Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash
Date this lecture was recorded: July 17, 1998.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“You really can’t understand the future without the psychedelic experience. History seems to be becoming more and more psychedelic.”
“We have all made too many sacrifices in the name of fitting ourselves into the culture we find around us through the circumstances of our destiny.”
“[Culture is a] toxic environment that one needs to negotiate with great care.”
“Domestication and civilization are curiously intertwined concepts.”
“A society has to be incredibly confident of its first premises to allow its citizens to habitually and regularly explore altered states of consciousness.”
“The entire Internet- computer-revolution rides on the backs of people who were taking LSD in the Sixties. People have expressed horror at this idea and then taken opinion polls at various professional gatherings, such as Sigraph and Comdex, and gatherings like that, and have this insight confirmed overwhelmingly. The entire post-1950s edifice of information transfer and replication technology was created by psychedelic people, and it’s serving them very well, as well as the corporate elite.”
“Only the expansive, the generous, the psychedelic are going to be left standing when all of this stuff is sorted out, if it is ever sorted out.”
“The shaman is the one who is allowed to know how the culture is wired under the board. Everyone else stands out bathed in the glow of the big screen of cultural values, but the shaman are the people who actually understand the reasons for these performances, myths, and rituals.”
“We are trying to build, not a class of shamans but a shamanic culture. In other words a culture, and I think there has never been a culture of this type on the planet, a culture that actually lived in the light of the fourth dimension.”
“No human being has greater insight into your circumstance than you do.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’m going to keep my remarks somewhat brief today for two reasons.
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The first one being that I have to finish getting ready for tonight’s live salon,
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where I plan on telling the story of one of my three greatest adventures.
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And I still have to finish getting my photos arranged for it.
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And by the way, this story doesn’t have anything to do with psychedelics, in case you’re wondering.
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In fact, not one of my top three adventures involved drugs.
00:00:49 ►
Not that I haven’t had some interesting adventures involving psychedelics, of course.
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The second reason for keeping my remarks brief is that we are about to listen to a Terrence McKenna talk
00:01:00 ►
that fellow salonner Brant Attaway sent to me the other day.
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talk that fellow salonner Brant Attaway sent to me the other day.
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And after doing a little cleanup
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on the sound, I listened to it and
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discovered that it was one I hadn’t heard before.
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Of course,
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I said that a few months back and
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discovered, much to my dismay,
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that it was a McKenna talk
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that I’d previously played several years
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earlier. But as some of
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our fellow salonners have pointed out,
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it never hurts to hear one of
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Terrence McKenna’s talks a second time or more. The talk that we are now going to listen to was
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given just two weeks before the Valley of Novelty series of talks that I podcast back in February of
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2006, beginning with my podcast number 27. So even though we didn’t know it at the time,
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this talk was given very near the end of Terrence McKenna’s career,
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which means that, of course,
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we’ve heard many of these stories before,
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yet listening to him retell one of his favorite stories
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is always a joy.
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So now let’s join Terrence and a few of his friends
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on a Friday evening in July of 1998.
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You really can’t understand the future without the psychedelic experience.
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History seems to be becoming more and more psychedelic, if by that we mean self-complexifying, interconnected,
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proceeding along unexpected developmental pathways,
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more and more concrescent,
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more and more at the behest of the dynamics of emergent properties
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that are unpredictable.
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of emergent properties that are unpredictable.
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Alfred North Whitehead said it’s the business of the future to be dangerous.
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And, of course, as we approach the millennium,
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this is the subject matter of every pundit and public speaker and street coroner orator,
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because though it is simply on one level an abstraction of you know a turn of
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a zero nevertheless the calendar is the largest frame for our being that we allow the unconscious
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to generate and the calendar is like a kind of geodesic structure inside of which being is caged
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you know the mayan calendrical cycle is coming to a close in 2012 in a way on a scale of even
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tens of thousands of years hardly to speak of millions of years,
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you could see our own calendar and the Mayan calendar as almost in lock-sync,
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differing only in a small percentage in their choice of a millennial
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or, in the case of the Maya, larger turning point.
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So no matter where in the spectrum of epistemological sophistication you lie,
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there is, I think, a sense of enormous pregnancy in these times.
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in these times.
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Vast processes are being summed up and whole new cards are being dealt into the game.
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Indeed, whole new players are entering the game.
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So this is sort of what I want to talk about,
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not as seriously as my sleep-deprived solemnity might imply.
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Let me say a little bit about this business of the archetype of the circus and why I see that as
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conversationally a bridge for talking about the psychedelic experience and the unfolding future.
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First of all, the circus is a wonderful place for children.
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In fact, it’s a celebration of the values of childhood,
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both individual childhood and archaic childhood.
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But it’s also ambiguous.
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Personally, I’m sure my first awareness of Eros that I have any memory of
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was when I was a person so small that they were wrapped in a blanket
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and passed from hand to hand. And I saw a lady in a tiny two-piece spangled costume
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hanging by her teeth, working without nets up in the big top.
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And I got it.
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I got the Eros death dichotomy there.
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Similarly, in the circus,
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death dichotomy there.
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Similarly, in the circus,
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away from the light and the action,
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away from the center ring,
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are the exhibit halls,
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the thing in the bottle,
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the hermaphrodite, the fat lady,
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the goat-faced boy. In other words, realms of mutation, strangeness, dread for
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a child or anyone else with their wits about them, for that matter. And then the circus
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is a symbol for designated impropriety. when I was growing up
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on the west slope of
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Colorado in the town of Paonia
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every 4th of July
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is cherry day without a
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hint of irony
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and
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a carnival always
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came to town and we
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children were always told
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that in the week that the carnival was in town
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we couldn’t stay out and play past nine o’clock because these strange people some even of dark
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skinned hue and so forth and so on were there disequilibrating the normal social ecosystem.
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And then, of course, any child worth their salt wishes to run away to the circus. So it’s a symbol of an alternative to bourgeois values, is what it is.
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So I see both the psychedelic experience and the future as having all these properties that I’ve just talked about. dynamically chaotic, more challenging, and more appealing to the inner child in each of us
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than the past has been. And as I say, it’s what in union psychology is called a coincidencia
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positorum. It’s a union of opposites. It’s not a thing which is all good or all bad, all up or all down. Like all real things,
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it manages to encapsulate into itself contradiction and this sense of tension that comes from that
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contradiction. Now somebody hearing this might say, well, it’s strange to connect the psychedelic
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experience to the future because isn’t it archaic? In fact, perhaps a tool of use in our distant
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hunting and gathering past, but now to be put aside by science-adumbrating sophisticates such as ourselves.
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This is one way of knocking the psychedelic enterprise.
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But I completely differ with that
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because I believe that the only way to smooth our movement
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down the birth passageway here at the end of history is actually
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by going back and revivifying archaic values that the journey through history took an enormous toll
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on our uh humanness and that aspects of our being had to be suppressed or were suppressed,
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we can argue whether it was necessary or not, that science, Calvinism, urbanism,
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industrialism have all taken their share of an essential humanness that was intact as recently as 15,000, 20,000 years ago.
