Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The world that we are living in is not at all as the linguistic structures we have inherited would have us have it. We are actually living inside some kind of artificial construction which is potentially permeable by human understanding but to date has not been.”
“The unspeakable is the ground of language.”
“History is the story of the cancerous and unchecked growth of the ego.”
“If our god is omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong always right, utterly unforgiving, this is a jerk! Who needs this? We don’t need this. Our image of deity is pathological. Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously untamed ego.”
“Psychedelics are not an ideology. Psychedelics are an experience.”
“What the shamans say is truer than anything we can say about them.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And I want to remind my Patreon supporters that in tonight’s live salon,
00:00:28 ►
our guest will be Richie Obelnik, who you may know better as Eric Taub.
00:00:34 ►
Richie, or Eric if you prefer, is a pioneer of the Ibogaine movement
00:00:38 ►
and will be with us tonight to answer questions about this important psychoactive medicine from Africa.
00:00:45 ►
And if, like me, you don’t have a lot of experience with this medicine, well, then tonight’s conversation will
00:00:51 ►
be a great place for you to ask your questions from an expert, and I hope to see you there.
00:00:56 ►
By the way, if all goes well, I’ll record tonight’s live salon and podcast it here as a
00:01:01 ►
Salon 2 track. As you know, I’ve been numbering the Salon 2
00:01:05 ►
podcasts a little differently from the main track because these recordings are coming from our
00:01:10 ►
fellow salonners and aren’t solely my work. And I think of these live salons that same way because,
00:01:16 ►
well, everybody there has a chance to join in the conversation. And before long, I’ll begin
00:01:21 ►
podcasting a major series of Salon 2 programs.
00:01:31 ►
These programs are being coordinated by the Lakey Sisters, from whom we have already heard one of their programs,
00:01:36 ►
and this series is going to feature a major work of psychedelic literature.
00:01:44 ►
It’s the novel that’s titled The Rose of Pericles on Secrets and Sacraments, and it was written by Leonard Picard.
00:01:49 ►
Now, if you’ve been with us here in the Sal salon for a while, you already know who Leonard is.
00:01:54 ►
Well, because he’s the man that the United States government has sentenced to life in prison for the crime of just preparing to manufacture LSD in an abandoned missile silo.
00:02:01 ►
Leonard is actually one of the most visible of the many political prisoners being held in the so-called War on Drugs, and while in prison, he has written this splendid novel. Let’s get started. getting on with today’s program, I feel that I should apologize for getting it out a bit late,
00:02:25 ►
because, well, what happened was, I digitized that last tape in the Terrence McKenna workshop
00:02:31 ►
that I’ve been podcasting recently, but after I began editing it, I discovered that the original
00:02:36 ►
tape had been recorded over. While we were supposedly listening to the final hour of that
00:02:41 ►
workshop, well, it was only the first few minutes on the tape, and after that, somebody had recorded the previous tape over it. So it looks like that final session
00:02:50 ►
is lost forever. But not all is lost, because, well, I dug through that box of old cassette tapes,
00:02:57 ►
and I found two more talks of his that I don’t think have been posted before. While I’m not
00:03:02 ►
completely sure about the details of this talk,
00:03:07 ►
it appears to have been given around May of 1990.
00:03:13 ►
So without any further ado, here again is the one and only Terrence McKenna.
00:03:27 ►
Well, I want to explain a little bit about why I should even be sitting here talking to you and why I’m qualified to do that, if I’m qualified to do that.
00:03:42 ►
A few years ago, my wife and partner and I organized land that we owned in Hawaii as a non-profit that could be turned into a botanical garden. And this is a unique botanical garden
00:03:45 ►
in that our focus is on psychoactive plants
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and plants with a history of shamanic usage.
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And even though we’re a very modest effort,
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it turns out we’re the only people in the world,
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as far as we can tell, who are actually doing this.
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people in the world, as far as we can tell,
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who are actually doing this.
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You’re all aware of the speed at which the rainforests of the world are being cleared,
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but what is never mentioned
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is the even more rapid disappearance
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of folk knowledge about the rainforest.
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I’m an optimist and I believe that eventually
00:04:29 ►
the rainforest clearing will be halted
00:04:32 ►
and there will be huge preserves in the tropics
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but nothing will halt
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the homogenization of human
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knowledge and the abandonment of localized
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ancient folkways
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in favor of the kind of generic kinds of understanding
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that operate in the world cultural market.
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In the next 30 years, it’s going to be the last opportunity
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that we will have to preserve 50, 100,000 years
00:05:05 ►
of folk medical knowledge relative to the tropics.
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So this is the real-world political work
00:05:12 ►
that my wife and I do,
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and Kat runs it on a day-to-day basis.
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I’m its spokesman,
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but she does the grunt work and the organizing
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and organizes the expeditions and the collections.
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If any of you are of a philanthropic bent,
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this is something I would be interested in discussing with you on our own.
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For the rest of you, I simply want to inform you
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that this kind of effort is going on.
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If you find yourself in exotic foreign
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countries or planning to travel
00:05:48 ►
to remote tribal areas
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we would be interested
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in signing you up to help
00:05:53 ►
in our collection efforts
00:05:55 ►
I believe that the
00:05:57 ►
collecting and preserving of
00:05:59 ►
these psychedelic and psychoactive
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plants is equivalent
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to the preserving of ancient manuscripts
00:06:06 ►
that was done in the dark ages.
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Preserving things we don’t understand
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toward a brighter day
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when society will create an open enough climate of inquiry
00:06:20 ►
that these things can actually then be looked at.
00:06:24 ►
Well, so much for that.
00:06:26 ►
As far as my qualifications,
00:06:29 ►
they’re pretty minimal in the academic realm.
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I have a degree in conservation of natural resources
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from the University of California at Berkeley,
00:06:37 ►
which is a little like saying, you know,
00:06:40 ►
I have a degree in tap dancing from the University of Antarctica.
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I have a degree in tap dancing from the University of Antarctica.
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But from the time that I was a very small child,
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I was an edge runner.
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And I don’t know why,
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but this turned out to be a very fruitful natural style for getting ahead in the world.
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The exploration of edges, the oldest books, the forgotten countries, the unpronounceable islands, that sort of thing.
00:07:18 ►
And I was a rock collector and a butterfly collector and an amateur rocketeer and all these things.
00:07:25 ►
And when I analyzed these pursuits of mine,
00:07:29 ►
it was the pursuit of a certain flash of iridescence.
00:07:34 ►
The iridescence that you get when you break open ore-bearing rock
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or the iridescence that you get when you capture certain kinds of butterflies
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in tropical environments
00:07:44 ►
or the kind of iridescence that you get
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when you mix potassium perchlorate and sugar in a hot sauce pan and ignite it.
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In other words, pushing out at the edge of the permissible,
00:08:00 ►
at the edge of the probable,
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looking for a certain something,
00:08:06 ►
a scintilla, a spark, a possibility.
00:08:09 ►
And as I matured
00:08:13 ►
and became a goggle-eyed chess master
00:08:18 ►
and hell-on-wheels science fair competitor,
00:08:21 ►
I came to understand,
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I came to assimilate the methodology of science,
00:08:28 ►
which is not particularly at the top of its share of the market at the moment.
00:08:35 ►
But I assimilated that and I discovered the second part of the method that has been so serviceable to me, which is the good stuff can take pressure. The good stuff doesn’t have to be looked at sideways. In other words, if something is real, you can stress it. You can test it. It doesn’t require belief.
00:09:09 ►
it. You can test it. It doesn’t require belief. This was, for me, a great intellectual watershed.
00:09:19 ►
The understanding that belief of any sort was a kind of encumbrance to the relationship that I was attempting to have with what I naively called reality. That was the thing.
