Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Psychedelic researcher Sasha Shulgin in his lab
Date this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable dimension for us to be in, and I daresay matter would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on so that the rainforest, chipmunks, glaciers, and schooling salmon can go back to doing what they do best.”
“There is no reason to expect rationality to be apprehensible.”
“A little courage on the part of these almighty scientists would go a long way toward overwhelming the fearful strictures placed on them by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium that is fairly odious anyway.”
“Mantras, with psychedelics, work like magic. Yoga, breath control, drumming, visualization, simple prayer, it all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics.”
“Unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do’s and don’t s.”
“I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community… . We must, somehow, carry everyone with us.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
And today we are going to join Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends for the third installment of his October 2, 1992 workshop.
00:00:33 ►
Like many of his talks that were directed by questions from the attendees,
00:00:37 ►
a wide variety of topics was covered.
00:00:40 ►
And basically, this talk reflected the interests of those who were there, and those interests included psychedelics, glossolalia, DMT, language, astrology, science, scientists, morphic residents, ayahuasca, LSD, mind, FDA, and psilocybin.
00:00:59 ►
Probably something else in there, but I didn’t get track of all of them. But there seems to be something here for almost everybody. So let’s join them now. Whom, or all of which, I’m not sure,
00:01:12 ►
evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines. When those environments became evolutionarily
00:01:20 ►
crowded, the octopi evolved into the benthic depths, into the parts of the ocean where no
00:01:26 ►
light ever reaches. But in order to maintain lines of communication, over long periods of time,
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they evolved phosphorescent organs on their bodies and eyelid-like membranes covering those
00:01:41 ►
phosphorescent organs. So in the benthic depths of the sea all that one
00:01:47 ►
octopus ever encounters of another is its pure linguistic intent nothing else can be seen so i
00:01:55 ►
think that uh the dmt elves i mean all i can figure is that they are trying to catalyze us to move up the scale
00:02:05 ►
in the refining of the bandwidth
00:02:07 ►
of our communication skills.
00:02:10 ►
Yeah.
00:02:10 ►
Do you feel it often,
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your experience with the DMTL,
00:02:13 ►
that you come any closer to
00:02:14 ►
expressing your communication
00:02:16 ►
through those meetings?
00:02:19 ►
You mean do I feel more able to do that?
00:02:22 ►
Yeah.
00:02:22 ►
Do you feel a journey closer
00:02:23 ►
or is it otherwise just maybe an entertainment
00:02:25 ►
instead of an enlightenment
00:02:26 ►
if we aren’t able to actually reach it?
00:02:28 ►
Well, no.
00:02:30 ►
I mean, they urge one
00:02:34 ►
toward a kind of glossolalia,
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a kind of ecstatic verbal activity
00:02:41 ►
that is devoid of attachment
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to the culturally contrived dictionary.
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And for a long time I could hear them do this.
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I could hear this stuff, this DMT gibberish flowing through my mind.
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And then eventually I became able to do it.
00:03:00 ►
And it’s immensely satisfying. This relates back to what we discussed this morning
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about how there’s DMT in the human brain
00:03:12 ►
being produced for some reason.
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You see, we do tend to connect
00:03:18 ►
successful linguistic activity
00:03:20 ►
with the visual cortex.
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In other words,
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if somebody successfully communicates something to you,
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you say, I see what you mean.
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Now it’s clear to me you’ve painted a picture.
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Why is it that when we want to say that language is succeeding,
00:03:42 ►
we reach for visual metaphors?
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It’s because we trust our eyes.
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We don’t trust our ears.
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The world is defined for us
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as something seen.
00:03:53 ►
And the ambiguity
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of ordinary communication,
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which is culturally defined,
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and for each of us defined
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by basically where on the surface
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of the planet you first saw the light of day.
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You know, the French speak French, the Dutch speak Dutch.
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Why can’t the English learn how to speak?
00:04:15 ►
Or no, that’s something else.
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But what I’m talking about is an Ur language that you don’t learn from a culture,
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but that you learn in the same way that you know how to breathe,
00:04:29 ►
you know how to eat, you know how to grasp.
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It’s in the organic structure rather than in the cultural software.
00:04:38 ►
But is it the communication?
00:04:41 ►
Can you communicate with others?
00:04:43 ►
Other human beings?
00:04:46 ►
On this level? Well, you can if you’re both loaded on DMT
00:04:49 ►
but
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that’s such a chaotic environment
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in which to sort this kind of stuff out
00:04:55 ►
that’s what drove me to the Amazon
00:04:57 ►
in the first place was
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the DMT flash is so
00:05:00 ►
maddeningly short
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I mean you’re trying to sort all this out
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and assure yourself you’re not dead as a doornail
00:05:08 ►
in about two and a half minutes.
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And I thought, you know,
00:05:12 ►
we need to slow it down and stretch it out.
00:05:16 ►
Why does it have to be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon
00:05:18 ►
run backwards at five times normal speed?
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I mean, you just cannot get a grasp on it.
00:05:25 ►
And over the years,
00:05:27 ►
judicious manipulation of these substances
00:05:30 ►
and all kinds of special conditions,
00:05:32 ►
eventually you see what it is.
00:05:34 ►
And it’s almost as though language
00:05:37 ►
is trying to be born out of matter.
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The pure energy thing of 50s science fiction
00:05:44 ►
may in fact be a fairly accurate take
00:05:47 ►
on where we’re headed
00:05:49 ►
we are headed toward becoming pure syntactical intentionality
00:05:54 ►
just shedding the monkey
00:05:56 ►
shedding any umbilical cord into matter
00:06:00 ►
matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable dimension
00:06:04 ►
for us to be in and I dare say matter
00:06:07 ►
would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on so that the rainforest chipmunks glaciers
00:06:14 ►
and schooling salmon could go back to doing what they do best. Nicole.
00:06:32 ►
well this could be i mean all i’ve ever seen of that other universe is an area smaller than this room and yet i assume that other universe is probably equal in size to our own so i’m not
00:06:39 ►
exactly ferdinand magellan where it’s concerned. Yeah, I think our materialism has focused us so entirely away from these more rarefied layers
00:06:53 ►
that we cannot see them at all, that we in fact deny their existence.
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You know, in a way what science has practiced over the past 500 years, has come down to is it has been a relentless de-spiritualizing of the world.
00:07:13 ►
Until finally, you know, they tell you there is no soul, there are no spirits, what you see is what you get.
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We have risen to the surface well a shaman looking at a person with that kind of a
00:07:26 ►
mental map of things just pities them their simplistic stupidity he says you know my god
00:07:34 ►
you’re you’re like a half-wit or something because everything interesting and complex you say doesn’t
00:07:40 ►
even exist i agree but that doesn’t mean that because we as a culture
00:07:45 ►
are now at a point where we do need to go back to this forgotten land.