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In other words, we’re not talking about biological evolution here.
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We’re talking more about how culture as an enterprise has insulted the individual.
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We have all, whether we are Hottentots or Hasids or citizens of Houston,
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we have all made too many sacrifices in the name of fitting ourselves into the culture we find
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around us through the circumstances of our destiny. Culture then, in my analysis, is perhaps enemy is too strong a term,
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but it’s a toxic environment that one needs to negotiate with with great care.
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And people who are so clueless that they never realize this, who imbibe their culture,
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who somehow exemplify its values, are dehumanized in the process because cultural ideals are always
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caricatures. They are somehow a kind of necessary shorthand for doing the business of human organization,
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but they are not true to the complexity of each and every one of us,
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not true to what I call the felt moment of immediate experience.
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In fact, it’s that felt moment of immediate experience,
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In fact, it’s that felt moment of immediate experience,
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whether in orgasm or in intoxication or simply in ordinary involvement with life,
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that culture is always making a claim against and trying to somehow minimalize or negotiate into a lesser position.
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Again, this has to do with the children wanting to run away from the village negotiate into a lesser position.
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Again, this has to do with the children wanting to run away from the village with the gypsy circus.
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Culture is felt to be stultifying.
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The archaic mode and why I think it represents an ideal worth struggling to somehow bring back into expression
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was a mode based on connectivity and reciprocity.
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And I have a very complicated theory of human emergence and evolution that I won’t discuss here tonight.
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I’ve discussed it in the human diet,
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interrupted for perhaps 100,000 years, ending 15,000 years ago.
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And in that 100,000 years, when by omnivorously expanding our diet we allowed psychoactive
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alkaloids to become part of human uh the human experience our uh tendency to form these male
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dominant hierarchies was overturned in other words we literally medicated ourselves out of a style of organization that was brutal, if not neurotic.
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However, when this cultural involvement with hallucinogens ended for various reasons,
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these tendencies in the human soma, in the human psyche, had never been eliminated,
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only suppressed. And they reemerge right at the moment that we call the beginning of civilization.
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I’m sure that the first cities were in fact areas where one group of people kept other people in
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pens like domestic animals domestication and civilization are curiously intertwined concepts
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and you know 10 9 to 12 000 years ago depending on where you look on the earth, you have a sudden efflorescence of an
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entirely new cultural style based on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. It’s phenomenally
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successful agriculture, a consequence of which is surpluses, a consequence of which is paranoia,
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because suddenly these surpluses have to be defended from outgroups.
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You have sedentary settlements, and consequently the great nomadic round and movement of people
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and flocks that knows no notion of place or property was interrupted. And so at that moment where you get the first urban centers,
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agriculture, you also get male kingship, standing armies,
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and role-specific social definitions.
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In other words, the high priest, the shaman, the miller,
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the metal worker, the soldier, the whore, the slave.
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This all comes into being where before everyone
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operated as required in any circumstance. And my analysis is that the fall from a sense of
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the eminence of God, in whatever form you want to talk about it, the fall from a sense of the eminence of God, in whatever form you want to talk about it, the fall from a sense of the living vitality of nature,
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the fall from a sense of authentic community,
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these falls all characterize the experience of human history.
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And we are now basically at the end of our rope.
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We can fall no further without dragging the entire enterprise of planetary biology into
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catastrophe.
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And so, according to some marvelous rule which must govern everything, at the last possible
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moment, there’s a compensatory reflex.
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There’s a counterflow.
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And I think this counterflow in the West, I mean, it has many dimensions.
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This is a hideous simplification, you understand.
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But the counterflow in the West has to do with this incredibly pretentious and self-righteous science, which
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named itself anthropology, sailing forth about 100 to 120 years ago and beginning to gather up
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all the detritus of the destroyed aboriginal cultures, their cooking utensils, their origin myths, their hunting implements, and yes, by golly, their medicine kits.
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And the importation of these medicine kits and all this anthropological and ethnographic data back into the core of Western civilization
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was an authentic situation of a Trojan horse.
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was an authentic situation of a Trojan horse.
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Because inside these apparently harmless objects and plants was lurking the long-banished demon of community egalitarianism,
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care for the earth,
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all the things that had been compromised
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by the march towards scientific positivism
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and the present scientific civilization.
00:18:13 ►
And in the course of the 20th century, this has been an enormously hard-fought social
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issue.
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Do people have the right to explore their own minds for spiritual or hedonistic purposes absent the guiding hand of government?
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And many people, reasonable, decent people, have expressed puzzlement as to why the establishment is so resistant these apparently harmless stay-at-home activities largely?
00:18:49 ►
Well, to me, the answer is obvious. The government is not so duped as one might imagine, and by the
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government, it’s a generic term for authority in all times and places. It is perfectly obvious, to me anyway, that psychedelics so challenge cultural values that a society has to be incredibly confident of its first premises to allow its citizens to habitually and regularly explore altered states of consciousness.
00:19:27 ►
That’s a level of democratic dialogue that would rip this society asunder.
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I mean, American society cannot function without a vast, deep, hidden, dark closet
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into which nobody ever looks and no rhetoric ever penetrates. And if it did, the whole enterprise would just rip at the seams.
00:19:49 ►
Every once in a while, this happens.
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The president’s blowjob, a case in point.
00:19:54 ►
But, you know, we move very slowly and cautiously in these areas.
00:20:15 ►
areas. But nevertheless, curious intellectual elites feeling the existential ennui imposed by scientific materialism have made special rules for themselves. And throughout the 20th century,
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we have had the phenomenon of bohemian culture,
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experimenting with sexual mores, experimenting with intoxicants of various sorts,
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experimenting with ideas. And I mean the bohemian community in a little larger sense
00:20:39 ►
than simply the artistic community, because there has always been a bohemian community in science as well.
00:20:46 ►
Renegade scientists, the Rupert Sheldrakes of the world, represent essentially the denizens of scientific bohemia.
00:20:57 ►
And someone could argue with this premise, but I would argue with them and win, I tell you.
00:21:08 ►
would argue with them and win, I tell you. The enormous explosion of creativity, artistic,
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scientific, in popular culture, in design, in fashion, in literature, throughout the 20th century has been driven by, generically, social disequilibrium, movement of people and ideas,
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and in the background of that, psychedelics.
00:21:32 ►
The entire internet computer revolution
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rides on the backs of people who were taking LSD in the 60s,
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and people have expressed horror at this idea
00:21:47 ►
and then taken opinion polls at various professional gatherings
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such as SIGGRAPH and COMDEC and gatherings like that
00:21:57 ►
and had this insight confirmed overwhelmingly.
00:22:02 ►
confirmed overwhelmingly.
00:22:08 ►
The entire post-1950s edifice of information transfer and replication technology
00:22:12 ►
was created by psychedelic people
00:22:16 ►
and is serving them very well,
00:22:18 ►
as well as the corporate elite.
