:40:08 ►
quickly becomes a cascade
00:40:10 ►
and you have to know
00:40:12 ►
how to
00:40:13 ►
stop these cascades
00:40:17 ►
a very practical
00:40:19 ►
technique that I use
00:40:21 ►
is I take a hit
00:40:23 ►
of cannabis
00:40:24 ►
because that seems to shake up the deck that I use is I take a hit of cannabis because
00:40:25 ►
that seems to shake up
00:40:27 ►
the deck again
00:40:29 ►
so you know if I’m having
00:40:32 ►
these visions and it’s
00:40:33 ►
orchids and ruins
00:40:35 ►
and machines and I’m
00:40:38 ►
grooving this and then suddenly
00:40:39 ►
it becomes about
00:40:41 ►
meat and surgery
00:40:43 ►
and excrement and this and that.
00:40:47 ►
And then I just say, you know, it’s time for a J.
00:40:56 ►
Now Stan Grof would say you should go through these things
00:40:59 ►
and that this is important for your process.
00:41:04 ►
But, you know, I’m squeamish
00:41:06 ►
and enjoy steering it
00:41:12 ►
also it’s good to be informed
00:41:16 ►
to know when you get in there
00:41:18 ►
how dangerous is this drug
00:41:20 ►
and how much did I take
00:41:22 ►
and if you know that you took 15 milligrams of
00:41:26 ►
psilocybin and you know that the LD50
00:41:29 ►
of psilocybin is some astronomical
00:41:31 ►
figure well then you can tell yourself
00:41:35 ►
this cheerful little story about how you can’t possibly
00:41:38 ►
die because you took so little but
00:41:41 ►
the main thing is it teaches you discipline
00:41:44 ►
and you know thinking you’re going
00:41:47 ►
to die at least for me is not all that rare i mean if somebody invites me to go sailing with
00:41:55 ►
them on the bay on a sunday afternoon at least twice in the afternoon i will sign off completely and just assume that’s it you know maybe I’m a little
00:42:08 ►
paranoid you know or maybe I have crazy friends but
00:42:12 ►
um
00:42:12 ►
Terrence we were talking at lunch about extending the feeling, the connection that you have during the trip in straight life.
00:42:31 ►
I’m not verbalizing this very well,
00:42:32 ►
but do you feel that after years of experiencing psilocybin
00:42:38 ►
that you can touch that feeling at straight times?
00:42:44 ►
You can hear the logos times you can hear the logos
00:42:45 ►
you can get the information
00:42:47 ►
well I can’t hear the logos
00:42:49 ►
in the sense
00:42:50 ►
well not always but
00:42:52 ►
I can invoke it
00:42:55 ►
I mean I have a sense of it
00:42:57 ►
it’s where I talk from
00:42:59 ►
but my public
00:43:02 ►
career gives me so much permission
00:43:04 ►
to spend time with this stuff.
00:43:06 ►
I mean, and I think about it all the time.
00:43:09 ►
I mean, I image everything.
00:43:14 ►
It’s just cognitive activity
00:43:16 ►
is all that the psychedelic experience is.
00:43:19 ►
It’s accelerated cognitive activity.
00:43:22 ►
So if you run around,
00:43:23 ►
I urge people to think. it’s sort of an anti
00:43:28 ►
several other positions
00:43:30 ►
Position, but I think it’s good to think I don’t preach stilling the mind or any of that stuff
00:43:37 ►
I think that the glory of human
00:43:41 ►
Beings is cognition and that if you paint, if you sculpt
00:43:45 ►
if you write, if you sing
00:43:48 ►
if you dance, if you weave
00:43:50 ►
if you act, if you
00:43:52 ►
cook
00:43:53 ►
whatever we do
00:43:55 ►
cognition
00:43:57 ►
can follow through it
00:43:59 ►
and that what psychedelics lead to
00:44:02 ►
is appropriate activity
00:44:03 ►
appropriate activity is the way to be straight with
00:44:07 ►
the psychedelic vision do what is
00:44:10 ►
appropriate and it will resonate with
00:44:14 ►
the vision because the vision is a
00:44:17 ►
vision of what is appropriate and then
00:44:21 ►
if you have to do terribly
00:44:22 ►
inappropriate things you know if you
00:44:24 ►
contact the logos on Saturday night
00:44:26 ►
and go back to designing the stealth bomber
00:44:29 ►
on Monday morning
00:44:30 ►
there’s going to be, it’s going to be difficult
00:44:33 ►
to act psychedelically
00:44:34 ►
because that is not appropriate
00:44:37 ►
behavior
00:44:37 ►
appropriate behavior is a self-explanatory
00:44:41 ►
concept, everybody knows what that
00:44:43 ►
is. Yes, you had a question.