00:07:52 ►
That’s true, but also eventually you get into a situation of diminishing returns.
00:07:59 ►
For instance, you know, it was a great step forward for von Leeuwenhoek
00:08:06 ►
instance, you know, it was a great step forward for von Leeuwenhoek to grind his lenses and to see little animals cavorting in a drop of water. But, for instance, now, ordinary
00:08:14 ►
science is going to Congress and saying, in order to take another step deeper into the understanding of matter, we want $20 billion to create an instrument
00:08:28 ►
17 miles in diameter that will take 30 years to build and that will allow us to at last
00:08:36 ►
confront the bottom quark or something like that.
00:08:42 ►
I heard these guys on NPR probably some of you heard them
00:08:46 ►
being challenged particle physicists being challenged by someone who said well you want
00:08:52 ►
America to commit I think it was 50 billion dollars to building the super collider is that
00:08:58 ►
can you name a single spin-off from particle physics that has trickled down into the lives of ordinary people and they
00:09:07 ►
were absolutely stymied well i kind of go with peter russell’s theory that you know perhaps from
00:09:17 ►
our technological culture we did get something you know first all, none of us would be here if it was not for technology,
00:09:25 ►
because today we have close to 5 billion people on Earth.
00:09:30 ►
That might be a curse, but that also might be, you know,
00:09:32 ►
do you want to be the one who is not born?
00:09:36 ►
A tricky question.
00:09:41 ►
So in that fact of life explosion there is one thing that happened is that we do not have
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a conscious of ourself as one planet as one whole being i mean even with the technology of going to
00:09:58 ►
the moon through the physicality we have a view of ourselves from the outside.
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I mean, to me, I look at it like maybe in the evolution of humanity,
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it’s like being seven years old, you know, all of a sudden you say, but hey, I am me, you know, I am somebody,
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and I can decide, you know, to say no or to say yes,
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but it is something there, there is an entity.
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And as a planet, maybe that’s what we did when we went to the moon.
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And the Indians, you know, I go
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down to sweat lodge every week and I
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participate with the Indian community
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down in San Pedro. So I’m trying to
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learn a bit the way they think.
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And a lot of things I
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enjoy very much, you know, but then other
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things, you know, I don’t
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agree totally. For instance, with the
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moon thing, you know, they say, well, we for instance with the moon thing you know they say well we’ve
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been to the moon many many times before and we go to the moon through the dream world see like you
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want to be else but a lot of people go to the stars i mean there is a lot of other realities
00:10:59 ►
out there and it’s not the future and it’s not the past it’s just life, it’s part of that sense
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but do you think that it’s simply that there are a lot of realities?
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for instance, what puzzles me about these encounters with these elf things
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is the urgency from their side
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you know, I could imagine just breaking into an elf ecology
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and seeing them busy making shoes
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and, you know, putting the blush on strawberries
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or whatever elves do.
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But they seem intently focused on a project
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that has consequences in this world.
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And that puzzles me.
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I don’t think history has been a waste of time.
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I think probably it’s served its purpose,
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and that what we now have to do is take what we’ve learned.
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It’s the prodigal son. I mentioned that.
00:11:57 ►
And now return to the archaic family with the ability to move to the moon and to etch microcircuitry and to define the protein
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coats of viruses and these fancy things that we can do all that is good knowledge but it has to be
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linked to a coherency of self that we somehow have gotten so strung out on this scientific descriptive binge that we
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forgot why we’re doing it and what this is all for the basis of my criticism of science is not
00:12:36 ►
the science that it does which it does very well but the metaphysical pontificating that it claims to be able to do
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based on nothing more than its assumption that all competitors are naive.
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I mean, science should not be telling us what we should think about astrology
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because astrology is not a proper object for scientific judgment.
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In other words, science is simply one method of understanding the world.
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But the people who practice science think it’s a meta-method,
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think that it is somehow the arbiter of truth,
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and that we are supposed to take any proposition
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and lay it at the feet of science,
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and it will tell us whether it’s kosher or not
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and that means that the scientists are completely out of their domain and should be sent back to
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the workbench and the test tube and stay out of the domain of metaphysics and philosophy which
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is not properly their area.
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I think that’s part of the chance.
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Well, if it’s all nonsense,
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then we’re in a hell of a fix.
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Well, that’s where we may be.
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Wittgenstein had a slightly different notion
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that I think is more serviceable here.
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He said, what we want to do
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is we want to make statements that are true enough.
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Now, there is a monkey concept.
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That’s what we want.
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We want to say things which are true enough.
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That means serviceable in the circumstance in which they are being applied.
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And that is, yeah, or whatever, you know, if you’re solving tensor equations of the
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third degree, then in that domain.
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solving tensor equations of the third degree than in that domain.
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But the idea, you see, it’s so crazy to think that talking monkeys could get anywhere near truth.
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I mean, do you think a sea urchin possesses the truth or a macaw?
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Well, then why you?
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And especially when you realize, you know, we do all this business in English and we’re utterly naive about the limitations of language.
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You can’t even, I mean, take someone like Derrida, for instance.
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Whatever the man’s truth is, it can’t even be exported into English without becoming gibberish.
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Because when you read him, you can’t understand him. And as you suggest with these elves that you’re talking
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about a medium of pure language. Oh, a purer language. Yes, well, language, you
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know, if you were to look at this planet and seek the thumbprint of a higher
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intelligence, God or the goddess or whatever.
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Language is the thing to look at.
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I mean, this is the thing we do
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that is an incredible symmetry break
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with the rest of nature.
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Do you think a dog can tell the difference
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between those stairs and that floor
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or the rug and that
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or even the flowers and that?
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He sees it as a continuum that simply is a texture. Like we look at this rug, we don’t identify that spot from the rug in that or even the flowers in that he sees it as a continuum
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that simply is a texture
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like we look at this rug
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we don’t identify
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that spot
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from the rest of it
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we just simply say
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it’s a rug
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well an animal intelligence
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is suspended
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in the here and now
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we have
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language
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seems to be
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a strategy
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for binding time
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and notice
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that the entirety
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of evolutionary advance
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is a series of time-binding strategies.
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Once you possess language,
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and especially once you possess writing,
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the past is not so past as it used to be.
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It hangs around,
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and we begin to create a database of experience
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larger than any community of living people could ever have.
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And the past stays with us.
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This is both a blessing and a curse.
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Notice that we have industrial cultures as a result of the accumulation of written language.
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There’s a simultaneousness between written language and agriculture, etc.
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and industrial culture.
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Oh yeah, I don’t have any problem with that.
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Somebody said language was created to lie.
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Yes, but it does it so elegantly and so well
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that the half-truths it tells are all that we can communicate.
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The truth cannot be said.