00:22:21 ►
And so what I see happening is
00:22:24 ►
the dirty and unspoken secret of the 20th century’s
00:22:29 ►
phenomenal diversity and creativity is its relationship to artificial stimulation of the
00:22:38 ►
imagination by whatever means. And we’re now so late in the 20th century,
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so late in the unfolding of modernity,
00:22:50 ►
that I think it’s all right to talk about this.
00:22:53 ►
Now the creativity loop is very short.
00:22:58 ►
I mean, people are inspired,
00:23:01 ►
and they can implement through coding on the internet through graphic tools that they
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have at their disposal and so faster and faster the imagination is vivifying itself it is becoming
00:23:17 ►
more eminent and this is what what the future is the future is a breakdown of the notion of three-dimensional linear Newtonian space
00:23:31 ►
to be replaced by a fractal landscape of a trillion private Idaho’s
00:23:38 ►
that are all reacting to each other and integrating with each other
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and leaping over each other in a dimension much deeper
00:23:49 ►
and much more variable than the social dimension
00:23:53 ►
that we’re used to seeing societies function in.
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And I think that if you’re paying attention
00:24:03 ►
or if you’re semi-unemployed, as I am,
00:24:06 ►
you realize that you can spend all your time
00:24:11 ►
simply trying to understand what is happening
00:24:15 ►
to the world and to yourself
00:24:18 ►
and to technology and sexuality and medicine
00:24:22 ►
and spirit and mathematics and art.
00:24:27 ►
And this drama of being is now being waged on so many levels
00:24:33 ►
at such an intensity that the metaphor of saying
00:24:40 ►
history is like a psychedelic experience
00:24:44 ►
is actually giving way to the fact,
00:24:48 ►
the demonstrable fact of the matter.
00:24:53 ►
And the reason I think it’s worth, you know,
00:24:56 ►
talking this way and about these things
00:24:59 ►
is because this process,
00:25:02 ►
which is now identifiable in the terms I’ve laid out,
00:25:06 ►
is nevertheless embryonic at this point.
00:25:12 ►
In other words, we have a lot farther to go than the distance we’ve already come,
00:25:20 ►
and we are going to go this final distance much faster than we have ever traveled before.
00:25:30 ►
And there is a lot of fear about the future and what it holds and the opportunities and the challenges. I mean, when you start talking about life extension,
00:25:47 ►
downloading human beings into circuitry, nanotechnology, an infinite number of easily
00:25:54 ►
designed and uncontrollable drugs, psychedelic and otherwise, that do all kinds of things,
00:26:07 ►
all kinds of things, artificial intelligence, possibly alien intelligence,
00:26:12 ►
you realize the planet is busting at the seams.
00:26:18 ►
And the main task of everyone who, by good fortune,
00:26:24 ►
finds themselves close to the top of the pyramid in the high-tech industrial democracies,
00:26:28 ►
and I mean everybody in this room tonight for sure,
00:26:35 ►
the main challenge then is to participate in the managing of this,
00:26:41 ►
the managerial process, not that it can be flawlessly managed.
00:26:49 ►
It has a morphogenetic dynamic of its own. And in fact, this morphogenetic dynamic is so powerful that if you don’t arrange yourself to its convenience, life will probably
00:26:58 ►
get very weird indeed. People who are homophobic or people who have racial prejudices or people who believe in grab as much as you can and hold the other guy down. if they haven’t already along the road of life, because these are fatal, not simply erroneous thought structures,
00:27:31 ►
they’re fatal thought structures.
00:27:35 ►
Only the expansive, the generous, the psychedelic
00:27:43 ►
are going to be left standing when all of this stuff is sorted out if it is
00:27:49 ►
ever sorted out so this archaic quality of the psychedelic experience exemplified by the shaman as the paradigmatic figure who brings together archaic values. The shaman is,
00:28:09 ►
I think, the icon that might ease the transition into this new order of information and being.
00:28:19 ►
Because I think shamans have always stood in a position relative to the other of being sort of the advance scout for their cultural group or their tribe.
00:28:37 ►
It’s a strange thing, you know, in, for instance, a tribal group group there will be initiations
00:28:46 ►
into puberty for the boys and the young women
00:28:49 ►
and often these will involve
00:28:52 ►
various theatrical we would say
00:28:56 ►
performances where demons appear
00:28:59 ►
or seem to appear and are very frightening
00:29:02 ►
well all this stage machinery,
00:29:06 ►
smoke machines and drums and so forth and so on,
00:29:09 ►
is in the hands of the shaman.
00:29:12 ►
The shaman is the one who is allowed to know
00:29:16 ►
how the culture is wired under the board.
00:29:20 ►
Everyone else stands out,
00:29:21 ►
bathed in the glow of the big screen of cultural values,
00:29:25 ►
but the shamans are the people who actually understand the reasons for these performances, myths, rituals.
00:29:36 ►
I’ve spent time in the Amazon, and on more than one occasion, you know, you will go into some remote group,
00:29:44 ►
on more than one occasion, you know, you will go into some remote group and the people gather around and they’re very curious
00:29:48 ►
and they want to touch your skin and your instruments and your tents and things.
00:29:54 ►
But always at the edge of this chattering, happy group of people
00:29:59 ►
is a guy looking on who isn’t pushing his way forward
00:30:03 ►
and who doesn’t care about Gore-Tex.
00:30:07 ►
And this is the shaman.
00:30:11 ►
And he is essentially an alienated intellectual.
00:30:16 ►
And he observes the behavior of his culture from a higher point of view.
00:30:22 ►
And in fact, if you know anything about shamanism,
00:30:25 ►
you know that worldwide it explores motifs of levels, transition.
00:30:32 ►
Ladders are climbed, sacred trees are climbed,
00:30:36 ►
magical flights to distant realms are accomplished.
00:30:41 ►
The shaman can shift levels.
00:30:49 ►
accomplished the shaman can shift levels and you know we can say well this is a way of talking about intoxication or trance or well yes but in fact when you stop talking about ways of talking
00:30:57 ►
and actually get loaded what you discover is that they were speaking as clearly and concisely as not only they could but as is
00:31:08 ►
possible and that in fact under the influence of at least psychedelics and i’m speaking here from
00:31:16 ►
my experience the psyche unfolds it’s almost as though it has two conformational geometries.
00:31:27 ►
One folded, tight, culture-bound, paranoid, ego-driven, so forth and so on.
00:31:37 ►
The culturally defined persona, the good son, the hard worker, the good mom, so forth and so on,
00:31:45 ►
and then absent those cultural constraints and under the influence of,
00:31:53 ►
and let’s use the Jungian word, inflating dynamic like a psychedelic,
00:32:00 ►
the self, the ontos of being, unfolds into a completely different world.
00:32:08 ►
And I maintain that it is not fully grasped within psychological metaphors alone,
00:32:16 ►
that this world that is unfolded into is better grasped by mathematical metaphors.
00:32:22 ►
And what I mean by that is this is not a vision, an insight, a trip.
