Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: March 19, 1998.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically, and it becomes a much more manageable thing.”
“I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say, “Call in McKenna and his friends.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’m pleased to begin today by thanking fellow salonners,
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Lauren G., Samuel G., Sam V., and regular donor, Ian W., all of whom made direct financial donations to the salon during the past 30 days.
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Also, I’m extremely pleased to announce that since beginning the Salon 3 first run and live salon tracks in November, the number of supporters of that project has increased from 150 to almost 350 fellow salonners, and the amount of donations have gone up by almost $300 a month.
00:01:05 ►
may seem like a dollar or two a month isn’t all that much, it actually does add up to a lot for me. You see, my plan is to continue these live Monday night podcasts for as long as I can.
00:01:11 ►
And since I feel so good right now, well, to me, that means another 10 years or so.
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So when someone pledges a dollar a month on Patreon, the way I see it is that over the next
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10 years, if they stay with me that long, they’re making a donation
00:01:25 ►
of $120 for my support and comfort in my closing years of podcasting. In other words, my supporters
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on Patreon have become my extended family and to them I will be forever grateful. And to continue
00:01:39 ►
making our Monday Night Live salon sessions interesting, I’ve begun inviting a number of
00:01:44 ►
guests to join us.
00:01:45 ►
Tomorrow night it’s going to be Bruce Dahmer,
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at least if all goes well,
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because he’s going to be at a dinner party
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with several of my other friends,
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and hopefully a couple of them will also be able to join us
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and make it a truly memorable salon.
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And then the following week, my guest in the live salon
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will be my friend Matt Palamary,
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who has been featured here in the salon on several occasions, sharing his wisdom and stories about his extensive experiences in
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South American jungles. There are also quite a few other interesting people with whom I’ve been
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talking about joining us for a live salon, and actually they’ve all told me that they’d like to
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join us one night. However, I’ve kind of fallen behind in my
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correspondence with them, I guess and with everybody else for that matter, because I’ve
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become a little preoccupied with the fact that right now I have to find a new apartment,
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pack, move, and unpack all in the next six weeks. So a few of my administrative tasks
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are going to be slipping behind for a while, but I’ll do my best to get a new podcast out each week.
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In fact, depending on how tomorrow evening’s live salon goes,
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I may podcast that on the Salon 2 track in the next few weeks while I get resettled.
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And by the way, if you live near Santa Barbara,
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then this coming Saturday, January 19th,
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I’ll be speaking at the Entheo Medicine event.
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And the other speaker that evening will be Alan Badner, who is a Buddhist scholar and the author of Zigzag Zen.
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His talk for the evening is titled, Buddhism and Psychedelics, Two Complementary Paths to Free the Mind.
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And my talk is going to be about ways that we can continue to strengthen the global psychedelic community.
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Hope to see you there.
00:03:28 ►
Now, for today’s program, which is the second half of a conversation between Art Bell and Terrence McKenna
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on the Coast to Coast All-Night Radio Program,
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well, in this segment, Terrence takes questions from listeners who call in from all over the country.
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In this segment, Terrence takes questions from listeners who call in from all over the country.
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And I guess for our younger salonners, I should explain that the reason that radio coverage is so widespread is because it was AM radio.
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And for what it’s worth, AM radio played a very guy here in the salon who, back during the 1950s,
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would wait until his parents went to sleep and then sneak out to the living room and listen to the Alan Freed show,
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The Moondog, as he filled the airwaves with R&B and eventually rock and roll music that our local stations wouldn’t carry.
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In some strange way, I feel that by trying to suppress this new music that we all like so well,
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the effect was actually the opposite of what they intended.
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And so we all went out of our way to find it and listen to it, and that’s how we found the Moondog.
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Now, yet today, if you want to, you can still hear the Coast to Coast radio program
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from 1 o’clock until 5 o’clock in the morning, Eastern Time,
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and it can be found on over 600 stations in the United States.
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And, of course, you’re not going to be entertained by the moon dog,
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but it still can be extremely interesting if you’re into topics that are a little off the beaten path.
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As Terrence McKenna was back in March of 1998,
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when he and Art Bell began taking questions from listeners around the country.
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Let’s join them now.
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All right, back now to the world of Terence McKenna on the side of a volcano.
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By the way, Terence, just in case somebody or something does eventually push alternate controlled delete.
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Being there on the side of a volcano, you would be the first probably in all probability to experience the moment of deletion.
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Well, it depends.
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We were talking about the Y2K problem.
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What I’ll do is I’ll shut down an hour before and come online an hour
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after and see if anybody’s left.
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You know, that’s a great idea, actually.
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As far as living on this volcano is concerned, if it’s true, it’s the devil we know.
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It’s been in constant eruption for 13 years.
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We tell ourselves it’s all over on the other side, which it is, but of course that’s 50 miles away.
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But it’s kind of nice to have all our problems packaged into one problem and to have it be a natural problem
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so there’s no point in the swining
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and grossing about it.
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The volcano is the volcano.
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Now I’m not an expert on things volcanic, but I do think that the great danger is not
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the slow constant eruption that you now experience, but rather if a lava dome were to begin to be in place and the entire volcano were to start to expand with pressure
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until finally the entire thing blew up, creating probably a new island or new portions of an island,
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but in the process erasing Terence McKenna and everybody else.
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but in the process erasing Terence McKenna and everybody else.
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Well, you know, people have only been here a thousand years or so,
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and what went on in the remote past of Hawaii, I think there were very dramatic geological events.
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They had an international geological congress out here in Hilo a couple of years ago, and there was evidence presented for these enormous underwater land slippages that happen out here, local tidal waves of 2,000 feet.
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That’s right.
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In part of the picture.
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That’s right.
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Yes, well, the Earth is a violent place.
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This little asteroid scare last week was a wake-up call.
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On every level, nature is relentless in continuing to deal and redeal the deck.
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That’s why every window of opportunity that isn’t acted upon is somehow an opportunity forever lost.
00:08:07 ►
Well, I’ve felt for a long time that somebody’s shuffling the cards right now.
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Anyway, listen, here we go.
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Let’s go to the phones.
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First time caller line, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna in Hawaii in the boondocks there.
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Where are you?
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In New York.
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New York.
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You’re going to have to yell at us.
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Boy, you’re not too strong.
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Yell at us.
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How’s that?
00:08:27 ►
Better?
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It’s better for you.
00:08:29 ►
I can still not hear this guy, so relay the question, Art.
00:08:33 ►
All right.
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Yell the question.
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Okay.
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Well, I’d like to ask Terrence to analyze an experience of mine.
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First, though, I want to ask him, can DMT in your brain be released by intentional means?
00:08:47 ►
Well, that’s a very good question, and there’s not a very good answer.
00:08:53 ►
If DMT could be released by spontaneously or through some act of will,
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we might have an explanation in hand of certain kinds of paranormal phenomena.
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Years ago when I studied yoga in India and read all these yoga texts,
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I was on the trail of the idea that using your body as a chemical factory
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to naturally manufacture these active hallucinogens may be what yoga is about.
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And I still think that that’s a reasonable hypothesis.
00:09:33 ►
When DMT was first discovered, people thought that it was going to shed light on schizophrenia
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and that surely schizophrenics must be producing large amounts of DMT in their brains.
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Well, it seemed like a good idea, but the research has never supported it.
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The only research in the last 40 years done on DMT with human subjects
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was done by Rick Strassman and his team a few years ago out at the University of New Mexico,
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and the report on that was published by MAPS,
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which is an organization which actively works for the legalization of psychedelics,
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but which also publishes a very good journal.
00:10:19 ►
And if you look that up, you can see the results, which were fascinating.
00:10:24 ►
For instance, everybody who got the results, which were fascinating.
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For instance, everybody who got the stiff dose saw Ls, just like I did. So here’s a scientific study that secures the presence of Ls on the other side of this pharmacological boundary.
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But then you have some other question.
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Well, here’s why I ask.
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But then you have some other quest.
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Well, here’s why I ask.
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Up until last summer, I never tried any sort of mind-altering drug,
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but at that point I tried marijuana for the first time.
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My experiences seem to be quite different than what everyone else, you know,
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typically told me about, and I found that very odd.
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Then, you know, I listened to your first interview you had back last year with Art, and a lot, although not completely, but a lot of the elements you spoke about seemed frighteningly familiar.
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Like you spoke about, like, glistening orbs.
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You spoke about like glistening orbs.
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All right, a caller to kind of the J’s.
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Is that what you experienced or not?
00:11:33 ►
Yeah, that’s one of them.
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Also the experience of going to another place.
00:11:42 ►
Well, I think what you’re describing is what sometimes happens to first-timers on cannabis, which is if it’s great cannabis and you’re
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a first timer, it hits with the impact of a much more powerful psychedelic.
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The old cannabis hand can only admire such virgin synapses.
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Repeated exposure to cannabis socializes it dramatically,
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and it becomes a much more manageable thing.
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But part of the whole drug thing and where our educational system is failing our kids
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is part of growing up now in postmodern society is learning what drugs you can and cannot take.
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And it’s like learning what your sexual style is and what your political and religious beliefs are.
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Some of us can drink.
