Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Photo by Kyle Nieber on Unsplash
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Often in what I say there is, if not the fact of contradiction, then the appearance of contradiction. This is because, to my mind, life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction.”
“The great thing about the rational program of science is, pushed far enough, it reveals the irrational foundations of nature. And that’s really what the crisis in science now is.”
“The human imagination, married to technology, has become a force too powerful to be unleashed within the fragile ecosystem of this planet. So we must either carry ourselves elsewhere, or the planet’s homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary biology will eliminate us.”
“The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture-bound idea.”
“What ‘psychedelic’ means to me is, in structural terms, a very small number of compounds all based on indoles. The indole hallucinogens are the true psychedelics.”
“I prefer to believe that [mind is] coming from the outside. That mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation, but it’s not being generated in the neurons of the brain.”
“We’re living in a fool’s paradise, trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism.”
“I think that the greatest disservice that science has done to humankind is the marginalizing of our own importance.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we are going to be regaled once again by the Bard McKenna.
00:00:28 ►
I thought that since our planet’s environmental situation has become so dire,
00:00:33 ►
that, well, it might be good to hear a few thoughts about the environment from Terrence.
00:00:37 ►
And one of the things that I believe you’re going to find refreshing about his point of view
00:00:42 ►
is that even though he shares our degree of concern
00:00:45 ►
for what is taking place, nonetheless he advises against being too pessimistic and preaching a
00:00:51 ►
doomsday scenario. Some of my favorite quotes from this talk of his are, and I quote,
00:00:58 ►
we’re living in a fool’s paradise, trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism.
00:01:06 ►
And also he said,
00:01:11 ►
I prefer to believe that the mind is coming from the outside,
00:01:15 ►
that mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation,
00:01:19 ►
but it’s not being generated in the neurons of the brain.
00:01:22 ►
And finally, one of my favorites is,
00:01:30 ►
I think that the greatest disservice that science has done to humankind is the marginalizing of our own importance.
00:01:41 ►
And for me, this was one of, if not the most clearly articulated description of what Terence experienced when in a deep hallucinogenic state.
00:01:45 ►
And about 50 minutes from now, you’re going to understand exactly what I mean. So let’s get started with yet another fascinating Terrence McKenna talk.
00:01:52 ►
Well, as you know, then, I’m an inveterate talker, and it doesn’t take much to set me off,
00:02:01 ►
and it takes quite a bit to turn me off. So it seems to me these things are always more interesting if they’re driven by the
00:02:11 ►
concerns of the audience.
00:02:13 ►
And if the concerns of the audience aren’t sufficient to fill the time, well, then I
00:02:19 ►
have a whole laundry list of obsessions that we can work our way through till the last syllable of
00:02:29 ►
recorded time, since that’s not far away in my opinion.
00:02:37 ►
Very little of what I planned to say last night got said because whenever I discover
00:02:43 ►
that I’m going to have to stand at a podium
00:02:45 ►
rather than sit in a chair, I can’t, because of my contact lenses, glance down at my notes
00:02:52 ►
comfortably.
00:02:54 ►
So instead, I just sort of rave.
00:02:57 ►
So I appreciated the enthusiasm of the audience last night, my personal assessment of the talk was that it was
00:03:06 ►
an even more than usual meandering diatribe.
00:03:12 ►
And a critic who charged me with a basic incoherence
00:03:17 ►
would probably get my blushing acquiescence.
00:03:23 ►
Maybe we can do better today.
00:03:25 ►
Are there questions from last night?
00:03:29 ►
At the time, I wasn’t aware of any kind of discontinuity,
00:03:34 ►
but I was thinking about it later.
00:03:36 ►
Me too.
00:03:37 ►
Yeah.
00:03:39 ►
And I wanted to know,
00:03:41 ►
what’s the continuity between what you were saying at the beginning
00:03:48 ►
about changing the way we are in relationship to the earth and consuming less resources
00:03:53 ►
and then what you were saying toward the end about the coming of the millennium
00:03:59 ►
and moving out of the birth canal into a new reality.
00:04:02 ►
Right. No, I think that there is, if not a contradiction there, at least it’s some kind of
00:04:11 ►
coincidence of opposites. What I don’t want to say is that there’s nothing to be done, that there is no moral or political imperative, and that we can just continue
00:04:26 ►
with this mindless potlatch civilization until everything is ruined, because I don’t believe
00:04:34 ►
that, and I think it’s socially irresponsible to say that.
00:04:38 ►
On the other hand, what I don’t want to fall too much in the other direction toward
00:04:45 ►
is saying that it all depends on us
00:04:49 ►
and that we must raise enormous levels of anxiety in ourselves
00:04:54 ►
and act as though the salvation of the planet depended on us.
00:05:02 ►
What more is happening is that
00:05:05 ►
the most important political work
00:05:09 ►
that needs to be done
00:05:11 ►
is for each of us to raise our own consciousness
00:05:15 ►
about these issues
00:05:17 ►
and then to create a community
00:05:21 ►
based on the sum total of our personal acts of reformation.
00:05:28 ►
So, you know, it is very important to bring help to people in the third world
00:05:36 ►
who are struggling to raise families and preserve their environments and this sort of thing.
00:05:43 ►
and preserve their environments and this sort of thing. But if I were a rationalist,
00:05:47 ►
I would be completely despairing.
00:05:50 ►
So we are more in the role of like midwives
00:05:54 ►
of this new order.
00:05:57 ►
And I guess it’s useful then to return
00:06:00 ►
to that birth metaphor.
00:06:02 ►
The birth of the new humanity and the new earth is going
00:06:09 ►
to happen. But in the same way that a midwife or an obstetrician can ease a birth, make
00:06:18 ►
it smoother, make it less painful for all concerned, That’s the role that political activism needs to take.
00:06:28 ►
So I think we should act as though the salvation of the earth is on our shoulders,
00:06:38 ►
but feel as though it is an automatic unfolding that we need not have anxiety about.
00:06:48 ►
You know, the Chinese philosopher Weipo Yang said,
00:06:53 ►
worry is preposterous.
00:06:56 ►
And I think that’s true.
00:06:58 ►
We don’t know enough to worry.
00:07:03 ►
And to worry is, in a sense sense that kind of act of hubris because
00:07:10 ►
you are claiming complete knowledge of the situation and then you worry and so
00:07:16 ►
what is much more empowering and what makes the process of historical ending easier, I think,
00:07:25 ►
is to act from your heart and to individual acts of caring
00:07:31 ►
are more important than giving your energy to grandiose political schemes.
00:07:39 ►
I mean, it almost comes back down to the gospel admonition to, you know,
00:07:46 ►
heal the sick, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead.
00:07:52 ►
But there’s nothing there about grandiose political reform and all that sort of thing.
00:07:58 ►
That, I think, arises out of the zeitgeist of the collectivity.
00:08:04 ►
And I’m very hopeful.
00:08:06 ►
People sort of hear my rap differently.