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It may even be possible to chart the evolution of a single individual
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from an infant
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all the way through his maturity
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as one who takes the journey
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from the right side of his brain
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into the left side of his brain
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crossing a certain membrane there
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where he switches his dominance
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from right to left
00:17:18 ►
and then going full circle
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and then once again
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becoming quote-unquote spiritual
00:17:22 ►
by adopting and integrating
00:17:24 ►
the right once again. Well,unquote spiritual by adopting and integrating the right once again
00:17:25 ►
well yeah these are all metaphors and analogies for a process which is essentially incomprehensible
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there is no reason to expect reality to be rationally apprehendable this is the the basic
00:17:40 ►
fallacy that we so confidently assume the world is for us that we assume that we should
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also therefore be able to understand it when in fact what we’ve done is just carved out a very
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limited domain of repetitious algorithms that don’t have fatal consequences for us and then the rest of it
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lies in the realm
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of the great
00:18:07 ►
who knows
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but you know
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since there’s
00:18:10 ►
very little
00:18:10 ►
percentage
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to be made
00:18:12 ►
out of that
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people
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prefer to
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keep their faces
00:18:16 ►
turned inward
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toward the
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campfire
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not outward
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toward the
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immense darkness
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revealed by the
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campfire
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and the bigger you build the campfire of metaphor the immense darkness revealed by the campfire, and the bigger you build the campfire of metaphor,
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the more darkness you reveal outside of its domain.
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So if ever there was an argument for open-endedness
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and defocusing on closure,
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it would be the linguistic enterprise, I think. Well, we could just, it may, you know, language may be the carrier for the virus that in fact causes consciousness.
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There may not be any consciousness without this infection of language.
00:19:01 ►
Yeah, well, I don’t have any trouble with that.
00:19:04 ►
I mean, William Burroughs said
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language is a virus
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from outer space
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and well
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it may be
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it does have
00:19:12 ►
you know
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it self-replicates
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itself
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it spreads
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through a population
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ideas mutate
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they compete
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with each other
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ideas become extinct
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new ideological forms that are more adaptable squeeze out other forms.
00:19:28 ►
I mean, the whole evolution of organic life may be simply a lower dimensional rehearsal
00:19:35 ►
for a kind of syntactical evolution that is going to go on in a domain that we can barely conceive of.
00:19:45 ►
Yeah, over.
00:19:46 ►
For myself, I’m not so concerned with what the truth is, but what in fact works in one’s
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life and how one uses the word or uses the ideas to manifest in the reality that we’re
00:19:59 ►
swimming through.
00:20:01 ►
In light of that, I’m just wondering about the mushroom morphogenetic fields,
00:20:07 ►
the plant community in terms of allies that one can become connected with
00:20:14 ►
as a collective community that we’re all participating in.
00:20:19 ►
Can you elaborate on that?
00:20:22 ►
Well, I’ve talked with Rupert a lot about this,
00:20:25 ►
and sort of different things can be said.
00:20:30 ►
I mean, one way of thinking about what the psychedelic experience is
00:20:34 ►
is that psychoactive compounds amplify the morphogenetic field
00:20:42 ►
to the point where it becomes a potential object for inspection by the conscious mind.
00:20:49 ►
In the same way that we know right now that this room is filled with radio, VHF, UHF signals,
00:20:58 ►
but we also know that we would have to have a radio or a television set in order to tap into them,
00:21:09 ►
a radio or a television set in order to tap into them the morphogenetic field is ordinarily damped by experience but becomes overwhelmingly present when we jack our neural neurophysiological
00:21:19 ►
receptors up to the point where these previously invisible influences become visible the other
00:21:27 ►
thing in terms of the morphogenetic field theory and how it relates to psychedelics is to realize
00:21:34 ►
that when you take a plant the plant takes you and so for instance uh the one of the reasons I prefer
00:21:45 ►
shamanic hallucinogens to synthetics
00:21:48 ►
is that they are so much
00:21:50 ►
richer as databases
00:21:54 ►
because they have inside them
00:21:57 ►
all the people who’ve ever taken them
00:21:59 ►
I mean when you take psilocybin
00:22:02 ►
you leave something behind in there that every subsequent user of psilocybin will encounter.
00:22:13 ►
So you know the way Tibetans leave little cairns of rock when they cross high mountain passes? well, this is what we’re doing in the psychedelic experience. And really, the character of psilocybin is the cumulative superimposition
00:22:29 ►
of the character of the thousands and thousands of people over the millennia
00:22:34 ►
that have taken it plus something else, its own unique nature.
00:22:40 ►
When you take a drug which induces an altered state like ketamine, for instance, ketamine is a drug that has not been around very long, hasn’t been taken by millions of people, and is oddly empty.
00:23:12 ►
The building is there, the architecture is there, but where are the hurrying secretaries, the water coolers, the executives, the buzzing elephants?
00:23:12 ►
Nothing.
00:23:15 ►
It’s empty real estate.
00:23:16 ►
It’s for rent.
00:23:26 ►
And if you want to move in, well, then you can live there. there but it’s the difference between a modern office building and a 14th century Italian villa when you contrast a modern synthetic with a well-used shamanic organic yeah a lot of times
00:23:36 ►
when I first take like five grams or something I get this this is kind of a simple thing but it’s
00:23:40 ►
a yawn I’m wondering if does anybody else get that yawn?
00:23:53 ►
No, the yawn is a physiological response to psilocybin that is part of it.
00:23:56 ►
And so is the runny nose in the first hour.
00:24:01 ►
This is, you know, every drug has a spectrum of effects and some are dependable and some are not i mean for instance lsd
00:24:07 ►
almost you could almost say 100 of the people who take lsd it dilates your eyes that is an effect
00:24:17 ►
of lsd that it would be impossible to eliminate but i wouldn’t say% of the people who take LSD encounter the good Lord or something
00:24:28 ►
like that.
00:24:28 ►
That’s a more selective effect.
00:24:31 ►
Okay.
00:24:31 ►
The second part is, after I take five grams and after I get the buzzing sound in my ears,
00:24:37 ►
and then this last time I took it, I was in a darkened room, laid on the bed, got naked,
00:24:43 ►
and just laid there.
00:24:45 ►
And for the first time, what happened, usually I close my eyes and I’m able to get visions,
00:24:50 ►
kind of a passing vision, almost like a film going through my head.
00:24:53 ►
I’m wondering also, does anybody get it where it’s coming from the right to the left
00:24:57 ►
or from the left to the right, sort of a film coming across?
00:25:00 ►
Back to the front.
00:25:01 ►
Talk to the left.
00:25:02 ►
Ah.
00:25:00 ►
coming across?
00:25:02 ►
Ah!
00:25:09 ►
Well, I think that the number of ways these things can
00:25:12 ►
present themselves is practically
00:25:15 ►
infinite. I mean, I’ve seen, I’ve had
00:25:17 ►
really weird experiences with information.
00:25:21 ►
For instance, you know these flashers
00:25:24 ►
on buildings where the news goes by?