00:09:27 ►
And eventually, this strategy of edge running
00:09:32 ►
led me into psychedelics.
00:09:36 ►
I had had the good fortune to make my way
00:09:39 ►
to the University of California at Berkeley.
00:09:42 ►
So I was at, this was 1965,
00:09:44 ►
I was at ground zero of the cultural, impending cultural implosion. My good fortune. But at that point, discovering psychedelics, I realized that not only the tired cliche
00:10:06 ►
that everything you know is wrong,
00:10:10 ►
but also that whatever is true cannot even be imagined.
00:10:17 ►
And since I discovered this on my own,
00:10:21 ►
I don’t feel under any kind of constraint not to talk about it. I wasn’t initiated by any
00:10:29 ►
secret society. Nobody swore me to silence. So I seem to have gotten through a number of filters.
00:10:39 ►
I feel perfectly empowered to talk about this thing which I think nobody is supposed to talk about.
00:10:47 ►
And I don’t mean the legal side
00:10:52 ►
of it or the social side of it. I mean, that barely interests me at all. Who cares?
00:10:57 ►
I mean that
00:10:59 ►
the world we are living in is not
00:11:03 ►
at all as the linguistic structures we have inherited would have us have it.
00:11:10 ►
That we are actually living inside some kind of artificial construction,
00:11:16 ►
which is potentially permeable by human understanding, but to date has not been.
00:11:24 ►
We have been very much on the surface of things.
00:11:27 ►
The question that I raise constantly
00:11:31 ►
with myself, and it’s interesting to talk about it with other people then,
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is, you know, just what is going on?
00:11:42 ►
Just what do you think is going on? Just what do you think is going on?
00:11:47 ►
I mean, have you backed off from it?
00:11:49 ►
Do you have a grip on the outlines of the problem?
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Or are you just sort of adrift inside the context?
00:11:59 ►
Because the situation is mighty peculiar, friends.
00:12:02 ►
The situation is mighty peculiar, friends.
00:12:11 ►
What we have here is a kind of creature made out of information,
00:12:14 ►
apparently loose in an environment of meaning,
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on the surface of a planet upon which gene swarming is happening.
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And all of these things,
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gene swarming,
00:12:28 ►
self-reflection,
00:12:29 ►
production of epigenetic codes like writing
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and this sort of thing
00:12:31 ►
have no precedent.
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We don’t go out and collect
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other forms of these things.
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They all are generated out of us.
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We as moderns, as inheritors of Cartesian rationalism,
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look out at a universe that our science tells us
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is energy, matter, conservation of mass and momentum,
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and yet we never notice the peculiar enigma posed by the question, who’s looking?
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Who’s looking? How is it
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possible that the coextensive
00:13:12 ►
continuum of a parent being is
00:13:15 ►
coordinated inside organism
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into an experience
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of ongoing becoming with which we have some
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kind of identification.
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This is very weird.
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It should provoke more comment than it is.
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I think it’s fairly easy to compress
00:13:42 ►
the entire history of philosophy into the process of achieving age eight. By age
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eight, most of us, if we have the time on our hands, are able to carry out an analysis of being
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where we reach the conclusion that everything is events in the nervous system.
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that everything is events in the nervous system.
00:14:07 ►
We understand this.
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We understand that light being reflected from objects then creates neurochemical events
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which reconstruct an image of the outer world.
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So we pay lip service to this idea
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that everything is a neurological event.
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But in fact, we have a very strong faith
00:14:26 ►
in the so-called three-dimensional Newtonian world.
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And yet, this is the faith
00:14:33 ►
that can be deconstructed on psychedelics.
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It shows us something which we give lip service to,
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but which is very hard to raise to the level
00:14:46 ►
of a felt experience
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and that is that the world is made of language
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it is made of language
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this is not something you say at sales meetings
00:15:00 ►
to boost sales
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this is bedrock as far as I can tell and everything else is unconfirmed
00:15:08 ►
rumor. Well then you know what is language? What is it if the world is made out of it?
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Well then this becomes dicey because the tool for describing language is language. And you don’t have to have graduated to logic three
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to understand that there’s a self-limiting program involved
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in something carrying out a complete description of itself.
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It’s a tautology.
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It can’t be done.
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Does that mean then that language can only be understood
00:15:44 ►
from the vantage point of the unspeakable?
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I think so.
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We didn’t know what that meant.
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We thought the unspeakable was like silence.
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That isn’t what it is.
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The unspeakable is the ground of language.
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Well, how did we get into this situation?
00:16:07 ►
This is part of the question that relates to what is going on.
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How did we get into this situation?
00:16:14 ►
If you came in a flying saucer and observed the earth,
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I think you would come to the conclusion that the breakout process or the anomaly in the mix is the human element.
00:16:32 ►
Animals of all sorts have existed get this breakout away from genetics,
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away from the raw transmission of hereditary characteristics
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and into a whole new realm of being,
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a whole new ontos of possibility,
00:17:00 ►
which is epigenetics, codes, self-generated language, song, dance, painting, chanting.
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All of these things are forms of expression, but they are not genetic expression.
00:17:17 ►
What seems to be happening on this planet, at least, and in the universe generally, is a conservation of complexity,
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a speeding up of process, and a conservation of complexity.
00:17:33 ►
Now, the ordinary theory of evolution
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is thought to be a theory that is confined within the domain of biology.
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It’s a theory of how one organism supersedes another and there is advancement
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of form. But scientists are very nervous when you extend the concept of evolution to the inorganic
00:17:54 ►
universe at large. And yet, if you think about the life of the universe, as we all have learned it from Carl Sagan you know that we all began
00:18:06 ►
as an infinitely small dense hot dot
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but that didn’t last long
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because there wasn’t much going on
00:18:15 ►
because there was so much energy
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that no arrangements could be made
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then there was a massive explosion
00:18:23 ►
and a tremendous drop in temperature.
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And at that point, atomic free atoms,
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electrons could settle into orbits around atomic nuclei
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and you get atomic chemistry,
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which condenses into stars made of pure hydrogen and helium,
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which cook out iron and carbon.
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You get more complex chemistry
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with more complex bond possibilities. This allows
00:18:48 ►
the molecular bond to form for the first time. Suddenly, an entirely new universe of possibilities
00:18:56 ►
springs into being. And at the end of that cascade of possibilities is organic life.
00:19:03 ►
cascade of possibilities is organic life.
00:19:08 ►
Organic life then contorts and conserves information and folds it in upon itself and replicates it and distorts
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it and you get more and more advanced forms of higher
00:19:15 ►
organisms, plants and animals. Ultimately this process ushers
00:19:20 ►
into human beings with culture, electronic
00:19:24 ►
culture and then finally the cataclysmic ushers into human beings with culture, electronic culture,
00:19:25 ►
and then finally the cataclysmic connectedness of the 20th century.
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From a psychedelic point of view, this is all a connected process.
00:19:38 ►
You see, the Newtonian scientific thing lifted human beings out of the center of the cosmos properly and set them off
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to one side small planet small star small galaxy to one side and that may have been a refreshing
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dose of realism to the monotheistic ego that had been created out of the medieval eschatology. But in a way, it’s unsatisfying
00:20:07 ►
because the felt presence of experience
00:20:11 ►
has a centrality to it. We do feel that we are
00:20:15 ►
important, at least to ourselves.
00:20:19 ►
Can we create a metaphysic that is true to
00:20:24 ►
what is observed of the universe
00:20:26 ►
and true to our intuition?
00:20:30 ►
Yes, we can if we see history as the inheritor
00:20:37 ►
and the culminating process of all these other processes.