00:08:11 ►
I mean, I’ve had people, after what I thought were inspiring panegyrics,
00:08:18 ►
come up to me and say, but it’s such a dark and horrifying vision.
00:08:22 ►
It means that I failed as a communicator in that situation
00:08:28 ►
because I’m the gone-est and most irrational hope freak I’ve ever met. I mean, I think
00:08:36 ►
everything is fine. Everything is going toward the purpose for which it was intended, but it’s an act of conscious awareness
00:08:47 ►
on the part of each of us
00:08:49 ►
that carries us toward that.
00:08:52 ►
So, you know, often in what I say,
00:08:54 ►
there is, if not the fact of contradiction,
00:08:58 ►
then the appearance of contradiction.
00:09:00 ►
This is because, to my mind,
00:09:03 ►
life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction. This is because, to my mind, life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction.
00:09:09 ►
Was it Oscar Wilde or who was it who said, I contradict myself? I contradict myself.
00:09:18 ►
Logical consistency is one of the prejudices that we’ve inherited from the scientific attempt to describe the world.
00:09:30 ►
But in fact, even science at its basic level has now abandoned that as an ideal.
00:09:39 ►
In quantum physics, the way it’s done mathematically is you have an ordinary causal logic and if-then logic.
00:09:51 ►
But in order to handle what quantum physics is attempting to describe, you also have to have what are called islands of Boole or Islands of Boolean Logic, which is embedded in the standard logic and which is a logic of both and.
00:10:11 ►
And you cannot reduce this to a non-contradictory description.
00:10:17 ►
The great thing about the rational program of science is pushed far enough, it reveals the irrational foundations of nature.
00:10:28 ►
And that’s really what the crisis in science now is. The cutting edges of physical science
00:10:36 ►
have contacted the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the 20s, the anthropocentric principle in the 80s and 70s. And we are realizing that somehow the notion of an observer outside the system with a godlike objectivity and zero input into the situation, that was a necessary fiction for the more naive program of description of nature.
00:11:11 ►
But as we move into the more sophisticated description of nature,
00:11:15 ►
we have to place the observer in the picture
00:11:19 ►
and then there is going to be a reverberation of contradiction that probably can’t be gotten rid of.
00:11:31 ►
I referred to this in the talk last night where I said we shouldn’t push for closure.
00:11:38 ►
We should accept that it is in principle mysterious.
00:11:43 ►
And so we are never explaining life
00:11:46 ►
or relationships or economies
00:11:48 ►
or whatever we’re looking at.
00:11:49 ►
We’re describing them
00:11:51 ►
with ever more prescient accuracy.
00:11:56 ►
But we cannot eliminate the unknown.
00:12:00 ►
One of my teachers years ago,
00:12:02 ►
West Churchman,
00:12:04 ►
wrote a wonderful book called Planning on Uncertainty.
00:12:09 ►
And I think, you know, we all need to plan on uncertainty.
00:12:12 ►
And it’s the one thing that is left out of most models because the model builder has such faith in the model
00:12:19 ►
that he would never build in a trap door into the realm of uncertainty. And yet life is composed almost entirely of these kinds of trap doors, you see.
00:12:31 ►
Does that do it?
00:12:35 ►
So do I understand, then, that in your vision,
00:12:41 ►
we really don’t know anything about what it’s going to look like once we’re out of the birth canal.
00:12:47 ►
But what we can do now is behave with integrity toward the world that we’re in today.
00:12:52 ►
Is that right?
00:12:52 ►
That’s right.
00:12:53 ►
And it’s not that in principle we can’t know what it’s like out beyond the birth canal.
00:13:01 ►
It’s simply that it’s too early.
00:13:07 ►
the birth canal. It’s simply that it’s too early. I used the metaphor last night of that the transcendental object is below the event horizon. It is. And so all we can see is the rosy glow of
00:13:17 ►
its promise at this point. But give us 10 years and the actual edge of the transcendental object will rise above the event horizon.
00:13:30 ►
I mean, I don’t think that we are marginalized or part of fad and fashion.
00:13:41 ►
and fashion.
00:13:43 ►
I think this is actually the rising modality
00:13:46 ►
necessary for the future
00:13:49 ►
if we’re going to make it through.
00:13:51 ►
In other words,
00:13:51 ►
I suspect that 10 years from now,
00:13:53 ►
15 years from now,
00:13:55 ►
the things we are talking about today
00:13:57 ►
will be the general metaphors
00:14:00 ►
and concerns in society
00:14:03 ►
because I just have a very strong intuition based on, you know,
00:14:10 ►
a lot of journeying into those hyperspatial modalities that this is the path.
00:14:19 ►
And I’m sufficiently convinced of that to submit it to a kind of intellectual plebiscite.
00:14:25 ►
I mean, I believe that ideas compete with each other the way animals compete in an environment.
00:14:33 ►
And that the best ideas, the most fitting ideas for the human adventure will eliminate their competition.
00:14:47 ►
And that’s what we’re experiencing now in the political domain, is the competition between
00:14:54 ►
ideological systems roughly comparable to dinosaurs and mammals.
00:15:00 ►
And you can decide which is which, but the two are incommensurate
00:15:06 ►
and one is in the act of eliminating the other.
00:15:11 ►
And so it’s a matter of observing this process,
00:15:16 ►
understanding it, and being comfortable with it.
00:15:19 ►
If you’re right, I don’t think you need to feel any urgency
00:15:24 ►
because that will quite naturally
00:15:27 ►
percolate out in the mix.
00:15:31 ►
Many of you have heard me quote William Blake.
00:15:34 ►
It’s always worth repeating.
00:15:36 ►
He said, if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
00:15:45 ►
In other words, understanding compels belief.
00:15:49 ►
You don’t have to hammer on somebody.
00:15:51 ►
Your task is to refine your message into an understandable form
00:15:57 ►
and then let the dynamics of intellectual competition decide
00:16:03 ►
what is the best model to follow.
00:16:08 ►
Yeah.
00:16:10 ►
I had a question related to what you were just saying, and then I had a chemistry question.
00:16:16 ►
What keeps me optimistic is that information seems to be spreading more rapidly.
00:16:22 ►
Some futurists have said that by the year 2011, that information will be doubling every second.
00:16:29 ►
I was wondering if you could comment on that.
00:16:33 ►
Well, yeah.
00:16:33 ►
I mean, part of what I was going to about how history unfolds itself and what time is.
00:16:51 ►
And to your great good fortune, you’re not going to be exposed to this today.
00:16:57 ►
Had we two days, I would flay you with it on the second day.
00:17:04 ►
But here’s the thing that’s going on.
00:17:08 ►
Since the very first moments of the universe’s existence,
00:17:14 ►
novelty, as I call it, or complexity, as someone else has called it,
00:17:22 ►
or connectedness, has been increasing.
00:17:27 ►
So that the early universe was very simple.
00:17:31 ►
It was a plasma of free electrons.
00:17:34 ►
There were no laws of molecular physics, still less laws of biology or gene segregation or something like that.
