Program Notes
RIP QueerNinja
(details to follow)
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://dopefiend.co.uk/Sounds of World Wide Weed was heard on The Dopecast
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“And what was this profession [of shamanism] precisely about? Well, it was about exploring the envelop of cognition, pushing against the linguistic membrane of what it was possible to say, symbolize, conceive, and communicate.”
“I prefer the organic hallucinogens and recommend them to other people because I think their long history of shamanic usage is the first seal of approval that you must look for. I mean, if these things have been used for thousands of years, then you can be fairly confident that they do not cause [medical problems].”
“The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer but facing the answer. The answer has been found. It just happens to lie on the wrong side of the fence of social toleration and legality.”
“If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”
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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.
00:00:24 ►
And today I have to begin with some sad news.
00:00:27 ►
Our dear friend, Queer Ninja, has died.
00:00:31 ►
And if you’ve been with me here in the salon for a while, you’ll remember KMO and the Dope Bean and me talking about him in his great podcast, The Sounds of Worldwide Weed.
00:00:41 ►
You know, at my age, the news of a death of one of my friends seems to come almost
00:00:46 ►
every month now, but when it’s the death of somebody that’s much younger than myself, it
00:00:51 ►
really hits hard. And to be honest, getting this podcast out today is, well, it’s about all that I
00:00:56 ►
can do right now. And everyone who knew the ninja, well, they all feel about the same way, I’m sure.
00:01:03 ►
and Ninja, well, they all feel about the same way, I’m sure.
00:01:07 ►
In a couple of months, after we’ve had some time to adjust,
00:01:12 ►
KMO, the Dope Fiend, and I will be producing a joint podcast tribute to Queer Ninja,
00:01:17 ►
and we’ll try to also include some of his other friends, like Lefty and BB.
00:01:22 ►
BB, of course, is Black Beauty, whose lovely voice we hear each week here in the salon after the featured speaker’s talk.
00:01:24 ►
Well, today,
00:01:25 ►
the best that I can do without coming to tears is to play one of Ninja’s favorite songs at the end
00:01:31 ►
of today’s podcast. But right now, it’s time to press on. And taking Terrence McKenna’s advice
00:01:38 ►
about what to do when hitting a barrier of some sort, well, I’m reverting to the last thing that
00:01:43 ►
worked, namely another
00:01:45 ►
talk by the bard himself.
00:01:47 ►
This one is a little different from most of the other 300 Terence McKinnon recordings
00:01:51 ►
here in the salon, in that, well, it’s a scripted talk as opposed to his usual method of answering
00:01:57 ►
random questions from the crowd, and I hope you enjoy it.
00:02:00 ►
I hope you enjoy it.
00:02:10 ►
Basically, for myself, my involvement with shamanism has been a deepening meditation over now about 20 years.
00:02:14 ►
And it seems to me very fruitful because it continues to change and integrate itself ever
00:02:24 ►
more deeply into the meaning of reality at large.
00:02:29 ►
So that for me shamanism has become a kind of overarching metaphor
00:02:36 ►
for not only personal being in the world, but the historical adventure,
00:02:44 ►
the being of the species in the world. So I want to
00:02:50 ►
talk about it today and as an advocate I want to make it seem indispensable to
00:03:00 ►
living a life of right reason in the world.
00:03:08 ►
I want to show that without shamanism,
00:03:16 ►
the notion of humanism itself is in a kind of jeopardy.
00:03:21 ►
And probably most of us can find ourselves in agreement with that. But then I want to leave most of us behind and go further and
00:03:28 ►
suggest that this humaneness rooted in shamanism is a humaneness
00:03:35 ►
ultimately rooted in very complex
00:03:40 ►
symbiotic
00:03:41 ►
relationships with plants and
00:03:44 ►
chemicals in the environment. I want to argue in
00:03:49 ►
fact that people without plants are in a state of potential neurosis, a state of existential wanting and that in fact part of the Western
00:04:09 ►
dilemma is the sense of abandonment that followed with the breaking off of these
00:04:18 ►
symbiotic relations with vision producingproducing plants that characterize the rise of Western monotheism
00:04:27 ►
and even more characterize the rise of modern society.