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And then if we see ourselves installed at the
00:20:48 ►
cutting edge, at the leading edge of history, as
00:20:51 ►
its major players and actors. And this is in fact
00:20:56 ►
the situation. I mean, have you ever stopped to
00:21:00 ►
consider how many people
00:21:03 ►
didn’t screw up for you to be sitting here tonight? You know, your ancestors,
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how many times there were opportunities for, you know, the saber-toothed tiger to strike back, or
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the hunt to fail, or the fever to sweep through through or the breast to go dry
00:21:25 ►
or how many times were there opportunities that somebody had their eye on the ball,
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somebody paid attention.
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You are the inheritor of that process.
00:21:38 ►
There’s a lot of talk in the New Age, Shemage, about the Tao of the ancestors, or Tao.
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Well, what does the Tao of the ancestors mean, except that you are the rearranged genetic
00:21:55 ►
component of your particular genetic stream, and your grandfather, your great uncle, your
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grandmother, your great aunt had ways of doing grandmother, your great-aunt had ways of doing things.
00:22:06 ►
Pitting peaches, planting beans, trimming flank steak.
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That’s the Tao of the ancestors, that there’s a way to do things.
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And that when you do things that way,
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that is the appropriate way for you to do it.
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And you can tell it’s the appropriate way
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because there is very little energy loss.
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That’s what the Tao is.
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It is appropriate activity.
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And from a psychedelic point of view,
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when we analyze the state of the world,
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what we see is not that there are many problems, sexism, racism, air pollution, monotheism,
00:22:50 ►
you name it, not that there are many problems, but that there’s really just one problem. The problem
00:22:57 ►
is, well, it can be defined many ways, but it’s basically that we are inappropriate to ourselves. We are ill with ego.
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We have a narcissism that we cannot put down. Why? Why, given what we know about evolution and how
00:23:20 ►
it tries to smooth the way, why do we have a maladaptive relationship to reality?
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It doesn’t make any sense.
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Well, here’s why.
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It’s nobody’s fault, first of all.
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It has to do with the fact that the monkey
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is lagging behind the dynamics of the planet.
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Three million years ago, we were happy in the trees of Africa,
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in the canopied tropical equatorial forests of Africa.
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And in the way of planets, there are long cycles of drying and
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aridification and a cycle like that
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began in Africa and these
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arboreal primates which had
00:24:14 ►
a social form and a complex kind
00:24:17 ►
of pack signaling
00:24:18 ►
they were fruititarian and highly
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specialized at it,
00:24:25 ►
came under environmental pressure
00:24:27 ►
because of the retreat of these rainforests
00:24:32 ►
and their replacement by grasslands.
00:24:35 ►
When an animal comes under environmental pressure like that,
00:24:38 ►
it has to expand its diet or face extinction.
00:24:44 ►
It’s just that simple.
00:24:46 ►
Now, to my mind, the great unexamined dynamic of evolutionary theory is diet,
00:24:54 ►
especially when we discuss human evolution.
00:24:57 ►
Why?
00:24:58 ►
It works like this.
00:25:00 ►
These monkeys are under pressure to expand their diet.
00:25:03 ►
Therefore, they must experiment with new kinds of food.
00:25:07 ►
When you experiment with new kinds of food,
00:25:09 ►
you are opening yourself up to exotic chemicals
00:25:14 ►
and mutagenic compounds present in plants in your environment.
00:25:20 ►
Plants produce these things to ward off predation,
00:25:23 ►
discourage insects, attract pollinators, various reasons.
00:25:28 ►
But chemically speaking, the very compounds which are pheromones,
00:25:34 ►
sexual attractants or poisons, are also in the chemical families
00:25:40 ►
that impact on human physiology.
00:25:43 ►
Alkaloids, steroids, hormones, neurotransmitters,
00:25:48 ►
and yes, psychedelic drugs.
00:25:50 ►
These things are all present in the diet.
00:25:53 ►
Well, the peculiar way in which we differ from the other primates,
00:26:01 ►
speaking generally,
00:26:03 ►
is that we have what are called
00:26:05 ►
neonatal characteristics.
00:26:07 ►
The persistence of infantile characteristics
00:26:10 ►
into adulthood
00:26:11 ►
is typical of human beings.
00:26:14 ►
This is why we have this extremely long
00:26:17 ►
period of semi-non-functionability
00:26:21 ►
up to age 16 or something.
00:26:23 ►
You’re not fully all there, you know. This is
00:26:26 ►
incredible for an animal. This means we remain, we’re almost like kangaroos. You know, when the
00:26:33 ►
kangaroo is born, it’s an eighth of an inch long. It lives in the motherot form. And our hairlessness
00:26:45 ►
and our large skull
00:26:49 ►
and numerous characteristics
00:26:51 ►
are neonatal and were probably induced
00:26:55 ►
by mutations, alkaloids and things like that
00:26:59 ►
in the diet.
00:27:00 ►
The one I want to particularly call to your attention
00:27:03 ►
is psilocybin because here is the scenario of human emergence
00:27:08 ►
and I defy anyone to top it
00:27:11 ►
this is how it happened
00:27:13 ►
here’s how the boy ate the cabbage
00:27:16 ►
or something
00:27:17 ►
part of this pressure to expand diet
00:27:22 ►
had to do with abandoning vegetarianism
00:27:26 ►
and turning on to the fact that there were huge amounts of protein on the hoof in these grasslands
00:27:33 ►
in the form of ungulate mammals that were developing in the same environment.
00:27:39 ►
So these pack-hunting primates began to take an interest in these ungulate mammals and, you know,
00:27:45 ►
hunt them, club them, or predate on carrion kills by lions and that sort of thing. And when they did
00:27:55 ►
this, of course, if you follow herds of ungulate animals, you see a lot of what the president calls
00:28:01 ►
deep doo-doo. And in this, you encounter mushrooms. The technical
00:28:07 ►
term is coprophilic, dung-loving, somewhat like the president. And these dung-loving,
00:28:15 ►
coprophytic mushrooms contain psilocybin. Well, if you’ve ever been in the veldt environment or in
00:28:21 ►
any environment where these pasture pasture mushrooms are happening they’re
00:28:25 ►
extremely noticeable in the environment i mean i have seen them in the amazon the size of dinner
00:28:31 ►
plates and you can see them you know from 300 yards away in a pasture also in kenya i’ve observed
00:28:39 ►
personally pack hunting baboons and what they’re into are grubs that locate under cow pies and
00:28:47 ►
so their technique is to run around flipping over cow pies and
00:28:52 ►
Picking up weird things and smelling and tasting them
00:28:55 ►
This means that the mushroom is planted directly in the evolutionary path of these evolving primates
00:29:03 ►
They’re moving on to the grassates. They’re moving onto the grasslands,
00:29:05 ►
they’re following the herds,
00:29:06 ►
they’re looking for the game kills,
00:29:08 ►
and they’re encountering mushrooms
00:29:10 ►
and testing them for food value.
00:29:15 ►
Okay, very simple three-step process.
00:29:19 ►
When you take psilocybin in very small amounts,
00:29:23 ►
amounts so small that subjectively you don’t notice
00:29:27 ►
anything. Roland Fisher did
00:29:31 ►
tests in the 1960s and he showed, using rats
00:29:35 ►
and later graduate students, that
00:29:38 ►
that small amounts of psilocybin
00:29:46 ►
actually increase visual acuity.
