Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
https://entheomedicine.org/allan-badiner-lorenzo-hagerty-january-19th-2019/Date this lecture was recorded: May 1990.
Today’s podcast features the second part of a talk that Terence McKenna gave in May of 1990. Rather than follow a script for this talk, Terence answers questions from the audience which feature such diverse topics as the family, education, ayahuasca, DMT, history, language, and psychedelics.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“For us, authentic meaning is beheld.”
“History is the lower-dimensional language slice … among other things, of course.”
“We have to educate people about drugs, and we have to tell them the truth. And the truth, unfortunately, is complex. So how do you tell a kid a complex truth?”
Entheo Medicine January 19, 2019
The Imperfectionists
Don’t Get Owned
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And to begin with today’s podcast, I first want to play a soundbite from it that you’ll be hearing once again in just a few minutes.
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Psychedelic people look like everybody else.
00:00:43 ►
And one good purpose served by these events is that they draw them out of the woodwork.
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So you might look around and see who your affinity group is.
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Odds are, whatever you need, someone in this room has it.
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Whatever you need.
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And the reason that I wanted to point that out is because there’s a gathering that I’ll be at on the 19th of January, this coming January,
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and I think that it may be, well, may just be one that fits the bill with what Terrence had just said.
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The event is being organized by the Entheo Medicine Group in Santa Barbara, California,
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and it’ll take place on the evening of Saturday, January 19th, 2019.
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Alan Badner will be the other speaker,
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and he’ll be talking about ways in which psychedelics can enhance a Buddhist practice.
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Maybe I’ll see you there.
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And now I’m pleased to thank regular donor, Ion W.
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And by the way, Ion, I haven’t forgot about returning those McKenna tapes that you sent.
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I plan on mailing them right after the first of the year.
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And hey, thanks again for letting me podcast them.
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Also, we received donations from Christopher C., Samuel G., Dan O., Deborah R., and along with a very generous donation from Thomas R.,
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and I’d like to thank you one and all from the bottom of my heart.
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Additionally, during the past 45 days,
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the number of supporters to my first-run Patreon feed has almost doubled.
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As you know, I’m now podcasting new programs first on Patreon,
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where my supporters are chipping in $1 a month to help
00:02:26 ►
me begin this next phase of my life that’s taking place right now. And for that princely sum, they
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not only get to listen to these podcasts in full a few months before they appear on the classic RSS
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feed, I also host a live version of the salon every Monday night. Well, almost every Monday night, because I am going
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to take off Christmas Eve, but we will be live on New Year’s Eve. However, I do hope that you’ll
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have something better to do than to chat with a few of us non-party people on that night.
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However, speaking of parties, how about we rejoin Terrence McKenna on a May evening in 1990 and
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see what kind of a party he can stir up in our minds right now.
00:03:10 ►
So let’s just take questions and we’ll go for a while.
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Before we begin, there’s just one thing I want to say, a point that I want to make, which is I say it in all situations where I come to a place like this for the first time.
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Maybe you all do know each other other I get the feeling this is
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a small town but anyway psychedelic people
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look like everybody else and the one
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good purpose served by these events is that
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they draw them out of the woodwork so you might
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look around and see who your affinity group is.
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Odds are, whatever you need, someone in this room has it.
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Whatever you need.
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Okay, so much for clowning around.
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Yes?
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Okay, so much for clowning around.
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Yes?
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As a parent of a teenager and several other children,
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I felt a responsibility to bring my oldest daughter here tonight.
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These same substances that we’re talking about are out on the plaza on the streets of Santa Fe,
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and children are using them in ways that I think need guidance.
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Could you speak to that?
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Yes, sure.
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I’m glad to.
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This is an excellent question.
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I have a boy 11, a girl 9,
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so I’m meeting this as well.
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What do you say to your kids
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about this issue
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and about drugs generally?
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The main thing about drugs
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is a lack of education.
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I mean, we have to educate people about drugs
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and we have to tell them the truth.
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And the truth, unfortunately, is complex.
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So how do you tell a kid a complex truth?
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You know, I mean, the Surgeon General says
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tobacco is as addictive as heroin.
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Tobacco you get from a machine.
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Heroin, they send you up the river for years.
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How do you make sense of this for a kid?
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All I know to do is, first of all,
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I don’t hide anything I do from my
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children. And I think it’s a bad idea. I actually make a character judgment. I don’t think people
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should hide what they do from their children. This, we can’t light up a jade till the children
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are in bed stuff, is malarkey. Because it’s giving a message of subterfuge and confusion. It means you’d have
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no principles. You don’t know where you stand on this. You’re all over the map. In fact,
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you look like an addict to something. So why don’t you just be out front about it?
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The other thing is it’s just like sex and all these tricky things that you come to with children.
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You try to give a good example, try to give the best information that you can,
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and stand back and hope.
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But I really think the main thing is openness and education.
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think the main thing is openness and education. And I say to my kids, you know, if you want to try something, discuss it with me. If you get past me, I’ll get it for you. So, you
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know, don’t be out on the street. We’ll make sense of it together, whatever decision we
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come to.
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That’s great. Thank you, Jackie.
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Well, it’s not very satisfying, but I don’t know what else to do That’s great. Thank you, Jackie. It’s not very satisfying,
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but I don’t know what else to do.
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Back there.
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And then my question is,
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you have talked about all the very positive things
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that psychedelics can do,
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and you have talked very well about it.
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You have expressed many wonderful truths.
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But then the other side of the coin is,
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what do you do or how do you deal with such occurrences as,
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for example, Charlie Manson and psychedelics being used for satanic purposes?
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and psychedelics being used for satanic purposes.
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The question of a Manson or something like that,
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I don’t really, I don’t deal with that because I regard it as anomalous.
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But what I hear you asking is,
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what about the dark side of psychedelics?
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And I think that’s certainly worth talking about.
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and I think that’s certainly worth talking about.
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It isn’t a joy ride necessarily.
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One thing that is quite wonderful about psychedelics is that,
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and I’ll just speak of the mushroom in this case,
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is that it’s wonderfully kind to beginners.
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But if you are an acolyte of the priesthood,
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sooner or later it will scare the socks off you.
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And in many ways it can do this.