00:04:36 ►
But let me return then to the origins, because this is where I think the case can be made. My interpretation of the time we’re living through
00:04:48 ►
and this amorphous movement that we all somehow in some way are a part of,
00:04:55 ►
which calls itself the New Age or what have you,
00:05:01 ►
I call it the archaic revival.
00:05:03 ►
what have you. I call it the archaic revival.
00:05:10 ►
And the reason I call it the archaic revival is rooted in my conviction that it is, in fact, a revivifying of the models and energy forms of archaism.
00:05:19 ►
And shamanism, then, is suddenly centrally highlighted.
00:05:24 ►
And shamanism then is suddenly centrally highlighted.
00:05:31 ►
Shamanism was the profession ni plus ultra of the upper Neolithic era. And what was this profession precisely about?
00:05:38 ►
Well, it was about exploring the envelope of cognition,
00:05:48 ►
exploring the envelope of cognition pushing against the linguistic membrane of what it was possible to say symbolize conceive and communicate now why should
00:05:58 ►
one species out of all those competing on the earth attain somehow a kind of mega-adaptive ability
00:06:10 ►
that causes a kind of compression of biological time
00:06:15 ►
into the phenomenon that we call history?
00:06:20 ►
Is it simply, as our theologians have always been forced to conceive, that divine agency entered into the mechanism of the world and somehow set a spark in motion that kindled and grew into humanity?
00:06:46 ►
it as the 19th century explored so exhaustively the possibility that incremental change can eventually initiate and insinuate into a situation
00:06:55 ►
new states of higher order including even possibly the state of higher order
00:07:02 ►
that we call self-reflecting consciousness.
00:07:05 ►
But somehow this is no more than a gradual refinement out of previous states of nature.
00:07:15 ►
Well, what I want to suggest is that it is a bit of both of these points of view, the
00:07:21 ►
divine intervention and the evolutionary.
00:07:28 ►
of view, the divine intervention and the evolutionary. I think what evolutionary biologists have missed in looking at the emergence of human beings out of the
00:07:34 ►
primate phylogeny is, generally speaking, the mutagenic influence of foods. The fact that a fruit-eating arboreal primate
00:07:48 ►
because of a situation of spreading dryness in the environment evolved into
00:07:54 ►
a pack-hunting creature of the grasslands with an omnivorous diet and
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omnivores by their very nature expose themselves to a very large number of
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mutagenic influences
00:08:13 ►
I’m speaking now chemically
00:08:16 ►
mutagenic influences that interfere with the correct copying of protein
00:08:24 ►
interfere with spacing of children, lactation,
00:08:30 ►
interfere with mentation, psychoactive compounds in the food chain. And it’s
00:08:37 ►
very interesting that as human beings transform themselves into omnivorous pack-hunting omnivores, you begin to see the
00:08:48 ►
first faint stirrings of self-reflection.
00:08:53 ►
You begin to get the fire pits and later the chipped flint leavings of earliest Neolithic
00:09:02 ►
human tool making. What this says to me is that
00:09:07 ►
there was a unique confluence of factors present in the evolutionary situation
00:09:13 ►
that were capable of kindling this ontological transformation of what had
00:09:20 ►
previously been the animal mind. And what I suggest this factor is or was
00:09:28 ►
psychoactive plants in the environment,
00:09:34 ►
specifically psychoactive plants in the grasslands environment
00:09:40 ►
in which human pastoralism evolved in Africa over a million years
00:09:46 ►
ago. The plant must be African. It must be extraordinarily noticeable in the
00:09:55 ►
environment. It must not be a deep forest endemic because this is not where human evolution was taking place. The only plant which fits this description
00:10:07 ►
is a mushroom of the psilocybin-containing variety. And it’s very easy to see, I think,
00:10:17 ►
that the presence then of psychoactive compounds of this sort in the early human diet set the stage for a number of
00:10:28 ►
structural and psychological changes. Plocibin ingested in low doses increases visual acuity.
00:10:37 ►
Now it’s not difficult to see that in an animal in under evolutionary pressure in a pack hunting environment increased visual acuity
00:10:47 ►
will mean a more successful reproductive strategy this means that those animals not including the
00:10:56 ►
psychoactive substance in their diet will be mitigated against and fade from the scene. And by this process, a steady bootstrapping process,
00:11:08 ►
self-reflection was born in our species. How do we get from visual acuity to self-reflection?