00:29:50 ►
And he gave people eye tests,
00:29:52 ►
a particular kind of eye test
00:29:53 ►
where there were two parallel bars
00:29:56 ►
and by turning a crank out of sight of the test subject,
00:30:00 ►
you could deform these bars
00:30:02 ►
so they were no longer parallel
00:30:04 ►
and the subject would push a
00:30:06 ►
button when they felt the bars had moved out of parallel. No question. The very slightly stoned
00:30:12 ►
people could pick this up much faster than an ordinary person. Okay, you don’t have to be an
00:30:20 ►
evolutionary biologist to know that if there’s a plant in the environment of a hunting animal
00:30:26 ►
that will improve the visual acuity
00:30:29 ►
of that hunting animal,
00:30:31 ►
then those animals that admit that
00:30:33 ►
into their diet
00:30:34 ►
are going to outbreed
00:30:36 ►
the other individuals
00:30:38 ►
who don’t admit it into their diet
00:30:39 ►
because they’re going to have
00:30:40 ►
more success at hunting,
00:30:42 ►
which means more food,
00:30:44 ►
which means more babies
00:30:46 ►
and more successful adults,
00:30:49 ►
so forth and so on.
00:30:50 ►
First step.
00:30:52 ►
Second step,
00:30:53 ►
slightly more psilocybin.
00:30:56 ►
Now what happens?
00:30:58 ►
Psilocybin is an indole hallucinogen
00:31:00 ►
like LSD,
00:31:01 ►
bogaine,
00:31:02 ►
so forth,
00:31:04 ►
beta-carbolines, DMT.
00:31:07 ►
Okay, it’s a CNS activator.
00:31:10 ►
That means that it is going to cause CNS arousal.
00:31:15 ►
Forget CNS.
00:31:17 ►
It’s going to cause arousal.
00:31:19 ►
Forget arousal.
00:31:20 ►
That means erection.
00:31:22 ►
Okay, so in the mid-range dose on psilocybin,
00:31:26 ►
it’s causing an interest in sexual activity.
00:31:30 ►
Increased generalized arousal, but it’s an itch you can’t scratch,
00:31:34 ►
and you usually settle down to getting laid.
00:31:37 ►
I mean, this is just how arousal works.
00:31:41 ►
Okay, so then, and now what is this doing? It’s like an aphrodisiac or something in the food
00:31:52 ►
chain of this animal. Well, what is it doing? It’s causing more of what primatologists call
00:31:59 ►
successful copulations. And these successful copulations are happening in the presence of an increased food source
00:32:06 ►
because of the increased visual acuity.
00:32:09 ►
So you see what is happening.
00:32:11 ►
The factors are beginning to snowball
00:32:13 ►
that will favor the outbreeding
00:32:17 ►
of the non-mushroom-using part of the population.
00:32:22 ►
Well, then at still higher levels of psilocybin ingestion,
00:32:26 ►
you get the full-blown psychedelic ecstasy,
00:32:30 ►
which even we as moderns,
00:32:33 ►
with Heidegger and Husserl
00:32:34 ►
tucked under our arm,
00:32:35 ►
we don’t know what the hell’s going on.
00:32:37 ►
We are as primitive in the face of it
00:32:40 ►
as people in the Magdalenian were.
00:32:43 ►
But it introduces the notion of a transcendent other,
00:32:49 ►
a tremendum, a translinguistic reality,
00:32:52 ►
the experience of the logos, the unspeakable,
00:32:55 ►
in other words, religion.
00:32:57 ►
So here’s a three-step process.
00:33:00 ►
Increased success in hunting brings increased food supply,
00:33:04 ►
which brings increased sexual activity, which brings higher birth rate, which is all happening in the ambiance of this tremendous psychedelic experience.
00:33:24 ►
alone is sufficient to make the case that it must have been indole alkaloids in the early human diet that catapulted us
00:33:28 ►
into this extraordinary relationship to language and cognition that we have.
00:33:34 ►
But there’s more to it than that,
00:33:36 ►
because we just have been glossing this thing that we call the psychedelic experience.
00:33:43 ►
After all, what is it? Well, then when you try and go experience. After all, what is it?
00:33:46 ►
Well, then when you try and go into it and say, what is it?
00:33:49 ►
I think that a number of issues are coming together
00:33:55 ►
that may not have appeared to be related.
00:33:59 ►
The hysteria over drugs in our society,
00:34:03 ►
the apparent approach of the end of all life
00:34:07 ►
as we know it on this planet.
00:34:10 ►
And our political wrong-headedness.
00:34:15 ►
Well, now, what does all this have to do
00:34:17 ►
with a hypothesized relationship of proto-humans
00:34:21 ►
to a food source in the belts of Africa
00:34:23 ►
a million years ago
00:34:25 ►
well I just prefer this kind of big picture
00:34:28 ►
analysis that’s it
00:34:29 ►
and what I think happened
00:34:34 ►
is that if you
00:34:37 ►
know anything about monkeys they are not
00:34:40 ►
very pleasant creatures
00:34:42 ►
they have a male dominance hierarchy,
00:34:47 ►
what’s called an alpha male primate.
00:34:49 ►
He kicks everybody around and keeps the good women for himself
00:34:52 ►
and the good food and so forth.
00:34:54 ►
As we look at lower primates, it’s a fairly discouraging picture.
00:34:58 ►
But I believe that shamanism in its heyday was
00:35:05 ►
you know not
00:35:07 ►
the
00:35:09 ►
feeble curing of
00:35:11 ►
psychological ailments that we
00:35:14 ►
grant
00:35:14 ►
to shamanism on the borders
00:35:17 ►
of the third world today
00:35:19 ►
but that it was a deeper understanding
00:35:22 ►
of nature
00:35:23 ►
and humanity than we possess right now.
00:35:28 ►
And that what the high shamanism of the Paleolithic did
00:35:32 ►
was it put us into a quasi-symbiotic relationship
00:35:38 ►
with the mind of the earth, if you can grok this.
00:35:42 ►
That there is actually a chemical
00:35:45 ►
network of communication.
00:35:48 ►
That the earth is a living
00:35:52 ►
organism, yes, but it’s also a
00:35:54 ►
reflected, minded organism.
00:35:58 ►
And this is beyond what Lovelock and all those people
00:36:00 ►
are willing to say. This is not based on science.
00:36:04 ►
This is based on the experience of meeting the management
00:36:07 ►
on the other side of science.
00:36:10 ►
The earth is some kind of conscious intellect
00:36:14 ►
and it is managing itself toward an end.
00:36:21 ►
We are embedded in a plan.
00:36:23 ►
We are not a breakaway mutation.
00:36:26 ►
We are a desperate response to something.
00:36:30 ►
And what was going on back there
00:36:33 ►
in the high Paleolithic was
00:36:35 ►
on a very regular basis,
00:36:39 ►
human beings in this nomadic
00:36:42 ►
hunter-gatherer situation
00:36:44 ►
were taking mushrooms together as a religious ritual.
00:36:50 ►
They were dissolving boundaries.
00:36:53 ►
This is what we experience when we take psilocybin.
00:36:56 ►
The generalized description of the psychedelic experience is
00:36:58 ►
it dissolves boundaries.
00:37:01 ►
And the main boundary that it was dissolving
00:37:04 ►
and that it does dissolve is the ego.
00:37:09 ►
Psychedelics are an inoculation against selfishness at the expense of group values.
00:37:18 ►
And it is selfishness at the expense of group values that is shoving us toward Armageddon. These pastoralist, mushroom-taking,
00:37:29 ►
goddess-worshipping, equilibrium, partnership societies were the solution to the human
00:37:37 ►
problem. They had achieved a kind of dynamisis that we can only envy they were fully minded their thoughts were deeper than our thoughts
00:37:47 ►
Their poetry was richer than our poetry. They didn’t build things. They didn’t have a
00:37:54 ►
demonic
00:37:55 ►
relationship to matter
00:37:59 ►
Because because
00:38:01 ►
every new and full moon they were taking mushrooms and jumping on each other in a big heap
00:38:07 ►
and this was making it impossible
00:38:11 ►
to trace male paternity
00:38:13 ►
and so care of children was generalized
00:38:17 ►
it was a group phenomenon
00:38:19 ►
and so then what happened?