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In fact, that’s what’s so scary about it, is it knows the way to scare you,
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just like it knows everything else about you and um so so
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in my talk i stressed the facility with which one can access these places. The question is then, but is it easy to control
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and manipulate and understand these places? And this is where it can turn you every way but loose.
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This is where you want to have your mantras polished and your yantras ready, because is ready because in that domain it all works all that malarkey that doesn’t ever work anywhere else
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in that domain it works and and so i think one should have techniques uh you know the ring pass
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not or mantras uh something that you have faith in, power objects
00:09:26 ►
ultimately the best advice I’ve ever come on
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and you know it’s pretty sickening advice
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but the goal is to survive these things
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is Frank Herbert’s advice in Dune
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about fear and he says
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fear comes like a wind
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it comes and the way you meet it is you meet it and you wait.
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And it blows and it blows and it blows itself out.
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And then you’re alone again.
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And that’s what you have to do.
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And then in terms of practical instruction,
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there are ways to navigate
00:10:05 ►
through hard spots
00:10:06 ►
breath control
00:10:08 ►
singing
00:10:09 ►
singing is wonderful
00:10:11 ►
we tend to suffer silently
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and if you get into a
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pressurized place
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on a psychedelic
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I don’t think it’s a good idea
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to squeeze down
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and meet it like that I think it’s a good idea to go to squeeze down and meet it like that
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I think it’s much better to sing
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to circulate huge volumes of oxygen through your body
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and just send your whole metabolism spiraling off
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in some other direction
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shamanism was defined by the foremost
00:10:43 ►
commentator on it,
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Mersiliad, as the archaic techniques of ecstasy.
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Notice its techniques.
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And this is really important.
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This is not a religion or an ontology
00:10:59 ►
or a set of beliefs like Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, you name it.
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It’s a set of beliefs like Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, you name it. It’s a set of techniques and the techniques deliver the experience and then out of the experience one creates
00:11:14 ►
whatever models of the universe seem appropriate. But this is what science was before science. This is what religion was before religion.
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And it’s deep.
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It’s the deepest thing there is.
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Our society, living in ignorance of this,
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is infantile and destructive and narcissistic and materialistic
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and the whole gamut because we can’t touch the gold in life.
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It’s hard for us.
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It’s very elusive.
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It’s far from us.
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Authenticity is fleeting
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and we require psychotherapists
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and self-affirmation
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and all this stuff to hang on to it.
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But this was understood and is there.
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I mean, how I got into this,
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like the gentleman who asked the question,
00:12:15 ►
is by being in the Amazon,
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by having searched India to see.
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So, you know, what can you show me?
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And they couldn’t show me anything.
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They wanted me to sweep the ashram for 12 years
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and then something wonderful was going to happen.
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But then when I got to South America,
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I said, what can you show me?
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And this guy said, let’s sharpen our machetes.
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We’ll go out here and get some of this snake vine
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and come back and I’ll show you.
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And by 10 o’clock that night,
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I was sobbing in the guy’s arms.
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He’d shown me. I was a convert. I’d sweep his courtyard for 12 years without asking. Anyway, yes.
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Would you speak more about your ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon?
00:13:07 ►
Sure.
00:13:08 ►
For those of you who aren’t aware,
00:13:09 ►
although I think there’s high awareness in this town,
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but ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant and beverage
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made of that plant with others.
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It’s slow-release DMT.
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What’s happening is DMT is being combined with an MAO inhibitor
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to make it orally active, which would not ordinarily be the case.
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And it’s a slow-release DMT trip that lasts from four to six hours.
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It’s quite extraordinary.
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It’s existed in the Amazon for a long long time
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no one knows how long
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I’m at work on a paper arguing that
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Mayan religion that it reached as far up as Chiapas
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this cult at one time
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and what’s interesting about it is
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it’s a little different from psilocybin
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psilocybin has this
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millenarian high high-tech,
00:14:08 ►
outer space, insects driving strange machines
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kind of thing to it.
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Ayahuasca is not like that.
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It’s all about water and flow and life
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and organic and suspension of liquids
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and miscible layers of flowing color.
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And it’s wonderful. It’s quite feminine.
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It doesn’t speak the way ayahuasca does,
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but you become like a camera’s eye.
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You just become a roving eye, a moving eye,
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seeing incredible things.
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And it had a reputation when it was first discovered
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the alkaloid was isolated and named telepathy
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because it was felt that there were group states of mind going on.
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And this is so, this is happening. I mean mean this is what you want to talk about shamanism
00:15:07 ►
this is what it’s about these people upriver bare-ass people not people working in sawmills
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but the still uncontacted or barely contacted people the elders take this stuff together and they rise into a higher dimension of social data,
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is the only way to put it.
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In other words, they see the group,
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the predicament in a hyper-dimensional matrix of some sort
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where weather and game levels
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and social relations with other groups and all this stuff are factored in
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and then collectively they make a decision
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and I went to the Amazon
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very interested in this because I think
00:15:55 ►
that part of what this whole
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incipient breakthrough
00:16:01 ►
that we’re talking about is about
00:16:03 ►
is what I call an ontological transformation of language.
00:16:08 ►
I believe that language is something which, when done right,
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you look at it.
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You don’t hear it.
00:16:18 ►
When language is correctly performed, it is something seen.
00:16:23 ►
And this is one of the arts of the high paleolithic that we have
00:16:27 ►
lost. We speak a barbarian speech, ear speech. Ear speech has a very shallow depth of signal.
00:16:40 ►
And these hallucinogenically, these societies rocked in the cradle of hallucinogenic ecstasis
00:16:48 ►
through their shamanism, were living in a kind of poetic hologram,
00:16:55 ►
culturally created poetic hologram.
00:16:57 ►
This is what all this talk about the poetry of high antiquity is attempting to reference,
00:17:06 ►
poetry of high antiquity is attempting to reference you know all this talk about the celts and the tremendous accomplishments of thracia and yugoslavia it’s it’s that language
00:17:13 ►
before male dominance the phonetic alphabet monotheism and all this other stuff confining cultural effects, language was something that you see. And when we take
00:17:29 ►
hallucinogens under group circumstances where there is an intent to have that kind of a linguistic
00:17:35 ►
experience, it occurs. It’s just under the surface. It’s in our biological organization,
00:17:42 ►
but somehow damped by our cultural organization.