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Some of us can’t get near liquor.
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Some drugs are bad for almost everybody. Some drugs are pretty harmless for almost
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everybody. But in the case of any drug, spectacular exceptions to the rule can be found. And it’s
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a rich combination of your psychology, your genetic heritage, your cultural style, what drugs you choose to inculcate into your life.
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And that’s why having the further complication of somebody else who doesn’t know what they’re talking about
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making laws and criminalizing some drug preferences and not others
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is just a layer of complication that we don’t need. Well, while there is some enlightenment out there, Terrence,
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I read a report from the UK News the other day.
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And they stand by that report that the World Health Organization
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conducted a rather comprehensive study on cannabis
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and concluded that it was less harmful than either cigarettes or alcohol
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and that the entire report was suppressed and will not be released for reasons that most of us understand.
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Every study of cannabis ever done since the 1898 British High Commission report on cannabis in Bengal
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has reached the same conclusion.
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Richard Nixon appointed a study group.
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They reached the same conclusion, and each one of these reports is buried.
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And people ask why.
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You asked me this question earlier.
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I really believe that it’s because of the impact of cannabis on political attitudes.
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It makes people more difficult to propagandize and push around and manage.
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It’s just a headache to the managerial class.
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Or if you want to take a more sinister view, they would fail to be able to enslave us if cannabis were legal.
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The people who think we’re going to legalize cannabis by making some economic argument about
00:14:54 ►
the virtues of hemp are fooling themselves. The establishment is perfectly aware that it is the psychoactive properties of cannabis that make it such a hot potato.
00:15:09 ►
I mean, it’s really an issue of chemical engineering.
00:15:12 ►
They want people drinking Jack Daniels and doing coffee and working like demons
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and lusting after German automobiles,
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and they don’t want people biking back and having better sex
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and more comfortable relationships with their environments and children
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in those sort of easygoing style that we all associate, I think, with pot.
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It’s even a caricature of cannabis culture.
00:15:41 ►
Would you care to comment on why the government has not yet assassinated you?
00:15:47 ►
Me? Yeah. Well, maybe they’re hoping somebody else will do the job for them. I don’t know.
00:15:55 ►
I think maybe that the government tolerates a certain level of dissent, almost as a fallback position.
00:16:06 ►
In other words, you never quite throw away the smallpox virus.
00:16:11 ►
You keep it in case you might need it.
00:16:13 ►
It’s true.
00:16:14 ►
I can imagine the culture crisis getting so crazy that the people at the top will have to turn to their cohorts and say,
00:16:26 ►
call in McKenna and his friends.
00:16:29 ►
Oh, boy.
00:16:32 ►
You know, Robert Anton Wilson said a funny thing years ago.
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He said, you should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely knit group of nearly omnipotent people,
00:16:49 ►
and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.
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Otherwise, you have a loser’s scenario, and who wants to have a loser’s scenario?
00:17:02 ►
An enslaved scenario.
00:17:04 ►
Yes.
00:17:05 ►
So I believe in paranoia, which is the opposite of paranoia.
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I believe that reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement.
00:17:18 ►
Everybody’s working very hard to make me happy.
00:17:22 ►
All right.
00:17:23 ►
Well, let me bring on one of these happy folks right now.
00:17:27 ►
Wild Card Line, you’re on the air with the ruler of the world, Terrence McKenna.
00:17:32 ►
Oh, great.
00:17:32 ►
This is John in Las Vegas.
00:17:34 ►
In Las Vegas.
00:17:35 ►
You’re going to also have to yell at us.
00:17:36 ►
Oh, I’m sorry.
00:17:37 ►
That’s all right.
00:17:38 ►
John in Las Vegas listening on Hot Talk 105.1 FM.
00:17:42 ►
Yes, sir.
00:17:42 ►
Okay.
00:17:41 ►
Yes, sir. Okay, I’d like to recount briefly what I think are mysterious seasons of events that have
00:17:50 ►
recently occurred and get your comments if I could.
00:17:53 ►
I got a book that has some sacred geometry in it and I started fooling around with some
00:18:03 ►
of the shapes.
00:18:11 ►
And then I had a dream that ended with me standing next to the building in midtown Manhattan. We had the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.
00:18:15 ►
Yes.
00:18:15 ►
And there were a group of short, wide, dark beings wearing the same color blue that you have on your commercial?
00:18:25 ►
No.
00:18:26 ►
Okay, here’s the weird part.
00:18:28 ►
I went to the library.
00:18:29 ►
I got a textbook about geometry.
00:18:31 ►
Yes.
00:18:32 ►
And on page 21, it’s lesson four definitions.
00:18:39 ►
Decide which of the following statements are good definitions of the italicized words by
00:18:46 ►
determining whether or not their converses are true.
00:18:50 ►
If it’s New Year’s Day, then it’s January 1.
00:18:54 ►
That’s an example and the answer is a good definition because if it’s January 1, it’s
00:19:02 ►
New Year’s Day. And then right next to it, the following statement is a definition of extraterrestrial creature.
00:19:10 ►
An extraterrestrial creature is a being from a place other than the Earth.
00:19:14 ►
Then they have like the converse, inverse, and contrapositive of the statement.
00:19:18 ►
Okay, well, the question is, you know, in the dream,
00:19:39 ►
Well, the question is, you know, in the dream, whatever they were beings were standing next to, I think, what Kadeed describes as the symbol of New Year’s Eve, which is, you know, where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.
00:19:41 ►
They were standing right next to that then in this book these two references are side by side new year’s day
00:19:48 ►
and extraterrestrial creatures and i’m thinking that maybe there’s um some meaning there that
00:19:58 ►
i’m not well maybe there wasn’t get your input, let me ask Terrence about it. Terrence, it brings us back to the geometric beings or sentient beings, I guess, that you experienced with the MT.
00:20:14 ►
You know, there’s an interesting question for you, and it is that I interview a lot of near-death experiencers.
00:20:28 ►
death experiencers. I interview a lot of people like Gordon Michael Scallion, who have had some sort of physical trauma to their selves, and inevitably, near death experiences, physical
00:20:37 ►
trauma followed by psychic ability. All of these people, Terrence, talk to me about having seen geometric patterns and shapes
00:20:49 ►
that brought them an understanding they never had before. I know it sounds weird, but believe me,
00:20:54 ►
it’s common. And isn’t there possibly a common thread to your experience with DMT?
00:21:01 ►
Yes. I mean, these journeys into these higher places, wherever they are, seem to demand mathematical
00:21:11 ►
metaphors.
00:21:12 ►
And people with no previous association with mathematics are driven to mathematical metaphors.
00:21:21 ►
William Blake, the English poet, talked about the spiral of necessity.
00:21:27 ►
And if you remember in the 10th book of Plato’s Republic, there’s this amazing passage
00:21:33 ►
called the Myth of Ur, E-R, where this guy Ur, who is a soldier, dies or he’s killed in battle and he lies on the battlefield eight days dead and then he
00:21:48 ►
revives magically and he comes back and he tells this story of what he saw in the underworld and
00:21:56 ►
it is the most puzzling and amazing passage in the whole classical literature. He talks about the spindle of necessity, and he
00:22:05 ►
details the ratios of these various gears within gears. Yeah, let me say about the caller and his
00:22:15 ►
dream, the way I interpret much of what you’re, the material you deal with, Art, the weird
00:22:23 ►
experiences and the ideas people generate out of it,
00:22:27 ►
and the public attention to all that, is that something is trying to be told.
00:22:36 ►
The universe is trying to reach us.
00:22:39 ►
All right, we’ll pick up on this.
00:22:40 ►
We’re at the bottom of the hour, and I’ve got a break here.
00:22:42 ►
The clock says I’ve got a break, so I’ve got a break.
00:22:44 ►
We’ll be right back.
00:22:46 ►
All right.
00:22:47 ►
Once again, here is Terrence McKenna.
00:22:49 ►
Do you remember Michael Dukakis, Terrence?
00:22:52 ►
Yes.
00:22:52 ►
Didn’t he run for some place?
00:22:55 ►
Yeah, he ran for the presidency.
00:22:58 ►
And he was a fellow that took the very unfortunate video of himself in a tank bobbing up and down,
00:23:07 ►
trying to prove that he had military sympathies and so forth and so on,
00:23:13 ►
and he looked silly.
00:23:14 ►
You remember that?
00:23:15 ►
Yes.
00:23:16 ►
Okay, well, in the debates, Michael Dukakis was absolutely floored
00:23:20 ►
when somebody asked him, they were debating the death penalty or something, and
00:23:25 ►
somebody asked, well, what if somebody killed your wife?
00:23:29 ►
And instead of saying angry, instead of getting angry and saying, well, I’d kill this son
00:23:33 ►
of a bitch, you know, and whatever else people expected him to say, he was very moderate,
00:23:38 ►
and he was perceived to have lost the debate.
00:23:41 ►
So I have a Michael Dukakis-like question for you.
00:23:44 ►
Okay.
00:23:44 ►
And it comes by a faxer.
00:23:46 ►
Dear Art, you and Ms. McKenna were talking about how hung up on sex we are
00:23:52 ►
and how we should be more like France, where they’re more open-minded about sex.