00:17:45 ►
As the universe has aged, it has become more and more complex.
00:17:52 ►
We represent the culmination to the present moment of that process.
00:17:59 ►
Well, I don’t think that’s particularly big news.
00:18:02 ►
It’s sort of a stating of the obvious that the universe
00:18:05 ►
has grown more complex
00:18:07 ►
through time.
00:18:08 ►
But what is interesting
00:18:10 ►
is that each advancement
00:18:13 ►
into complexity
00:18:15 ►
that has built
00:18:17 ►
on the previously established
00:18:19 ►
foundation of complexity
00:18:21 ►
occurs more rapidly
00:18:24 ►
than the stages which preceded it.
00:18:28 ►
So if you were to draw a diagram of that, it would be an involuting spiral.
00:18:34 ►
So that after the Big Bang and things settled down after the first few nanoseconds of the universe’s existence,
00:18:43 ►
well then for a long time it was very boring.
00:18:49 ►
And all that happened was the temperatures fell very gradually.
00:18:54 ►
Eventually they fell to the point where atoms could settle down into stable orbits around nuclei.
00:19:03 ►
And then as the temperature fell still further, eventually these atoms could aggregate into
00:19:11 ►
molecular structures.
00:19:14 ►
Again, each advancement into novelty proceeding more rapidly than the stage which preceded
00:19:21 ►
it. Well, that’s why to my mind human history is not a radical break with primate biology. It simply represents an acceleration of primate behavior into a more compacted temporal domain and high technology, electronic data transfer, the erection of global society, which has built on the previous levels of cultural attainment, has happened even more quickly so that these eras or epochs, you could almost think of them as, of complexity are now of such short duration that instead of taking millions of years or perhaps billions of years to transit through one of these, we now are moving through them at the rate of one or two a decade,
00:20:30 ►
and beyond that, one or two every two or three years, and beyond that, one or two every few
00:20:36 ►
months. And I see no elegant reason for assuming that this process will ever cease its asymptotic acceleration. Well, then if you picture what I’m describing, it’s a funnel of some sort, which begins with an extremely wide mouth, but which has now narrowed to an extremely small and fast-moving kind of situation.
00:21:08 ►
And this is why history is a self-limiting process.
00:21:12 ►
It isn’t that we have broken away from the slow-moving processes of ordinary nature.
00:21:24 ►
slow-moving processes of ordinary nature.
00:21:30 ►
It’s that we represent nature at a different time frame.
00:21:34 ►
And I think this is why history is ending,
00:21:38 ►
because it’s going so much faster than it used to go that it’s going to finish very soon.
00:21:41 ►
There may be as much experience ahead of us as there is behind us, but we’re moving
00:21:50 ►
through it so much faster than we used to that we are literally approaching the end of time at a
00:21:59 ►
faster and faster speed. And this is something built into the structure of the cosmos.
00:22:06 ►
It’s the answer to the question, where did we come from?
00:22:11 ►
We were called forth out of biological organization by the continued acceleration of the expression
00:22:21 ►
of novelty.
00:22:22 ►
of the expression of novelty.
00:22:27 ►
And this is why I count myself as a proponent of what I call the big surprise
00:22:30 ►
rather than the big bang.
00:22:33 ►
The big surprise lies ahead of us,
00:22:36 ►
not billions of years or millions of years
00:22:40 ►
or thousands of years in the future,
00:22:42 ►
but within our lifetimes, potentially.
00:22:47 ►
And it’s interesting, I think I said this last night,
00:22:51 ►
the people who run the world now possess curves,
00:22:57 ►
which when they draw these curves and try to extrapolate them 50 years into the future,
00:23:02 ►
it makes no sense at all.
00:23:09 ►
them 50 years into the future, it makes no sense at all. You cannot extrapolate the ozone hole,
00:23:16 ►
the AIDS epidemic, the spread of plutonium. You cannot extrapolate these things 100 years into the future because they all go asymptotic and reach infinity. So it means the oceans boil,
00:23:22 ►
the atmosphere blows off, everybody dies, and that’s the end of it. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think novelty is the saving grace, and that we are phenomena that for all preceding generations could only be anticipated and prayed for.
00:23:58 ►
It’s a screwy position, I understand.
00:24:02 ►
I mean, boil down to a bumper sticker, it’s a bearded guy on the corner with a sign which says, repent for the end is nigh, or maybe just the end is nigh. But I think all the evidence is that the soul is about to collectively leave the body. The human imagination married to technology
00:24:29 ►
has become a force too powerful to be unleashed
00:24:34 ►
within the fragile ecosystem of this planet.
00:24:39 ►
So we must either carry ourselves elsewhere
00:24:43 ►
or the planet’s homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary
00:24:48 ►
biology will eliminate us through epidemic disease or climatological upheaval or, you
00:24:57 ►
know, there are many possibilities.
00:24:59 ►
So I think we are being propelled somewhat reluctantly into a new human modality
00:25:06 ►
that is as radical a shift as birth is to the individual
00:25:13 ►
or as the original entry into history was for our species.
00:25:18 ►
History cannot be conceived of as preceding another thousand or ten thousand years.
00:25:27 ►
I mean, it just can’t be.
00:25:30 ►
So it must be that it’s a self-limiting process.
00:25:35 ►
And it only lasts 25,000 years.
00:25:38 ►
I mean, if you go back 25,000 years, the Earth was in ecodynamic balance.
00:25:42 ►
5,000 years. The earth was in ecodynamic balance.
00:25:44 ►
Human beings were fully
00:25:45 ►
established as intelligent,
00:25:48 ►
as caring, as creative
00:25:49 ►
as you and I.
00:25:51 ►
Theater, poetry, dance,
00:25:54 ►
love, hope, tragedy,
00:25:56 ►
religion, all these
00:25:58 ►
things were in place. But
00:25:59 ►
history represents
00:26:01 ►
Gaia
00:26:04 ►
hitting the fast forward button on the evolution of the primates. And it
00:26:10 ►
seems of long duration to us because we, at the level of the expression of the individual phenotype,
00:26:20 ►
are as ephemeral as mayflies. You know, a person lives 70 years, 90 years, and then they’re gone.
00:26:28 ►
But on a scale of 25,000 years,
00:26:33 ►
clearly what is happening on this planet is the emergence of an entirely new kind of order
00:26:39 ►
within the natural order.
00:26:42 ►
It is natural, but it is new.
00:26:44 ►
There is no contradiction in this.
00:26:47 ►
Once atoms were a new invention.
00:26:50 ►
Once molecules were a new invention.
00:26:54 ►
Once polymers were the cutting edge
00:26:56 ►
of what’s happening.
00:26:58 ►
Now the cutting edge of what’s happening
00:27:00 ►
is large-scale primate machine
00:27:03 ►
integrated societies based on the
00:27:06 ►
movement of information did that do it yeah yeah oh you want to follow on oh
00:27:15 ►
yeah I’m sorry it’s five methyl oxy and and I methyl
00:27:20 ►
tryptamine crystalline legal to possess and. And if one was going to mix it, would one mix it with harming,
00:27:29 ►
harmelo, haroline, or harmaline?