00:17:46 ►
Something we have to learn.
00:17:49 ►
Well, this is what shamans knew in high antiquity.
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It’s what the peculiar interdimensional beings that I call self-transforming machine elves teach.
00:18:07 ►
It’s what the entities in the other dimension,
00:18:12 ►
the so-called spirit helpers, the allies, I call them the tykes,
00:18:17 ►
these things, this is what they teach, a new ontos of language.
00:18:22 ►
An ontos of language beheld.
00:18:26 ►
Can you imagine if you could see what I mean,
00:18:32 ►
how close that would make us?
00:18:35 ►
How, in fact, if you could see what I mean,
00:18:37 ►
we would be the same person.
00:18:40 ►
Because seeing is so intimately connected with our definition of who we are
00:18:47 ►
that we place no, what do I want to say, leans against it.
00:18:56 ►
We accept what we see.
00:18:58 ►
That’s why when we talk about perfected speech,
00:19:03 ►
someone doing a good job talking,
00:19:05 ►
we say,
00:19:06 ►
he spoke clearly.
00:19:08 ►
It’s a visual metaphor.
00:19:10 ►
Or we say to them,
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I see what you mean.
00:19:13 ►
I see what you mean.
00:19:15 ►
Means that for us,
00:19:17 ►
authentic meaning is beheld.
00:19:20 ►
This is because,
00:19:21 ►
this is how we did it
00:19:22 ►
until we fell into history.
00:19:24 ►
History is the realm of the lower dimensional language slice.
00:19:30 ►
Among other things, of course.
00:19:33 ►
Yes, someone else.
00:19:35 ►
Yes.
00:19:36 ►
In terms of language and the visual,
00:19:40 ►
don’t you think there is a genetic connection with the symbols and the images?
00:19:46 ►
I mean, it would be the Jungian archetypes.
00:19:49 ►
But to me, it seems very genetic, the way those images have crossed cultures
00:19:54 ►
probably historically.
00:20:00 ►
I’m not sure whether I agree or not.
00:20:02 ►
Yes, to some extent.
00:20:04 ►
I mean, for instance, there are these repositories of imagery,
00:20:08 ►
and I, being Celtic, get these Celtic images.
00:20:12 ►
But then also I hit nodules of Mayan imagery,
00:20:16 ►
and I’m pretty sure there’s no Mayan genetic stuff floating around in my situation.
00:20:22 ►
I confess, I don’t know,
00:20:25 ►
it’s hard to make sense
00:20:27 ►
or to get a metaphor together
00:20:28 ►
that can encompass the psychedelic experience.
00:20:31 ►
I mean, for example,
00:20:32 ►
here’s a game that can be played on ayahuasca
00:20:35 ►
if it’s stiff.
00:20:38 ►
And that is,
00:20:39 ►
you can just say to the on-rushing stream of vision,
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Art Deco.
00:20:48 ►
And suddenly, there’ll be thousands of ashtrays,
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cigarette lighters, candy serviettes,
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stirring sticks, cocktails,
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all tumbling toward you in black space.
00:21:00 ►
And then you can say, you know,
00:21:04 ►
Italian Baroque. And here it can say you know Italian Baroque and here it comes you
00:21:07 ►
know these bleeding Madonna’s and oldest gold brocade and well that’s pretty then
00:21:13 ►
you can say to it hey surprise me and the level of surprise will begin to rise until you say, you’ve surprised me enough.
00:21:27 ►
You know, the first two examples,
00:21:32 ►
Art Deco and Italian Baroque,
00:21:34 ►
these are coherent styles which affected whole eras
00:21:39 ►
and involved the lives of hundreds of artists and so forth.
00:21:42 ►
Well, then what’s happening with number three,
00:21:44 ►
the surprise me, where you’ve never seen anything like this before? Is it also potentially capable
00:21:51 ►
of seizing a decade or two by the throat and stamping every t-shirt and belt buckle with its
00:21:58 ►
kiss? And then what are these things, these galaxies of stylistic motifs
00:22:05 ►
that you encounter in the hyperspace of the mind
00:22:09 ►
very bizarre
00:22:10 ►
I confess, you know, there are no
00:22:13 ►
I don’t think this stuff has limits
00:22:15 ►
I think we’ve hit meaning’s edge here
00:22:19 ►
it’s a tool
00:22:21 ►
here’s what it is
00:22:23 ►
it’s for anybody who has ever defined life as a quest
00:22:27 ►
or a path or a search or a mystery.
00:22:33 ►
It’s like you’ve hit the main vein.
00:22:36 ►
It is a path.
00:22:37 ►
It is a quest.
00:22:38 ►
There is a mystery.
00:22:40 ►
And when you get to the mystery,
00:22:42 ►
it’s better than you thought it would be
00:22:45 ►
it’s better than you could think it would be
00:22:47 ►
hell it’s the mystery
00:22:48 ►
that’s what it is
00:22:50 ►
and you say I never thought
00:22:51 ►
I doubted all the way
00:22:52 ►
the whole time I was looking
00:22:53 ►
I never thought
00:22:54 ►
and yet you know
00:22:56 ►
and it pays back
00:22:57 ►
and you don’t have to sign up
00:22:58 ►
with the rattlesnake people
00:23:00 ►
and the men who wear dresses
00:23:02 ►
and all this clergy
00:23:03 ►
and dogma and malarkey.
00:23:06 ►
That isn’t it, you know.
00:23:08 ►
The mystery is real.
00:23:09 ►
It can take the heat.
00:23:10 ►
Can you?
00:23:12 ►
That’s the question.
00:23:15 ►
How I do digress.
00:23:18 ►
Yes.
00:23:21 ►
I would like you to comment on how these psychedelics give us access to part of the mind that we don’t even imagine,
00:23:30 ►
and how this can be used.
00:23:37 ►
Their answer has different depths. the first answer is it’s as though
00:23:45 ►
there were a nearby dimension
00:23:48 ►
that is made out of art
00:23:50 ►
made out of art
00:23:52 ►
great art
00:23:54 ►
in one of these deep passes
00:23:58 ►
which last about 20 minutes
00:24:01 ►
you feel like you have seen more art
00:24:04 ►
than the human race has produced in the last 500 years minutes, you feel like you have seen more art than the human race has produced
00:24:06 ►
in the last 500 years.