00:23:56 ►
One thing that is always brought up is how the president of France has a mistress,
00:24:01 ►
and it’s no big deal because the French are so open-minded.
00:24:06 ►
Have you ever noticed how they’re open-minded when it comes to men having a mistress,
00:24:12 ►
but I don’t think that men are that open-minded when it comes to their own wife.
00:24:16 ►
Now, I don’t think you’d be so open-minded if it was your wife that the president of the U.S. put the make on.
00:24:24 ►
What do you say, Terrence?
00:24:27 ►
Well, I’m single, fortunately.
00:24:30 ►
However, let me try to cast myself.
00:24:33 ►
Try me.
00:24:35 ►
If I were married and the President of the United States put a make on my wife,
00:24:41 ►
then I suppose, like Hillary, I would have a ticket to ride.
00:24:47 ►
But how about the rest of us?
00:24:50 ►
And my point being, it’s a personal matter for these people to work out.
00:24:56 ►
As long as it doesn’t affect the functioning of government, I think it’s a trivialization.
00:25:02 ►
government, I think it’s a trivialization.
00:25:09 ►
People are, I mean, I’m amazed that it is so true that people will always be people no matter wherever and however they are, that this sort of thing goes on.
00:25:15 ►
But on the other hand, when you read about the Harding presidency, it was pretty racy
00:25:22 ►
stuff.
00:25:23 ►
And you get back to the late Roman emperors
00:25:25 ►
we haven’t even got traction yet
00:25:27 ►
Art
00:25:28 ►
I haven’t even got traction
00:25:31 ►
East of the Rockies
00:25:32 ►
you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna
00:25:34 ►
hello where are you please?
00:25:35 ►
West Haven Connecticut
00:25:36 ►
alright fire away
00:25:38 ►
alright Terrence
00:25:39 ►
we don’t need lie detectors
00:25:43 ►
we need truth detectors
00:25:44 ►
why do we need lie detectors. We need truth detectors.
00:25:47 ►
Why do we need crap detectors?
00:25:48 ►
What?
00:25:52 ►
Perhaps we need B.F. detectors.
00:26:00 ►
I have a statement on transplanetary truth and universal stalemates.
00:26:06 ►
But first I want to digress with Timothy Leary’s idea about intelligence squared. Have you heard of that idea?
00:26:11 ►
Now you have to be careful because we’ve got a delay because of the system we’re using. So it’s like you’ve got to ask the question and then
00:26:15 ►
pause and listen to the answer and then when the answer is complete
00:26:19 ►
speak again caller. Ask your question again.
00:26:24 ►
Well I have a statement and a question.
00:26:26 ►
The question,
00:26:27 ►
I want
00:26:30 ►
to comment on Timothy Leary’s
00:26:32 ►
observation about intelligence
00:26:34 ►
squared and how it’s a two-edged
00:26:36 ►
sword as regards psychedelic
00:26:38 ►
substances.
00:26:41 ►
And
00:26:41 ►
what point do you want to make about
00:26:44 ►
that? Well, say if you take 120 IQ as being 1 and a 60 IQ as being 0.5 and a 240 IQ as being 2,
00:26:55 ►
you not only square the intelligences, but you square the difference of the intelligences as well.
00:27:02 ►
So if you are four times as intelligent as somebody else
00:27:06 ►
and you take a substance,
00:27:08 ►
you could become 16 times as intelligent as that person.
00:27:12 ►
That person would actually become stupider
00:27:14 ►
and you would become much smarter.
00:27:15 ►
All right, well, let’s hold it there.
00:27:17 ►
Well, here’s a slightly smoother metaphor for all this.
00:27:22 ►
As the sphere of knowledge expands,
00:27:25 ►
the surface area of ignorance
00:27:27 ►
necessarily grows larger.
00:27:30 ►
You can’t do anything about that.
00:27:33 ►
All right.
00:27:34 ►
Very well said.
00:27:35 ►
West of the Rockies,
00:27:36 ►
you’re on there with Terrence McKenna
00:27:38 ►
in the wilds of Hawaii.
00:27:40 ►
Hello?
00:27:41 ►
Hello there.
00:27:42 ►
Where are you?
00:27:42 ►
I’m in Salt Lake.
00:27:43 ►
Salt Lake City.
00:27:45 ►
All right. Turn your radio off. Salt Lake City. All right.
00:27:46 ►
Turn your radio off and ask your question, sir.
00:27:48 ►
Go ahead.
00:27:49 ►
Yes.
00:27:50 ►
I wanted to ask Terrence what he thinks about the concept of linear time and why people
00:27:55 ►
insist on all times are the same when in actuality time can be cut up however it wishes to be.
00:28:03 ►
All right.
00:28:04 ►
The subject of time. Let us talk about that a little bit.
00:28:06 ►
What would you say, Terrence, of the nature of time?
00:28:09 ►
I was talking to a physicist the other day who suggested that time is absolutely our invention
00:28:17 ►
and that once there was nothing, then there was one thing, and then finally there were two things and when two things
00:28:25 ►
existed then we had time because we could measure how one moved against the other, how
00:28:31 ►
far away one was from the other.
00:28:34 ►
Until that moment there was no such thing as time and really there is no such thing
00:28:38 ►
as time today except as we measure it. Well, there is no such thing as a philosophical position.
00:28:52 ►
I think it’s true that time is a cultural artifact.
00:28:58 ►
In other words, cultures create different kinds of time,
00:29:02 ►
which they then perceive as the only kind of time there is.
00:29:08 ►
Linear time has arisen slowly over the past thousand years as a consequence of the introduction of print
00:29:18 ►
and accurate timekeeping in the West, and just a whole bunch of cultural accidents lead us to believe that there is, you know,
00:29:27 ►
this unrealized future and knife-edged present and then a world of memory that we call the past.
00:29:36 ►
We don’t notice that we all have different pasts and that we all go to different futures.
00:29:43 ►
and that we all go to different futures.
00:29:47 ►
As far as whether time in the physical sense is real,
00:29:56 ►
this is a question probably I’m not professionally capable of answering.
00:30:03 ►
It seems to me, though, that the second law of thermodynamics imparts a kind of an arrow to time.
00:30:08 ►
Also, this new force that we mentioned earlier, Art, this anti-gravitational force that gets stronger over time seems then to give an arrow to time.
00:30:18 ►
I mean, if this force gets stronger as time passes,
00:30:22 ►
then time is a real thing not only to to human beings, but to this force.
00:30:27 ►
So we have to look at that.
00:30:29 ►
I believe that time is a fluctuating kind of topology,
00:30:37 ►
and that where our models of time have failed is that we too enthusiastically embraced probability theory.
00:30:47 ►
Probability theory makes the error of believing that you take a series of measurements, then
00:30:53 ►
you average them, then you divide by the number of measurements you took, and that this somehow
00:30:59 ►
tells you something useful.
00:31:01 ►
That, in other words, when the measurements were taken is not important the time
00:31:08 ►
is smeared out by probability theory and i think you know that time is that probability is
00:31:17 ►
fluctuating on many scales the first thing you learn when you study probability in an academic situation is that chance has no memory.
00:31:28 ►
In other words, the flip of a coin is not affected by the flips that preceded it.
00:31:35 ►
But no gambler believes that.
00:31:39 ►
Experience shows that if there’s a run toward heads or tails, you should bet that way. Well,
00:31:46 ►
I think this indicates a universal tendency toward a fluctuation of probability that is how
00:31:53 ►
the universe actually sculpts itself into higher and higher form. This is not the theory of
00:32:00 ►
evolution that Darwin came up with, which sort of pushes from behind. It’s
00:32:06 ►
a theory that there is a kind of attractor in the future that is actually shaping processes,
00:32:13 ►
pulling us, as it were, like iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field. But this
00:32:19 ►
is a field that acts through history.
00:32:22 ►
Well, you can even observe, Terence, a macrocosm of that in your own life.
00:32:27 ►
In other words, if the coin coming up heads means good stuff happens to you, we go through
00:32:34 ►
these cycles where literally almost nothing bad can happen.
00:32:39 ►
Everything is good.
00:32:40 ►
Everything is coming up heads.
00:32:42 ►
And then we run smack into a wall and
00:32:45 ►
tails will start to come up. But it doesn’t seem, it does seem to run in those exact sequences
00:32:56 ►
that you talked about. And I can’t understand why.
00:32:59 ►
Well, you put your finger on it when you said we see this pattern even macrocosmically in our own lives.
00:33:06 ►
We see it in history.
00:33:08 ►
We see it in the planet’s history.
00:33:10 ►
We see it at every scale where we define time, and I maintain right down to a few minutes or a few milliseconds.
00:33:25 ►
that in a way we have to switch lenses when we look at nature, and probability theory carries you from complete ignorance to a blurry vision of how nature works.
00:33:34 ►
Then if you will turn your attention toward time
00:33:37 ►
and actually propound a more complex model than simply that time is invariant,
00:33:45 ►
then the rest of nature will snap into being.
00:33:48 ►
The part we can’t understand yet, societies, processes,
00:33:54 ►
this is where our thing is not yet ready for prime time, scientific explanation.