00:38:22 ►
if it was so wonderful
00:38:24 ►
what the what happened? If it was so wonderful, what the hell happened?
00:38:27 ►
Well, again, no blame, no blame.
00:38:32 ►
What happened was that the very processes that created this perfect world,
00:38:39 ►
which were a process of gradual drying of the African continent
00:38:43 ►
to force these monkeys out of the trees
00:38:45 ►
and into this grassland,
00:38:47 ►
symbiotic, pastoral, nomadic adaptation.
00:38:51 ►
That drying process continued.
00:38:54 ►
And the grass dried up,
00:38:56 ►
and the water holes got further and further apart,
00:38:59 ►
and the mushroom festivals were no longer held every Saturday night.
00:39:03 ►
They were held once a month,
00:39:04 ►
and then at the solstices and held once a month and then at the
00:39:05 ►
solstices and equinoxes and then at the solstice and then every 10 years and then never.
00:39:11 ►
And the other thing that was going on was there was frantic pressure to try and figure out how
00:39:16 ►
to preserve the mushrooms since they were so hard to get. And the only solution anybody could come
00:39:21 ►
up with was honey. And honey is a material which left to itself in that kind of an environment
00:39:27 ►
will turn into mead.
00:39:29 ►
And mead is an alcoholic beverage.
00:39:31 ►
And the difference between a psilocybin cult and an alcoholic beverage
00:39:36 ►
is the difference between church and North Beach.
00:39:57 ►
beach. So around 9,500 years ago, it wouldn’t work in Africa anymore. It was insupportable.
00:40:07 ►
And these people began moving out into the Nile Valley and what is now Palestine. And if you know anything about the archaeology of the Nile, you know that before this, the stratigraphy is basically empty.
00:40:14 ►
He slays the cosmic bull.
00:40:17 ►
Then he goes to the shaman figure, Enkidu,
00:40:21 ►
and against his will, he puts big pressure on Enkidu to go with him into the wilderness and
00:40:28 ►
There they cut down the tree of life
00:40:32 ►
This is what they do. This is what Gilgamesh does
00:40:34 ►
This is the first act of the first man in the first moment of the story of Western civilization
00:40:41 ►
Out into the woods to chop down the tree of life
00:40:44 ►
meanwhile of the story of Western civilization out into the woods to chalk down the tree of life. Meanwhile, the Semite, their story
00:40:48 ►
is the story of history’s first drug bust.
00:40:53 ►
You know, this woman finds this plant.
00:40:56 ►
The caretaker of the garden has put up signs
00:40:59 ►
which say, don’t eat this plant.
00:41:01 ►
She eats it and the shit hits the fan.
00:41:05 ►
And I recommend to you a thorough reading of Genesis.
00:41:10 ►
It’s astonishing what’s going on there.
00:41:13 ►
Here we have Yahweh after this little contretemps has taken place.
00:41:18 ►
Yahweh, he’s wandering around in the garden.
00:41:21 ►
He speaks, don’t ask me to who.
00:41:24 ►
He speaks and he says, if they eat of the fruit of the tree of life, they will become as we are. This can’t fly. So the issue is, everybody perceives the issue the same. Adam, Eve, and Yahweh. The tension is over the fact that there would be equality
00:41:47 ►
if the plant knowledge
00:41:51 ►
were fully available.
00:41:54 ►
And it’s clear that it comes
00:41:56 ►
through the woman.
00:41:58 ►
I think that women
00:41:59 ►
were the custodians of language.
00:42:02 ►
I think language was
00:42:03 ►
a woman’s mystery.
00:42:06 ►
Again, looking at it from a point of view
00:42:08 ►
of evolutionary stress,
00:42:10 ►
the evolutionary stress on men
00:42:11 ►
was to be the stoic, silent hunter,
00:42:16 ►
to be able to hold a hunting position
00:42:18 ►
in a game drive for hours.
00:42:22 ►
And women stayed closer to home
00:42:25 ►
because they had children hanging off them.
00:42:27 ►
They had a different physical constituency.
00:42:29 ►
And they were in charge of the gathering part
00:42:34 ►
of the hunter-gatherer equation.
00:42:37 ►
Well, gathering is essentially the art of description.
00:42:43 ►
It’s the small bush with the silver leaves
00:42:47 ►
at the bottom of the arroyo near the black rock
00:42:50 ►
with the gray scratch across it.
00:42:52 ►
You have to have your language skills down.
00:42:55 ►
You have to be able to describe hundreds of plants
00:42:57 ►
and their parts and where they’re located
00:43:00 ►
and how to separate them and how to prepare them
00:43:03 ►
and what part of year is important and so forth and so on
00:43:07 ►
And this repertoire of detail was what women had and what?
00:43:14 ►
Created them their power in this goddess
00:43:19 ►
Mushroom ambience
00:43:21 ►
The thing that I’ve learned in studying history and living life
00:43:26 ►
is that the thing that makes you happy
00:43:29 ►
eventually makes you unhappy.
00:43:32 ►
Everything flows. Nothing
00:43:35 ►
lasts. And this is a hard truth to come
00:43:38 ►
to grips with, psychedelic or otherwise.
00:43:41 ►
Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts.
00:43:44 ►
Not even yourself. or otherwise, nothing lasts. Nothing lasts.
00:43:46 ►
Not even yourself.
00:43:53 ►
And what failed for the archaic world was the cleverness of women
00:43:56 ►
evolved into the potential understanding of agriculture.
00:44:04 ►
They had this vast repertoire of understanding of agriculture.
00:44:08 ►
They had this vast repertoire of understanding of plants.
00:44:11 ►
But when they abstracted it and generalized it,
00:44:13 ►
they realized, we don’t need this.
00:44:18 ►
We just need to utilize what we know about these six plants and forget all this other stuff
00:44:21 ►
and lean hard on these six plants.
00:44:24 ►
Well, but then everything is, you know, you’re not gathering now. get all this other stuff and lean hard on these six plants.
00:44:29 ►
Well, but then everything is, you know, you’re not gathering now.
00:44:31 ►
You’re setting plow to the earth.
00:44:33 ►
You’re wounding the earth. And, you know, from there to this moment, it’s just the blink of an eye.
00:44:38 ►
It’s that wonderful camera dissolve in 2001 where the bone is thrown into the air.
00:44:44 ►
And as it comes down, it turns into a space station in orbit around the bone is thrown into the air and as it comes down it turns into
00:44:46 ►
a space station in orbit around the earth
00:44:49 ►
the rest is history as they say
00:44:52 ►
history is the story of the cancerous
00:44:55 ►
and unchecked growth of the ego
00:44:57 ►
its institutions, its structures, its stratagems
00:45:01 ►
its ploys, its work every single
00:45:04 ►
angle its stratagems, its ploys. It’s worked every single angle.
00:45:06 ►
And I think that monotheism is appealing philosophically
00:45:11 ►
as a certain economy.
00:45:13 ►
One god, you know, that wraps it up nicely.
00:45:18 ►
But, you know, you’ve got to be a little more subtle than that.
00:45:22 ►
Let’s take a Jungian perspective for a moment. Our gods
00:45:27 ►
are the images that we collectively empower ourselves to emulate. And if our God is
00:45:40 ►
omnipotent, omniscient, never wrong, always right, utterly unforgiving.
00:45:47 ►
This is a jerk.
00:45:49 ►
Who needs this?
00:45:52 ►
We don’t need this.