00:25:27 ►
I’ve had hallucinations where it became a textual hallucination. In other words, what I was seeing
00:25:35 ►
was an illuminated page of print, and then as I looked at it, every 50th letter would invert,
00:25:41 ►
looked at it every 50th
00:25:42 ►
letter would
00:25:43 ►
invert and
00:25:45 ►
then suddenly
00:25:46 ►
every 20th
00:25:47 ►
and then every
00:25:48 ►
10th and then
00:25:49 ►
every 5th and
00:25:50 ►
I literally
00:25:50 ►
watch a page
00:25:51 ►
of text go
00:25:52 ►
from being
00:25:53 ►
readable to
00:25:54 ►
being gibberish
00:25:55 ►
and then watch
00:25:56 ►
the meaning
00:25:57 ►
come through
00:25:58 ►
again in a
00:25:59 ►
loop.
00:25:59 ►
I mean I
00:26:00 ►
think anything
00:26:01 ►
you can conceive
00:26:02 ►
of it can
00:26:03 ►
do and many
00:26:04 ►
things you can’t conceive of.
00:26:07 ►
What’s the beauty of individual perception?
00:26:10 ►
I mean, we’re all individuals.
00:26:11 ►
We all have the gift of bringing our own ideas.
00:26:15 ►
But still, you have to be able to make general statements about it,
00:26:18 ►
or you would have to say that it’s all and everything.
00:26:22 ►
But if it was exactly the same, it would be boring.
00:26:24 ►
Well, although how would you know
00:26:26 ►
since you would never have any trip but your own?
00:26:29 ►
One of the things that happens on psilocybin and on ayahuasca
00:26:34 ►
that really puzzles me that I just go back to again and again
00:26:38 ►
is you can be having these volleys of hallucination
00:26:42 ►
and then you can say to it uh art deco and click and suddenly there
00:26:50 ►
will be thousands of cigarette lighters limousines candy dishes stuff rolling in black space in front
00:26:59 ►
of you thousands of these things perfectly exemplifying this very narrowly defined aesthetic domain.
00:27:09 ►
Italian Baroque.
00:27:10 ►
Click, altarpieces, saints with their eyes rolled back,
00:27:15 ►
dripping gold, the whole thing.
00:27:18 ►
And so you say, boy, that is really strange.
00:27:20 ►
We click through aesthetic epochs like points on a dial but then you can say to it
00:27:27 ►
surprise me in baroque not on pier not dynastic egypt not north american indian maya or fujiwara
00:27:36 ►
japanese but something never seen on this planet but equally coherent as those other styles. And I always think, you know,
00:27:45 ►
my God, if I could just grab hold of this,
00:27:48 ►
I would be Yves Saint Laurent or Klimt
00:27:52 ►
or somebody like that.
00:27:54 ►
And then, you know,
00:27:58 ►
the most puzzling one of all is you can say to the mushroom,
00:28:01 ►
okay, enough of surprises, art deco italian baroque show me what
00:28:08 ►
you are for yourself and then it’s almost like you know there’s a roll of drums and black curtains
00:28:17 ►
begin to rise and and there’s a cold air that sweeps through the room and you realize you know
00:28:23 ►
okay you know after about 45 seconds of
00:28:25 ►
that you have to call a halt because you say you realize you know this thing was had clothed itself
00:28:32 ►
in so many levels of visual reassurance for you as a human being that the request that it reveal
00:28:40 ►
its true nature sets off the cascade headed in a truly appalling direction and usually
00:28:47 ►
you say okay that’s enough of your true nature let’s go back to dancing chipmunks and little
00:28:54 ►
candies rolling in the dark yeah do you foresee a thought or discrete thought in particular being
00:29:00 ►
kind of locatable on the frequency spectrum of matter and energy such that it
00:29:06 ►
could drive the input to virtual reality so that you could communicate these kinds of
00:29:10 ►
experiences?
00:29:12 ►
You mean a machine that could be driven by the imagination?
00:29:16 ►
It’s pretty, well, it raises a bunch of questions.
00:29:21 ►
I mean, the first question is, where is thought generated?
00:29:25 ►
of questions I mean the first question is where is thought generated the straight people believe that the brain makes thought makes it I think that the
00:29:32 ►
evidence is overwhelmingly against that that that’s as naive an approach to
00:29:38 ►
thought as I remember when I was little I once tore apart a radio looking for little people inside of it
00:29:46 ►
and you know there are no little people inside the radio the radio transduces
00:29:53 ►
vibrations that surround the planet and turns it into recognizable a
00:30:00 ►
recognizable experience I I don’t believe thought can be located in the brain I think the brain is
00:30:08 ►
an amplifier and an antenna for something that is everywhere that the phrase my thought is the
00:30:16 ►
complete misnomer you don’t own thoughts you don’t generate them all you do is tune into an ocean of thought in which we’re embedded this
00:30:28 ►
is the morphogenetic field about which so much shouting and arm waving is going on the to my
00:30:36 ►
mind the proof of this position is the fact that the psychedelic experience unleashes visions in your head which you could not possibly have
00:30:46 ►
conceived of or imagined it doesn’t come from you if we say that the content of the psychedelic
00:30:54 ►
experience comes from the self then we have defined the self in such a way that it’s
00:31:00 ►
unrecognizable to us and if yourself is unrecognizable to you
00:31:05 ►
then it isn’t yourself you see so these things are proving that we participate
00:31:13 ►
in the world of mind but that we don’t generate it
00:31:24 ►
well it’s that’s like saying when we
00:31:27 ►
swim in the ocean why don’t we all see the same fish because the ocean is enormous because we all
00:31:35 ►
enter it from different angles of attack together would we experience the same thing yes we would
00:31:42 ►
and on psilocybin one of the most stunning experiences you can have
00:31:46 ►
if you wanted to make a believer out of you
00:31:48 ►
is to sit with somebody and describe what you’re seeing
00:31:52 ►
and agree that after three minutes you’ll shut up and they’ll start up
00:31:58 ►
and you discover that you just hand the baton on.
00:32:02 ►
They see what you see.
00:32:04 ►
You see what they see.
00:32:06 ►
This is confounding.
00:32:08 ►
You see, if we could do legal research with this stuff,
00:32:11 ►
we could overturn the paradigms of normal science
00:32:14 ►
in a number of areas within 18 months.
00:32:17 ►
I’m sure of it.
00:32:18 ►
I’ve seen it happen.
00:32:20 ►
I mean, I’ve seen states of group-mindedness
00:32:22 ►
that were so specific
00:32:24 ►
that there was no possibility
00:32:26 ►
that what was not happening was no shit one-on-one real-time telepathy.
00:32:31 ►
Are there countries in the world, maybe Amsterdam where or?