00:34:01 ►
When you do this new drug that you have been so
00:34:06 ►
enthusiastic about recently, what is, even though in real time or linear time it’s
00:34:15 ►
only a few minutes, what is your perception during that trip on DMT? Well
00:34:22 ►
it’s concerning time you mean? Yeah.
00:34:30 ►
In other words, are you aware that you have only been gone for X number of minutes, or is it an experience?
00:34:32 ►
It’s an elongation of time, not a spectacular elongation of time, but what is interesting
00:34:38 ►
is the sense that you only do it once, and that no matter how many times you do it, it never
00:34:46 ►
repeats. You just go back to the same one again. It’s bizarre. And so if you did it
00:34:54 ►
early in life, I first smoked DMT when I was about 20, I always seemed then to be 20 again going into it.
00:35:05 ►
The other thing about DMT that suggests a time aspect is you feel like you have fetal
00:35:13 ►
body proportions, that your head is very large compared to your torso.
00:35:21 ►
Now that you’ve gotten me onto this subject, I’m recalling a DMT trip years ago where I did it with two women who sat across from me,
00:35:30 ►
and at one point in the experience I opened my eyes,
00:35:35 ►
and these were both women probably 25 years old,
00:35:40 ►
and one of them was running backward in time,
00:35:44 ►
changing into a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old, an 8-year-old.
00:35:49 ►
The other one, her hair was turning white.
00:35:51 ►
Her gums were retracting.
00:35:54 ►
Her skin was…
00:35:55 ►
Wow.
00:35:56 ►
It was talk about amazement.
00:35:59 ►
I didn’t say anything at the time because I didn’t know whether it would be interpreted personally.
00:36:05 ►
My personal feeling was it wasn’t a statement about the personalities of either of these women
00:36:11 ►
or how I felt about them, that I was actually seeing time run forward and backwards at the same time.
00:36:19 ►
It was a lesson to me out of the DMT place,
00:36:23 ►
but it was definitely a strong hit of a kind of time we’re not accustomed
00:36:29 ►
to.
00:36:30 ►
Oh, that’s a remarkable story.
00:36:32 ►
That really, I’m going to give that some serious thought over time in the linear world.
00:36:37 ►
First time caller line, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
00:36:40 ►
Hello, where are you please?
00:36:41 ►
I’m from Silver City, New Mexico.
00:36:44 ►
Okay.
00:36:45 ►
And Terrence and Art, good morning.
00:36:49 ►
Good morning.
00:36:50 ►
We spent some time together down in Catimaco about five years ago at the Entheogenic Botanical Conference.
00:36:58 ►
I was the clinical herbalist down there.
00:37:00 ►
Yes, that was a wonderful time in the rainforest of Catamaco.
00:37:05 ►
I’m glad you’re still trucking.
00:37:07 ►
Still working with the plants.
00:37:10 ►
I have two questions.
00:37:13 ►
One, I was wondering what do you feel about all of these mutating viruses
00:37:21 ►
and bacteria that seem to be manifesting all over the globe.
00:37:27 ►
And the second question, which is kind of bizarre, I think in many respects that to
00:37:36 ►
approach a lot of these viruses and bacterias with remedies or cures, being a clinical herbalist, I sometimes look at all different
00:37:47 ►
forms of medicine, hallucinogenic, botanical medicine, homeopathic medicine.
00:37:53 ►
And recently I’ve been wondering if you knew of anything concerning meteorites used as
00:38:00 ►
medicine, specifically like the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia in 1969,
00:38:07 ►
it contains many organic molecules which are not found on Earth. And I’m wondering if you’ve
00:38:15 ►
ever in your research or experience have ever come across meteorites being used as medicine,
00:38:23 ►
especially meteorites that contain amino acids which
00:38:27 ►
are not part of the…
00:38:29 ►
Yes, one might also, though, question whether some of the new and mutating viruses and bacteria
00:38:36 ►
are not being delivered by these healing meteorites.
00:38:40 ►
At any rate, it is a very good question, Terrence. We have all of these new little bugs that are turning against us in increasing numbers
00:38:51 ►
with our ability to combat them decreasing at about the same rate.
00:38:57 ►
What’s going on?
00:38:59 ►
Well, one thing that’s going on is we’re disturbing habitats that have never been disturbed in the rainforest,
00:39:06 ►
in the warm tropics.
00:39:08 ►
I mean, that’s what the Ebola thing is about, and that’s what these aerosol leukemias in
00:39:14 ►
New Guinea are about.
00:39:16 ►
We’re going into places where human beings have never been and busting up the joint,
00:39:22 ►
and nature is fighting back.
00:39:27 ►
This is very real and it’s problematic.
00:39:30 ►
Also, you mentioned, Art, there is a minority but respectable opinion in the scientific community
00:39:39 ►
that believes that virus particles and prions and things like this are being delivered to the Earth’s surface
00:39:47 ►
from the extraterrestrial environment and that plagues from space,
00:39:54 ►
that book by Fred Hoyle was very interesting where he correlated numerous epidemics
00:40:00 ►
with the Earth passing through cometary veils and this sort of thing.
00:40:06 ►
So it wouldn’t surprise me if the Earth’s biota was being challenged and renewed by material from space.
00:40:14 ►
And I think that the inner solar system is becoming more dynamic and active.
00:40:21 ►
I think there’s a lot of material moving around out there.
00:40:24 ►
This is a nightmare to the scientific and military community.
00:40:28 ►
As a matter of fact, Terrence, they don’t understand it.
00:40:30 ►
We have had objects coming down in Greenland over El Paso,
00:40:34 ►
constantly over Colorado and Georgia and the Bay Area,
00:40:40 ►
more things coming down with no good astronomical explanation whatsoever.
00:40:46 ►
And who knows what they’re bringing with them.
00:40:49 ►
Yes, I think it’s a problem.
00:40:52 ►
This little scare over the asteroid last week should bring people to awareness.
00:40:57 ►
I saw a page on the Internet that showed the number of known objects in the inner solar system
00:41:04 ►
superimposed over the orbits of Mars, Venus, and Earth.
00:41:09 ►
And I’m telling you, it’s a swarm.
00:41:11 ►
You look at that, and it looks like collision is inevitable, that anything else would be highly improbable.
00:41:19 ►
And then it’s just a matter of the time scales and meanwhile as we say the
00:41:25 ►
biota of the earth is constantly challenged
00:41:28 ►
by the introduction of
00:41:29 ►
extraterrestrial material
00:41:31 ►
both active and
00:41:33 ►
radioactive. It is all a matter
00:41:35 ►
of time Terrence
00:41:37 ►
alright hold it right where you are
00:41:39 ►
and we’ll be back to do one final hour
00:41:42 ►
Terrence McKenna is my guest
00:41:43 ►
this is Coast to Coast AM.
00:41:46 ►
I’m Art Bell.
00:41:48 ►
Don’t touch that bell.
00:41:50 ►
Now again, here’s Art.
00:41:52 ►
Terrence McKenna is here this morning in the early hours.
00:41:55 ►
Not so early for him in Hawaii, about midnight hours or so.
00:42:00 ►
We’ll get back to him in a moment.
00:42:03 ►
All right, here’s what Dave says the president should have said in his State of the Union address.
00:42:09 ►
Members of Congress, people of America, I banged her.
00:42:13 ►
I banged her like a cheap gong, which is not news, folks,
00:42:18 ►
because if you think Monica Lewinsky was the only skin-glute player in my orchestra,
00:42:23 ►
you haven’t been paying attention.
00:42:23 ►
Lewinsky was the only skin flute player in my orchestra.
00:42:24 ►
You haven’t been paying attention.
00:42:32 ►
The only babes in D.C. I have not tried to do are the First Lady, Reno, Albright, and Shalala,
00:42:35 ►
mostly because they’re a little older than I like, and they have legs that former Houston oiler Earl would envy,
00:42:40 ►
which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate Hillary.
00:42:42 ►
I do.
00:42:43 ►
If not for the ice water coursing through her veins,
00:42:46 ►
I’d be pumping gas into farm equipment in Hope, Arkansas,
00:42:49 ►
and she’d be married to the president.
00:42:50 ►
So, let me set the record straight.
00:42:54 ►
I dodged the draft, hid FBI files, smoked dope,
00:42:57 ►
flipped whitewater properties, set up a new Korean wing in the White House,
00:43:00 ►
fired the travel staff, paid hush money to Hubble,
00:43:04 ►
sold the Lincoln bedroom like an upscale Motel 6, and grabbed every ass that entered the Oval Office.
00:43:09 ►
Got it?
00:43:10 ►
Good.
00:43:12 ►
Now, if he’d said that or some variation of that at any point, what do you think the reaction
00:43:19 ►
would have been?
00:43:20 ►
Terrence?
00:43:20 ►
Well, I caught the State of the Union address, and I thought it was some variation of that.
00:43:31 ►
John, I can’t help that.
00:43:34 ►
First time caller line, you’re on the air with Terrence H.
00:43:37 ►
Hello.
00:43:38 ►
Hello.
00:43:38 ►
I’m out here in Los Angeles.
00:43:40 ►
This is Jeff.