00:11:16 ►
Low doses of psilocybin give increased visual acuity. Medium-range doses of psilocybin give an increased interest in
00:11:26 ►
erotic activity. You should laugh. There may not be too many laughs with this one.
00:11:39 ►
Slightly higher doses of psilocybin give an experience of the Pneumonosum, an actual
00:11:48 ►
contact with a mystery in the human psyche which is no less mysterious to us
00:11:54 ►
today than it was to our ancestors when the last glaciation was retreating
00:12:00 ►
against Canada. I mean don’t kid yourself in the face of this the
00:12:06 ►
content of this symbiotic relationship modernism, rationalism, positivism all is
00:12:14 ►
exposed as just whistling past the graveyard because the numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is
00:12:29 ►
completely impenetrable to modern analysis that’s why even discussing its
00:12:36 ►
presence is mitigated against so intensely well I don’t want to spend too
00:12:43 ►
much time on this early facet of the
00:12:46 ►
emergence thing. I want to move ahead and show that as pastoralism developed, as
00:12:52 ►
the domestic relationship between cattle, human beings, and mushrooms settled down
00:12:58 ►
into a self-reinforcing cycle of consciousness, language arose, religion arose of the goddess-oriented variety,
00:13:10 ►
and the connection of the cow to the goddess is there at the dawn time. There is no question about
00:13:18 ►
it. Language seems to have been the particular prerogative of women in the early
00:13:25 ►
emergent phases. This is possibly because men were involved in hunting activities
00:13:35 ►
where great premium is placed on silent stealthiness. While women were engaged as
00:13:43 ►
gatherers in the hunting gathering phase,
00:13:46 ►
women were engaged in gathering plants. And as all botanists can tell you,
00:13:53 ►
gathering plants involves an extensive taxonomic language so that the
00:14:00 ►
difference, the minute differences between cereal grains and insects and all of these things
00:14:08 ►
need to be linguistically defined and characterized.
00:14:12 ►
And to this day, a taxonomic description of a plant is a joyous and thrill to read because you know sub-ethically glaborous with lanceolate
00:14:26 ►
trifolium and so on for many many lines
00:14:34 ►
but in a strange way that is a law repeated over and over again through
00:14:39 ►
history each advanced somehow outsmarts itself.
00:14:45 ►
And the wonderful linguistic depth which women attained as gatherers
00:14:50 ►
through the production of Pope taxonomy eventually led them to a terrible discovery.
00:14:59 ►
The discovery of agriculture.
00:15:02 ►
Because they learned that rather than maintain this vast library
00:15:07 ►
of shifting information about seasonal plants randomly distributed or
00:15:12 ►
distributed according to the whims of nature they could in fact focus on a
00:15:17 ►
very small number of plants learn how to grow these plants, learn their needs alone.
00:15:32 ►
And at that point, the retreat was on and the dualism was fully in place.
00:15:37 ►
And there was that which was domesticated, that which was of the hearth,
00:15:46 ►
and that which was of the ausland, the howling unknown, that which was beyond the pale I think it was Weston LeBar great old anthropologist who felt he said hallucinogens can only be used
00:15:54 ►
in hunting and gathering cultures because when agriculturalists use them
00:15:59 ►
it makes it impossible to get up at dawn and go hoe the field and so suddenly the
00:16:05 ►
gods become the corn gods and the wheat gods gods of symbolizing domesticity and
00:16:12 ►
hard labor and and that sort of thing and at this moment of agriculture which
00:16:21 ►
led to overproduction which led to trade which led to cities and so forth
00:16:26 ►
there is a beginning of the breaking away of this symbiotic relationship which had bound
00:16:35 ►
human beings to nature to this time and i don’t mean this metaphorically I mean I want to be taken seriously as
00:16:46 ►
proposing that the all we of modernity is the consequences of a disrupted
00:16:53 ►
symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature and that only a restoration of this in some form is going to carry us into a full inheritance of our birthright as human beings.
00:17:14 ►
Now what did this symbiotic relationship consist of? effect of this psychedelic use this embeddedness of language using cognition
00:17:29 ►
using but stoned primates in the natural order well I submit to you that what it or how it acted operationally was as a
00:17:47 ►
feminizing pheromone that the continuous exposure to this
00:17:55 ►
tremendum represented by the hallucinogenically
00:17:58 ►
induced ecstasy acted to continuously dissolve that portion of the psyche which as moderns
00:18:08 ►
we call the male ego and I don’t mean that it only worked on men I mean that
00:18:14 ►
wherever in human personalities this certain catch began to form and build
00:18:22 ►
like a calcareous tumor in the personality,
00:18:25 ►
the psycholitic presence of the undeniable fact of the tremendum
00:18:32 ►
tended to dissolve this back into Tao, psychic hell, however you wish to style it.