00:32:36 ►
Well there are countries in the world where psychedelic research is tolerated is the only way to put it but it’s in the hands of scientists and
00:32:46 ►
people of the imagination impaired are largely in charge of these research
00:32:55 ►
programs they’re asking the wrong questions you know I mean if you get a
00:33:00 ►
well that’s enough they They’re asking their own questions. I wanted to share this with everybody else.
00:33:06 ►
I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with MAPS,
00:33:08 ►
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
00:33:11 ►
They’ve just released their new newsletter,
00:33:13 ►
and what this newsletter said, basically,
00:33:15 ►
is that at a recent convened meeting with the FDA
00:33:19 ►
and a couple days after that
00:33:22 ►
with the National Institute for Drug Abuse,
00:33:25 ►
they’ve worked out an arrangement now where MDMA, at least,
00:33:28 ►
and they say in another article here that possibly LSD testing
00:33:33 ►
will be undertaken very seriously in the near future.
00:33:37 ►
And this is going through MAPS and in conjoint working with the FDA to get certain types of permits
00:33:46 ►
for the more intensive research that should be done in this field?
00:33:52 ►
There is, I think, the resistance to psychedelic research is beginning to weaken
00:34:00 ►
because an entire generation of people, people who were three and four years old in the 1960s,
00:34:08 ►
are now entering the medical research establishment
00:34:11 ►
as post-docs and so forth.
00:34:14 ►
And there is no good reason to be given
00:34:17 ►
for not having a research program on psilocybin, for example.
00:34:22 ►
I mean, it was never a social problem.
00:34:25 ►
It is a valid object for scientific research.
00:34:29 ►
It’s amazing to me the gutlessness
00:34:32 ►
of the scientific establishment on this matter.
00:34:35 ►
I mean, why, you know,
00:34:37 ►
we hear about the omnipotence of the AMA
00:34:40 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:34:42 ►
Why has the scientific establishment
00:34:44 ►
lain down like a dog and let
00:34:47 ►
politicians set the research agenda for human research on psychedelics the last time this
00:34:54 ►
happened was in the 14th century when the pope and his cronies tried to make it impossible for
00:35:01 ►
people to dissect corpses because they didn’t want people to
00:35:06 ►
understand human anatomy well in that situation instead of swallowing it and
00:35:12 ►
putting up with it medical students would steal bodies off the gallows and
00:35:18 ►
trail along behind armies to look at the freshly killed in order to create a compendious understanding of human
00:35:27 ►
anatomy and and they did in the 20th century science which would have you believe that it’s
00:35:35 ►
absolutely unbiased and it goes wherever curiosity seeks without prejudice or deference to anybody’s social values or anything is in fact a sycophantic
00:35:48 ►
slave to the agenda of these frightened politicians so it’s a real disgrace because
00:35:55 ►
you know i lived through the first psychedelic revolution and the news about lsd swept over the
00:36:04 ►
psychoanalytic community with the kind of force that the splitting of LSD swept over the psychoanalytic community
00:36:05 ►
with the kind of force that the splitting of the atoms swept over the physics community
00:36:10 ►
and people involved in treating mental illness and studying brain function
00:36:16 ►
and mapping the brain said this is amazing
00:36:18 ►
a tool has been put into our hands that will throw open doorways
00:36:24 ►
in the practice of psychology we couldn’t
00:36:26 ►
dream of and instead it was absolutely slammed shut imagine if galileo had smashed his telescope
00:36:36 ►
after there was a little bit of whining from the vatican had that happened you know we would still be living in a universe defined by the Aristotelian
00:36:47 ►
stellar shells a little courage on the part of these almighty scientists would go a long way
00:36:55 ►
toward overwhelming the the fearful strictures placed on by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium that is fairly odious anyway.
00:37:07 ►
Yeah.
00:37:07 ►
Yeah, I guess I’m supportive of one thing you said
00:37:11 ►
and also a question which I hope will be organized enough for you to answer.
00:37:16 ►
Your remarks about the telepathy,
00:37:19 ►
after some extremely intense boundary dissolution experiences with my wife,
00:37:26 ►
we have gotten to the point where using straight Michael Harner shamanic journeying techniques,
00:37:33 ►
we routinely have each other’s visions.
00:37:36 ►
I think I’m wondering if it isn’t as much a matter of a learned response as anything else.
00:37:43 ►
No, I think it is a learned response.
00:37:45 ►
I think it requires psychedelics usually to plow the channel,
00:37:53 ►
but once you open the groove,
00:37:56 ►
then there are ways to reinforce it.
00:37:58 ►
And one of the underrated tools in this game
00:38:04 ►
is the power of acoustical driving and the power of sound to
00:38:10 ►
synergize subtle chemical reactions. I mean, music is so compelling to us because it is essentially brain massage of some sort and the pleasure we derive from music
00:38:27 ►
is uh at some level a chemical pleasure and i i think you know trying to get to these places
00:38:37 ►
with yoga and drumming and fasting and all that is a pretty thankless task unless you clear the way with psychedelics
00:38:46 ►
and then you can really get somewhere if you use psychedelics in combination with any of these
00:38:54 ►
traditional techniques for working in these areas suddenly these traditional techniques techniques previously found to be maddeningly ineffective become very very powerful tools
00:39:08 ►
so mantra with psychedelics works like magic yoga breath control drumming visualization
00:39:19 ►
simple prayer it all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics.
00:39:25 ►
And in the absence of psychedelics entirely, it’s a pretty frustrating get-go.
00:39:33 ►
And unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques
00:39:37 ►
are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us,
00:39:46 ►
the beady-eyed priests among us who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do’s and don’ts stapled to the front of it and that’s entirely discouraging
00:39:53 ►
yeah my other question is kind of ties together some things you’ve mentioned during the course
00:39:59 ►
of the day you mentioned way back when about no one else having the experiences that you have.
00:40:06 ►
And so my question is to the whole issue of community and lifestyle.
00:40:13 ►
The issue that I’m wrestling with right now, I think part of what I’m experiencing is my own drive for wholeness or insight or whatever.
00:40:23 ►
Part of it is perhaps the transcendental object on the event horizon,
00:40:28 ►
but what I’m wrestling with is how to follow my muse,
00:40:32 ►
how to live the life that’s drawing me,
00:40:38 ►
and at the same time be able to function and pay my child support
00:40:42 ►
and not live in the woods.