00:43:40 ►
Yes.
00:43:40 ►
I’m having a problem with a little bit of Terrence’s trips with DMT.
00:43:49 ►
I’m near 50 right now, and I used to play around with DMT in a crystallized form back when I was around 20 years old.
00:43:57 ►
And he says that you keep having the same trip over and over.
00:44:05 ►
I didn’t find that to be true at all.
00:44:07 ►
No, I think what I’m saying is that it takes me to the same place over and over.
00:44:12 ►
In other words, it’s got a very unique character.
00:44:15 ►
It’s not like anything else, and it keeps being what it is each time I try it.
00:44:22 ►
Well, I personally found myself that it didn’t take me to the same place.
00:44:28 ►
In fact, the only way that it even took me at all to the same,
00:44:34 ►
even calling it the same place, it was just an hallucination.
00:44:38 ►
Or I wouldn’t even call them hallucinations really, I’d call them more distortions.
00:44:42 ►
And I find that with most psychedelics, like LSD for instance, in all the trips I’ve taken
00:44:47 ►
and all the experiences I’ve taken with other people, I’ve never personally had a bad trip.
00:44:53 ►
But I find that more people that have bad trips with LSD and psychedelics are people
00:44:58 ►
that are not stable.
00:45:00 ►
Yes, I agree.
00:45:02 ►
I said earlier that psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
00:45:09 ►
That’s good for most of us.
00:45:11 ►
We’re pretty tightly boundary defined, but some people are not.
00:45:16 ►
Some people are having an uphill battle just to keep the boundaries in place,
00:45:21 ►
and those people are definitely not candidates for psychedelics.
00:45:26 ►
I don’t think psychedelics are something for everybody.
00:45:29 ►
I view it as a kind of a psychic and athletic calling like ocean kayaking or rock climbing.
00:45:39 ►
You need to know your tools.
00:45:41 ►
You need to know the territory.
00:45:41 ►
You need to know your tools.
00:45:43 ►
You need to know the territory.
00:45:46 ►
You’ve got a buddy system in place.
00:45:51 ►
And you’re physically trained and mentally prepared.
00:45:52 ►
That’s how I see it.
00:45:58 ►
That’s why I railed against the concept recreational drugs, which I just think is some kind of weird way to sell speed in nightclubs or something.
00:46:05 ►
All right.
00:46:07 ►
Terrence, here we go again.
00:46:09 ►
I’m trying to devote this to the listeners because I could ask you a million questions.
00:46:12 ►
Wild Card Line, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna in Hawaii.
00:46:15 ►
Where are you, please?
00:46:16 ►
Hello, Art and Terrence.
00:46:17 ►
I’m in, Bob, in KES country, Beaverton.
00:46:20 ►
Oregon, okay.
00:46:21 ►
Right.
00:46:22 ►
All these things you’ve been talking about tonight,
00:46:25 ►
I’d like to put them in the same pot and stir them up and see what comes out.
00:46:29 ►
Computers are sentient beings.
00:46:31 ►
When you look at the depths of our perceptions,
00:46:33 ►
for instance, I’ve been studying people’s ability to perceive signals from the earth,
00:46:39 ►
and then look at reverse speech with David Todd Oates and his findings that we are very much sexual beings
00:46:48 ►
in the underlying areas where reverse speech comes out.
00:46:52 ►
How are you going to put those together, all that processing, all that perceptional abilities,
00:46:58 ►
and then try to put that into a computer?
00:47:02 ►
Well, in a way, what I think is going on is that the concept of the collective unconscious
00:47:09 ►
which was enunciated by carl jung in the early decades of the 20th century he and freud basically
00:47:18 ►
discovered that the mind had a flip side that could only express itself in dreams and that seemed very primitive and aggressive and a dark landscape.
00:47:31 ►
And they tried to cut some lines through it and map it.
00:47:36 ►
Psychedelics also threw light on that landscape.
00:47:40 ►
Now if we’re going to become a planetary being,
00:47:43 ►
we can’t have the luxury of an unconscious mind.
00:47:47 ►
That’s something that goes along with the monkey stage of human culture.
00:47:53 ►
And so comes then the prosthesis of technology,
00:47:59 ►
that all our memories and all our sciences and our projective planning abilities can be downloaded into
00:48:08 ►
a technological artifact, which is almost our child or our friend or our companion in
00:48:18 ►
the historical adventure.
00:48:20 ►
And this is all being done by very switched-on people who learned the rules of the unconscious in the 60s,
00:48:28 ►
largely from psychedelics, and are now in a position to technologically implement a cultural artifact,
00:48:37 ►
the Internet, that actually casts light into the unconscious.
00:48:46 ►
cast light into the unconscious. I mean, I believe in information, and I believe if people can find out, you know, know the truth, and it will set you free. Well, the internet is opening up
00:48:53 ►
the avenues to truth to more people faster than at any time in history, and this was not the plan
00:49:00 ►
of the managerial class or the nation state or the corporate elites.
00:49:05 ►
It’s a side to the technologies that they put in place that they never foresaw, as is
00:49:12 ►
always the case.
00:49:14 ►
Actually, the Internet, of course, the genesis of it was with our very own government.
00:49:20 ►
Do you think that they, in effect, birthed their own worst enemy?
00:49:26 ►
In a sense, they created their successor.
00:49:30 ►
They transcended themselves.
00:49:32 ►
When they built a network that could withstand thermonuclear exchanges,
00:49:38 ►
they built a multicentered dynamic organism that lived on information.
00:49:45 ►
And it quickly spread to the universities, the think tanks, and beyond that to the corporations,
00:49:52 ►
and beyond that to you and me.
00:49:54 ►
And now it’s so embedded in the very life of global capitalism
00:50:00 ►
that the nation state has just been told to keep its mitts off.
00:50:06 ►
This whole Telecommunications Decency Act scenario showed that when the chips are down,
00:50:15 ►
the world corporate state is very able to assert its control and ownership of the Internet
00:50:21 ►
and how it’s used.
00:50:24 ►
Use of the Rockies. You’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
00:50:27 ►
Hi, where are you, please?
00:50:29 ►
Hi, this is Byron in Shreveport, Louisiana.
00:50:31 ►
Yes, sir.
00:50:32 ►
Yes, sir, Art.
00:50:32 ►
I love this show.
00:50:33 ►
I just discovered you this month.
00:50:35 ►
I didn’t know such a good thing was on the air late at night.
00:50:38 ►
Well, as I tell people, it is different.
00:50:41 ►
It certainly is, sir, especially for those of us who work nights and then on our nights
00:50:45 ►
off we can’t sleep.
00:50:46 ►
So this is wonderful.
00:50:48 ►
Well, here’s a question I have for Terrance.
00:50:52 ►
This has been happening to me for some time.
00:50:54 ►
When I heard Terrance speak of the universe reaching out to us or trying to, it brought
00:51:01 ►
home to me some things that are happening. When I was getting my first degree, I took a philosophy course.
00:51:09 ►
I asked my professor, I said,
00:51:11 ►
Sir, do you ever have patterns come to you?
00:51:13 ►
He said, What do you mean patterns?
00:51:16 ►
I said, Well, I’ll be going along doing my business,
00:51:20 ►
and on the news or in a magazine or a book,
00:51:23 ►
a word, an unusual word, jumps out at me.
00:51:27 ►
I’ll go, okay, I’m a word hound, so I kind of take note.
00:51:31 ►
Then, later that same day or the next day, the very same unusual word jumps out at me again.
00:51:38 ►
And then the next day, in a very different place, the very same unusual heretofore,
00:51:45 ►
rarely or maybe never seen word, pops up again.
00:51:48 ►
And so I thought, well, maybe something is trying to tell me something.
00:51:55 ►
So I would take note of that word.
00:51:58 ►
Then I’d go along for months, and then it happens again with another word.
00:52:02 ►
I didn’t know what to call this phenomenon,
00:52:05 ►
so I just called it a pattern because it kept reappearing.
00:52:08 ►
But I wondered, you know, when Terence mentioned the universe trying to reach out to us,
00:52:14 ►
Terence, do you suppose that could be one form of some outer intelligence reaching in?
00:52:20 ►
It may not be that deep philosophically.
00:52:23 ►
I’ll give you one answer for example if you go out and
00:52:26 ►
buy um a new chevy a nova car all right uh you if you’ve heard before you will not have noticed
00:52:35 ►
novas now you will suddenly see novas everywhere yes that’s true So it may be that or it may be deeper. Terrence, what do you say?
00:52:49 ►
Well, it’s funny, again, to mention Jung.
00:52:53 ►
He had this concept which he called synchronicity,
00:53:10 ►
which is the apparent coincidence of a mental state with an event in the exterior world. And what I mean by that is you’re walking along the street thinking about Mr. Fishman to whom you owe money, and suddenly there’s a fish right on the street in front of you.
00:53:17 ►
This is called a synchronicity.
00:53:19 ►
And Jung felt that there was a kind of what he called acausal connectedness
00:53:26 ►
and that this was how the unconscious attempted to communicate
00:53:31 ►
by juxtaposing thoughts with exterior events that seem related to them in some magical way. And if you’re, you know, sometimes synchronicity is one or two a week,
00:53:50 ►
and we just sort of notice it and pass on.