00:18:44 ►
And that the evolution of language then,
00:18:48 ►
setting up this movement off into specialization
00:18:52 ►
and a movement away from nature,
00:18:56 ►
set up the consequences of the all we
00:19:00 ►
which permeates Western civilization.
00:19:02 ►
It is only in Western civilization that you get this steady focus
00:19:09 ►
on this monotheistic ideal and working out the implications
00:19:14 ►
of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern,
00:19:21 ►
the pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity.
00:19:30 ►
No one you would invite to your garden party.
00:19:36 ►
It’s very interesting that this ideal is the only instance, the only hypostatization of deity that I know of
00:19:45 ►
that has no congress with woman
00:19:48 ►
at any point in the theological myth.
00:19:53 ►
The god of Western civilization
00:19:54 ►
has nothing to do with women.
00:19:58 ►
And the presence of the Sophia
00:19:59 ►
and the presence of the Mater Dolorosa
00:20:02 ►
and all of these things have only been tolerated
00:20:04 ►
as heresies in the Western tradition.
00:20:08 ►
And it is the Western tradition that has the most continuous break with this symbiotic relationship.
00:20:23 ►
we have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious.
00:20:30 ►
And we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.
00:20:36 ►
A similar situation, which may give us some objective perspective on our own,
00:20:44 ►
haunts the fate of those
00:20:46 ►
portions of Indo-European humanity that went east instead of west. In other words,
00:20:53 ►
the whole story of Indian civilization is the story of a masculine, static, hierarchically organized system
00:21:11 ►
coming into place in the wake of the loss of the secret of Soma,
00:21:17 ►
the loss of the portal to another kind of vegetable gnosis.
00:21:29 ►
the portal to another kind of vegetable gnosis. Well, so provided then that I have made my case and convinced you that this is all gospel, what kind of options are
00:21:37 ►
there to someone who believes this? Well,
00:21:43 ►
what that means is a brief survey of the anthropological opportunities to explore hallucinogenesis presently afforded by societies living throughout the world.
00:21:56 ►
There are, of course, the psilocybin complex discovered by Gordon Wasson, the magic mushrooms of central Mexico which may
00:22:06 ►
have played a role in the Mayan and Toltec civilizations, and the wider
00:22:11 ►
ranging pan-tropical Stropharia cubensis, Coelopiphae cubensis, which originated in
00:22:19 ►
Thailand but is distributed throughout the warm tropics. Interesting, all of these shamanically sanctioned hallucinogens
00:22:29 ►
are in the indole family, a very narrow family of compounds,
00:22:35 ►
with the exception, I almost blew it,
00:22:38 ►
with the exception of mescaline, which is in a different family,
00:22:43 ►
a kind of amphetamine but all the others
00:22:47 ►
including the morning glory complex with its lsd like alkaloids chinoclovine and
00:22:55 ►
ergonamine the psilocybin complex which involves as i, several pandemic species and many highly indemnified species,
00:23:07 ►
especially in the Pacific Northwest.
00:23:09 ►
The Iboga cult of Gabon in Western Africa,
00:23:14 ►
which is sort of the exotic cousin of all of these things,
00:23:17 ►
but nevertheless structurally an indole.
00:23:23 ►
And then the short-acting tryptamines and the beta-carbolines.
00:23:28 ►
The short-acting tryptamines can be used separately.
00:23:32 ►
The beta-carbolines, though hallucinogenic in themselves,
00:23:35 ►
are usually used as monoamine oxidase inhibitors
00:23:39 ►
to enhance the effect of short-acting tryptamines.
00:23:43 ►
This is a highly evolved pharmacology and shamanic complex in South America.
00:23:50 ►
One of the peculiar puzzles of shamanic anthropology and ethnobotany
00:23:55 ►
is the clustering of hallucinogenic plants in South America.