00:27:36 ►
That was a word salad.
00:27:40 ►
Well, I think you’re asking about 5-MeO-DMT, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, the toad foam of recent fame.
00:27:52 ►
As far as I understand, I think that it’s legal.
00:27:56 ►
However, it would probably depend on the length of the fangs of the local DA,
00:28:02 ►
of the fangs of the local DA because there is what’s called the
00:28:05 ►
Cogener Law, which says that structural
00:28:08 ►
near-relatives of hallucinogens can also
00:28:11 ►
be prosecuted as illegal
00:28:14 ►
compounds. As far as
00:28:17 ►
the question about the harming
00:28:20 ►
alkaloids, harming, harmaline,
00:28:24 ►
tetrahydroharman,
00:28:25 ►
harmelo, I think is apocryphal, species.
00:28:33 ►
But the notion which must lie behind your question is
00:28:37 ►
harming alkaloids inhibit monoamine oxidase,
00:28:42 ►
which is an enzyme system in the human gut that tends to inactivate amines, monoamines, of which these hallucinogens almost all fall into that category.
00:29:11 ►
You could attempt to inhibit your MAO with a dose of harmin or harmaline and then smoke 5-MeO-DMT.
00:29:21 ►
But I don’t recommend this unless you are a pharmacologist with hours and hours of psychedelic flight time on your log.
00:29:26 ►
This is certainly nothing for the ingenue to attempt.
00:29:28 ►
Once you get out into the realm of synergies,
00:29:30 ►
that means what happens
00:29:32 ►
when you run two
00:29:33 ►
metabolically active compounds
00:29:36 ►
at the same time,
00:29:38 ►
and some people do three
00:29:39 ►
and four and five,
00:29:40 ►
you know, you’re definitely
00:29:42 ►
on your own
00:29:43 ►
because pharmacology doesn’t study drugs like that.
00:29:48 ►
They study them in isolation, their activity.
00:29:52 ►
And, you know, some people say of the smokable tryptamines,
00:29:57 ►
they’re so quick that wouldn’t it be logical to inhibit your MAO in order to freeze frame the experience instead of having it last
00:30:07 ►
three minutes have it last 30 minutes yes that’s a fine idea but what if it lasted 30 hours instead
00:30:14 ►
I mean you you don’t you know a miss is as good as a mile in this game so you should should have your mantras ready if you push off into that.
00:30:28 ►
Yeah.
00:30:31 ►
While we’re on the subject of chemistry, I have a quick and easy question.
00:30:36 ►
Okay.
00:30:37 ►
I imagine psilocybin is probably, you know, pretty common and pretty common use.
00:30:42 ►
And I’m sure that the people around here are pretty aware of malathion spraying that’s going on and I’ve always been
00:30:48 ►
curious I’m not a chemistry student but since psilocybin does have a phosphorus
00:30:53 ►
in it and I know most of malathion and most of the other chemicals like it are
00:31:00 ►
organophosphates and they react synergistically. Is there a possibility of a synergistic toxicity
00:31:07 ►
when you get a dose of malathion and you’re using psilocybin?
00:31:16 ►
Well, every once in a while these kinds of questions come along
00:31:21 ►
and the answer is always since research with psilocybin is
00:31:27 ►
illegal and even in rats counterproductive
00:31:31 ►
to your career, nobody
00:31:35 ►
knows. You mentioned the phosphorus
00:31:39 ►
group in psilocybin. Psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxine
00:31:43 ►
and dimethyltryptamine. This is very interesting
00:31:47 ►
to me because, and we don’t have to spend too much time on this, but it’s the only 4-substituted
00:31:54 ►
indole in nature on this planet. The only 4-substituted indole in nature on this planet. Well, this is suggestive to me of a possible extraterrestrial origin for this molecule
00:32:10 ►
because the way evolution works is from one structure,
00:32:16 ►
you elaborate another structure,
00:32:18 ►
and then near cousins of that appear and so forth and so on.
00:32:23 ►
The phosphorus group in the four position on psilocybin sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at the structure of organic nature.
00:32:34 ►
Too much that malathion is a phosphorylated compound.
00:32:41 ►
It was interesting, I noticed in Hoffer and Osmond’s hallucinogens,
00:32:46 ►
melathion is occasionally, there are known cases of human abuse of melathion.
00:32:52 ►
It causes severe dream disturbances.
00:32:55 ►
I can tell you that from experience.
00:32:58 ►
And is there a bigger debt to pay at the dose where it does that?
00:33:03 ►
I don’t know. Not by the aerial spraying, but
00:33:07 ►
accidentally working with it and fairly concentrated.
00:33:11 ►
I’ve gotten it on my skin and for several days I had
00:33:15 ►
very disturbed dreams and broken sleep and I think that
00:33:19 ►
it’s pretty well reported that that’s not uncommon at all.
00:33:23 ►
Well, that’s very interesting.
00:33:25 ►
Because it’s a neurotoxin, it also creates a neural disturbance.
00:33:31 ►
You know, I’m willing to buy into the notion that all drugs are poisons at certain doses.
00:33:39 ►
All substances are poisons at certain doses. I mean, you can kill yourself with common salt.
00:33:47 ►
If you eat three pounds of it, that’s all she wrote for you.
00:33:51 ►
So always what you’re doing is you’re perturbing the dynamic of ordinary functioning.
00:33:59 ►
And then what you’re watching is the chemical cascade that returns you to equilibrium.
00:34:09 ►
After penis, which is a psychedelic type of compound used in many cultures, but never really with much pleasure.
00:34:18 ►
I don’t think many cultures actually would posit that.
00:34:22 ►
Jimson weed, for instance, is an enjoyable high.
00:34:25 ►
So it may give you psychedelic experiences, it may give you vivid dreams,
00:34:28 ►
but it’s not something that many people would volunteer to take.
00:34:31 ►
Jokes of that type.
00:34:32 ►
Yeah, well, that’s something worth talking about, and certainly I found it true.
00:34:37 ►
The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture-bound idea.
00:34:48 ►
And what one culture considers an acceptable intoxication,
00:34:53 ►
another culture just regards as an incredibly unpleasant experience.
00:35:01 ►
Alcohol in high doses is not something most rational people would care to repeat I think
00:35:10 ►
unless there were cultural conditioning pushing you toward that
00:35:15 ►
or tobacco I mean essentially that’s an experience of toxicity
00:35:20 ►
and until you build up tolerance to the more toxic aspects of tobacco,
00:35:28 ►
every time you smoke it, you turn green and become nauseated.
00:35:33 ►
We had the experience in the Amazon.
00:35:37 ►
There was, for years, my brother and I pursued a hallucinogen called Ukuhe that was in use in a very restricted
00:35:50 ►
area by three tribes of Indians.
00:35:52 ►
And the reason we were interested in it is because the ethnographic literature said that
00:35:57 ►
the shamans used it to talk to little men.