00:32:29 ►
This is an other dimension
00:32:32 ►
as Riemann, Lobachevsky, and Euclid
00:32:36 ►
would understand the word dimension.
00:32:40 ►
This is why the shaman can see
00:32:42 ►
where the game will congregate,
00:32:45 ►
predict the weather, successfully cure,
00:32:48 ►
because the shaman is perceiving the world
00:32:51 ►
from a higher-order mathematical domain
00:32:54 ►
that is outside the confines of cultural conditioning.
00:32:59 ►
And just, you know, where am I going with this?
00:33:01 ►
We’re close now.
00:33:03 ►
The learning curve was steep, but now a storm-battered cabin.
00:33:10 ►
Where this is going is this evolution
00:33:15 ►
of the shamanic hyperdimensional type
00:33:19 ►
out of confined culture
00:33:21 ►
is a fractal model for what is happening to us here at the end of history.
00:33:27 ►
We are trying to build not a class of shamans, but a shamanic culture. In other words, a culture,
00:33:38 ►
and there has never, I think, been a culture of this type on the planet, a culture that actually lived in the light
00:33:45 ►
of the fourth dimension. Not as passed down through a shamanic class, but as a component
00:33:54 ►
of the felt experience of every single member of that culture. And that is what this spatial displacement of locality is about,
00:34:07 ►
how our minds are spreading over the planet.
00:34:09 ►
We are losing our association to our genetically endowed primate bodies.
00:34:16 ►
We are no longer, our gender self-definition is no longer bound by biological destiny.
00:34:24 ►
Our political institutions are designed to free us for class transition.
00:34:29 ►
We are in this act of expanding to fill a larger mental space.
00:34:36 ►
And this is a huge thing.
00:34:38 ►
I mean, you hear about the paradigm shift,
00:34:41 ►
but we’re like barnacles on the whale of the paradigm shift and it’s
00:34:47 ►
very hard for us to orient toward what is happening we each think we’re having
00:34:52 ►
our own private adventure with our career with our sexuality with our
00:34:57 ►
philosophical understanding with our psychedelic voyages with our spiritual
00:35:02 ►
teachers but in fact you know notice that everybody else is going
00:35:07 ►
through something very similar and the uh the payoff of all of this i think is uh a more
00:35:19 ►
comfortable mode of being that we really do feel the weight of some kind of original sin we are cast from
00:35:30 ►
paradise we we feel flawed and if we aren’t flawed we rush to invent flaws so you know if agriculture
00:35:39 ►
didn’t do the trick then phonetic alphabets surely will. And if that can’t, how about monotheism? And if
00:35:46 ►
that can’t, how about science? And if that can’t, how about political correctness? And on and on
00:35:52 ►
and on, we flagellate ourselves for our perceived inadequacies, define ourselves as apart from
00:36:00 ►
nature, a fallen creature. And we say this came from the church or the corporation or the king,
00:36:07 ►
but everybody participated in this particular thought crime along the way.
00:36:14 ►
I mean, there were few brave heretics who held out against it.
00:36:18 ►
Now there are many heretics who hold out against it
00:36:23 ►
and say the distinction between the artificial and the natural, between the male and the female, between the polis and the wilderness, these things must be erased because they are infantile. we have come to the end of our childhood as a species,
00:36:47 ►
as a semi-cannibalistic, rape-prone, ravenous, copulating, destroying ape species.
00:36:57 ►
Business along those lines is a sure bullet in the head
00:37:02 ►
for every man, woman, and child on this planet within 500 years, no question about it.
00:37:08 ►
And so what we pride ourselves on is our flexibility.
00:37:12 ►
Well, by God, we’re going to be put to the test.
00:37:16 ►
Everyone must push themselves
00:37:20 ►
and the great enemy to this process and people say are you an anarchist
00:37:30 ►
are you a nihilist what are you uh the great enemy to this process of freeing ourselves for a dynamic
00:37:39 ►
future i believe is ideology not bad ide. God knows we have enough of them.
00:37:50 ►
But ideology itself is a form of neoteny, a form of self-juvenilization. It’s a cop-out. A mature, civilized being lives without closure,
00:38:09 ►
without the closure provided by Freudianism, Marxism, Buddhism,
00:38:14 ►
positivism, capitalism, Zen, the Hopi prophecies,
00:38:18 ►
the teachings of the Arturians, or anything else.
00:38:22 ►
Living without closure is honest living. And it’s uncomfortable
00:38:28 ►
because there’s something about the anal retentive primate mind that we want to button it down,
00:38:35 ►
you know, and say, well, it’s this or it’s that, with no sense of irony, no sense of scale,
00:38:48 ►
no sense of irony, no sense of scale, no tongue-in-cheek approach at all. I mean, if you met a termite who aspired to understand the cosmic workings of the universe, you would just roll your
00:38:54 ►
eyes at such a naive misunderstanding of one’s own position in the cosmos. Well, do you think we stand so far from where the termite stands
00:39:07 ►
that our musings about how the cosmos works are carrying much force? I don’t think so.
00:39:16 ►
Well, then people say, well, but without ideology, I mean, isn’t it, aren’t we supposed to reject
00:39:21 ►
fascism and choose community? No. i mean at a certain stage yes but
00:39:28 ►
this is the the sophomoric stage of becoming a an intellectual person once you’ve reached the
00:39:37 ►
hoary ages that i now reside in you see and and notice you know, I had a, I visited my doctor recently, and as I was
00:39:48 ►
getting dressed, he said, you know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead.
00:39:54 ►
And I’ve thought of that remark on many different levels, and I realize culture is a con game designed to bewilder you for 35 to 40 years.
00:40:08 ►
And then if by some miracle you can outlive that span of time,
00:40:14 ►
a strange realization will begin to dawn as you sit at the poker table.
00:40:20 ►
You’ll realize, this is a bunch of crap.
00:40:25 ►
I’ve been had.
00:40:28 ►
Well, up until very recently,
00:40:31 ►
only a very few people in any society lived into those ages,
00:40:36 ►
and then that was called wisdom.
00:40:39 ►
He said, you know, he just sits on his porch and rocks
00:40:43 ►
and occasionally chuckles.
00:40:47 ►
But now, because the cultural dialogue is so frank,
00:40:53 ►
and because so many people live to very ripe old ages,
00:40:57 ►
the biologically generated con of culture is being seen through.
00:41:03 ►
And the falsity of ideology is exposed for what it is, something
00:41:09 ►
that you bamboozle children with for 30 years. But beyond that, it doesn’t serve. Well, so then
00:41:17 ►
what is to fill this void that has always been filled by passionate convictions,
00:41:25 ►
regardless of what they might happen to be.
00:41:29 ►
What is to fill the void is what I call, and I mentioned it earlier,
00:41:34 ►
the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:41:39 ►
The felt presence of immediate experience.
00:41:42 ►
This is sufficient.