00:24:01 ►
Why are the Old World tropics, the tropics of the Malukas in Indonesia, not equally
00:24:07 ►
rich in hallucinogenic flora? No one can answer this question, but certainly Mesoamerica and the
00:24:16 ►
New World seems to be the great home of these things. You notice that I don’t mention any synthetics in the list. This is because I would
00:24:28 ►
sort of like to peel away the vision-producing plants from the whole stromundang of the of the drug problem and the drug issue which is a whole other kettle of
00:24:50 ►
fish and has to do with the fates of nations and trillion dollars scamola and
00:24:57 ►
who knows what else I I prefer the organic hallucinogens and recommend them to other people
00:25:09 ►
because I think their long history of shamanic usage
00:25:14 ►
is the first seal of approval that you must look for.
00:25:22 ►
I mean, if these things have been used for thousands of years then
00:25:26 ►
you can be fairly confident that they do not cause tumors or miscarriages or that this
00:25:35 ►
has because nature is far richer in exotic and poisonous and mutagenic and psychoactive chemicals than the human pharmacopoeia. I mean many
00:25:47 ►
things are avoided. There are many potential hallucinogens that are not
00:25:53 ►
utilized by human beings so there has been a certain trial-and-error
00:25:59 ►
selectivity applied to these things. I think it’s important to confine oneself to
00:26:08 ►
compounds which are least insulting to the physical brain, not because the
00:26:15 ►
physical brain has anything to do with the mind particularly, but because it
00:26:20 ►
certainly has to do with the metabolic end state of indoles.
00:26:27 ►
And so things which are alien to the brain should probably not be introduced into it.
00:26:35 ►
One way of judging how long a relationship between a human population and a plant has been in place is to see how benign
00:26:47 ►
the compound is in human metabolism and if you take some plant and your knees
00:26:55 ►
are feeling rubbery three days later or your eyes aren’t in focus 48 hours later
00:27:03 ►
then this is not a benign compound this is not a
00:27:07 ►
compound where there has been a smooth hand in glove fit with the human user
00:27:15 ►
this is why to my mind the tryptamines are so interesting and why another
00:27:22 ►
reason why one I just thought of that I argue
00:27:26 ►
for the mushroom as the primary hallucinogen involved in human origins
00:27:32 ►
because these things bear a weird resemblance to human neurochemistry the
00:27:40 ►
human brain and indeed all nervous systems run on 5-hydroxytryptamine serotonin.
00:27:49 ►
NN-dimethyltryptamine is the hallucinogenic compound of this Amazonian complex
00:27:59 ►
is the most powerful of all hallucinogens in the human system
00:28:04 ►
and yet clears your
00:28:06 ►
system in a matter of minutes. This argues for a great antiquity of the
00:28:15 ►
relationship between these things. So then having discussed options, it would remain, it seems, to discuss techniques,
00:28:28 ►
since it’s almost what Huxley called a gratuitous grace.
00:28:33 ►
All conditions for success can be present, and one can still fail.
00:28:41 ►
Although not if all conditions for success are present
00:28:45 ►
and one does it over and over again
00:28:47 ►
maybe there’s a temporal variable there
00:28:52 ►
I’m not sure
00:28:54 ►
but technique to me is a kind of
00:28:59 ►
I’m reluctant to talk about it
00:29:01 ►
because it seems so obvious to me
00:29:03 ►
what good technique is.
00:29:06 ►
I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention.
00:29:11 ►
It’s basically the good technique.
00:29:14 ►
And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.
00:29:21 ►
And then sit down, shut up, pay attention.
00:29:24 ►
feeling comfortable and then sit down shut up pay attention
00:29:36 ►
it’s something which happens behind the eyelids it is not eudetic hallucination although it begins
00:29:42 ►
like eudetic hallucination i’ve been talking about this kind of stuff now for about 10 years publicly like this and one of the major things
00:29:47 ►
the major conceptual and linguistic problem to get over is to actually convey to people
00:29:55 ►
what’s being talked about because probably i would assume 95 percent of the people in this room have something under their belt which they call drug experience.
00:30:09 ►
But did you know that yours is different from everybody else’s?