00:24:08 ►
You, one person.
00:24:10 ►
The richness of our inner life
00:24:15 ►
is truly awesome.
00:24:18 ►
I mean, you know when they sent that probe
00:24:21 ►
out to Jupiter and hung it above these storms 11,000 miles wide
00:24:27 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:24:28 ►
That kind of stuff is in your mind.
00:24:31 ►
We have been so sold down the river by materialism.
00:24:36 ►
I mean, we’re living in a paradisical palace
00:24:40 ►
and our task is to communicate this to each other.
00:24:44 ►
And our task is to communicate this to each other.
00:24:54 ►
So the unifying and politically salvational aspect of psychedelics is that by showing us all this beauty,
00:24:58 ►
I think it allows secular, reasonable people
00:25:05 ►
to return to faith in the order of things.
00:25:11 ►
This is real religion.
00:25:15 ►
This is why religion was created in the first place.
00:25:18 ►
Animals don’t need religion
00:25:20 ►
unless there’s something to respond to.
00:25:22 ►
And this is what it is,
00:25:23 ►
that there is a secret about this planet,
00:25:27 ►
about the way things are here,
00:25:29 ►
and that you find out the secret
00:25:32 ►
by digging in the sub-basement of your own mind.
00:25:36 ►
And then you come upon the lost records,
00:25:40 ►
the true history of your family.
00:25:44 ►
And it’s as though
00:25:46 ►
I keep making these metaphors of dysfunctional relationships
00:25:50 ►
but it’s as though we are amnesic
00:25:52 ►
we suffer from this dysfunctional relationship
00:25:57 ►
in prehistory
00:25:58 ►
literally being torn from the arms of the goddess
00:26:01 ►
plunged into male dominance
00:26:04 ►
by climatological catastrophe,
00:26:07 ►
and then left to wander.
00:26:10 ►
And we’re haunted by this sense
00:26:13 ►
of a perfect world,
00:26:16 ►
somehow lost,
00:26:18 ►
of a way of being,
00:26:20 ►
somehow sensed,
00:26:22 ►
and then all these religions are hammering at us,
00:26:25 ►
do it this way, do it that way.
00:26:27 ►
And we’re just uncomfortable in reality.
00:26:35 ►
And it’s because we are amnesic.
00:26:38 ►
We have lost something.
00:26:40 ►
The world is being pulled over our eyes.
00:26:43 ►
We are operating on one cylinder.
00:26:45 ►
We don’t understand about how there is this tremendous, affectionate, helping intellect
00:26:56 ►
that would like to help us through this for its sake as much as our own.
00:27:02 ►
So getting in touch with that, and you can call it getting in touch with
00:27:06 ►
the other half of your mind, or getting in touch with your unconscious, or getting in touch with
00:27:11 ►
the planet, or getting in touch with the, you know, over mind in hyperspace. The point is,
00:27:19 ►
there is an organized, intelligent universe of meaning that is trying to break through
00:27:26 ►
into the chaotic human world.
00:27:29 ►
It’s the plan from the unconscious.
00:27:32 ►
And we are frozen, twisted.
00:27:36 ►
It’s been a long, rough ride.
00:27:38 ►
We can hardly see straight.
00:27:40 ►
And yet, you know, we need to back down,
00:27:42 ►
step aside, and surrender.
00:27:45 ►
And the voices are being heard.
00:27:47 ►
We know what needs to be done.
00:27:50 ►
It’s that ideology must be abandoned.
00:27:54 ►
Nature must be served.
00:27:57 ►
The future must be served.
00:28:00 ►
I mean, these are hardly argumentative positions,
00:28:06 ►
yet who the hell is taking them?
00:28:09 ►
And yet we must.
00:28:11 ►
So anything which is a catalyst to that kind of consciousness
00:28:16 ►
is definitely in play here at the end of the world.
00:28:26 ►
Yeah.
00:28:29 ►
I want to tell you that I really love what you’re saying
00:28:32 ►
and it’s validated my perception and I really appreciate it.
00:28:38 ►
Now, I’ve taken a lot of psychedelics
00:28:43 ►
and at a certain point I became confused.
00:28:47 ►
It was very difficult for me to live within the morality of the society, to live within society and, you know, to function and to live.
00:28:58 ►
So I would love to hear more of your personal experience of how you aligned taking psychedelics
00:29:06 ►
and living in the world.
00:29:09 ►
Thank you.
00:29:10 ►
Good question.
00:29:11 ►
The best advice I can give you
00:29:13 ►
is don’t say everything you think.
00:29:18 ►
That’s how I do it.
00:29:29 ►
well I mean the question is an important one
00:29:32 ►
many times when I first started doing this
00:29:35 ►
in 83, 4, 5
00:29:37 ►
after talks like this people would come up to me
00:29:40 ►
and they would say until I heard you talk
00:29:44 ►
I thought I was crazy and And I’ve never told anybody
00:29:48 ►
any of these things that happened to me because my trips seem to be, other people seem to be having
00:29:53 ►
a good time. And what was happening to me was what you’re talking about. And part of the motivation for doing this is to build a community of agreement that can allow people to say the kinds of things that I say about self-transforming machine elves from hyperspace and nobody reaches for a white telephone. phone. You know, they say, oh, he’s talking about that, or he’s talking about his visions. In other words, to give people permission to have an inner life, a rich inner life, because
00:30:33 ►
it’s there. So building community and clarifying language is very, very important. You know,
00:30:42 ►
it’s illegal to take drugs or sell drugs or whatever it is. So we don’t
00:30:47 ►
really have much practice even building up among ourselves images of what we’re talking about.
00:30:54 ►
Probably most people in this room, except for, well, and even them, I was going to say except
00:31:00 ►
for the cops, but even them, everybody in this room has a notion of what’s going on
00:31:07 ►
when I say drug experience.
00:31:10 ►
Everybody says, oh, it’s like the time I…
00:31:13 ►
But no.