00:40:44 ►
And if you could maybe give some
00:40:46 ►
guidance to me and some others of us that are wrestling with that issue well this is the
00:40:51 ►
tension between the transcendental and the mundane what do you do about it i don’t know i i experience
00:40:57 ►
it as a real tension as well because i you see all these other um spiritual techniques yoga breath control diet you name it
00:41:10 ►
the way you pursue those is with the pedal to the metal in other words full-on full court press
00:41:19 ►
the way you relate to psychedelics is entirely the opposite with your foot on the brakes all the time
00:41:26 ►
they the people who are using these other these non-psychedelic techniques are endlessly
00:41:33 ►
frustrated by the fact that they’re not able to get where they want to go i think the people who
00:41:39 ►
use psychedelics spend a huge amount of time trying to keep from overshooting the goal and losing themselves in
00:41:47 ►
the incomprehensible who knows what i think that if you have a genuine desire to leave us all behind
00:41:57 ►
and to go up on cold mountains and to become a taoist immortal and to clothe yourself in a hair shirt and eat roots
00:42:07 ►
and contemplate the one forever hey there’s nothing stopping you it’s just that that’s an
00:42:15 ►
easy goal to enunciate when it’s practically impossible but it’s in the presence of psychedelics
00:42:22 ►
it is quite realizable and then you have to think
00:42:26 ►
but wait a minute what about child support what about you know my love of double cappuccino
00:42:34 ►
what about and then you say well i could leave this world i could become an ascended master but is that what i really wanted all along and and i think this
00:42:48 ►
is a tension i mean i feel it in myself basically i do what i do and it’s a chicken shit response
00:42:57 ►
to what i could be doing because what i could be doing is becoming utterly incomprehensible to everybody else on the planet and living in
00:43:06 ►
a tree somewhere and happily staring into space every waking minute and but i i i am not ready
00:43:17 ►
to kiss off my library my children my friends my v. And so people in our position have to balance these things.
00:43:30 ►
And I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community,
00:43:35 ►
that we must, you know, it’s sort of the bodhisattvic ideal.
00:43:41 ►
We must somehow carry everyone with us.
00:43:44 ►
It’s not about bailing out of history it’s about
00:43:48 ►
sticking with it until we can end it for everybody but i’m not saying that’s the only point of view
00:43:55 ►
if you want to go if you want to become an arhat i don’t think there’s anything stopping you you see once you get to the place where you find out by some
00:44:06 ►
set of peculiar circumstances about these things psilocybin dmt and so forth you have crossed a
00:44:15 ►
real frontier this is not simply another spiritual technique for you know picky unish advancement one more small step down the path
00:44:29 ►
this is in fact this works and maybe you never thought you would find something that works
00:44:36 ►
well so the entire you see the attitude it’s it’s a naive attitude to quest it’s the attitude of the ingenue the fool the castaneda
00:44:48 ►
figure seeks once you reach the psychedelic plateau the tool has been placed in your hands
00:44:57 ►
now now you have to figure out whether you were really serious about all this transcendental yearning that you indulged in when it seemed so
00:45:06 ►
far out of reach because now you know it’s just a dose away and we all come to that very differently
00:45:14 ►
it’s a different dilemma from the rest of the spiritual community they just need more and more
00:45:21 ►
power we need more and more insight and wisdom in order to know
00:45:26 ►
what to do with the fact that we can now achieve whatever we conceive of so now
00:45:32 ►
is the moment to take a deep breath and decide where we really want to go with
00:45:36 ►
this stuff I just wanted to go back to you talking about the AMA.
00:45:47 ►
I know I’ve heard Dr. Andrew Wilde talk about how they used LSD in treating autism.
00:45:50 ►
I knew a guy that was autistic and regained his hearing
00:45:53 ►
when his brother gave him LSD when he was 12 years old.
00:45:57 ►
I believe the AMA does not want us to be healthy.
00:46:01 ►
They do not want us to have the tools.
00:46:04 ►
There’s a book called Toxic Psychology
00:46:06 ►
about how psychopharmacology is actually making people brain dead. And I think, I mean, if
00:46:14 ►
you go back in time, the original healers who used plants and herbs were burned at the
00:46:20 ►
stake of being witches because of the medical schools they had back then. And they were
00:46:24 ►
all men. They wouldn’t let women women in it even though they had been the
00:46:27 ►
original humans and right now the FDA is doing this you’re trying to outlaw
00:46:31 ►
plants and herbs for healing for anything and this is vitamin food
00:46:37 ►
supplements everything and like I myself I don’t see pharmaceutical drugs because
00:46:42 ►
they make me sick and the only thing I have to use for my PMS
00:46:46 ►
It’s hemp and it’s the only thing that works and we all have to be somewhat political and make statements to people and enlighten them
00:46:54 ►
And educate them as to what’s really going on because there is a whole world that could be opened up
00:46:59 ►
If we started using our plants in our room for healing again
00:47:03 ►
Yeah, I agree.
00:47:13 ►
There’s a lot of holistic centers opening up all over.
00:47:15 ►
I was just in one in Leavenworth, Washington, and it was really rewarding and wonderful to see a physician
00:47:19 ►
actually reaching out and searching other healers,
00:47:24 ►
a shaman and also herbalists,
00:47:28 ►
everybody in her private practice.
00:47:30 ►
So it is coming, and it’s very slow,
00:47:32 ►
but it’s coming around.
00:47:34 ►
And faster and faster.
00:47:35 ►
I think that’s why the FDA right now
00:47:37 ►
is trying to do away with it, because it is growing.
00:47:39 ►
If you knew the legislation that is going on right now,
00:47:42 ►
they are raiding health food stores with guns and taking things out of there that like aloe vera products and they’re
00:47:50 ►
saying they’ve never been tested we haven’t approved it and they’re taking
00:47:54 ►
I guarantee you this is happening right now and that’s why you have to be aware
00:47:57 ►
and you have to educate people about it but you see at the same point at the
00:48:02 ►
same time they’re granting the first INDs for psychedelic research in 30 years.
00:48:08 ►
So instead of taking a paranoid view that they are against it and us,
00:48:16 ►
I just think that if you dissect these human institutions, what you find always are individuals.
00:48:29 ►
human institutions what you find always are individuals and usually these institutions are fraught with internal conflict about what they’re doing there’s a lot of fear there’s a lot of
00:48:37 ►
mistrust and very few people go around rubbing their hands together and cackling over the fact that they
00:48:46 ►
are committing acts of pure evil.
00:48:49 ►
Most people have some kind of internal story that tells them that they are doing the very
00:48:56 ►
best they can.
00:48:57 ►
It’s just that there are also a lot of jug-headed misconceptions about what the best we can
00:49:03 ►
actually mean.
00:49:09 ►
headed misconceptions about what the best we can actually mean this is why um dialogue is so important why free speech is such a powerful notion let all ideas compete on a level playing
00:49:18 ►
field and the the correct points of view i I think, will emerge eventually.
00:49:25 ►
Well, that’s why we need people like you out there.
00:49:27 ►
Thank you.
00:49:34 ►
Backing up a little bit to the journeys to Elkdom and other places,
00:49:40 ►
most semantic journeys seem to be almost,
00:49:42 ►
even when they’re begun as a group thing,
00:49:46 ►
end up being a solitary journey of your own,
00:49:49 ►
whether you’re the octopus with the colors displaying yourself
00:49:52 ►
and you’re out there.