00:44:45 ►
Ram Dass talks about his gurus
00:44:48 ►
like in India,
00:44:49 ►
like taking ten times the dose of LSD
00:44:52 ►
than normally would turn them on
00:44:53 ►
and nothing happens.
00:44:54 ►
As if the thought being
00:44:57 ►
that they’re always in that state.
00:44:58 ►
What do you feel about that?
00:45:00 ►
No, the thought is that
00:45:01 ►
they will never attain this state.
00:45:06 ►
What?
00:45:07 ►
How do they keep from it?
00:45:10 ►
Well, by being beastly little priesties, basically.
00:45:15 ►
No, no, I mean…
00:45:18 ►
I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought.
00:45:29 ►
It’s just because, you see, everything in the world seeks to disempower direct experience.
00:45:37 ►
And that is obscene.
00:45:39 ►
We mustn’t let that happen.
00:45:42 ►
So these people who have techniques and lineages and ashrams
00:45:46 ►
and all of this stuff,
00:45:48 ►
the first million years of religion
00:45:52 ►
was psychedelic.
00:45:54 ►
And then when these dominator societies
00:45:57 ►
got going,
00:45:58 ►
they said,
00:45:59 ►
well, we need religion,
00:46:00 ►
but we need religion at 15% power.
00:46:04 ►
These orgies bust up the community rhythm.
00:46:08 ►
Nobody wants to get up in the morning
00:46:10 ►
to go hoe the fields.
00:46:13 ►
Suddenly, not psychedelic plants,
00:46:16 ►
but agriculture, corn, tammuz,
00:46:19 ►
all of this comes into play.
00:46:22 ►
Food plants gain importance in agriculture.
00:46:25 ►
It’s really the nomadic pastoralists
00:46:27 ►
and the hunter-gatherers
00:46:29 ►
who seem to be able to sustain
00:46:32 ►
the psychedelic lifestyle.
00:46:34 ►
Your question touches on this issue
00:46:37 ►
that always comes up in these things.
00:46:39 ►
Is there another way to get there?
00:46:42 ►
And is this the same thing that the geishis and roshis and rishis and gurus and babajis are talking about?
00:46:54 ►
I’ve spent a lot of time on this question and I can’t yet convince myself that it’s the same thing.
00:47:01 ►
They betray themselves.
00:47:06 ►
They’re too blasé this is the problem
00:47:08 ►
with all of these
00:47:10 ►
other paths
00:47:11 ►
they don’t raise their voice
00:47:14 ►
to tell you
00:47:15 ►
how weird it is
00:47:17 ►
I mean I’ve never heard
00:47:18 ►
someone say about yoga
00:47:20 ►
this is really weird
00:47:22 ►
do this
00:47:24 ►
and you will feel weird and you’ll see weird things and bizarre
00:47:28 ►
thought no they say you know do this and energy will rise and the thing which pervades the
00:47:35 ►
psychedelic experience is this sense of weird sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort I don’t even claim that the psychedelic
00:47:50 ►
experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience somewhere between moral
00:47:57 ►
rectitude and Buddha you may be able to pass from moral rectitude to Buddha and never get near the psychedelic experience.
00:48:08 ►
That’s one of the reasons Flattery’s book about Haoma is so fascinating,
00:48:13 ►
because he makes the point about Iranian religion
00:48:16 ►
that it’s thoroughly matter-of-fact about this other dimension.