00:36:01 ►
And because we had encountered in the DMT flash these things that I’ve called
00:36:07 ►
self-transforming machine elves we were interested in an aboriginal hallucinogen that would let you
00:36:15 ►
talk to little people of some sort and the chemistry of these things was known, of the okuhe, gradually became known in the 70s,
00:36:26 ►
and it was made from the resin of a certain tree, which elaborated not only DMT,
00:36:33 ►
which is a clean, fast-acting psychedelic tryptamine, but also a number of other tryptamines.
00:36:40 ►
And, you know, after immense expense and physical wear and tear, we on the upper Yaguas Yasu drainage in Peru, we actually contacted people who knew how to make this hallucinogen. the doorway to the golden realm. And when we finally got to the bioassay of it,
00:37:07 ►
which is a term which means getting loaded on it,
00:37:11 ►
it was really tough to take this stuff.
00:37:17 ►
And, you know, your heart felt like it was just going to hammer its way out of your chest.
00:37:22 ►
And there were sweats.
00:37:27 ►
And there was hallucination. But my God, you were monitoring so many other physiological systems going into crisis that, you know, it seemed almost ancillary.
00:37:40 ►
So then, you know, live through it.
00:37:43 ►
So then, you know, live through it.
00:37:51 ►
The next morning, troop down to the shaman’s hut and say, you know, listen, Basilio, we have to talk.
00:37:57 ►
And then him saying, well, yeah, it takes getting used to.
00:38:03 ►
And, you know, that’s why our shamans don’t live very long. And so then you realize,
00:38:08 ►
aha, what we’re dealing with here is a culture
00:38:10 ►
that has sanctioned this experience
00:38:13 ►
and projected a lot of cultural baggage onto it,
00:38:17 ►
but that if you’re the unsold customer,
00:38:22 ►
you say, you know, I think once is enough thank you
00:38:26 ►
for that a more
00:38:27 ►
familiar case that I
00:38:30 ►
think is similar although some people
00:38:31 ►
rise up in holy wrath and
00:38:34 ►
we get into great arguments about this
00:38:36 ►
but my personal opinion
00:38:37 ►
is that
00:38:39 ►
Amanita Muscaria do you all know
00:38:42 ►
what that is it’s the red
00:38:43 ►
mushroom of European folk mythology in German.
00:38:48 ►
It’s called the Fliegenpilz.
00:38:50 ►
It’s atropinic too.
00:38:53 ►
Well, a lot of people who never got loaded on it spewed a lot of scholarly argument
00:39:02 ►
about how this was a wonderful shamanic intoxicant
00:39:05 ►
but I submit to you in most
00:39:08 ►
cases it comes closer
00:39:10 ►
to being an ordeal
00:39:11 ►
and it may be
00:39:14 ►
that because of
00:39:16 ►
genetic variation
00:39:17 ►
seasonal variation
00:39:20 ►
individual variations
00:39:22 ►
in the expression of its genome
00:39:24 ►
edaphic factors meaning the soil that it grows in
00:39:28 ►
the nature of its mycorrhizal relationship
00:39:32 ►
and in other words we’ve staked out here about an eight variable equation
00:39:37 ►
relative to Amanita muscaria
00:39:39 ►
that sometimes it’s wonderful
00:39:42 ►
but unless you have always been in that area
00:39:46 ►
and can draw on the shamanic
00:39:48 ►
lore of great tradition
00:39:50 ►
about it, I think just going
00:39:52 ►
out into the woods and faunching down
00:39:54 ►
on the first Amanita muscaria
00:39:56 ►
that you come upon is probably a ticket
00:39:58 ►
to the emergency room
00:40:00 ►
if you’re not very
00:40:02 ►
careful
00:40:02 ►
in Madagascar, there are no hallucinogens
00:40:09 ►
as we would understand it,
00:40:11 ►
but there are what are called ordeal poisons.
00:40:17 ►
This is an entire category
00:40:18 ►
in Madagascan aboriginal shamanism.
00:40:22 ►
What’s going on here, there,
00:40:25 ►
is there are these plants
00:40:27 ►
which you take them
00:40:29 ►
and you at first assume
00:40:33 ►
you’re going to die
00:40:35 ►
because you feel so bad.
00:40:36 ►
And then you feel so bad
00:40:38 ►
that you beg to die.
00:40:40 ►
And then you don’t die.
00:40:42 ►
And you recover completely
00:40:44 ►
within 10 to 12 hours. and you are so damn glad to
00:40:49 ►
be alive that this has all the characteristics of a psychedelic experience i mean you come down a
00:40:56 ►
kinder gentler more attentive more decent human being but it’s only because you’ve been hurled into the jaws of death itself and then
00:41:07 ►
brought back. That will work, folks. But so my interest has always been to squeeze
00:41:16 ►
the definition of psychedelic, to narrow it, to make it more precise. I mean, sometimes people say, well, it’s about altered states.
00:41:29 ►
Well, there are all kinds of altered states, thousands of altered states,
00:41:34 ►
without even talking about drugs.
00:41:36 ►
We can talk about being in love, being abandoned in love,
00:41:50 ►
in love, being abandoned in love, being jealous, being anxious about your financial situation,
00:41:56 ►
suddenly seeing your roots in high Atlantis. These are all altered states.
00:41:59 ►
None of them are psychedelic.
00:42:02 ►
Well, then you move into the realm of drugs.
00:42:02 ►
None of them are psychedelic. Well, then you move into the realm of drugs.
00:42:05 ►
There are, as you mentioned, atropine states,
00:42:10 ►
tropane-induced deliriums,
00:42:15 ►
the ketamine-type states,
00:42:19 ►
states on the edge of anesthesia,
00:42:22 ►
states of extraordinary agitation
00:42:24 ►
brought on by the whole amphetamine
00:42:28 ►
family. All of these things are altered states, pharmacologically achieved, and to my mind,
00:42:35 ►
they are not truly psychedelic. What psychedelic means to me is, in structural terms terms a very small number of compounds
00:42:45 ►
all based on
00:42:49 ►
indole.
00:42:52 ►
The indole hallucinogens
00:42:54 ►
are the true psychedelics.
00:42:57 ►
And let’s see, what are they?
00:42:58 ►
There aren’t that many.
00:43:01 ►
There’s LSD,
00:43:02 ►
which is a semi-synthetic
00:43:04 ►
made in the laboratory but from organic precursors
00:43:08 ►
usually
00:43:09 ►
LSD, ibogaine
00:43:12 ►
about which not much is known
00:43:15 ►
because it has never achieved much currency
00:43:17 ►
in the underground in this country
00:43:20 ►
psilocybin, DMT
00:43:23 ►
and the beta-carbolines, which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors, but
00:43:32 ►
only hallucinogens at close to the toxic dose.
00:43:37 ►
And that’s it.
00:43:38 ►
What about peyote?
00:43:40 ►
Peyote is an interesting edge situation because mescaline is not an indole.