00:31:16 ►
Having had a drug experience
00:31:18 ►
doesn’t qualify you
00:31:21 ►
for talking about psychedelics
00:31:24 ►
or thinking you understand them. And even taking psychedelics doesn’t qualify you for talking about psychedelics or thinking you understand them.
00:31:25 ►
And even taking psychedelics doesn’t qualify you for talking about them or thinking you understand them.
00:31:31 ►
They are not to be extrapolated from anything else.
00:31:36 ►
It is unique.
00:31:38 ►
The fact that it’s even called intoxication is a joke.
00:31:41 ►
It’s more as though there is a doorway into either another part of our mind
00:31:48 ►
or another part of the space-time continuum. And I’m, you know, pretty Amish on this. It’s a very
00:31:56 ►
narrow band of substances that do the thing that I find most fascinating, and you’re certainly free to disagree with me, but I place great stress on vision, on hallucinations.
00:32:10 ►
And people say, well, why?
00:32:11 ►
It makes you feel good, you have great insights.
00:32:14 ►
Why are you always harping on vision?
00:32:17 ►
Because being sort of a reductionist,
00:32:20 ►
the visions are the part of it that convince me that it isn’t me,
00:32:26 ►
because I can examine the visions and say,
00:32:29 ►
but an emotion or an insight, what would be the point in saying that isn’t me?
00:32:38 ►
But the visions are coming from somewhere else, other than the self. Or if this is the self,
00:32:47 ►
then it’s unrecognizable.
00:32:49 ►
The Jungian cartography
00:32:51 ►
did not set us up for it.
00:32:53 ►
It did set us up
00:32:55 ►
for what LSD is showing.
00:32:56 ►
But when you go deeper,
00:32:58 ►
like with DMT,
00:33:00 ►
the Jungian maps are useless.
00:33:02 ►
You don’t know where you are
00:33:03 ►
and you don’t think anybody’s ever been here before.
00:33:07 ►
I mean, there are no initials on the trees, let me tell you.
00:33:13 ►
So part of the answer to this what is to be done question
00:33:20 ►
and the political question and the question up here
00:33:23 ►
about integrating it into our lives and what I’m trying to do i mean i should just be up front with you is it’s a very conscious
00:33:30 ►
and subversive effort to uh goose along the evolution of language we can’t create a new world unless we can talk about it.
00:33:48 ►
And so the forced evolution of language,
00:33:54 ►
the forced and rational and designed expansion of the capacity of language is our best way to get out of this mess.
00:33:58 ►
We have problems we don’t even know we have
00:34:00 ►
because we don’t have words to talk about them.
00:34:03 ►
The psychedelics operating on the
00:34:05 ►
social level where we’re talking about not my trip
00:34:08 ►
your trip but what does it do to millions of people
00:34:11 ►
it enriches language
00:34:14 ►
it incites colorful speech
00:34:18 ►
it provokes metaphor
00:34:20 ►
know what I mean?
00:34:23 ►
so that and that’s what it was doing way back then, and it gave us
00:34:27 ►
language and all these control languages that flowed from it. But now we can consciously
00:34:33 ►
contemplate that effect and attempt to engineer it and attempt to create languages that make
00:34:42 ►
these dimensions real, that give them a political consequence, that give permission to other people to think about them, to explore about them, to wonder about them.
00:34:53 ►
And by this means, very slowly, let us hope fast enough, attention will evolve.
00:35:03 ►
And it’s basically, you know, as fast as we each care to participate in this project and it’s not easy
00:35:09 ►
see the initial political challenges is to get stoned and
00:35:14 ►
People resist that because they’ve got something to lose or they think they’ve got something to lose
00:35:20 ►
So it’s it’s very tough political work
00:35:27 ►
Over here. So, it seems that in that metaphor, we’re stuck. We can see it, we can feel it, but we can’t quite bridge it. We can’t get beyond it.
00:35:56 ►
And go along with what we’re saying as far as the domain of language. I know we’ve got to be beyond this one well
00:36:05 ►
I agree with you
00:36:06 ►
a hundred percent
00:36:06 ►
Hansen’s work
00:36:08 ►
and Borelli’s work
00:36:09 ►
and all those
00:36:11 ►
but
00:36:13 ►
if we’re continually
00:36:14 ►
using the metaphor
00:36:15 ►
and the myth
00:36:18 ►
and shifting it
00:36:18 ►
how are we going to
00:36:20 ►
get on it
00:36:20 ►
because all we’re doing
00:36:22 ►
is shifting it
00:36:23 ►
well
00:36:24 ►
when we go beyond language,
00:36:26 ►
are we going to discover
00:36:27 ►
silence or song?
00:36:30 ►
That’s what I think.
00:36:31 ►
I mean,
00:36:32 ►
I think that this
00:36:33 ►
visual language thing
00:36:36 ►
needs to be thought about
00:36:39 ►
very carefully.
00:36:41 ►
For a long time,
00:36:43 ►
it seemed to me
00:36:44 ►
it was unbridgeable. It was a creature of my own
00:36:47 ►
imagination. But technologies exist and are being perfected that are going to allow us to see each
00:36:57 ►
other’s aesthetic intent, to be able to follow the footprints of the artist through his own imagination in a kind of virtual reality.
00:37:10 ►
And I think probably we’re headed for some kind of quasi-telepathic meltdown
00:37:15 ►
and that the ego, its life is limited.
00:37:20 ►
And we have no idea how profoundly this will affect each of us
00:37:23 ►
because we may like to think we’re new style,
00:37:27 ►
but when it comes to the real trans-techno-polymorphically perverse
00:37:33 ►
multi-cyber human being,
00:37:35 ►
I don’t know how many of us could cut the mustard.
00:37:37 ►
Yeah.
00:37:49 ►
Well, but I don’t want to get into a dualism here see I think all terms are migrating toward each other
00:37:52 ►
the drugs of the future
00:37:55 ►
will be computers
00:37:57 ►
the computers of the future will be drugs
00:38:00 ►
one way of thinking of the historical enterprise
00:38:04 ►
is that what we’re about here is
00:38:07 ►
we’re trying to turn human beings inside out we want to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the
00:38:18 ►
body so that the body becomes an image of some sort freely commanded in a domain
00:38:25 ►
called the imagination
00:38:27 ►
and the soul, previously difficult to locate
00:38:31 ►
becomes actually a cultural artifact
00:38:34 ►
I imagine it rather like a polished silver disc
00:38:38 ►
and that exteriorized soul
00:38:42 ►
becomes the new
00:38:44 ►
loci of self-identification.