00:45:55 ►
Our image of deity is pathological.
00:46:00 ►
Our image of deity is the image of the cancerously untamed ego.
00:46:08 ►
And until we do something about this,
00:46:12 ►
we haven’t got the prayer of a snowball in hell.
00:46:15 ►
Exhortation is not going to do it.
00:46:17 ►
And now time is running out.
00:46:21 ►
Time is running out.
00:46:23 ►
It was not for nothing that this psychedelic surge
00:46:27 ►
occurred in the 60s this the human story is not going to be allowed the luxury of
00:46:37 ►
being a comedy you know what a comedy is a comedy is when you’ve got no choice. This is going to be a tragedy
00:46:45 ►
because the cards are on the table.
00:46:49 ►
If you drown because this boat is sinking,
00:46:53 ►
it’s because you didn’t bother to wander over
00:46:56 ►
and climb in the lifeboat.
00:46:58 ►
That’s the kind of situation we’re in.
00:47:01 ►
By analyzing the archaic context, which was the last sane moment this species ever knew
00:47:10 ►
So what that it was 15,000 years ago. It’s a blink of an eye. No, we’ve been ill since then now, let’s fix it
00:47:18 ►
the last sane moment we ever knew and
00:47:22 ►
Then comes the cascade of history
00:47:28 ►
sane moment we ever knew. And then comes the cascade of history. History is an absolute nightmare.
00:47:36 ►
And it can only be redeemed by us. This is this thing about the Tao of the ancestors.
00:47:46 ►
You know, did all these people get freezed to death and stomped on by mastodons and eaten by saber-toothed tigers and ravaged by disease so you can blow it you with your mercedes and your 48 foot television set it can’t be that lame you know
00:47:57 ►
so so then how does one what is to be done right the tolstoyan question what is to be done the Tolstoyan question
00:48:05 ►
what is to be done
00:48:07 ►
is it a political program
00:48:08 ►
I don’t think it is that
00:48:11 ►
I think that
00:48:13 ►
the way the psychedelic thing works
00:48:16 ►
is you must establish
00:48:18 ►
a level of authenticity
00:48:20 ►
in yourself
00:48:21 ►
vis-a-vis reality
00:48:23 ►
and then you become a walking
00:48:28 ►
Social
00:48:30 ►
Catalyst regulator meme generator, whatever you want to put it. It’s it’s
00:48:37 ►
authentic
00:48:38 ►
understanding
00:48:40 ►
without ideology
00:48:42 ►
This is it psychedelics are not an ideology.
00:48:46 ►
Psychedelics are an experience.
00:48:48 ►
I mean, you can have the psychedelic experience
00:48:51 ►
without taking drugs.
00:48:52 ►
It’s just that, you know,
00:48:54 ►
you have to drive your car 100 miles an hour
00:48:56 ►
over a 300-foot cliff and live.
00:49:01 ►
You know, and then you come out of that
00:49:03 ►
ready to talk turkey.
00:49:07 ►
But, you know, we lose too many people that way.
00:49:16 ►
Because, you see, what we’re in is serious denial. I mean the capacity of the Western mind for denial of the predicament is just mind-boggling.
00:49:31 ►
I mean here we are calmly discussing.
00:49:33 ►
The clock is ticking and we’re sitting on a planet stuffed full of thermonuclear bombs,
00:49:39 ►
disease delivery systems, crazo politicians, psychopaths at every organizational level,
00:49:47 ►
propaganda machine running wild.
00:49:49 ►
And we intellectuals calmly gather
00:49:52 ►
to again consult Tolstoy,
00:49:54 ►
consult this, consult that,
00:49:56 ►
try and figure it out.
00:49:57 ►
The level of denial is pretty incredible.
00:50:01 ►
And I think we have to go back to the 60s to see why that’s the case.
00:50:11 ►
It’s because we’re very much afraid. The issue around psychedelics, both collectively and
00:50:19 ►
personally, if you’re doing them right, is surrender. You know, if you’re doing them right,
00:50:27 ►
it scares you to death how much you do.
00:50:31 ►
Because you do so much that you lose control.
00:50:36 ►
That’s the thing.
00:50:37 ►
Control is the issue, always and everywhere.
00:50:42 ►
And we’ve got this scene so controlled
00:50:45 ►
that we’re on the brink of Armageddon
00:50:48 ►
behind control.
00:50:50 ►
How can it be very, very carefully deconstructed?
00:50:56 ►
Well, I think the first thing is
00:50:58 ►
we have to open a pipeline to the logos.
00:51:04 ►
We have to reach the goddess mind behind nature.
00:51:08 ►
And this means following the classical prescriptions of shamanism.
00:51:13 ►
It’s true what they say.
00:51:16 ►
What the shamans say is truer than anything we can say about them.
00:51:23 ►
In other words, it’s not that they’re putting it through a language
00:51:26 ►
filter or that they’re epistemologically naive or some horseshit like that. That’s not it. It’s you
00:51:32 ►
who are epistemologically naive and me. We have no idea what is possible in nature, in positions of courage and high intoxication.
00:51:47 ►
So I see the whole 20th century as a very, you know,
00:51:54 ►
it’s like trying to turn a battleship with an oar.
00:51:58 ►
It’s very, very slow going.
00:52:00 ►
But with Freud and Jung, we get the discovery of the unconscious.
00:52:08 ►
I mean, they discover it through a spyglass at 900 yards but they do announce that it’s out there
00:52:11 ►
and then through surrealism, abstract expressionism, psychedelic drugs
00:52:18 ►
we are now exploring this domain. We, the analogous cultural crisis
00:52:26 ►
is the
00:52:28 ►
late 15th century,
00:52:31 ►
the 1490s.
00:52:33 ►
Printing was invented in Mainz in 1440.
00:52:35 ►
By 1492,
00:52:37 ►
the new world had been discovered.
00:52:41 ►
We,
00:52:43 ►
it’s 1490
00:52:45 ►
we need to go somewhere
00:52:48 ►
we don’t know quite where
00:52:50 ►
but you can almost taste it
00:52:53 ►
what it is
00:52:54 ►
is that we I think are getting set
00:52:58 ►
to take flight
00:52:59 ►
into what has always been
00:53:02 ►
our destiny
00:53:03 ►
we’re special.
00:53:06 ►
We are not outside the plan,
00:53:10 ►
but we’re in a loop of the plan
00:53:14 ►
that the rest of organic nature is not participating in.
00:53:18 ►
We are the hands of the planetary mind,
00:53:22 ►
and the technologies that we have assembled
00:53:25 ►
are for the purposes of the planetary mind.
00:53:30 ►
Surely it must sense the finite nature
00:53:34 ►
of the life of the planet and the star itself.
00:53:40 ►
We are a kind of strategy for moving energy around.
00:53:51 ►
Someone once said animals are a strategy invented by plants for moving seeds around.
00:53:59 ►
Well, I think human beings are a strategy invented by nature for catalyzing natural process.
00:54:04 ►
Clearly, the whole planet is being sped up. We are preparing to depart for a dimension which can only be called the imagination.
00:54:14 ►
This is what culture is.
00:54:16 ►
8,000 years ago, when we began to crowd into cities and build walls
00:54:22 ►
and define everything into grids and mandalas. That was the beginning
00:54:26 ►
of the excrescence of mental space. That’s what we’re living in. These are all ideas. This was
00:54:34 ►
just unorganized matter put through the mills and presses of design to create a world that reflects the world that is living on the other side of our foreheads,
00:54:49 ►
the world of our imagination.
00:54:51 ►
But it has always operated against the background of the laws of physics,
00:54:57 ►
the strength of materials, the laws of gravity.