00:41:44 ►
This is, it’s hard for us,
00:41:47 ►
armored as we are
00:41:49 ►
and defocused from the moment
00:41:53 ►
as we are by our previous imbibing
00:41:56 ►
of toxic cultural values.
00:41:58 ►
Occasionally we touch this.
00:42:00 ►
Well, I think psychedelics
00:42:02 ►
are the way back
00:42:03 ►
that you can train yourself.
00:42:05 ►
And there may be other roads back meditation and so forth but psychedelics is the
00:42:10 ►
fast track I would argue to a sense of here and nowness a sense of Bodhi mind a
00:42:18 ►
sense of stillness a sense of connectivity to the Gaian intent. And with that, the morphogenetic dynamic that is unfolding becomes exhilarating,
00:42:33 ►
adventuresome, trust, you can reach down into it and trust nature.
00:42:41 ►
Without it, it’s all paranoia and should I stockpile food and what should I do with my
00:42:46 ►
investments and where am I going to run to given this catastrophe, that catastrophe?
00:42:53 ►
You know, people are so agitated by the notion of the end of the world and yet don’t seem to notice that the end of their world is a pretty sure bet.
00:43:09 ►
Most people are dead.
00:43:11 ►
I hate to be the one to break it to you.
00:43:14 ►
Whatever dead means, we don’t know.
00:43:16 ►
But most people are in that condition.
00:43:21 ►
And so it shall come to us, presumably, in one form or another.
00:43:26 ►
Well, compared to your own self-extinction,
00:43:30 ►
issues like the end of the world seem like fairly abstract political matters.
00:43:36 ►
So I think that corporate capitalism and object fetishism,
00:43:43 ►
which seem to be two human traits that cross-fertilize each other, are run on anxiety.
00:43:51 ►
And that this anxiety trivializes what it is to be human.
00:44:17 ►
And that all of nature waits upon human beings to awake from the delusion of history and to re-embrace the living processes that nature represents.
00:44:21 ►
And the medium of exchange are the psychedelics.
00:44:23 ►
They are very mysterious. Anybody who thinks they simply,
00:44:27 ►
through perturbation of brain chemistry or something,
00:44:31 ►
allow, I don’t know, repressed material
00:44:35 ►
from the personal unconscious to come into focus,
00:44:39 ►
this is such a dumbing down of what it is.
00:44:42 ►
These things carry intelligence, far greater intelligence than our
00:44:48 ►
own. An ocean of alien intelligence moves through the vegetable world, which is ancient beyond
00:44:56 ►
imagining on this planet. I mean, it goes back 500, 600 million years. And an ocean of very strange intelligence,
00:45:07 ►
but approachable, at least approachable enough
00:45:10 ►
to be identifiable as intelligence, resides there.
00:45:14 ►
And we have wandered from this,
00:45:17 ►
and in our hubris built these paranoid schemes
00:45:21 ►
into our behaviors that I call cultural values,
00:45:25 ►
and they have pushed us now into very precarious places.
00:45:30 ►
So it’s time to come back.
00:45:34 ►
And, you know, this is pretty egg-heady stuff.
00:45:40 ►
You can’t shout this on the street corners.
00:45:44 ►
You can’t shout this on the street corners.
00:45:55 ►
But as I said, we represent the upper 10, 5% of the pyramid of privilege and connectivity on this planet.
00:46:09 ►
And if we can begin to talk this way, think about things in these terms. Transcend ideologies. We will move forward and we will assuage the anxiety of those less fortunate and further down on the social pyramid. And I’m really
00:46:17 ►
serious about this ideological thing. I mean, because I see that there’s a kind of bifurcation,
00:46:27 ►
which I almost said ahead,
00:46:29 ►
but no, we are in this bifurcation right now.
00:46:33 ►
And it’s whether we shall fragment into cult
00:46:36 ►
or embrace this thing I’m talking about,
00:46:40 ►
which is living without closure.
00:46:43 ►
Cult is no answer cult is the old answer repackaged in
00:46:50 ►
smaller sizes no human being has greater insight into your circumstance than you do if you’ve
00:47:01 ►
somehow managed to convince yourself that this is not the case you need to seriously
00:47:07 ►
think it through because our perspectives are unique we can generalize from one person to
00:47:15 ►
another but no one is in a position to claim leadership it’s unnecessary The dynamic of the situation is larger than any single human being.
00:47:27 ►
And anyone who says, I understand, I know, follow me,
00:47:32 ►
is certainly not to be invited home to dinner or tithed to.
00:47:37 ►
Because no one knows.
00:47:42 ►
It is a mystery.
00:47:43 ►
And a mystery is not an unsolved problem.
00:47:47 ►
This is what science has led us to assume.
00:47:50 ►
All mysteries, you hire people, they gather data, the mystery goes away.
00:47:55 ►
Only the trivial edges of the mystery can be illuminated in that fashion.
00:48:04 ►
The core of being is pure contradiction.
00:48:08 ►
Life is death. Death is life. The past is the future. The present is eternity. And comprehending
00:48:20 ►
this is not to become some kind of ivory tower intellectual. Comprehending this is not to become some kind of ivory tower intellectual.
00:48:25 ►
Comprehending this is to move past intellectual concepts to actually embrace love.
00:48:33 ►
Love is what waits beyond abandoning the search for closure.
00:48:41 ►
Love is not closure.
00:48:51 ►
search for closure. Love is not closure. Love is a challenge, emotion, being in the purest sense, not becoming. This is the realm of becoming, and it is always striving, and it is always
00:48:59 ►
incomplete. Love is the realm of true being, and it lies beyond the prison of culture, beyond the prison of ideology, beyond the prison of self-defined limitations.
00:49:17 ►
Thank you. the richest part of this for me is dialogue because that’s where’t know what you think and I’m rarely not surprised so if
00:49:49 ►
anyone would care to hazard a question ah nuts and bolts enough of this
00:49:55 ►
high-flown metaphysical baffle garb well the question, what flavor do I recommend?
00:50:06 ►
And I believe I intuit the questioner to mean, what psychedelics do I prefer?
00:50:13 ►
And would I say a few words about it?
00:50:15 ►
Is that correct?
00:50:16 ►
Yeah.
00:50:19 ►
Well, people want different things from substances.
00:50:24 ►
Well, people want different things from substances.
00:50:34 ►
And, you know, substances sedate, stimulate, provide erection, stamina, all kinds of things.
00:50:41 ►
The indole hallucinogens, the alkaloidal hallucinogens,
00:50:45 ►
comprise a very small family of molecules considering the vastness of molecular nature.
00:50:49 ►
And they all have structural similarities.
00:50:52 ►
And I’m thinking of LSD, psilocybin, DMT,
00:50:59 ►
harmaline and harmine, the beta-carbolines, ibogaine,
00:51:06 ►
and that’s about it.
00:51:11 ►
Now, the only psychedelic, well, not quite the only, but one psychedelic substance left out there that has a noble pedigree is mescaline.
00:51:19 ►
It is an amphetamine.