00:49:54 ►
It’s very rarely that you hear of people journeying
00:49:56 ►
with another mind being, not the body being,
00:50:00 ►
but a mind being.
00:50:01 ►
So in these journeys, whether you’re in an elf realm
00:50:04 ►
or another realm
00:50:05 ►
is there a reading
00:50:09 ►
between these other entities
00:50:10 ►
and you
00:50:11 ►
in your journey to their world
00:50:14 ►
or their space
00:50:14 ►
is there a communication at all
00:50:17 ►
and also can you go with somebody
00:50:19 ►
from this realm
00:50:21 ►
out there
00:50:22 ►
but on a mind plane
00:50:24 ►
or as you described the octopus type thing where
00:50:26 ►
you’re communicating not with words or dictionary well it’s hard to say you know platonist who was
00:50:34 ►
a neoplatonic philosopher he described the mystical experience of as the flight of the alone to the
00:50:42 ►
alone and there certainly is an element in the psychedelic thing
00:50:47 ►
of its being so large a dimension
00:50:50 ►
that when you go into it,
00:50:52 ►
you not only see things that you have never seen before,
00:50:59 ►
and not only do you see things that no one else has seen before,
00:51:04 ►
but you see things which no one else will ever see again.
00:51:09 ►
So I tend to, and this is just my personal preference,
00:51:14 ►
and I’m a double Scorpio and a number of different things
00:51:17 ►
that push me in this direction,
00:51:19 ►
but I really like to do the deep work alone
00:51:23 ►
and then try to bring it back
00:51:25 ►
and this is the proper domain
00:51:28 ►
for sharing and community.
00:51:31 ►
We know that behind five grams of psilocybin
00:51:35 ►
lies the psychedelic world,
00:51:38 ►
but how can we create a psychedelic world
00:51:41 ►
here and now on zip?
00:51:44 ►
And the answer is by becoming ever more psychedelic world here and now on zip and the answer is by becoming ever more psychedelic
00:51:48 ►
ourselves and so it’s a tremendous empowerment for eccentricity and basically my whole career
00:51:57 ►
is based on eccentricity one of the most fearful questions to come my way is when I’m riding on airplanes to some situation like this and someone sits down beside me and says, so what do you do?
00:52:14 ►
And I usually, I try to escape.
00:52:18 ►
I say, and this is always a horribly weak thing, I say, I write books.
00:52:24 ►
And then they say, oh say oh well what do you write
00:52:26 ►
books about and then we move into the realm of pure lie i usually say travel
00:52:32 ►
so you know i think if you have uh i mean to return to your question if you have an extraordinary heart connection with someone
00:52:46 ►
you can voyage together a certain distance but this is a unique kind of thing and
00:52:56 ►
probably many a relationship has experienced unnecessary strain because somebody thought
00:53:02 ►
they had that kind of connection and then when they
00:53:05 ►
got out into the incoming psychic surf they discovered one person forgot their tanks back
00:53:13 ►
on the beach yeah i need to clarify you said earlier and i heard you say before that behind
00:53:20 ►
five milligrams of one thing and 500 of another there is a little green elf or something else.
00:53:26 ►
Is that a consistent picture for you?
00:53:29 ►
Not that the experience would not be new in terms of the communication,
00:53:32 ►
but is that consistent?
00:53:33 ►
Do you yourself find that same image or that same level of mushroom at that point?
00:53:42 ►
But then secondly, in terms of the people that that you
00:53:47 ►
communicate with who do measured quantities and who do it similarly say
00:53:51 ►
Rupert Shelby is you have you have other people of other individuals communicated
00:53:57 ►
that they see those same type of creatures for lack of a better word well i mean the answer is you know if you send 10 people to
00:54:08 ►
paris and then you interview them about their experience of paris you know one of them stayed
00:54:15 ►
with the wife of the prime minister somebody else stayed in a bordello on the wrong side of town
00:54:22 ►
their notions of paris are rather different however
00:54:26 ►
if you interview them closely enough you can tell that this must have been the same place
00:54:32 ►
in some sense i mean for me the dmt experience is remarkably consistent it always is this dome underground filled with these self-transforming
00:54:47 ►
elf machine creatures.
00:54:49 ►
And then when I talk to other people
00:54:51 ►
and interview them about it,
00:54:53 ►
what I’ve come away with is the notion
00:54:56 ►
that an archetype is like a series
00:54:59 ►
of concentric circles.
00:55:02 ►
And to the degree that you reach
00:55:04 ►
the center of the circle the accounts
00:55:07 ►
become more and more consistent for instance and in thinking along those lines what i’ve come to
00:55:13 ►
see about for instance dmt is that it has an archetype and the archetype is, and God knows why, the circus.
00:55:29 ►
DMT is the archetype of the circus. So you give it to someone who is not psychedelically sophisticated,
00:55:33 ►
and you give them a low dose.
00:55:35 ►
Then they come back.
00:55:36 ►
Then you say, what was it like?
00:55:38 ►
This is a direct quote from a woman a couple of years ago.
00:55:42 ►
She said, it was the saddest carnival i’ve ever been to
00:55:46 ►
she said all the rides were closed nobody was there there were just gum wrappers blowing between
00:55:55 ►
boarded up tents i said interesting so then give it to someone else and they said it was full of clowns and i said you mean l’s he said no just clowns and as
00:56:08 ►
the dose rises the familiarity of the image is stripped away and it migrates more and more toward
00:56:18 ►
this thing behind the mask well now if you think of the circus it is an interesting archetype
00:56:25 ►
first of all three rings in constant activity and it’s a wonderful thing for
00:56:33 ►
children children love the circus because there’s light and color and
00:56:37 ►
music and animals and you know clowns but then there’s also a side to it which children don’t see i mean you lift your
00:56:47 ►
eyes from the center ring and there is eros in the form of the beautiful blonde woman in the tiny
00:56:55 ►
spangled costume who works without nets hanging by her teeth far above the center ring and twisted into this erotic image is death because she works without
00:57:09 ►
net the whole point of her performance is the fact that she could fall and be killed well then
00:57:17 ►
there’s yet another aspect to this circus archetype which is away from the lady in the spangled
00:57:23 ►
costume and the clowns climbing out
00:57:26 ►
of their little cars and the powdered elephants of many colors are the sideshows that snake off
00:57:33 ►
into the darkness the two-headed lady the goat boy and the thing in the bottle they’re all there too to be looked at so it’s this incredibly rich amalgam of light
00:57:47 ►
color humor childhood memories cotton candy joy eros death the thing in the bottle the wild
00:57:55 ►
animals so forth and so on and as you make your way toward it it different layers fall away. Do you find similar but different consistencies
00:58:09 ►
with LSD and with psilocybin
00:58:12 ►
that you could make it clear
00:58:14 ►
as the consistency that you find with DNC?