00:55:00 ►
You just can’t build bridges with spans more than X or skyscrapers taller than Y.
00:55:06 ►
But in the imagination, wishes are horses, beggars ride.
00:55:13 ►
And this is the cultural dimension that we’s a way to manage this thing back down into the
00:55:28 ►
Equilibrial pastoralism of 20,000 years ago. We’ve burned those bridges
00:55:34 ►
It’s a real crisis. We will not recognize our
00:55:39 ►
grandchildren the
00:55:41 ►
Metaphor that gives me hope when I look at the world is the metaphor of birth.
00:55:47 ►
That must be what is happening.
00:55:50 ►
I mean, if you were suddenly to come around the corner of a building and encounter someone giving birth,
00:55:57 ►
the entire ambience is of crisis, at least, if not alarm.
00:56:07 ►
I mean, pain is being felt, blood is being shed,
00:56:12 ►
anguish at high volume is being expressed.
00:56:16 ►
It’s crisis.
00:56:17 ►
If you’d never seen it,
00:56:20 ►
how could you believe that this was an ordinary part of existence
00:56:25 ►
scripted into being as a necessary part of its happening at all?
00:56:32 ►
It wouldn’t take you like that.
00:56:35 ►
And yet that’s what is happening here.
00:56:38 ►
The mother and the child have now reached the moment where they must be parted
00:56:45 ►
if they’re not parted
00:56:47 ►
toxemia will set in
00:56:49 ►
this is bad for the child
00:56:50 ►
bad for the mother
00:56:52 ►
I’m not comfortable with this
00:56:57 ►
I don’t like this Gnostic thing
00:56:59 ►
of leaving the earth behind
00:57:01 ►
in any sense
00:57:02 ►
even if we just descend
00:57:04 ►
and become the size of grains of salt and live at the center of the earth behind in any sense. Even if we just descend and become the size of grains of salt
00:57:06 ►
and live at the center of the earth or something,
00:57:09 ►
it still means we’re going to leave everything
00:57:11 ►
that we know and love and understand behind.
00:57:17 ►
But nevertheless, you reach these places in your life.
00:57:21 ►
The birth canal is the first one.
00:57:24 ►
Leaving home is the next one. And, you know,
00:57:28 ►
there are many leavings. It’s just that this is a big one. We will never be the same. The earth
00:57:34 ►
will never be the same. And like the fetus, or the, yes, poised at the head of the birth canal,
00:57:43 ►
we don’t know where we’re going. We really don’t see light at the end of the tunnel.
00:57:48 ►
And neither does the fetus.
00:57:50 ►
This is the surrender issue.
00:57:52 ►
It’s going to get crazier.
00:57:55 ►
They were so relieved when the craziness stopped
00:57:58 ►
after October and November and December.
00:58:01 ►
But don’t be fooled.
00:58:03 ►
It was just a hesitation.
00:58:06 ►
The craziness is intensifying
00:58:08 ►
and intensifying.
00:58:11 ►
I believe that the transcendental object
00:58:14 ►
that is actually causing
00:58:17 ►
the lower dimensional phenomenon
00:58:21 ►
which we call reality,
00:58:22 ►
that the transcendental object
00:58:24 ►
is coming tangential
00:58:26 ►
to the historical continuum,
00:58:28 ►
that that’s what this is all about,
00:58:30 ►
that a hundred years from now,
00:58:33 ►
the earth will be empty of people.
00:58:37 ►
There won’t be a one, not a one.
00:58:40 ►
I mean, the breeze will move the grasses.
00:58:44 ►
We will be gone.
00:58:46 ►
Where?
00:58:47 ►
Guess.
00:58:48 ►
Who knows?
00:58:49 ►
Here’s hoping.
00:58:50 ►
We have to find the door
00:58:52 ►
because the place is filling up with shit.
00:58:57 ►
It’s very simple.
00:58:59 ►
And there are many doors.
00:59:01 ►
Here’s a door.
00:59:03 ►
Extinction.
00:59:04 ►
How do you like them apples?
00:59:06 ►
If you can’t find any other door,
00:59:08 ►
nature will kick open that door
00:59:09 ►
and push you right through it.
00:59:12 ►
And yet, you know,
00:59:13 ►
we possess creativity on a scale undreamed of.
00:59:19 ►
We can find a way out.
00:59:21 ►
There’s no problem.
00:59:23 ►
We have the technologies,
00:59:25 ►
the money,
00:59:27 ►
the resources.
00:59:28 ►
We have everything we need
00:59:30 ►
except the will.
00:59:34 ►
It’s a mental quality
00:59:36 ►
lacking in us.
00:59:39 ►
The will to do it.
00:59:40 ►
The will to undertake
00:59:41 ►
planetary-sized projects. the will to make a plan that has
00:59:49 ►
a 20-year, a 50-year, and a 500-year benchmark. But we are forever infantile if we do not avail ourselves of the psychedelic experience.
01:00:14 ►
It is on a par with sex. It makes my flesh crawl to imagine someone going from birth to the grave
01:00:26 ►
without ever having sex
01:00:27 ►
fortunately life is scripted in such a way that few escape
01:00:32 ►
this edifying experience
01:00:36 ►
which most if you question them around age 11
01:00:39 ►
would seek to avoid
01:00:40 ►
well the psychedelic experience is not made inevitable, except by death, if you insist
01:00:48 ►
on waiting that long. But a mature exploration of life includes it, because it shows you who you are.
01:01:01 ►
It gives you a conducted tour of the captain’s quarters. You may not have even known
01:01:07 ►
the captain’s quarters existed. Now, how much is your ignorance worth to you? We need to eliminate
01:01:16 ►
the unconscious mind. This is really what it comes down to, folks. We cannot, in an era of 30-minute delivery
01:01:26 ►
of thermonuclear weapons from anywhere to anywhere,
01:01:29 ►
we do not have the luxury of carrying around with us
01:01:33 ►
an enraged bull primate.
01:01:39 ►
We cannot afford the luxury of the unconscious,
01:01:42 ►
the hidden motive, the unexamined drive,
01:01:46 ►
the misunderstood acquisition.
01:01:52 ►
The only way we can correct our cultural situation
01:01:57 ►
is by returning to an archaic style.
01:02:00 ►
This is what societies always do when they’re slammed to the wall.
01:02:04 ►
When the medieval world blew up on itself,
01:02:07 ►
they returned to the classic models of Rome and Greece
01:02:10 ►
and created classicism.
01:02:12 ►
Classicism was created in the 15th century, for God’s sake.
01:02:16 ►
There hadn’t been a Roman around for a thousand years.
01:02:20 ►
When a society gets into trouble, it reaches back.
01:02:24 ►
We’ve got trouble in River City
01:02:26 ►
big trouble
01:02:27 ►
and we have to reach further back
01:02:30 ►
further, further
01:02:31 ►
Egypt won’t do
01:02:32 ►
the Nazis tried that
01:02:34 ►
it won’t do
01:02:34 ►
we have to go back to this high archaic shamanism
01:02:39 ►
and it’s a hard swallow
01:02:41 ►
for individuals and society
01:02:43 ►
because we have made illegal this possibility
01:02:49 ►
because it is threatening to the dominance of the ego.
01:02:54 ►
The ego cannot coexist in the presence of a psychedelic religion
01:03:00 ►
or a psychedelic option.
01:03:02 ►
To my mind, this is the real issue
01:03:05 ►
behind this asinine drug war.
01:03:08 ►
Nobody is going,
01:03:09 ►
we’re not going to have an epidemic
01:03:10 ►
of heroin addiction or cocaine abuse
01:03:13 ►
if they legalize all this trash.
01:03:14 ►
That’s ridiculous.