00:38:50 ►
If any of you have followed Julian Jayne’s work, you know that he thinks the ego arose
00:38:55 ►
in Homeric times, that recently, 1500 BC.
00:39:01 ►
Yeats, in Sailing to Byzantium, this wonderful line something about if ever out of nature
00:39:07 ►
I should be turned
00:39:09 ►
it’s all about becoming a jeweled object
00:39:13 ►
the thing of gold and gold enameling
00:39:15 ►
to play for an emperor
00:39:18 ►
it’s the image of the transformation
00:39:21 ►
of the human soul
00:39:24 ►
into a technical object.
00:39:26 ►
And a lot of people get their hackles up at this point.
00:39:29 ►
The image which I think unifies all this stuff is the flying saucer.
00:39:34 ►
I mentioned in my main talk the transcendental object at the end of history,
00:39:39 ►
but nobody rose to debate.
00:39:40 ►
The notion here you see is that the reason things are so nuts is because we are
00:39:51 ►
actually in very close to some kind of temporal discontinuity. And the phenomenon of history itself is the shockwave of an eminent eschaton, if you will. In other words, the reason history
00:40:10 ►
exists is because of the nearby presence in time of a transcendental object, which I call the
00:40:17 ►
eschaton, which is casting a kind of lower dimensional shadow backward through time so that all these messiahs and aesthetic anticipations
00:40:29 ►
and prophecies and all this are distorted interpretations
00:40:33 ►
of this transcendental object.
00:40:36 ►
And the flying saucer is this as well.
00:40:40 ►
The flying saucer haunts time like a ghost.
00:40:44 ►
What is it?
00:40:44 ►
It’s the cursor on God’s reality processor. well, the flying saucer haunts time like a ghost. What is it?
00:40:49 ►
It’s the cursor on God’s reality processor.
00:40:54 ►
If you’ve ever worked in word processing,
00:40:58 ►
you know that there’s a little blinking thing called the cursor.
00:41:02 ►
And you move the cursor in the text to the place where you either want to put something in or take
00:41:05 ►
something out. And once you have made the excision or the inclusion, you move the cursor
00:41:12 ►
elsewhere in the text. And this is what the UFO is. It’s like a ricocheting reflection of God’s mind at the end of time
00:41:26 ►
and to cross it, to come into its aura
00:41:32 ►
is to get this tremendous hit of the weird
00:41:34 ►
this is what the weird is as a matter of fact
00:41:37 ►
the weird is the backward flowing casuistry from the object at the end of time.
00:41:45 ►
And the reason the 20th century is so fraught with contradiction, paradox, hope, horror,
00:41:53 ►
is because we are drawing tangential to this transcendental object.
00:41:59 ►
And every time you take a psychedelic, you are in eternity with the transcendental logic.
00:42:04 ►
You take a psychedelic, you are in eternity with the transcendental logic.
00:42:08 ►
You see it dead ahead 22 years,
00:42:11 ►
and you’re closing with it at the speed of light or something.
00:42:21 ►
And it is what causes the phenomenon of ourselves being drawn out of nature.
00:42:23 ►
There is a drama.
00:42:27 ►
There is a wooing. There is a royal marriage, an alchemical process underway, and we’re the bride, and we are being drawn toward this
00:42:35 ►
union with this thing, which is what history was for. History is the placenta of this process to carry us to this moment of fusion
00:42:46 ►
where everything then falls together,
00:42:50 ►
makes sense, lifts off, closes down,
00:42:53 ►
and says goodnight.
00:42:56 ►
That’s all.
00:43:03 ►
Die hard.
00:43:06 ►
With ayahuasca, do you have a sense of witnessing
00:43:11 ►
that you’re having experience when you take an ayahuasca
00:43:15 ►
or is it sometimes changing them?
00:43:20 ►
Ayahuasca is these moving walls and membranes
00:43:25 ►
it’s a labyrinth
00:43:28 ►
the interesting thing about ayahuasca is
00:43:34 ►
chemically that it is made of neurohumoral substrate
00:43:39 ►
technically there’s no drug there
00:43:41 ►
there’s DMT and beta carbolines
00:43:44 ►
both of which occur endogenously in human metabolism.
00:43:47 ►
It’s a kind of brain cocktail.
00:43:50 ►
That’s why it has evolutionary implications, potentially.
00:43:56 ►
It’s possible that in the metabolic pathways of the pineal,
00:44:03 ►
we’re only a one or two gene mutation away
00:44:06 ►
from switching out
00:44:08 ►
an inactive cogener
00:44:12 ►
for a psychoactive cogener in that pathway
00:44:14 ►
and in fact this may have been traded off
00:44:17 ►
genetically through time
00:44:19 ►
there may be shamanic lines
00:44:21 ►
there may be people who have a facility
00:44:23 ►
for these things that is
00:44:25 ►
actually in the genes but the to me the most spectacular hallucinogenesis occurs
00:44:35 ►
under DMT and DMT it’s interesting it’s worth talking about for a moment because
00:44:41 ►
it too is an endogenous neurotransmitter. Even though it’s a
00:44:46 ►
schedule one drug, everybody’s carrying it all the time. You know, they don’t need anything else on
00:44:54 ►
the books. We’re all illegal as we sit here. But what’s interesting about DMT is it’s the strongest of all these hallucinogens.
00:45:08 ►
And then it comes on in a few seconds, 30 to 40 seconds,
00:45:12 ►
and yet it fades in a matter of four to five minutes.
00:45:17 ►
Well, now, what does this mean pharmacologically?
00:45:20 ►
You see, one way of thinking about a drug,
00:45:22 ►
if you’re thinking, you know, trying to assess toxicity,
00:45:26 ►
is how long does the drug stay in your system?
00:45:31 ►
If you have rubbery knees and blurred vision 48 hours after doing something, it’s garbage.