00:48:24 ►
It doesn’t call it higher or lower it doesn’t say
00:48:28 ►
you’re a better person if you can go there it just says that it’s there and that to me is more
00:48:34 ►
characteristic of of the psychedelic approach i’m puzzled by the relationship to moral goodness and to spiritual advancement
00:48:46 ►
that the psychedelic experience has
00:48:49 ►
it does seem to bring to the people
00:48:51 ►
who immerse themselves in it
00:48:53 ►
like the shamans of the Amazon
00:48:56 ►
a certain kind of moral suasion
00:49:00 ►
their impressive personalities
00:49:02 ►
the good ones won’t screw you
00:49:05 ►
the bad ones will
00:49:08 ►
but once you find a good one
00:49:11 ►
and follow him around for a few months or so
00:49:14 ►
you become quite convinced that this guy
00:49:16 ►
is a morally superior human being
00:49:18 ►
in all of his dealings with people
00:49:21 ►
this guy doesn’t lose the thread
00:49:23 ►
he acts from a very real place but I think just in
00:49:31 ►
the presence of so much transcendental wonder one is inspired to try and get one’s act together and
00:49:39 ►
also I think that if you are a quote-unquote bad person,
00:49:46 ►
your unconscious mind will attack you in the psychedelic state.
00:49:51 ►
This is why these certain kinds of personalities
00:49:55 ►
know instinctively that they shouldn’t get near it.
00:50:00 ►
And so they stay away from it.
00:50:04 ►
It doesn’t mean that if you take this stuff,
00:50:07 ►
you’re a great person.
00:50:09 ►
All it means is that you can put up
00:50:11 ►
with what a bum you are
00:50:13 ►
when seen through that lens.
00:50:17 ►
In other words, I mean, it humbles everybody.
00:50:19 ►
It really rubs your nose in it.
00:50:21 ►
And it doesn’t let you escape.
00:50:24 ►
And, you know know if you’re willing
00:50:26 ►
to put up with that then there’s
00:50:28 ►
also riches
00:50:29 ►
but I don’t think any
00:50:32 ►
technique
00:50:33 ►
or any religious ontology
00:50:38 ►
is in possession of a
00:50:40 ►
technique that can carry
00:50:42 ►
us close anywhere
00:50:43 ►
close to this place if If they could, we would
00:50:47 ►
know about it. In the back, yes.
00:50:50 ►
Yes, Terrence, do you have any ideas about other forms of life being sensitive to the
00:50:55 ►
same sort of realm that you described from a human standpoint? Say, for instance, insects
00:51:00 ►
or other beings?
00:51:08 ►
instance insects or other beings well insects are bizarre especially social insects and trying to imagine you know in a way a social insect hive is a kind of living brain i mean it is a loosely
00:51:19 ►
pheromonally connected nervous system that can have millions of individuals in it
00:51:26 ►
as far as speculating
00:51:29 ►
I mean if the depths of the human mind
00:51:31 ►
are unrecognizable to me
00:51:33 ►
I don’t know what I would make of the ontology
00:51:36 ►
of a termite hive
00:51:38 ►
you mean these forms of animal awareness
00:51:45 ►
I don’t know
00:51:48 ►
I think that there’s some premium
00:51:49 ►
you have to be able to freely
00:51:51 ►
code
00:51:52 ►
now certain animals can
00:51:55 ►
freely code
00:51:57 ►
to a degree
00:51:59 ►
then we begin to have to define
00:52:01 ►
freedom monkeys have a degree
00:52:04 ►
of freedom in their coding
00:52:05 ►
the octopi have a greater freedom
00:52:09 ►
in coding than almost any other species
00:52:12 ►
and you’ve probably heard me talk about octopi
00:52:16 ►
as an example in nature
00:52:19 ►
of a visibly beheld linguistic modality
00:52:23 ►
because octopi communicate
00:52:25 ►
their internal states
00:52:29 ►
by changing the colors
00:52:31 ►
and the surfaces and the display
00:52:35 ►
of their skin
00:52:37 ►
so that in a sense the surface of an octopus
00:52:40 ►
is what it’s thinking
00:52:42 ►
it is a visual manifestation of its
00:52:45 ►
internal processes, its thoughts appear
00:52:48 ►
as pictures on its skin which
00:52:51 ►
other octopi can read, now this is a form
00:52:54 ►
of free coding that approaches or exceeds
00:52:58 ►
our own and in fact might provide
00:53:00 ►
a model for future evolutionary
00:53:04 ►
developments in human language.