00:58:17 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:58:18 ►
I think that, see,
00:58:20 ►
one of the great confusions about psychedelics
00:58:23 ►
is that they’re all the same.
00:58:25 ►
Like in some textbooks, if you look up psilocybin,
00:58:29 ►
it will say a hallucinogen derived from fungi which causes LSD-type hallucinations.
00:58:36 ►
This is nonsense.
00:58:37 ►
This just simply means that LSD arrived first on the workbench of Western civilization,
00:58:44 ►
so everything is referent back to
00:58:46 ►
it if you’re going to take these things you need to take enough that you can tell the difference
00:58:52 ►
and at low doses all psychedelics are the same it’s just the experience of agitation
00:59:00 ►
and psychic inner turmoil sort of like speed you know but as the doses increase
00:59:07 ►
you begin to hit the bifurcation point and these things have distinct personalities for instance
00:59:15 ►
dmt the elf playroom reception area that seems to define it the amazing thing about psilocybin and its distinguishing
00:59:28 ►
characteristic is uh it speaks it speaks in english to you it conversationally approaches you
00:59:38 ►
and you talk to it in your mind i mean this, this is an amazing thing. If you’ve never experienced it, there’s something out there for you.
00:59:48 ►
Try it. That’s what was behind asking you that question
00:59:52 ►
because I don’t have any DMT experience. I’ve taken
00:59:55 ►
psilocybin just in the form of the mushrooms themselves in a botanical
01:00:00 ►
garden. And I don’t have much other experience.
01:00:03 ►
And what happened was quite
01:00:06 ►
transformational in the long term because it put me in touch with the
01:00:10 ►
plant world but not in I didn’t close my eyes I had no other realm it was the
01:00:14 ►
realm that was there in the garden a communication well you said it last
01:00:19 ►
night with the mind of that botanical area the mind of that plant world that
01:00:24 ►
was there it talked to me,
01:00:27 ►
I wouldn’t, I guess it got translated into English, but it was kind of saying everybody
01:00:31 ►
should have very close to them a realm like this to be in, and people would be okay. Do
01:00:37 ►
everything you can to support that.
01:00:41 ►
That’s the message. And for instance, you you know the mushroom has a personality and like all
01:00:49 ►
personalities it excludes some things and includes others the the mushroom personality is a radically
01:00:58 ►
eccentric personality the mushroom talks about transforming the planet it says you know i i come from a distant part of
01:01:07 ►
the galaxy i have 500 million years of galactic history in my data banks i have seen 50 000 worlds
01:01:16 ►
come into existence and pass out of existence i’ve seen ships the size of australia depart
01:01:23 ►
for andromeda i’ve seen this I’ve seen that it’s
01:01:26 ►
willing to show you the newsreels of it that’s kind of a and it says your world is ending put
01:01:33 ►
your furry paw into my hand and together we will march out to the stars it’s this Well, so then you take a compound or a shamanic hallucinogen like ayahuasca.
01:01:50 ►
Chemically, this is very, very similar to DMT.
01:01:54 ►
Experientially, it could hardly be more different.
01:01:59 ►
Ayahuasca does not show you images of enormous machines in orbit around alien planets and that sort of thing
01:02:06 ►
ayahuasca first of all it doesn’t speak it shows if you become like the eye of a camera
01:02:14 ►
flying through a world and what it shows you it’s much more feminine it shows you water flowing over the land.
01:02:28 ►
It shows you plant life growing and dying. It shows you the movement of glaciers over the surface of the land.
01:02:32 ►
It shows you people burying their dead.
01:02:36 ►
It shows you archaic civilizations.
01:02:38 ►
It shows you women nursing their children.
01:02:41 ►
It shows you meat.
01:02:44 ►
It shows you the stuff of this world on every level and
01:02:48 ►
and it moves you to tears i mean it’s emotive it’s not about our cosmic destiny out there in
01:02:55 ►
the starry blackness it’s about coming to terms with the earth and our past and each other and
01:03:04 ►
you say you know these things these things, these are personalities,
01:03:07 ►
these are visions, and the idea is to fuse all of this
01:03:10 ►
into a single unitary perception
01:03:13 ►
that does honor to all and limits none.
01:03:19 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:21 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time
01:03:25 ►
i bet that when you heard terence talking about how we say i see when we understand something
01:03:31 ►
and then he went on to say and i quote we trust our eyes we don’t trust our ears well i think
01:03:38 ►
that when you heard that if you’re like me you were probably thinking the same thing i was thinking
01:03:43 ►
and that is i wonder what terence would say about the deep fakes that are now possible with voice and video.
01:03:50 ►
And if you’ve seen some of them, you know exactly what I mean. But unless you’re a little geeky,
01:03:55 ►
like me, you may have missed the recent deep fake that was a video of President Nixon sitting at
01:04:01 ►
his desk and reading from a paper he was holding. And you heard and saw the image of Nixon, looking and sounding like Nixon,
01:04:10 ►
but reading a letter saying that the Apollo 11 astronauts were left stranded on the moon.
01:04:15 ►
The letter was real. It was written before their launch, just in case they failed.
01:04:20 ►
And that letter’s been available in the archives for decades.
01:04:23 ►
But if you didn’t know that the astronauts survived, you could easily be fooled.
01:04:28 ►
No longer can we trust our eyes, I’m afraid.
01:04:31 ►
Another thing that’s changed since this talk was given, and changed in a good way, I should add,
01:04:36 ►
and that is the fact that a significant amount of psychedelic research is now underway.
01:04:42 ►
While Terence was complaining about what he called the gutlessness
01:04:45 ►
of scientists who were afraid to risk their careers to study psychedelics, even back in 1992
01:04:51 ►
there were several researchers who did have the courage to keep psychedelic research inching
01:04:56 ►
forward, and two of those people are Rick Strassman and Charlie Grobe. At the time this talk was given, Rick had already begun the first FDA-approved
01:05:06 ►
study of DMT. Inspired by Rick’s success with the FDA, Charlie Grobe conducted government-approved
01:05:13 ►
human research projects that involved MDMA, ayahuasca, and psilocybin. Now today there are
01:05:20 ►
dozens of psychedelic research programs in the U.S., so in contradiction to what Terence said,
01:05:26 ►
there were, in fact, several scientists and medical doctors
01:05:30 ►
who actually did have the courage to risk their careers and livelihoods
01:05:34 ►
to pursue psychedelic research with human subjects.
01:05:38 ►
It seems to me that we owe these early researchers
01:05:41 ►
a huge debt of gratitude for keeping the flame alive.
01:05:45 ►
And if you want to learn more about Rick, Charlie, and other early scientific inquiries into psychedelics,
01:05:50 ►
you’ll find interviews with many of them here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:05:55 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:05:59 ►
Be well, my friends. you