00:53:52 ►
But they can build.
00:53:55 ►
And when we’re going through spiritual crises,
00:53:58 ►
or when we’re intoxicated on psychedelic drugs, for example,
00:54:03 ►
intoxicated on psychedelic drugs, for example,
00:54:06 ►
these synchronicities can multiply until the whole exterior world
00:54:10 ►
seems to be trying to communicate something to you.
00:54:14 ►
And it’s alarming to ordinary psychiatrists
00:54:18 ►
because they call it delusions of grandeur.
00:54:21 ►
The patient thinks the world is trying to communicate with him but having been on the
00:54:26 ►
inside of this i can tell you it’s very powerful and a lot of chinese philosophical thinking has
00:54:33 ►
been based on on recognizing this synchrony this resonance between mind and nature in critical time
00:54:41 ►
so as you see this fish reminding you of the man who owes you money
00:54:46 ►
flopping on the ground, gasping
00:54:48 ►
and dying out of the
00:54:50 ►
water, do you take pleasure?
00:54:52 ►
Well, I had a
00:54:53 ►
dead fish in my image.
00:54:56 ►
So it wasn’t an issue for me.
00:54:57 ►
It didn’t flop.
00:54:59 ►
No, it didn’t flop. In fact, it was quite light.
00:55:03 ►
West of the Rockies, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
00:55:06 ►
Hello.
00:55:07 ►
Where are you, please?
00:55:08 ►
I’m from Sacramento, California.
00:55:09 ►
All right.
00:55:09 ►
You’re going to have to yell at us from Sacramento.
00:55:11 ►
Go ahead.
00:55:11 ►
Okay.
00:55:13 ►
Terrence, I was just wondering, at your current standpoint, relative to the great scheme of things,
00:55:18 ►
what would your answer be to the old question, what is the meaning of life on our stay here on Earth?
00:55:24 ►
Oh, wonderful question, one that we started with yesterday. You might ask it this way.
00:55:30 ►
What is the greatest question that humanity could have answered for itself?
00:55:37 ►
Well, you know, in classical philosophy, they said, here’s what classical philosophy is about. Who are we? Where did
00:55:47 ►
we come from? Where are we going? These are the three questions. Everything arises from
00:55:54 ►
this. Each leads on to the other. I’ve tried to look at the question, where did we come from, and have proposed theories about it.
00:56:08 ►
By looking into my body brain with drugs and meditation and just analytical thinking,
00:56:15 ►
I’ve tried to look at who are we, and then the great unanswered question is, where are we going?
00:56:22 ►
What is to be the destiny of the human race
00:56:27 ►
are we an episode in the biology of this planet or will we build an eden strung along the milky way
00:56:35 ►
and from there to yet grander and greater things we don’t know how much intelligence there is in the universe,
00:56:45 ►
but we certainly know that something has broken out on this planet in our species
00:56:52 ►
that is like nothing else in the order of nature.
00:56:55 ►
What if we are nothing more than a virtual zip on the face of reality?
00:57:01 ►
Well, if by virtual you mean that we are inside some kind of uh artificial simulacrum yes yes yes
00:57:10 ►
software being run yes uh well then the question is by who and to what end i could get that i
00:57:18 ►
my life is so much like a story that I’m constantly asking the question,
00:57:26 ►
who writes this?
00:57:28 ►
Who writes this stuff?
00:57:29 ►
Who writes this stuff?
00:57:31 ►
I mean, who thought me up?
00:57:33 ►
Who thought Art Bell up and put us talking like this in front of 22 million people?
00:57:38 ►
That doesn’t happen in reality.
00:57:40 ►
That kind of thing happens in art of a very finely honed sort.
00:57:46 ►
And so I want to know what is the medium and who is the artist and who’s paying for this production.
00:57:53 ►
First time caller line, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
00:57:56 ►
Hello.
00:57:56 ►
Hello, Terrence.
00:57:57 ►
Hello, Art.
00:57:57 ►
Hi.
00:57:58 ►
Oh, you’re weak to weak phone connections.
00:58:00 ►
Yell at us, sir.
00:58:01 ►
I’ll yell.
00:58:01 ►
Oh, that’s better.
00:58:02 ►
Okay.
00:58:00 ►
Weak phone connections.
00:58:01 ►
Yell at us, sir.
00:58:01 ►
I’ll yell.
00:58:02 ►
Oh, that’s better.
00:58:02 ►
Okay.
00:58:08 ►
First of all, I want to say that I had some DMT experiences,
00:58:12 ►
and I’ve had the privilege of doing them outside the jurisdiction of the United States.
00:58:13 ►
Louder, please.
00:58:13 ►
Yeah, louder.
00:58:18 ►
He says he’s had DMT experiences outside the jurisdiction of the U.S.
00:58:25 ►
Anyway, I’ve had very similar experiences to the kinds of things that you, Terrence, have been talking about.
00:58:26 ►
Also, when I did something else, it brought me to a new space.
00:58:31 ►
And what I did is I had three grams of psilocybin mushrooms,
00:58:37 ►
and I did this in a ritual sort of way.
00:58:40 ►
I did a confession first to a friend to get things off my chest, and I sent out prayers, and it was a very directed ritual.
00:58:54 ►
All right, all right.
00:58:55 ►
Let me then put that question to him.
00:58:57 ►
He said that what he did, grams of psilocybin and so forth, he did in a very ritualistic way.
00:59:03 ►
of psilocybin and so forth, he did in a very ritualistic way.
00:59:08 ►
Do you think that there would be anything to that, in effect,
00:59:11 ►
cleansing yourself before doing something like that?
00:59:15 ►
Well, certainly energy follows attention.
00:59:18 ►
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand this.
00:59:20 ►
Energy follows attention.
00:59:26 ►
And then, you know, while it’s true these things are dramatically affecting the mind,
00:59:30 ►
they are physical drugs and they are going into your body.
00:59:35 ►
So, you know, not eating for four to six hours,
00:59:44 ►
not having recently stoked up on Big Macs or a lot of antibiotics or junk food, you know. I mean, obvious, reasonable rules are in place.
00:59:49 ►
All right, we’re going to have to hold it right there.
00:59:51 ►
We’re at the bottom of the hour, and we’ll head into the final portion in a moment.
00:59:54 ►
Terrence McKenna, my guest this morning.
00:59:56 ►
I’m Art Bell.
00:59:57 ►
From the high desert in the middle of the night, this is Coast to Coast AM.
01:00:01 ►
This is Coast to Coast AM.
01:00:10 ►
And so is Terrence McKenna.
01:00:15 ►
And that is an attitude, Terrence, of a programmer who does this embedded software thing and admits to being totally script-set.
01:00:17 ►
It’s never going to be self-aware.
01:00:20 ►
That is, I guess, one attitude. Is that macro thinking of one single programmer who is failing to embrace what’s actually really going on?
01:00:33 ►
Well, while we were off air, I was online and looking at the AI pages,
01:00:42 ►
and I would just recommend to someone with that attitude
01:00:45 ►
that they search words like superintelligence, artificial intelligence,
01:00:51 ►
and look at the stuff posted on the web.
01:00:54 ►
I work with a computer every day.
01:00:56 ►
I don’t have the same experience as the person you quoted.
01:01:02 ►
I find the evolution of software, I can’t keep up with it.
01:01:09 ►
I don’t feel any of us have written software that takes advantage of the hardware’s capabilities.
01:01:17 ►
In other words, no one has tested the edge of the hardware.
01:01:22 ►
The failure is in the software writing department.
01:01:25 ►
But if you look at what people like Bruce Dermar at Digital Space are doing,
01:01:32 ►
the singularity webpages, the artificial intelligence webpages, the transhuman webpages,
01:01:40 ►
the X-Tope, a lot of the same.
01:01:41 ►
Uh-oh, we’re getting a little break up here.
01:01:44 ►
Uh-oh, we’re getting a little breakup here.
01:01:54 ►
Wouldn’t the real evolution begin when nanotechnology becomes a reality and these machines then begin to either replicate themselves or to, in effect, write their own software,
01:02:03 ►
taking leaps beyond what we can do, because I think you’re right.
01:02:08 ►
Well, that would be one revolution.
01:02:10 ►
Another, I think, that will come sooner is when everything is implants,
01:02:16 ►
when the equivalent of today’s computer is something that you…
01:02:22 ►
Uh-oh.
01:02:31 ►
a machine to nervous system interfacing so that we don’t feel it as a machine.
01:02:35 ►
We feel it as a capacity of our own mind.
01:02:36 ►
This will come.
01:02:37 ►
All right.
01:02:41 ►
East of the Rockies, you’re on the air.
01:02:41 ►
Good morning.
01:02:43 ►
With Terrence McKenna, where are you, please?
01:02:45 ►
This is Bill in Wisconsin.
01:02:46 ►
Bill, you’re going to have to yell at us.
01:02:47 ►
Go ahead. Okay.
01:02:47 ►
How’s that?
01:02:47 ►
Better.
01:02:49 ►
Terrence, you were talking a little bit about the fish on the sidewalk.