00:43:48 ►
It’s an amphetamine.
00:43:50 ►
And if you look at the chemical pharmacological profile on peyote, it’s different from all these others.
00:43:58 ►
First of all, an effective dose of mescaline is, according the literature 700 milligrams that’s a pile
00:44:07 ►
of white powder in the palm of your hand in other words it’s it’s a it’s a an
00:44:14 ►
inefficient drug it puts a lot of strain on your system there are different ways
00:44:20 ►
to think about toxicity one way is to, how much of this compound do you have to take to
00:44:28 ►
experience an effect? If you have to take 700 milligrams, then it’s a pretty crude drug,
00:44:38 ►
because that’s a lot. On the other hand, you know, LSD is at the other end of the spectrum.
00:44:45 ►
You can feel quite strongly 50 gamma, 50 micrograms of LSD.
00:44:54 ►
Help me out here.
00:44:56 ►
What is that?
00:44:57 ►
Five ten thousandths of a gram is 50 gamma.
00:45:02 ►
is 50 gamma.
00:45:05 ►
That is, to a pharmacologist,
00:45:08 ►
the fact that a human being can feel 50 micrograms of a compound
00:45:11 ►
is like a miracle.
00:45:13 ►
I mean, to give you an analogy
00:45:14 ►
so you can understand that,
00:45:16 ►
that’s like having one red ant
00:45:19 ►
tear down the Empire State Building
00:45:21 ►
in 30 minutes.
00:45:24 ►
I mean, that’s what it looks like when 50 gamma of LSD enter your body.
00:45:32 ►
So LSD has an incredibly low toxicity by that measure, you see.
00:45:40 ►
Well, then psilocybin falls in the mid-range.
00:45:43 ►
It requires about 15 to 25 milligrams, and this is an acceptable situation.
00:45:54 ►
The other way of talking about psychedelics rather than structurally or in terms of dose-dependent profile, is it’s a specific altered state.
00:46:09 ►
It is, first of all, I like the word hallucinogen or hallucinogen.
00:46:16 ►
See, I grew up in a cattle town in Colorado,
00:46:19 ►
and I haven’t shed quite all of it.
00:46:22 ►
But hallucinogens, because I was always fascinated by the idea of hallucination.
00:46:28 ►
To me, for some reason, the idea of seeing something which is not there
00:46:33 ►
just became the holy grail for me
00:46:36 ►
because that was so challenging to my notion of what is possible.
00:46:42 ►
And so then when we lay these indole psychedelics out in front of us and are trying to make decisions, many people have a great enthusiasm for LSD because it empowers thought and stirs the engines of cognition. But it only reluctantly, compared to these other things,
00:47:08 ►
is a strong visionary hallucinogen.
00:47:10 ►
You usually have to synergize it with cannabis or mescaline,
00:47:16 ►
and then those combinations are highly visionary.
00:47:19 ►
What I love about psilocybin is that it causes you to hallucinate
00:47:24 ►
so effortlessly at relatively low doses
00:47:27 ►
and without a lot of accompanying, you know, sweating or tremoring or physical discomfort.
00:47:36 ►
And DMT is even more powerful as an inducer of visionary states. Now, people who have never had a hallucination,
00:47:46 ►
and if you read the literature,
00:47:48 ►
think that a hallucination means little traveling lights or colored lines
00:47:55 ►
or the kinds of things you see when you press on your closed eyelids.
00:48:00 ►
Those are not what I’m talking about.
00:48:03 ►
That kind of thing is called hypnagogia.
00:48:07 ►
Hypnagogia also includes chorus lines of dancing mice, little round candies, falling leaves, snowflakes.
00:48:16 ►
In other words, the flotsam and jetsam of the mental ocean,
00:48:30 ►
the mental ocean, which is generally no more interesting than the flotsam and jetsam of the oceans of three space. What I’m interested in are full field, 360 degree visionary scenarios of jungles, deserts, ice fields, ruined cities, machinescapes,
00:48:49 ►
and a whole bunch of other stuff which is not so easily dropped
00:48:53 ►
into any category of experience that we’re familiar with,
00:48:57 ►
but highly organized, three-dimensional, self-sustaining,
00:49:03 ►
transformed modalities
00:49:05 ►
that you cannot pour language over.
00:49:07 ►
I mean, when you try to say what it is,
00:49:09 ►
all you can say is what it isn’t.
00:49:12 ►
And I find that tremendously affirming
00:49:16 ►
because to me, and I guess this is important to me,
00:49:21 ►
that is the experience which proves
00:49:23 ►
that this is not self-generated. When I
00:49:27 ►
take a plant and it shows me something I could previously not have imagined,
00:49:34 ►
then I know I am in the presence of the other because it couldn’t have come out of me.
00:49:40 ►
I mean, if you insist that the volleys, that the Niagara of hallucination caused by psilocybin is generated out of the dynamics of your own psyche, if you insist that that’s true, then you are unableognizable to yourself in that case. And if you are unrecognizable to yourself, you are not yourself in some sense.
00:50:10 ►
So I prefer to believe that it’s coming from the outside,
00:50:14 ►
that mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation,
00:50:21 ►
but it’s not being generated in the neurons of the brain.
00:50:25 ►
Yeah, this guy’s been waiting patiently, or perhaps impatiently.
00:50:29 ►
I have a question about one other pollution again.
00:50:35 ►
I haven’t heard much about since the late 60s,
00:50:38 ►
and I think the FDA took it out of the marketplace.
00:50:41 ►
It was the Hawaiian wood rose.
00:50:44 ►
Do we know anything about that?
00:50:45 ►
Sure, yes.
00:50:47 ►
Hawaiian wood rose,
00:50:49 ►
Argyria nervosa.
00:50:51 ►
The Argyria refers
00:50:53 ►
to the silvery hairs
00:50:56 ►
on the underside of the leaves.
00:50:58 ►
It turns out that
00:50:59 ►
in the higher plants,
00:51:01 ►
you see LSD
00:51:03 ►
or its near relatives occur in ergot and are made from ergot.
00:51:10 ►
It doesn’t occur in ergot, but it’s made from ergot.
00:51:13 ►
Ergot is a fungi, an entirely different order of life than higher plants.
00:51:19 ►
But in the higher plants, in the convolvulaceae, the morning glory family,
00:51:26 ►
there are a number of different genera that contain alkaloids that are milligram effective cousins of LSD.
00:51:40 ►
And Argyria nervosa is the best known of these.
00:51:44 ►
And Argyria nervosa is the best known of these.
00:51:50 ►
It’s also probably, I would estimate, gram for gram,
00:51:56 ►
probably the most concentrated natural hallucinogen on this planet.
00:52:02 ►
Because half a teaspoon is an effective dose.
00:52:05 ►
Where people get in trouble with baby Hawaiian wood rose is they think, oh, well, it’s a plant
00:52:07 ►
and plants are always weak,
00:52:09 ►
so let’s do half a cup or something like that.
00:52:13 ►
And then, you know, you’re begging for mercy in a hurry.