01:03:16 ►
But we are going to have people
01:03:18 ►
experimenting with psychedelics
01:03:20 ►
if all drugs are legalized.
01:03:22 ►
And that’s absolutely terrifying
01:03:24 ►
to any establishment.
01:03:27 ►
You know, Marxist, George Bush, you name it.
01:03:30 ►
Anybody who’s got a stake in order is appalled at the notion
01:03:35 ►
that someone would examine the understructure and undercarriage of the social engine.
01:03:41 ►
They’re not interested in that.
01:03:43 ►
That’s what has to be done. We need a thorough
01:03:46 ►
revisioning of reality, a thorough recommitment to a revitalization of religion based on experience,
01:03:57 ►
not on the cant of priests, but on an experience. And, you know, there’s all kinds of stuff in the spiritual marketplace.
01:04:05 ►
Yoga and spirulina diets and colored lights and this and that.
01:04:09 ►
This is all, as far as I’m concerned, malarkey.
01:04:12 ►
I mean, these things do things.
01:04:13 ►
They move you around, altered states.
01:04:15 ►
My God, there are thousands of altered states.
01:04:18 ►
That’s not what we’re talking about.
01:04:20 ►
We’re talking about, you know,
01:04:23 ►
simultaneously shitting white with tears of joy streaming down your face
01:04:27 ►
because of the intensity of the proximity of the mystery.
01:04:33 ►
And it’s not difficult.
01:04:38 ►
It merely requires courage.
01:04:48 ►
courage. Whoever went in to the ashram with their knees knocking with terror over what the next yoga session would bring. I mean, give me a break. We’re talking about the real thing, and you know
01:04:58 ►
what the real thing is. And it is assimilated by an act of courage and an act of responsibility and an act
01:05:11 ►
of understanding if we commit ourselves back to this archaic thing to the mind behind nature nature. It is our
01:05:25 ►
home, our birthright.
01:05:28 ►
I think of the human race as
01:05:29 ►
someone who became
01:05:31 ►
separated from their mother’s hand
01:05:34 ►
in a department store
01:05:35 ►
for 15,000
01:05:37 ►
years. And we’ve been running
01:05:39 ►
from department to department.
01:05:42 ►
You know, is it tennis
01:05:43 ►
rackets? Is it bicycles?
01:05:45 ►
Is it sleds?
01:05:47 ►
What is it?
01:05:48 ►
Shoot it, chew it, this and that.
01:05:51 ►
No, no.
01:05:52 ►
We have to return to an authentic psychedelic shamanism
01:05:59 ►
that is rooted in our experience.
01:06:03 ►
If we empower our experience,
01:06:05 ►
we will cease to be the easily manipulated democratic masses.
01:06:11 ►
Do you know what democratic masses,
01:06:12 ►
do you know what kind of an insult that is to you and me,
01:06:15 ►
to be called the democratic masses?
01:06:18 ►
If we empower ourselves and become reacquainted
01:06:24 ►
with the authentic dimension within us, then
01:06:28 ►
we won’t put up with this crap anymore. This is what happened in the 1960s.
01:06:33 ►
People wouldn’t put up with it anymore and they poured into the streets and
01:06:37 ►
raised holy hell, scared everybody to death. Why wouldn’t they put up with it anymore? Because they saw how shoddy, chintzy,
01:06:48 ►
and knocked together it is.
01:06:50 ►
We’ve been sold a pig and a poke.
01:06:53 ►
It’s not worth having.
01:06:54 ►
These things don’t make us happy.
01:06:57 ►
They don’t bring us wisdom.
01:07:00 ►
They don’t give us depth.
01:07:03 ►
It’s an infantile, insulting, ridiculous society, except that it’s holding a gun to the head of every living thing on this planet.
01:07:16 ►
Shamanism with courage and commitment is, as far as I can see, the last best hope of mankind.
01:07:27 ►
Otherwise, there is no hope.
01:07:29 ►
In other words, I’m not saying this is easy, or now you’ve heard me say this, so we’re going to save the world.
01:07:34 ►
No, I give us a one chance in 50, but this is the only game in town.
01:07:40 ►
You know, Helmut Kohl isn’t going to do it, not Gorby.
01:07:42 ►
Nobody. Those guys are caught in their own definitions.
01:07:47 ►
Nothing changes people like psychedelics.
01:07:52 ►
And changing people is what we’ve got to do, ourselves and other people, fast.
01:07:59 ►
Thank you very much.
01:08:00 ►
We’ll take an intermission, then I’ll come back for questions.
01:08:04 ►
That’s the good part.
01:08:05 ►
Thank you.
01:08:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:08:18 ►
time. I wonder what you were thinking when just, we heard Terrence say, and I quote,
01:08:26 ►
We really don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, and neither does the fetus.
01:08:31 ►
This is a surrender issue. It’s going to get crazier, end quote.
01:08:36 ►
He said that 28 years ago, and I’m sure that I don’t need to remind you of all the craziness that has taken place since then.
01:08:45 ►
don’t need to remind you of all the craziness that has taken place since then. As a matter of fact,
01:08:50 ►
all of those historical events combined probably aren’t going to add up to the craziness that we’re now experiencing. Maybe we should take those old words of Terence’s to heart and take off our rosy
01:08:57 ►
blinders and face up to what’s actually going on in the world today. The great Irish poet W.B. Yeats
01:09:03 ►
foretold this era many years ago in his
01:09:06 ►
famous poem, The Second Coming, which reads, Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
01:09:13 ►
the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is
01:09:20 ►
loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
01:09:28 ►
The best lack all conviction,
01:09:30 ►
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
01:09:33 ►
Surely some revelation is at hand.
01:09:36 ►
Surely the second coming is at hand.
01:09:38 ►
The second coming?
01:09:40 ►
Hardly are those words out
01:09:41 ►
when a vast image of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight.
01:09:46 ►
Somewhere in the sands of the desert, a shape with a lion body in the head of a man,
01:09:52 ►
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs,
01:09:57 ►
while all about it reel shadows of the indigent desert birds.
01:10:01 ►
The darkness drops again, but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep
01:10:07 ►
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
01:10:15 ►
slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. Well, that’s not exactly the holiday cheer that I
01:10:23 ►
had intended to pass along today, and I’ll do better next week, but I do think that it’s important right now to take off our blinders and not look to the next U.S. election cycle or the next leader of whatever nation you now live in to change things.
01:10:45 ►
of how to best live in a global, civilized society is, well, it’s once again in flux.
01:10:51 ►
However, one thing that Terence said in this talk still sticks out in my mind more than anything else in today’s lecture, and that is when he said that we won’t recognize our own grandchildren
01:10:56 ►
the way things are going. Well, here’s a way to truly grok that idea if you already are a grandparent? What if we died back in 1990 and
01:11:06 ►
then somehow returned today? Well, back in 1990 there was no World Wide Web. There weren’t even
01:11:12 ►
cell phones, let alone web-enabled phones. Then throw in today’s music and fashion culture and,
01:11:19 ►
well, my guess is that you would most definitely not recognize the lives of your grandchildren today.
01:11:29 ►
However, the fact is that you are actually here,
01:11:32 ►
and you most likely do recognize your grandchildren,
01:11:35 ►
because, well, you’ve been evolving along with them.
01:11:38 ►
Perhaps not as rapidly as they have been,
01:11:41 ►
but you do at least understand some parts of their world.
01:11:44 ►
So take heart, no matter what your age. We are now riding the crest of,
01:11:46 ►
well, perhaps the greatest wave of change to wash over this planet in the last thousand years.
01:11:52 ►
And as long as we keep our balance, this should be a hell of a great ride.
01:11:58 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space, be well my friends. Thank you.