01:02:53 ►
Right.
01:02:54 ►
And I have had experience with LSD.
01:02:57 ►
I was a part of an experiment in the 1970s and mid-’70s,
01:03:00 ►
and we were allowed to inject three bottles of Sandoz LSD, 100 micrograms each at the
01:03:08 ►
same time, so 300 micrograms IV.
01:03:13 ►
Since that time, I’ve had experiences, hundreds of experiences, similar to the fish on the
01:03:19 ►
sidewalk.
01:03:20 ►
I’ll give you just one quick one, and I want to take it one step further and ask you this
01:03:24 ►
question.
01:03:27 ►
On the way to the motor vehicle department, I borrowed $35 from my girlfriend to get my
01:03:32 ►
motorcycle back in the 70s.
01:03:34 ►
I said, wouldn’t it be something to see an interesting plate come up?
01:03:39 ►
Well, it came up UIO35.
01:03:41 ►
Perfect example.
01:03:43 ►
Now, what’s your question? U-I-O-35.
01:03:47 ►
Perfect example.
01:03:49 ►
Now, what’s your question?
01:03:55 ►
Well, to take the fish store one step further, and I’ve found it hundreds of times since then,
01:03:59 ►
that not only does it reflect what you’re thinking or whatever, but reality seems to actually change as you walk, change as you think.
01:04:05 ►
Yes, well now I would say that this is a clue to the fact that the story you’ve been told
01:04:11 ►
by science and physics and chemistry and all that is simply a way that you are not, you’re
01:04:19 ►
a person in a story.
01:04:21 ►
Because all such things don’t go on in the world of ordinary probability
01:04:26 ►
and ordinary physics.
01:04:29 ►
So it’s like a certain point in the evolution of your understanding where you realize that
01:04:35 ►
physics and chemistry and all that is not what it’s about, that you’re inside the story. And I think the juice in that insight is that you can then try and figure out whose story is it.
01:04:51 ►
In other words, is it your story, or do you exist in this story to open the door for somebody on page 220, and is that it?
01:05:01 ►
And then, of course, the ultimate aspiration to become the author of the story.
01:05:07 ►
Imagine.
01:05:08 ►
I am the author at times.
01:05:10 ►
Okay.
01:05:11 ►
Other times, you’re nothing but a bit player.
01:05:14 ►
That’s it.
01:05:15 ►
That’s right.
01:05:15 ►
And the trick is to get some handle on those moments when you are the author.
01:05:22 ►
I’ve been working at it.
01:05:23 ►
All right.
01:05:24 ►
Excellent.
01:05:24 ►
Thank you. Thank you.
01:05:25 ►
Thank you very much.
01:05:26 ►
Very good question, actually.
01:05:27 ►
First time caller line.
01:05:28 ►
You’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
01:05:30 ►
Hello.
01:05:31 ►
Yes.
01:05:32 ►
I eventually wanted to get to,
01:05:35 ►
I have a physical condition known as car syncope,
01:05:39 ►
and when I combine that with a half a yoga discipline
01:05:44 ►
known as Uddi Anabana,
01:05:47 ►
and I am a 60s child as well.
01:05:50 ►
I’m your age, and I have experimented with purple houselies originally.
01:05:56 ►
I trigger an internal biological, it could be a natural production of DMT,
01:06:04 ►
could be a natural production of DMT.
01:06:11 ►
It allows me to enter a prolonged, I guess we call it flow consciousness, how lucid dreaming is involved, synchronicity is involved.
01:06:16 ►
Well, we were talking earlier about this, about yoga as a chemical factor.
01:06:22 ►
I have not, I listened to the full two hours now.
01:06:26 ►
I have not disagreed with a single word I’ve heard,
01:06:29 ►
except for perhaps what you said in the introduction, Art.
01:06:33 ►
Actually, it was Tom Wolfe’s electric Kool-Aid acid test,
01:06:38 ►
Ken Kesey and the others on the bus.
01:06:39 ►
It’s 10,000 hits of original Purple Owlsley that’s buried out near Winnemucca,
01:06:45 ►
not 50,000 hits of Blue Santos.
01:06:48 ►
But, you know, my experience analytically takes me, you mentioned, you know, probability theory,
01:06:55 ►
and really that comes down to quantum mechanics now, and you begin to understand non-locality.
01:07:01 ►
And when you look at it from the, say massage shamanism, archaic
01:07:07 ►
techniques of ecstasy
01:07:09 ►
the Nays book
01:07:11 ►
Consciousness Explained
01:07:13 ►
where you look at the
01:07:15 ►
AI parallel computing
01:07:17 ►
back through von Neumann machine
01:07:19 ►
making us
01:07:22 ►
believe
01:07:23 ►
that we have individual identities,
01:07:27 ►
just another belief system.
01:07:30 ►
All of this, you know, really does take us, I think,
01:07:35 ►
to the geometrical structures that you talk about.
01:07:43 ►
Yeah, I think that what we’re going to have to understand is that psychedelic experience
01:07:50 ►
and quantum mechanical theories actually come together.
01:07:55 ►
The brain is the perfect instrument for exploring these micro-physical low-energy states, and yoga and shamanism and psychedelics.
01:08:08 ►
This has been going on for a long time, not using metaphors drawn out of the evolution of modern science,
01:08:15 ►
but using equally powerful metaphors created in different contexts. context but the big news is the future prosecution of science into new areas is going to involve
01:08:29 ►
using the brain as an instrument and giving up the idea of scientific objectivity as a naive
01:08:36 ►
positivist notion and let’s just get down and explore being with all the means at our disposal, chief of which are pharmacological and chemical.
01:08:48 ►
And while you hang on, I suppose, tenuously, however strongly,
01:08:56 ►
to this scientific paradigm, you’re not going anywhere, right?
01:09:00 ►
Right.
01:09:01 ►
See, what’s held, one of the issues around drugs is that scientists don’t study them from the inside
01:09:08 ►
because this would compromise their supposed academic objectivity.
01:09:13 ►
But by studying them from the outside, they end up knowing nothing about them.
01:09:18 ►
So you have an emperor’s new clothes situation, and everybody in pharmacology knows this.
01:09:21 ►
is new clothes situation.
01:09:24 ►
And everybody in pharmacology knows this. Good pharmacologists simply take drugs but never say so in print.
01:09:31 ►
So in order to be as public about it as you are,
01:09:36 ►
one must find a remote mountainside in Hawaii
01:09:40 ►
and become a virtual or very nearly a hermit and then speak out with some safety.
01:09:50 ►
Is that a fair assessment?
01:09:53 ►
That’s about it.
01:09:54 ►
By voluntarily becoming a physical hermit, I get to have a podium in cyberspace.
01:10:01 ►
Wild card line.
01:10:02 ►
You’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
01:10:04 ►
Good morning. Good morning. I’m quite from KHVH Honolulu. Hon card line. You’re on the air with Terrence McKenna. Good morning.
01:10:05 ►
Good morning. I’m calling from KHVH Honolulu.
01:10:08 ►
Honolulu. Boy, what a
01:10:10 ►
route. Yeah, louder,
01:10:11 ►
please. Okay.
01:10:13 ►
Terrence, are you in the Big Island? Because
01:10:15 ►
the New Agers say the Big Island is like
01:10:18 ►
an energy vortex. You have
01:10:19 ►
Pele, the volcano,
01:10:21 ►
and Pele, which is also a Hawaiian goddess.
01:10:24 ►
And then I was looking at the map. I don’t think you have to be insensitive to perceive that the Big Island is an energy center.
01:10:31 ►
We’ve got the world’s largest volcano here right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
01:10:38 ►
We feel protected by Pele.
01:10:41 ►
She puts lots of mercury vapor into the air and keeps real estate cheap and tourists
01:10:47 ►
away.
01:10:48 ►
And do you like being there because, like I was looking at the map, the Big Island is
01:10:54 ►
180 degrees, almost exactly the other side of the world from the Pyramids of Giza, which
01:11:02 ►
is another energy vortex.
01:11:03 ►
No, what interests me about the Big Island is that it’s at 19 degrees 30 minutes north,
01:11:09 ►
which is the critical place to study the skies of Mexico.
01:11:14 ►
That means that the skies off my current porch are the same skies I see
01:11:19 ►
when I go to Palenque and Uxmal and all the Mayan sites.
01:11:24 ►
So I love that.
01:11:26 ►
All right.
01:11:27 ►
East of the Rockies, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna.
01:11:29 ►
Where are you, please?
01:11:31 ►
That would be J27 on your Minnesota state map, Art.
01:11:36 ►
All right.
01:11:37 ►
And I listened to you probably for the past year or so,
01:11:40 ►
and it’s unbelievable how hard it is to get through, but I tried twice.
01:11:44 ►
Here you are.
01:11:45 ►
And here I am.
01:11:46 ►
And also to Terrence.
01:11:48 ►
I used to subscribe to High Times and they had a pictorial back in the 70s
01:11:54 ►
of over 150 different varieties of indica from Hawaii.
01:12:02 ►
Do you believe that to be true?
01:12:04 ►
And also I have another question. It may have been true then.