00:52:16 ►
There are 13 species of Argyria,
00:52:20 ►
all natives of Asia,
00:52:22 ►
distributed from the base of the Himalayas to western Polynesia.
00:52:27 ►
And Argyria nervosa is simply the best known.
00:52:31 ►
Now, the problem with it is that, and this is something you always have to be aware of with plant hallucinogens,
00:52:40 ►
is that cardioactive compounds occur in argyria as well.
00:52:48 ►
And so if you misdose even slightly,
00:52:52 ►
it will put your heart through changes that will stand your hair on end.
00:52:57 ►
And I’ve never heard of anybody dying on it,
00:53:00 ►
but I’ve heard of people laying down and making their peace with their maker
00:53:07 ►
because they figured that they were probably going to die.
00:53:11 ►
Now, an interesting thing about Argyria Nervosa is, so far as we know from the ethnographic work that’s been done,
00:53:25 ►
work that’s been done, it is unclaimed by any aboriginal group,
00:53:30 ►
unless we count the surfers of Maui as an aboriginal people.
00:53:35 ►
And this is fascinating to me. You know, certain plants have great antiquity of use,
00:53:41 ►
and other plants, equally psychoactive, are ignored. And, you know, we tend to believe
00:53:49 ►
that Aboriginal people don’t miss a trick, but occasionally it seems like they’re as
00:53:56 ►
obtuse as we are. I mean, a couple of examples will make the case clear. As you all probably know, there’s quite a complex of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in central Mexico
00:54:09 ►
used by the Mazatecan and Mixtecan people there,
00:54:16 ►
and they seem to have exploited these mushrooms for millennia.
00:54:20 ►
However, on the northwest coast of North America, Washington and British Columbia, where you get the northwest coast Indian groups, the Shimsham, Kwakutl and Tlingit language areas, this is the densest concentration of psilocybin-containing species of mushrooms on this planet.
00:54:44 ►
And so far as we can tell, they never used them. of psilocybin-containing species of mushrooms on this planet.
00:54:48 ►
And so far as we can tell, they never used them.
00:54:51 ►
I mean, somebody will say, well, they used them,
00:54:53 ►
but they never told you in the shaman.
00:54:59 ►
But listen, you know, a huge amount of ethnography has been done in that area. And there is not the slightest indication that these people ever utilized these mushrooms.
00:55:05 ►
Even though they had an advanced shamanism, plant-based shamanism,
00:55:09 ►
they seem to have overlooked this.
00:55:12 ►
Another example that may have practical implications for some of the more astute among you
00:55:18 ►
is in the past two years it’s been realized that a plant which grows as a weed in the Midwest of North America
00:55:27 ►
called Illinois bundleweed, Desmanthus illinoyensis,
00:55:36 ►
is in fact the most concentrated source of natural DMT in the world on the root scraping of the root.
00:55:47 ►
And now, this one is perhaps suspect and maybe more ethnographic work seems to be done.
00:55:55 ►
The straight story is that the Indians of the Great Plains never knew about this and
00:56:02 ►
never utilized it.
00:56:03 ►
never knew about this and never utilized it.
00:56:09 ►
My question is, if that’s so, then why is it called bundle weed? Because that seems to imply to me a medicine bundle.
00:56:14 ►
And so perhaps further ethnographic excavation will show that this was used,
00:56:20 ►
but it could be the basis for a whole family of visionary hallucinogens
00:56:26 ►
that apparently were never utilized.
00:56:30 ►
Yeah.
00:56:30 ►
You.
00:56:32 ►
Yeah.
00:56:32 ►
Paul, I’d like to go back to some of those conversations, too.
00:56:37 ►
What over the years I’ve felt has been the focus of most of your work,
00:56:42 ►
which is essentially this realm you talk about
00:56:45 ►
pushing through uh into um this visionary world well yes i mean i i i regard myself as basically
00:56:58 ►
an explorer and a researcher i have a lot more questions than answers. The thing that has made me be what I am and do what I do is because what they’re telling you about these states of mind is a whitewash in that
00:57:25 ►
they say
00:57:26 ►
oh it gives you
00:57:26 ►
and these are the pros
00:57:28 ►
the people who are
00:57:30 ►
for hallucinogens
00:57:31 ►
say
00:57:31 ►
it’s a form of
00:57:32 ►
instant psychotherapy
00:57:33 ►
it’s great for
00:57:35 ►
straightening out
00:57:35 ►
your relationship
00:57:36 ►
it’s
00:57:37 ►
if you’re an architect
00:57:38 ►
you can visualize
00:57:39 ►
buildings in 3D
00:57:40 ►
they present it as
00:57:42 ►
a tool
00:57:42 ►
for understanding
00:57:44 ►
this world it’s relationships, and its interconnection.
00:57:51 ►
What I’ve observed is that at high doses and with sufficient intentionality, one seems
00:57:58 ►
to break through into what can only be honestly described as a parallel universe of some sort
00:58:06 ►
that has such existential presence and immediacy
00:58:10 ►
that it’s hard to squeeze it down to being a mental construct
00:58:16 ►
generated temporarily in your mind through pharmacological means
00:58:21 ►
because it seems much more like a place. And this is incredibly challenging to our way of thinking about reality because we deny the existence of these kinds of mental realms.
00:58:41 ►
of mental realms.
00:58:44 ►
It seems almost as though,
00:58:47 ►
or here is a model for how it might be,
00:58:50 ►
it seems that reality is a series of heavily compartmentalized universes of some sort.
00:58:55 ►
And under extraordinary situations
00:58:58 ►
of mental perturbation achieved by any means,
00:59:04 ►
these membranes that keep these worlds mutually exclusive
00:59:10 ►
and sequestered from contamination by each other just simply dissolve.
00:59:17 ►
And you experience what Marceliad called the rupture of plane.
00:59:21 ►
And the rupture of plane is just like poking a hole in nearby space
00:59:27 ►
and then lo and behold you know the utterly unexpected is found to be alive
00:59:35 ►
and well right here right now I mean it and I can’t stress enough how real this
00:59:43 ►
is and how confounding it is.
00:59:46 ►
I mean, I may not be the brightest person around, but I certainly have assimilated, you know,
00:59:52 ►
the basic shtick of what Western civilization is supposed to be about.
00:59:58 ►
And there is no place in the Western model of reality for the idea that just, you know,
01:00:05 ►
20 heartbeats and 70 milligrams of DMT away is an elf-infested megaspace
01:00:16 ►
of arcology-sized dimensions in which non-material beings made not of matter but of syntax are merrily
01:00:27 ►
pursuing their own goals and possibilities. I don’t know what to make of that and I also
01:00:35 ►
almost equally puzzling as the existence of such a place is our lack of knowledge about it
01:00:43 ►
is our lack of knowledge about it when I and hundreds of other people in my experience
01:00:48 ►
and presumably millions of people throughout history
01:00:51 ►
have known that you could use plant hallucinogens
01:00:54 ►
to break into that world.