00:53:07 ►
I’ll talk more about that since, on the face of it, it’s a puzzling statement.
00:53:14 ►
Why don’t we knock off for today, and if anybody needs any of this, we can help them out.
00:53:22 ►
It’s ten of six. We’ll meet here at 8 o’clock tonight.
00:53:37 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:53:39 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:53:41 ►
one thought at a time.
00:53:44 ►
I think that the first thing from this talk that I should comment on
00:53:48 ►
is the part where Terence said, and I quote,
00:53:51 ►
This transcendental object probably is more like a being than an object.
00:53:57 ►
I just call it a transcendental object to keep those issues out of it
00:54:02 ►
when we try to think of it as an attractor.
00:54:06 ►
No, it’s a mind.
00:54:08 ►
It’s an organizing intellect.
00:54:10 ►
It is the mind.
00:54:13 ►
It’s probably the mind that you call your mind.
00:54:18 ►
Wow, I’m sure that I’ve never heard him say this before,
00:54:21 ►
but if you know of an instance where he’s said it before,
00:54:23 ►
I really would like to know about it.
00:54:27 ►
For me, this changes his end-of-time ideas completely,
00:54:31 ►
because, well, at least to me, there is a huge difference between that attractor being a thing and an entity.
00:54:36 ►
Well, maybe we can get Matt Palomary to comment on this tomorrow night in the Psychedelic Salon Live,
00:54:41 ►
because, for sure, this is something I would like to explore with you and everybody else a little bit further in the months ahead.
00:54:48 ►
Now, I’m wondering if I’m also the only one who thought of Teilhard de Chardin’s important book, The Phenomena of Man, when Terence was talking about the approach of an omega point.
00:54:59 ►
Of course, that was the essential takeaway from that book.
00:55:05 ►
that was the essential takeaway from that book. And I know that Terrence was very familiar with it because the last time that I spoke with him was at the time when I was writing The Spirit
00:55:09 ►
of the Internet, which is based on Teilhard’s book. And in our discussion about my book,
00:55:14 ►
it was obvious that Terrence had thought a great deal about some of the ideas that were
00:55:19 ►
presented there. Also, there were several other ideas that Terrence floated in this talk that I think are worthy of further discussion on our live Monday night salon that’s available via Patreon for only a dollar a month.
00:55:31 ►
I’m not sure if we’ll get to any of them tomorrow night because our guest will be Matt Palomary, and I suspect that our fellow salonners already have, well, they probably have enough questions to keep them really busy.
00:55:42 ►
But here are a couple of Terence’s quotes from this talk
00:55:45 ►
that I think we can have some fun discussing in the weeks ahead.
00:55:49 ►
And I quote,
00:55:51 ►
What psychedelics lead to is appropriate activity.
00:55:54 ►
Appropriate activity is the way to be straight with the psychedelic vision.
00:55:59 ►
Unquote.
00:56:00 ►
The next one is,
00:56:02 ►
I regard all organized religion as a plot against free thought.
00:56:08 ►
I want to talk about that one.
00:56:10 ►
And finally, I quote, the thing which pervades the psychedelic experience is this sense of weird,
00:56:17 ►
sense of closeness to a bizarre secret of some sort.
00:56:20 ►
I don’t even claim that the psychedelic experience should be put on the spectrum of spiritual experience, somewhere between moral rectitude and Buddha, end quote. Well, I suspect
00:56:31 ►
that those little quotes should be able to stir up some interesting conversations in the weeks ahead,
00:56:36 ►
and I’m looking forward to participating in them with you.
00:56:40 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.