01:12:07 ►
They fly hard out here and have driven the pot
01:12:11 ►
growers pretty far underground. I mean, there’s definitely
01:12:15 ►
still primo pacalolo, but it’s not like it was
01:12:19 ►
in the roaring 70s.
01:12:22 ►
I used to live in Northern California,
01:12:25 ►
and I experienced red hair and purple hair sensimelia,
01:12:30 ►
and it probably is the Dom Periam of that region in my experiences.
01:12:38 ►
And I also have one other statement that between your two minds,
01:12:43 ►
I’m just wondering if this could be possible,
01:12:46 ►
that I had major surgery over a year and a half ago and kind of saw it coming in that I was slowing down
01:12:57 ►
and my life was coming to an end.
01:12:59 ►
And now after recovery that I’m getting this feeling that other than just an act of kindness, which is possible,
01:13:07 ►
and I’m a nice individual, but I just seem to be looking for my age.
01:13:12 ►
I look young, and I just keep to myself, and I’m kind to other people.
01:13:15 ►
But lately over the past week to ten days, people that I normally wouldn’t have contact with are smiling at me,
01:13:24 ►
People that I normally wouldn’t have contact with are smiling at me, and it just seems to me like I have this image of the look of death,
01:13:30 ►
but it’s channeling through these people, and they recognize me in that certain way.
01:13:35 ►
I’m just wondering if that’s as crazy or if that could be true.
01:13:39 ►
No, you’re going to die.
01:13:41 ►
Well, that sounds nice.
01:13:43 ►
I don’t know, Terrence.
01:13:50 ►
I don’t know, Terrence. I don’t know. You know, intuition is intuition and noise is noise and it’s a very hard call and a very important one. So what you do is
01:13:57 ►
you cook it in your mind and then you go with what feels right. All right. Western to the Rockies, you’re on the air with the answer man, Terrence McKenna.
01:14:09 ►
Hi, Terrence.
01:14:09 ►
This is Phil listening to 610-K-1-A.
01:14:13 ►
I heard you last, 23rd May last year, and do you have an information letter available to those without computers?
01:14:21 ►
Do you have anything new published in the last year,
01:14:25 ►
and have you had any new revelations in the past year?
01:14:28 ►
All right, well, a lot of past year there.
01:14:30 ►
Do you share through any other medium other than the Internet, Terrence?
01:14:39 ►
The Internet is pretty much it.
01:14:41 ►
I have books, and I’m interviewed a lot,
01:14:41 ►
The Internet is pretty much it. I have books and I’m interviewed a lot,
01:14:44 ►
and I’ve been interviewed in the past year in Magical Blend,
01:14:50 ►
but usually in small rave and music magazines seem interested in me.
01:14:57 ►
The Internet is the place where there is endless amounts of my material,
01:15:02 ►
much of it put up not by me,
01:15:07 ►
and thank you to those people who do that.
01:15:12 ►
I think that’s probably the place to get the most information about me.
01:15:15 ►
I was thinking the other night about DMT, and I thought of a phrase I’ve used to describe it, Arabian hyperspace,
01:15:21 ►
and I searched on the Internet, and it spat out my own text at me.
01:15:26 ►
It was a very weird moment.
01:15:28 ►
Yeah, it must have been.
01:15:30 ►
It was.
01:15:31 ►
It really must have been.
01:15:33 ►
There’s plenty of Terence McKenna on the net.
01:15:35 ►
Well, you know, here you mention hyperspace, you mention 19 degrees, mind you, not 19.5
01:15:43 ►
but 19.
01:15:43 ►
Have you ever listened to Richard Hoagland and his discussions about hyperdimensional physics?
01:15:50 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:15:51 ►
The problem is, Art, I knew these guys too soon.
01:15:55 ►
I knew them so long ago that I know how squirrely they truly are.
01:16:02 ►
I’ve played poker with them.
01:16:08 ►
All right. One last. I think we’re almost out of time
01:16:09 ►
Wildcard Line, you’re on the air with Terrence McKenna
01:16:11 ►
Where are you please?
01:16:12 ►
Aloha Art, I’m in Captain Cook
01:16:14 ►
I’m actually about a thousand feet north of 19.5
01:16:18 ►
And I wanted to ask Terrence a couple of questions
01:16:24 ►
One was about cannabis and ibogaine.
01:16:28 ►
The other was I wanted to thank him for at one time he was going to be a witness in my
01:16:33 ►
trial for the religious use of cannabis here in Kona.
01:16:37 ►
What is your question about cannabis and ibogaine?
01:16:40 ►
I’m interested in what you think of the fact that they’re the only two plants that are illegal to grow in the United States,
01:16:47 ►
and ibogaine being an addiction interrupter.
01:16:51 ►
Well, ibogaine was put in that Schedule I in that week of hysteria back in the 1960s,
01:17:01 ►
including compounds later found not even to be active in human beings.
01:17:08 ►
I think it is a tremendous detriment and an indictment of the scientific establishment
01:17:15 ►
that it doesn’t fight back more against government.
01:17:20 ►
You know, in the Middle Ages, medical students would steal corpses off the gallows in order to get bodies to do dissections, which the church had forbidden.
01:17:32 ►
And where is the courage of science now, big science even, that it allows government to set the agenda in the area of exploring substances which affect the human mind?
01:17:44 ►
The answer, Terrence, is they’re chicken.
01:17:47 ►
Now, we’re out of time.
01:17:48 ►
I want to ask you one quick question.
01:17:50 ►
One of our network employees just came back from Hawaii, Honolulu and elsewhere,
01:17:56 ►
and said the island is like a crispy critter.
01:17:59 ►
It’s so dry.
01:18:02 ►
She had never seen Hawaii in the state it’s in right now. Is that true?
01:18:07 ►
Yeah. The way the El Nino works is these huge storms in California, that’s all our winter
01:18:14 ►
water. And we, until a week ago, had not seen a drop of rain since before Halloween.
01:18:21 ►
I mean, since before Halloween.
01:18:26 ►
Now we’re getting weak rain occasionally,
01:18:30 ►
but people who didn’t store water are in trouble,
01:18:32 ►
and the coffee people are screaming.
01:18:36 ►
Boy, that’s almost impossible to imagine,
01:18:40 ►
recalling the Hawaii that I saw when I was living on Maui.
01:18:41 ►
Listen, that’s it.
01:18:43 ►
We’ve gone through all the hours, Terrence, and once again, you have been ever so gracious.
01:18:46 ►
What a wonderful interview, and aside from a few interruptions,
01:18:49 ►
your new phone system in the wilderness is working just spiffy.
01:18:53 ►
Terrence, got to say goodnight.
01:18:56 ►
It’s a great pleasure to talk to you, Art.
01:18:58 ►
Good luck.
01:18:59 ►
Take care, and when I come, I want to see you, Terrence, all right?
01:19:02 ►
We’ve got a guest room for you.
01:19:05 ►
You take care, my friend. That’s Terrence
01:19:07 ►
McKenna, folks.
01:19:12 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic
01:19:14 ►
Salon, where people are changing
01:19:16 ►
their lives one thought at a time.
01:19:19 ►
So, now maybe you have a
01:19:21 ►
little better idea of how some of Terrence’s
01:19:24 ►
more outrageous thoughts became so widespread.
01:19:27 ►
In these late night conversations with Art Bell, Terrence was reaching an audience of over 2 million people,
01:19:33 ►
all of whom were of such a nature that they liked to stay up through the night listening to Art Bell talking about UFOs, aliens, and DMT.
01:19:42 ►
It was really an interesting audience.
01:19:44 ►
And I think you have to hand it to
01:19:47 ►
Terrence. While I got a little lost when listening to some of the questions that he was being asked,
01:19:52 ►
Terrence just took them all in stride and seemed to do his best to answer them in a somewhat logical
01:19:57 ►
manner. Personally, I would have had to pass on some of those questions. Of course, by 1998, I assumed that Terrence had probably heard more than his share of off-the-wall questions,
01:20:10 ►
so he never seemed to react negatively when somebody asked a question that, well,
01:20:15 ►
maybe should have stayed in that person’s mind a little bit longer,
01:20:19 ►
so as to become perhaps better formed and clear enough for a guy like me to understand.
01:20:24 ►
become perhaps better formed and clear enough for a guy like me to understand.
01:20:29 ►
And on that topic, did you notice what a masterful job Art Bell did by taking an offbeat question and restating it in a way that Terrence could address it intelligently?
01:20:35 ►
Art was really a great radio host.
01:20:38 ►
Well, it’s time for me to go today, but tomorrow night at 6.30 Pacific time,
01:20:43 ►
I’ll once again open the doors of the salon for
01:20:46 ►
a live online session. And as I said earlier, tomorrow’s guest in the salon will be Dr. Bruce
01:20:51 ►
Dahmer, who has been a cornerstone of these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon ever since
01:20:56 ►
they began. While we may not reach a couple of million people tomorrow night, like the old Art
01:21:01 ►
Bell Show once did, nonetheless, I’m sure that our conversation
01:21:05 ►
will be every bit as diverse and interesting as it was in the program that we just listened to.
01:21:10 ►
I hope to see you there. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:21:16 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.