00:51:21 ►
It’s related but different enough to fall into a different category.
00:51:26 ►
Another exception, the new kid on the block,
00:51:30 ►
is the alpha-salvinorin, the constituent of salvia divinorum.
00:51:35 ►
And this is truly a wild card in the deck.
00:51:40 ►
No diterpene was known to contain psychoactive properties until this one was discovered.
00:51:48 ►
And it’s molecularly totally different from all other known psychoactive substances.
00:51:53 ►
And so it is right now a great object of discussion and deconstruction in the laboratory.
00:52:02 ►
But I mention these things in the interest of thoroughness.
00:52:06 ►
The main trail is psilocybin, DMT,
00:52:12 ►
and DMT made orally active through being complexed
00:52:16 ►
with an MAO inhibitor like harmine.
00:52:19 ►
And what I mean by that is DMT is smoked for its effectiveness.
00:52:26 ►
If you eat it, it’s destroyed in your stomach.
00:52:29 ►
There’s no psychoactivity.
00:52:31 ►
But if you inhibit an enzyme system in your digestive tract called monoamine oxidase,
00:52:38 ►
if you inhibit that enzyme system, the DMT is not destroyed in the stomach.
00:52:43 ►
It passes into the bloodstream, hence through the
00:52:46 ►
blood-brain barrier, and delivers a psychedelic experience. And that’s what these jungle beverages
00:52:53 ►
from South America are all about. Ayahuasca, Yahe, Natima, Daime, those are all local names for some combination of a DMT-containing plant,
00:53:09 ►
usually Socotria viridis, and an NMO-inhibiting plant, always Banisteriopsis capi.
00:53:19 ►
And people say, well, what about the synthetic, the laboratory psychedelics?
00:53:25 ►
In principle, they are very interesting.
00:53:28 ►
In principle.
00:53:30 ►
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with them,
00:53:31 ►
and we know artificial versus natural chauvinism going on here.
00:53:38 ►
But in practical fact, we know less about them.
00:53:42 ►
In other words, when you decide you want to take mushrooms,
00:53:47 ►
let’s say psilocybin mushrooms,
00:53:49 ►
you can look at cultures in the Sierra Mazateca mountains of central Mexico
00:53:55 ►
that have used these things for at least a thousand years before the conquest,
00:53:59 ►
probably several thousand years before the conquest.
00:54:03 ►
Well, that is your human data.
00:54:05 ►
You know then that they do not cause miscarriages,
00:54:09 ►
blindness, Parkinson’s syndrome, and so forth and so on.
00:54:13 ►
A compound may come from the laboratory
00:54:15 ►
and deliver an absolutely overwhelming psychedelic experience on the money,
00:54:23 ►
but what do you know of this compound on a scale of 200 years of exposure
00:54:28 ►
or with large numbers of people and and you know i am not interested in being able to stand up and
00:54:36 ►
say i took every drug on earth at every dose possible in every circumstance possible. That’s not the idea. The idea is to find a doorway that works
00:54:48 ►
and then drive through the doorway.
00:54:52 ►
And this may mean psilocybin mushrooms,
00:54:55 ►
but at high doses and many times,
00:54:57 ►
and you may not bother to take any other thing.
00:55:01 ►
The important thing is to find a way to this place
00:55:08 ►
that I’m talking about,
00:55:10 ►
this place where boundaries dissolve,
00:55:14 ►
language becomes visible,
00:55:16 ►
the plants talk to you,
00:55:18 ►
you see your past lives,
00:55:20 ►
you see the destiny of the universe,
00:55:23 ►
you understand the mysteries of higher mathematics, human love, and French cuisine.
00:55:30 ►
And when you find your way to that place, that’s the place, folks.
00:55:34 ►
And if you can get back there repeatedly by the same method,
00:55:41 ►
then that would be indicated as the thing to do.
00:55:44 ►
You see, it’s an incredibly personal thing
00:55:48 ►
because not only are we obviously as different from each other as we are,
00:55:56 ►
but this business of you can get down to a pretty nuts and bolts level.
00:56:02 ►
How you react to a given substance is related to your own unique genetically
00:56:08 ►
endowed component of synaptic receptors.
00:56:13 ►
And these are like locks in your brain waiting for chemical keys to be inserted into them. them and it’s well known that there are compounds that one person in 50 reacts
00:56:30 ►
to them as an unbearable odor but 49 out of 50 people this is an odorless
00:56:36 ►
compound that’s a gene if you have this gene you cannot stand the presence of
00:56:41 ►
this compound because the odor is so horrific.
00:56:50 ►
Well, how much more complicated than the synaptic interactions with drugs and these plant substances, which are themselves produced
00:56:54 ►
by the genome of a living creature.
00:56:56 ►
The plant transcripts its DNA.
00:57:00 ►
Part of that transcription process calls for the production
00:57:03 ►
of these low molecular weight
00:57:05 ►
alkaloid compounds and then you enter the food chain and it moves out of plant tissue and into
00:57:13 ►
primate brain tissue which has been hammered by evolutionary selective processes for millions of
00:57:20 ►
years in many different times and places and so it it’s a unique thing. So there is, when you get
00:57:28 ►
into the psychedelic path, if you want to put it that way, a period where I think people do try
00:57:36 ►
different things and different circumstances. But the idea is to quickly figure out what works for you and then use that tool judiciously and respectfully
00:57:48 ►
and with attention and these things are remarkably harmless i mean pharmacologically
00:57:58 ►
medically speaking these are some of the most harmless compounds that are active in organic nature.
00:58:07 ►
Someone once said to me, they said,
00:58:09 ►
if you want to understand LSD as a chemical in terms of its power,
00:58:14 ►
imagine the Empire State Building being ripped apart in a half an hour by one ant.
00:58:22 ►
An ant that could demolish the Empire State Building in 30 minutes.
00:58:27 ►
That’s how powerful LSD is as a molecule compared to a 145-pound human organism
00:58:35 ►
that it is taking from base to Buddhahood in an hour and 45 minutes.
00:58:43 ►
Well, that was a long answer,
00:58:45 ►
but an important operational question.
00:58:49 ►
Well, this is interesting stuff.
00:58:53 ►
I’m in a funny, I’m in a contradictory position,
00:58:57 ►
which is exactly where I should be.
00:58:59 ►
Because, you know, if you talk to me,
00:59:02 ►
and many people are disappointed
00:59:04 ►
when they have this experience
00:59:05 ►
i’m not friendly to all the weirdness being peddled in the intellectual marketplace
00:59:13 ►
not friendly to the face on mars or to the recent discovery of atlantis or not i mean i’m a show me
00:59:22 ►
kind of guy and then people say well you’re just you’re just, you’re some kind of a,
00:59:27 ►
you’re like a scientist or something.
00:59:29 ►
No, not exactly.
00:59:32 ►
I also have a very long and strange life of my own
00:59:37 ►
that’s been lived in weird places with strange people and bizarre drugs.