01:00:56 ►
We’re living in a fool’s paradise
01:00:59 ►
trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism.
01:01:04 ►
That’s the
01:01:05 ►
most seductive and delicious aspect of your thesis is that my god there is a
01:01:11 ►
reality somewhere beyond that membrane and then you compound it with with the
01:01:16 ►
exploration of logic or rationale where you present us the possibility that the
01:01:21 ►
Big Bang is the biggest is the most ludicrous thing to combine with
01:01:24 ►
rationality as could possibly be imagined.
01:01:27 ►
And then I’ve even heard people address, well, how is it possible that the vanity of the individual human being could think that he’s so important that the rest of the galaxy, the universe out there, that we should be at all significant?
01:01:41 ►
Whereas you say, well, hell, that’s all mindscape.
01:01:44 ►
It doesn’t exist. Or it feels like you say, well hell that’s all mindscape it doesn’t exist
01:01:45 ►
or it feels like you say well it’s a mindscape you know it isn’t it is it’s an invention well
01:01:52 ►
what i’m really saying is we know a lot less than we assume we know i mean if someone tells you that
01:01:59 ►
we live around a typical star at the edge of a typical galaxy
01:02:05 ►
strewn through a mega space trillions of times larger.
01:02:09 ►
I mean, they don’t know what they’re talking about.
01:02:12 ►
That’s just the cheerful assurance of modern astronomy
01:02:17 ►
based on a bunch of fishy formulas that were cooked up
01:02:21 ►
within the confines of the 20th century. I mean, the stars that shine down at night
01:02:27 ►
could be painted dots on a scrim for all we know.
01:02:32 ►
I mean, I’m not saying that’s the case,
01:02:34 ►
but what I am saying is I think that the greatest disservice
01:02:39 ►
that science has done to humankind
01:02:42 ►
is the marginalizing of our own importance.
01:02:47 ►
If we even, let’s take an objective measure
01:02:50 ►
and I think complexity,
01:02:56 ►
if you look around at nature,
01:02:58 ►
at the fossil record,
01:03:00 ►
at the human family,
01:03:02 ►
complexity is clearly something very dear to nature.
01:03:07 ►
Nature preserves it.
01:03:09 ►
Nature works through it.
01:03:11 ►
Nature builds upon it.
01:03:13 ►
Well, we’re told we’re a minor this
01:03:16 ►
in orbit around a minor that
01:03:18 ►
in a typical that and so forth and so on.
01:03:20 ►
But if you will look at the human cerebral cortex, what you discover is the
01:03:27 ►
most densely complexified matter known to exist in the universe. The human cerebral cortex contains
01:03:35 ►
more connections per cubic centimeter than any form of matter known to exist in this cosmos. If that’s true, suddenly our marginality is completely obviated and it’s clear that no, we are not marginal observers of a vast cosmic drama. We are at the cutting edge of the development and conservation of complexity. And it is our mind which gives us these scenarios of our position in space and time.
01:04:10 ►
It may well be that the human mind is very, very important.
01:04:16 ►
The human mind represents the culmination of biology,
01:04:19 ►
which is another phenomenon that these astrophysicists always love to marginalize
01:04:24 ►
and say, oh, well, biology, it’s just going on on one planet.
01:04:28 ►
As far as we know, it could be a fluke.
01:04:30 ►
It may have happened once and it’ll never happen again.
01:04:33 ►
But, you know, the life of most stars is on the order of 500 million years.
01:04:42 ►
We happen to have the good fortune to be in orbit around a
01:04:46 ►
very slow burning stable star and so we have ignored the fact that most stars
01:04:52 ►
last less than half a billion years we can dig into the gun flint church of
01:04:58 ►
South Africa and bring up fossils of soft-bodied creatures that are close to 3 billion years old.
01:05:09 ►
Six times the life of most stars in the universe.
01:05:14 ►
So when somebody’s trying to tell you that what the universe is about is the life and death of stars,
01:05:21 ►
they’re ignoring the fact that biology is a phenomenon as persistent
01:05:26 ►
as any phenomenon known to exist in the universe.
01:05:30 ►
And biology is not a static phenomenon.
01:05:33 ►
It isn’t an endless recycling of fissionable materials the way star life is.
01:05:39 ►
Biological life has been steadily complexifying itself over the entire time span
01:05:45 ►
of its existence. So
01:05:47 ►
life is not marginal.
01:05:50 ►
Mind emerging out of
01:05:51 ►
life at its more complex levels
01:05:53 ►
of organization is not
01:05:55 ►
marginal and we
01:05:57 ►
are not marginal. We
01:05:59 ►
are, I think, tremendously important
01:06:02 ►
in the cosmic drama and that a
01:06:03 ►
rational analysis of the situation will support that.
01:06:08 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:10 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:15 ►
I hope that you’ll take a little quiet time
01:06:18 ►
and think about Terence’s closing remarks just now,
01:06:22 ►
particularly the part about not marginalizing the importance of humanity.
01:06:27 ►
Sure, there most likely is life elsewhere in the universe, even in this galaxy most likely,
01:06:33 ►
but, and this is what I try to keep in mind when thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial
01:06:39 ►
life, and that is the fact that as of right now we have yet to discover something that’s alive and not from this planet.
01:06:48 ►
And even if we sentient beings aren’t unique in the cosmos, well, we most certainly are very rare.
01:06:55 ►
And I thought it was fascinating that that rap began with him saying,
01:07:00 ►
we know a lot less than we assume we know.
01:07:02 ►
Well, that really hit close to home for me.
01:07:02 ►
We know a lot less than we assume we know.
01:07:04 ►
Well, that really hit close to home for me.
01:07:11 ►
You see, as I’ve been getting older and having enough free time to do a little deep introspection,
01:07:14 ►
well, I came to exactly the same conclusion about myself.
01:07:20 ►
I don’t remember the exact quotation, nor do I recall who said it, but it can be said that many of the gravest errors that we make as adults stem from mistaken beliefs that we acquired in childhood.
01:07:29 ►
Lately, I’ve discovered that this has been the case many times during the course of my life.
01:07:35 ►
There were just some things that my parents and grandparents simply took for granted, and so did I.
01:07:41 ►
Unfortunately for all of us, some of those ideas were way off the mark.
01:07:47 ►
Maybe that’s what people mean when they say that old people seem to be wise.
01:07:52 ►
In my experience, wisdom stems from thinking for yourself and questioning everything you believe,
01:07:58 ►
particularly the things that seem to be unshakably true for you.
01:08:02 ►
And if those ideas can withstand your mental attack on them,
01:08:06 ►
well, then they’re your ideas and not someone else’s precepts. So bravo and brava to you.
01:08:13 ►
Well, something else that Terrence said in this talk struck me as well, but
01:08:16 ►
this time it struck me as funny. Remember when he said, given 10 years, the transcendental object at the end of time will rise above the event horizon?
01:08:28 ►
Do you think that he could have been predicting Trump?
01:08:33 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:08:38 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.