00:45:39 ►
You know, your body should be able to get rid of it.
00:45:41 ►
Well, DMT clears your system in three to seven minutes. It means it’s like hurling an ice cube into a blast furnace. It means that
00:45:50 ►
when the DMT hits the synaptic cleft, these enzyme systems swing into action
00:45:55 ►
and say, oh, we understand what this is. We know how to dealkylate, deanimate, and
00:45:59 ►
shuttle this into harmless pathways like indolecetic acid and then you come down almost as fast as it can be
00:46:06 ►
said yet it’s the most profound of all of these things conveys you instantly into a place so
00:46:14 ►
bewilderingly and titanically bizarre and profound that your jaw hangs in the air. A place you never suspected existed.
00:46:27 ►
Not a hint, not a jot, not an iota.
00:46:30 ►
You never dreamed it was possible.
00:46:32 ►
And suddenly, there you are.
00:46:39 ►
This is profound information about the human organism,
00:46:44 ►
about ourselves, about who we are. Who are you if that can happen to you?
00:46:47 ►
It’s a very mysterious part of you.
00:46:50 ►
We go back and probe the orgasm thing over and over again.
00:46:56 ►
But this is much more intense, much more content-laden.
00:47:01 ►
And yet what is all this content, these weird objects?
00:47:05 ►
Where are they coming
00:47:05 ►
from
00:47:06 ►
what does
00:47:06 ►
it mean
00:47:06 ►
who are
00:47:07 ►
these entities
00:47:08 ►
in there
00:47:08 ►
are they
00:47:10 ►
you know
00:47:10 ►
wandering
00:47:12 ►
extraterrestrial
00:47:13 ►
do-gooders
00:47:14 ►
or
00:47:16 ►
you know
00:47:17 ►
is it
00:47:17 ►
humanity
00:47:18 ►
in a far-flung
00:47:19 ►
future
00:47:20 ►
trying to
00:47:21 ►
pull the
00:47:21 ►
chestnuts
00:47:22 ►
of the
00:47:22 ►
20th century
00:47:23 ►
out of the
00:47:24 ►
fire
00:47:24 ►
or you know is it your
00:47:26 ►
dead grandmother you can’t figure out? And yet, you know, it’s really happening to you. You have
00:47:33 ►
to come to terms with it. I mean, that to me is the strangest thing about all of this stuff,
00:47:38 ►
is that it’s real. It’s like science fiction. It means that the world is science fiction.
00:47:50 ►
It means that there are things and places and possibilities going on that just read the mundane out.
00:47:54 ►
All those people who think the world is straight and rational and reasonable
00:47:57 ►
and squared off at the corners, they’re just whistling past the graveyard.
00:48:02 ►
It is so wild and woolly out there
00:48:05 ►
that you just come back, you know,
00:48:08 ►
eyes round and jaw slung
00:48:11 ►
because it’s so peculiar and so near.
00:48:15 ►
I mean, this culture that we’re living in
00:48:17 ►
is a tiny island,
00:48:19 ►
a bulwark raised against the unspeakable
00:48:22 ►
which is raging all around us.
00:48:25 ►
Hell, every time you hit the sack, it closes over you.
00:48:27 ►
And it’s only through the grace of forgetting that we’re able to reestablish it here.
00:48:33 ►
You know, this tiny little bubble of sanity.
00:48:36 ►
Well, yes, but what’s going on in the rest of reality?
00:48:42 ►
Grab a clue.
00:48:47 ►
Yes. going on in the rest of reality. Grab a clue. Yes? Audience Member 2
00:48:50 ►
Audience Member 3
00:48:53 ►
Audience Member 4
00:48:56 ►
Audience Member 5
00:48:59 ►
Audience Member 6
00:49:02 ►
Audience Member 7 Audience Member 8 No, I think that it’s possible. I’m comfortable with virtual reality. I’m just getting used to it.
00:49:08 ►
So you do it in order to love it?
00:49:10 ►
I do it in order to write articles about it. I visited all these labs.
00:49:15 ►
The heaviest battle I had with my wife this year was over virtual reality
00:49:21 ►
and whether or not it’s just another male mechano-techno-crapo trip or my
00:49:30 ►
position that there might be something going on here. I don’t like it that it’s so machine-like.
00:49:36 ►
On the other hand, all those machines could be shrunk down to the size of a sugar cube.
00:49:41 ►
For those of you who hate the idea of virtual reality, I have an argument that might
00:49:46 ►
sway you. I just saw a paper. God, I hope this isn’t industrially proprietary information.
00:49:55 ►
But anyway, I just saw a paper where these people have a virtual reality system, but they want to
00:50:01 ►
slave it to a satellite navigation system so that it can locate wherever
00:50:07 ►
you are on earth to within three feet and then the proposal is all advertising will be made
00:50:15 ►
illegal in three dimensions and will be forced to go virtual so that you will have to be wearing
00:50:22 ►
glasses and you will see ordinary reality except all the signs will be there.
00:50:28 ►
But if you take the glasses off, the signs will have been taken down in 3D.
00:50:33 ►
No billboards in 3D, no advertising, no print of any sort.
00:50:37 ►
If you want to read the signs, you’re going to have to buy the goggles.
00:50:41 ►
So there’s an argument for virtual reality.
00:50:47 ►
Yeah? goggles. So there’s an argument for virtual reality. Yeah.
00:50:52 ►
How’s that thing in the air-galloping virtual reality tape out there? Can anyone see it?
00:50:53 ►
Hot steer.
00:51:04 ►
Oh, see it. Okay. Oh, they can see it. My apologies. Well, let’s see. One last question, and then you should go do something more interesting.
00:51:07 ►
I hope you can figure out what it is. Go into nature. Go into your own mind. I mean,
00:51:12 ►
the message is rising. The urgency is rising. And, you know, if you have ears to hear, hear,
00:51:20 ►
and eyes to see, see, in terms of what that means practically, and I suppose I should
00:51:27 ►
leave you with this thought, do these things in silent darkness and do them with attention.
00:51:38 ►
Silent darkness. You don’t need Bach or Moody. Just skip it. Silent darkness.
00:51:45 ►
Let, trust that your mind is richer than you think it is.