00:59:43 ►
And I have seen absolutely confounding
00:59:47 ►
things. I have seen objects change from one thing into another. I’ve seen, I’ve experienced
00:59:56 ►
uncontrovertibly telepathies of certain forms. But what I’ve also observed in my life of probing these areas is that these things are incredibly rare and, for my money, impossible to anticipate or control.
01:00:29 ►
And ultimately I think mind is the ground of being, but we do not understand what mediates its intransigence.
01:00:34 ►
In other words, if the world is an idea, why isn’t it the way we want it to be?
01:00:38 ►
Why is it so resistant if it is so plastic? So my approach has been, and I recommend this to you and to especially young people who are just starting out into the jungles and ashrams of this world.
01:00:52 ►
Here’s how I operated.
01:00:55 ►
I investigated the weird by rational means.
01:01:02 ►
And I was never a believer.
01:01:09 ►
And my theory went like this. The truth is the truth. It does not require the cooperation of Ter lean as hard as you want
01:01:27 ►
on the flying saucer witness,
01:01:31 ►
the guru, the method.
01:01:34 ►
Lean as hard as you want
01:01:36 ►
because the real thing can take your leaning.
01:01:41 ►
Truth will not crumble before your critical onslaught.
01:01:45 ►
Bullshit will.
01:01:47 ►
And it drives me crazy when people approach a given, let’s say,
01:01:54 ►
spiritual or paranormal phenomena reverently, with eyes averted,
01:02:00 ►
never asking the hard question, never slamming it.
01:02:05 ►
And then, of course, you know, mountebanks, frauds, charlatans get the upper hand in that situation.
01:02:13 ►
So I say of a spiritual doctrine, an anomalous phenomenon, a spiritual teacher,
01:02:20 ►
you know, kick the tires, honk the horn, drive it around the block. The truth can take
01:02:27 ►
and will pass all tests. And here’s the good news. Some people think that if you have that attitude,
01:02:35 ►
the mystery will be not found, that it will retreat ahead of you and that you will be left in an existential desert.
01:02:46 ►
Not so.
01:02:48 ►
I’m the living proof of that.
01:02:52 ►
I was as hard-nosed as I could possibly be. I was as brutal as I could possibly be.
01:02:56 ►
And there is unimaginable strangeness,
01:03:01 ►
not at Zeneboganubi or Proxima Centauri, but, you know, North Denver.
01:03:10 ►
Phenomenal weirdness haunts the world nearby. And you can find it if you are not distracted
01:03:20 ►
by false weirdness. And there is so much false weirdness these days
01:03:25 ►
that I feel almost like I’m trying to save people
01:03:29 ►
from the clutches of all this New Age banditry
01:03:34 ►
that’s about.
01:03:37 ►
So that’s that.
01:03:39 ►
Well, at the risk of dragging the reluctant
01:03:42 ►
into places they didn’t think they’d go this evening.
01:03:50 ►
This is a fascinating thing. I mean, this is close to my heart, this question, because,
01:03:57 ►
first of all, let me background this as I understand it for you. Probability theory is a way of understanding nature
01:04:07 ►
that has been evolved primarily in the last couple of hundred years,
01:04:11 ►
and it is the primary tool of modern science.
01:04:16 ►
And roughly it works like this.
01:04:19 ►
If you want to know something,
01:04:21 ►
like let’s say how much electricity is flowing through a wire. The way to find this
01:04:28 ►
out is to measure the electricity 10 times, add those numbers together, and divide by 10.
01:04:39 ►
You now have a number called the average voltage moving through this wire. Now you might immediately notice that
01:04:46 ►
this number need not be identical to any of the numbers which you added together. In other words,
01:04:55 ►
it does not agree with a single measurement that you made. It is the average of those measurements. Now, I maintain that science has made a fundamental error.
01:05:09 ►
It’s an understandable error, but it’s not a forgivable error. And the error that science
01:05:16 ►
has made is this, in the application of probability theory to nature. Probability theory assumes on the basis of no evidence,
01:05:27 ►
but for purposes of simplification, probability theory assumes that when you make a measurement
01:05:34 ►
does not matter. That to specify that the measurement of the voltage moving through
01:05:41 ►
the wire was made on a Thursday rather than a Tuesday is utterly
01:05:46 ►
irrelevant to the question how much voltage is flowing through the wire now and probability
01:05:54 ►
theory has gotten a long way with this simplification modern science is its crowning
01:05:59 ►
achievement and all the technical toys that flow there from. But for 50 years, it’s been well understood by at least some people
01:06:10 ►
that truly complex phenomena just do not yield to this method of analysis.
01:06:19 ►
Can you understand love affairs by taking a hundred of them,
01:06:23 ►
adding them together and dividing by 100
01:06:26 ►
and then getting the generic love affair?
01:06:29 ►
Can you understand a corporate takeover
01:06:31 ►
or a social revolution by this method?
01:06:36 ►
No.
01:06:37 ►
So all higher order phenomena,
01:06:39 ►
and interestingly notice those were all sociological examples,
01:06:43 ►
all higher order phenomena that involve systems as
01:06:46 ►
complex as human systems. When you try to treat them statistically, you get a travesty.
01:06:53 ►
You get a cartoon, a flattening of the human affect that totally betrays the phenomenon.
01:07:01 ►
So I have proposed and worked out at great length and i won’t attempt to transmit it
01:07:07 ►
to you this evening because it’s impossible and to some degree boring uh but what i’ve looked at
01:07:17 ►
is what if we were to accept the idea that probability is actually fluctuating. You see, when you say that time is invariant,
01:07:29 ►
as the statisticians do, you’re turning time into what’s called an Aristotelian absolute.
01:07:37 ►
It’s not a thing. It’s an idea. Time for probability theory is pure duration. This was Newton’s phrase, pure duration.
01:07:49 ►
In other words, time is this mathematical dimension that you put stuff into so that its
01:07:55 ►
seriality is preserved. But I would suggest that time is a thing. A thing, as much a thing as water is,
01:08:05 ►
is certainly as much a thing as thought is.
01:08:09 ►
Time is a thing, a part of the physical universe,
01:08:12 ►
like light, energy, matter, time.
01:08:16 ►
And no phenomenon in nature
01:08:21 ►
has ever been found to be mathematically perfect.
01:08:25 ►
You know, the Greeks thought the planets moved in perfect circles because they were gods,
01:08:30 ►
and so they had to behave perfectly.
01:08:33 ►
But they discovered they then couldn’t predict planetary motion, and it took, you know, centuries
01:08:38 ►
of beating their heads against this wall before somebody said, try an ellipse.
01:08:43 ►
And bingo, you know, perfect observation and prediction matching.
01:08:49 ►
But the ellipse is not a perfect Aristotelian platonic form, and hence it was unsatisfying.