00:51:50 ►
And study the darkness behind your closed eyelids
00:51:52 ►
with the expectation that you will see something.
00:51:55 ►
And pay attention to breathing and sound, song.
00:52:00 ►
Open your mouth.
00:52:02 ►
Let air move through you.
00:52:04 ►
And five grams of mushrooms
00:52:08 ►
in silent darkness
00:52:09 ►
I’m telling you
00:52:10 ►
it will make a believer out of you
00:52:13 ►
if you aren’t already
00:52:14 ►
good luck
00:52:17 ►
you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:52:28 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:52:32 ►
In case you are relatively new here to the salon,
00:52:37 ►
I should insert that not everybody agrees with Terrence’s idea
00:52:41 ►
of taking five grams of dried mushrooms in silent darkness. Although I have
00:52:47 ►
tried this on more than one occasion, over time I, well, I finally came to the conclusion that
00:52:53 ►
candlelight and music done right can greatly enhance a psychedelic voyage. The secret for me
00:53:00 ►
is to have a wide range of music available and have the ability to easily switch from one mood to another.
00:53:08 ►
Also, I suspect that some of our younger fellow salonners
00:53:12 ►
were chuckling to themselves when Terrence went to great lengths
00:53:16 ►
to explain what a cursor was
00:53:18 ►
and how it works with the word processing program.
00:53:21 ►
Well, before you get too smug,
00:53:24 ►
please keep in mind that this talk was given in
00:53:26 ►
1990, and that was two years before the World Wide Web even came into existence, and well, not all
00:53:33 ►
that many households had a reason to buy a computer yet, so not many people really knew what he was
00:53:39 ►
talking about back then. Well, as this year is now coming to an end, there’s not only the excitement of getting
00:53:47 ►
together with friends, but many of us also take a look ahead and begin making plans for the coming
00:53:53 ►
year. For example, I’m working on talks that I’ll be giving in January at the Entheo Medicine event
00:54:00 ►
in Santa Barbara, and another for the Imagine Conference in March on Orcas Island.
00:54:06 ►
And I suspect that many of our fellow Saloners are also making plans for Burning Man, Lightning
00:54:12 ►
in a Bottle, and others. But I hope that you also keep in mind what John Lennon once said about
00:54:18 ►
making plans for the future. Remember it? He said, and I quote,
00:54:23 ►
Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. End quote.
00:54:29 ►
And as hard as it is to focus on that thought,
00:54:33 ►
I find it important to do so whenever it comes to my mind.
00:54:36 ►
Because, well, life, your life, is taking place right now.
00:54:41 ►
The past is gone and the future isn’t here.
00:54:44 ►
Life is always here and now. The past is gone and the future isn’t here. Life is always here and now. So I find it
00:54:47 ►
helpful to seek out the little things each day in an attempt to stay aware and in the moment.
00:54:53 ►
So from time to time, fellow salonners send me a copy of their recent CDs, and while I always
00:55:00 ►
listen to them, it isn’t often that I find the right slot to play one of their songs on a podcast.
00:55:06 ►
So when I received a copy of the latest CD from The Imperfectionists, whose music I played on a
00:55:12 ►
podcast once before, the first thing that struck me was the title, Don’t Get Owned. And if you know
00:55:19 ►
me, you know that that’s a title that would catch my eye. Then I noticed that the release date fell on my youngest son’s birthday.
00:55:27 ►
On top of that, one of the songs was titled Is, Is, Is.
00:55:32 ►
Now, if you’ve been joining our live Monday night salons lately,
00:55:36 ►
you probably remember my telling the story about the mushroom trip I had
00:55:40 ►
where the word is just continually echoed in my mind over and over and over for
00:55:45 ►
hours. So of course I had to listen to this song. And you can imagine the smile on my face when it
00:55:52 ►
began with the words, I’m tripping through a meadow with a very good friend of mine.
00:55:57 ►
We’ve been looking at a flower and having a very good time. However, it was the chorus that really got me, because it ends with the words,
00:56:07 ►
be pleased for the day. These are the days. These are the days of our lives. And my friends,
00:56:15 ►
that’s the message that I hope you can keep in mind as we end one year and begin the next,
00:56:20 ►
because these are the days of our lives. Today, here and now, not next summer, but here
00:56:27 ►
and now is where and when your life is taking place. So make it matter. For now, this is Lorenzo
00:56:34 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends, and hey, I’ll leave you with the
00:56:40 ►
imperfectionist recording of their song, Is, Is, Is.
00:57:07 ►
I’m tripping through a meadow With a very good friend of mine
00:57:11 ►
We’ve been looking at a flower
00:57:15 ►
And having a very good time
00:57:19 ►
And if I thought of it before
00:57:23 ►
I’d have brought some wine,
00:57:27 ►
and it is what it is, and I like it that way,
00:57:31 ►
just being here with you is fine.
00:57:35 ►
Be pleased for the day, these are the days, these are the days.
00:57:42 ►
Be pleased for the day, these are the days, these are the days, be pleased for the day.
00:57:52 ►
These are the days, these are the days of our lives. I’m crying, I’m dying
00:58:09 ►
Pain is very real
00:58:12 ►
Do you think I’ll live? I don’t know
00:58:16 ►
Do you think I’ll be able to feel?
00:58:20 ►
If I thought of it before
00:58:24 ►
I would have checked the road
00:58:27 ►
It is what it is
00:58:30 ►
And I like it that way
00:58:31 ►
And I haven’t lost my hope
00:58:35 ►
Be pleased for the day
00:58:37 ►
These are the days
00:58:39 ►
These are the days
00:58:42 ►
Be pleased for the day These are the days These are the days Be pleased for the day
00:58:45 ►
These are the days
00:58:47 ►
These are the days
00:58:50 ►
Of our lives
00:58:53 ►
These are the days
00:59:00 ►
Of our lives. Thank you. guitar solo I’m flowing, I’m blowing, I’m growing every day
01:00:13 ►
And if we flow together well, it might work out that way
01:00:21 ►
And if I thought of it before, I’d have left my pain behind Thank you. These are the days, these are the days. Be pleased for the day, these are the days.
01:00:48 ►
These are the days of our life.
01:00:56 ►
These are the days of our life. Oh, Pauline