01:08:58 ►
Well, one by one, science abandoned these perfect mathematical objects as descriptive of nature, with the single exception
01:09:06 ►
of this Newtonian notion of pure duration, which views time as a perfectly smooth surface,
01:09:15 ►
no matter at how great a magnification you zoom in. Zoom in by a power of 100 million,
01:09:22 ►
it’s still perfectly smooth. Zoom in another power of hundred million, it’s still perfectly smooth. Zoom in another power of
01:09:26 ►
a hundred million, it’s still perfectly smooth. Well, nothing in nature behaves like that. So
01:09:33 ►
why not entertain the rather messy idea that time probability fluctuates? You know, when you study
01:09:41 ►
probability theory, the first thing they teach you on day one is this.
01:09:47 ►
They tell you, memorize this.
01:09:49 ►
Chance has no memory.
01:09:52 ►
And then they give this example.
01:09:54 ►
A man has flipped a coin 49 times, and 49 times it has come up heads.
01:10:00 ►
Now he is flipping for the 50th time.
01:10:03 ►
What are the odds the coin will come up heads?
01:10:07 ►
And if you are a good student and expect to pass this course, the answer is 50-50. The coin does
01:10:15 ►
not know, does not remember that it’s already come up 49 times in a row a certain designation.
01:10:23 ►
49 times in a row, a certain designation.
01:10:27 ►
But now, if you put that problem to a gambler,
01:10:32 ►
the gambler would say, well, I’ll bet heads,
01:10:34 ►
because it’s on a run.
01:10:39 ►
Now, a run is a concept of a run all in time.
01:10:42 ►
It’s not the Aristotelian perfection.
01:10:45 ►
Notice that if it were really true that the odds of heads or tails were 50-50,
01:10:50 ►
if it were really, really, really true
01:10:54 ►
in a platonic universe,
01:10:55 ►
then the coin would land on its edge every single time.
01:11:00 ►
You have to haunt some really low bars
01:11:04 ►
to find surfaces so sticky that the coin will land upright
01:11:09 ►
every time uh and then you so you take this to a statistician you say why doesn’t the coin land on
01:11:16 ►
its edge each time and they said well there were uh secondary factors and you say well what are
01:11:22 ►
they and we say well we don’t you know obviously they’re there
01:11:26 ►
because it was one or the other and you get all this flim flam so i think uh and this leads into
01:11:35 ►
deeper water i’m the proponent of something which i call novelty theory and novelty theory is the idea that over long periods of time, complexification is actually favored over entropic dissipation.
01:11:53 ►
And the one way I say this is I say nature is a novelty conserving engine.
01:12:00 ►
Nature, having once produced something interesting, a new molecule, a new species, a new form of matter, nature will tenaciously hang on to that.
01:12:12 ►
Nature does not easily allow herself to be pushed backward.
01:12:17 ►
Occasionally there are speed bumps.
01:12:19 ►
There are hesitations. It’s not a smooth ascent into complexity. But every time the vector of
01:12:27 ►
complexity is deflected, it quickly writes itself and returns to the process. And I maintain that
01:12:36 ►
we ourselves are a manifestation of this phenomenon, that after organic evolution running for 700 million years
01:12:48 ►
on the surface of this planet,
01:12:50 ►
nature’s preference for novelty,
01:12:54 ►
nature’s conservation of complexity,
01:12:57 ►
has led not only to extremely advanced higher animals
01:13:01 ►
with superb binocular vision and muscular coordination and acoustical skills,
01:13:08 ►
but also has added the new sheen of cultural epigenetic behaviors,
01:13:17 ►
tool making, mathematics, music, dance, theater, humor.
01:13:31 ►
or humor. And so people say, well, your belief that we are on a collision course with some kind of singularity of complexity, doesn’t that seem to you highly improbable that in the entire course
01:13:39 ►
of the universe you would happen to find yourself so lucky as to be in the immediate domain of a
01:13:46 ►
concrescent complexification and the answer is no we are part of this concrescent
01:13:53 ►
complexification in other words the approach of the other.
01:14:07 ►
We are the outer edge of the shockwave of eschatology.
01:14:13 ►
Nature has pulled us forth out of being as simple witnesses
01:14:19 ►
to a much more complex phenomenon still to come
01:14:24 ►
of which we will be a part.
01:14:29 ►
And I think that eventually I feel very confident,
01:14:35 ►
not of necessarily the mathematical details
01:14:38 ►
of my formulation of this theory,
01:14:41 ►
but that it will be found that there is built into nature, just like the speed
01:14:47 ►
of light and Planck’s constant and the charge of the electron, a preference for the conservation
01:14:53 ►
of complexity. And if that’s true, you see, without kneeling down to anthropomorphic gods,
01:15:08 ►
anthropomorphic gods. We can abandon existential nihilism and all this rap about how we’re the chance witnesses lucky to be here and the universe is flinging itself from meaninglessness to greater
01:15:15 ►
meaninglessness. No, not at all. Suddenly we’ve uncovered the thread of the cosmic drama.
01:15:30 ►
the thread of the cosmic drama. Nature loves complexity. We are, in our hood, the most complex game around. Therefore, nature loves us. And immediately an ethic is implied. That which
01:15:40 ►
preserves and advances complexity serves the universal purpose that which degrades betrays
01:15:48 ►
and destroys complexity serves uh the negantropic uh tendency that nature at least organic nature
01:15:58 ►
but i maintain all nature is struggling to overcome so this is very exciting to me,
01:16:05 ►
that we could uncover an ethical vector in the universe
01:16:10 ►
and align ourselves with it.
01:16:14 ►
As far as a bibliographic citation
01:16:16 ►
for a critique against probability theory,
01:16:21 ►
I think probably this talk is some of the most detailed
01:16:26 ►
that’s ever been given to the subject.
01:16:32 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:16:34 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:16:39 ►
Well, Terrence has certainly given us a lot to think about
01:16:42 ►
during this past hour.
01:16:44 ►
One of the things that came to my mind at first was how prophetic his ideas were,
01:16:50 ►
considering the fact that they were given over 20 years ago.
01:16:53 ►
But then it dawned on me that maybe the fact is that things really haven’t fundamentally changed all that much.
01:17:00 ►
At the time he gave this talk, the media focus was about President Clinton getting a blowjob in the Oval Office,
01:17:06 ►
and today, well, you know what things are like today.
01:17:10 ►
The one thing that I would like to leave you with, however,
01:17:14 ►
is to let you know what I think it means for us to be a part of the psychedelic community that Terrence was speaking of.
01:17:21 ►
As I have said many times here in these podcasts,
01:17:24 ►
considering oneself to be a psychedelic person has nothing to do with taking drugs.
01:17:30 ►
The word psychedelic means mind manifesting, your mind.
01:17:35 ►
Psychedelic people think for themselves and question authority, all authority, and in particular the authority implied by your family, your culture, and your religion.
01:17:45 ►
And the best way that I know of to begin posing these questions
01:17:49 ►
is to bring each and every one of your beliefs face to face with one simple question.
01:17:55 ►
Why do you believe what you believe?
01:17:58 ►
And I’ll leave you to think about that for yourself for a while.
01:18:02 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from from cyberdelic space, be well my friends. Thank you.