00:30:14 ►
And that these things range from, you know, mild tingling in the feet to, you know, language fails and the thing to put across is the reality of
00:30:31 ►
the presence of this thing and this is the importance in talking to a group
00:30:36 ►
with an interest in transpersonal psychology. The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer
00:30:47 ►
but facing the answer
00:30:50 ►
The answer has been found. It just happens to lie on the wrong side of the fence of
00:30:57 ►
social toleration and legality
00:31:01 ►
And so we’re just forced into this strange little war dance where everybody knows that psychedelics
00:31:10 ►
are the most powerful instrument for the study of the mind conceivable and yet uh you know a lot of
00:31:19 ►
people are still ratomorphically involved in the academic and university system,
00:31:27 ►
trying to ignore the fact that the tool has been placed in our hands.
00:31:32 ►
Like the 16th century, when the telescope was invented,
00:31:36 ►
we have proven that we are not large enough to take the tool into our own hands
00:31:41 ►
without a social and intellectual transformation and i think it
00:31:48 ►
must begin in the field of psychology by acknowledging that if if what we are involved
00:31:57 ►
in if what this paradigm transform is is the archaic revival and that we really can create a caring,
00:32:06 ►
refeminized, eco-sensitive, global world
00:32:11 ►
by going back to these very, very old models,
00:32:17 ►
then it isn’t going to be possible to do it
00:32:20 ►
on the strength of political exhortation and rap alone. It’s going to have to rest
00:32:27 ►
on an experience that just shakes you to your roots, that is real and that is generalized
00:32:37 ►
and that can then be talked about and dissected. We need to acknowledge the depth of our dilemma
00:32:50 ►
about and dissected. We need to acknowledge the depth of our dilemma and the real truth,
00:32:57 ►
I think, that we know about our options out. I mean, we’re playing with half the deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately
00:33:09 ►
send its attention and where it cannot. I mean, it’s a essentially preposterous situation.
00:33:20 ►
It is essentially a civil rights issue, because what we’re talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility.
00:33:30 ►
In fact, not a religious sensibility, the religious sensibility, not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs,
00:33:48 ►
spun out by eunuchs but based on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000 years before the advent of history writing priesthood
00:33:56 ►
crafts and propaganda so it’s a clarion call to recover a birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us,
00:34:09 ►
a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience
00:34:18 ►
that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized,
00:34:35 ►
is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in this mysterious mama matrix which is all around us and which apparently extends to infinity and where our historical
00:34:46 ►
future actually lies. This is the other thing. It is now very clear that
00:34:54 ►
techniques of mind-human interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of manipulative techniques,
00:35:08 ►
all kinds of data storage imaging and retrieval techniques,
00:35:12 ►
all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture.
00:35:28 ►
angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture and the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this and hurrying full tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone as a 100%
00:35:38 ►
believing consumer inside some kind of beige-furnished fascism
00:35:45 ►
that won’t even raise a ripple.
00:35:49 ►
So the shamanic response in this situation, I think,
00:36:02 ►
is to push the art pedal through the floor. This is
00:36:07 ►
again one of the primary functions of shamanism and the function that is
00:36:13 ►
tremendously synergized by the psychedelics. They are in fact, if as I
00:36:20 ►
spoke of them earlier, pheromones which dissolve the male ego, then they are also
00:36:26 ►
pheromones which synergize the human imagination, cause us to connect and reconnect the contents
00:36:36 ►
of the collective mind in ever more architectonic, implausible, and yet self-fulfilling ways.
00:36:45 ►
I really think that the only escape from the trap
00:36:53 ►
which post-industrial, male-dominated, politically manipulative,
00:37:01 ►
drug-running, urban technocracy has in store for us.
00:37:08 ►
The only escape is a forward escape,
00:37:13 ►
a kind of rushing past it and brushing it aside
00:37:17 ►
by virtue of an immense expansion of unpredictable creativity.
00:37:26 ►
But what shamanizing means in the ordinary folkloric level is healing.
00:37:33 ►
And the art function is somewhat in the shadow.
00:37:38 ►
But in the face of the need for a planetary healing,
00:37:47 ►
need for a planetary healing the art making function of the shaman is going to stand front and center because what this art making function is is
00:37:53 ►
generating a new guiding image of ourselves this is why it relates so
00:38:01 ►
fundamentally to psychology we need a new paradigmatic image that can take us
00:38:08 ►
forward through the narrow neck of historical forces that we can feel impeding and resisting
00:38:17 ►
this more expansive, more at ease, more human, more caring dimension that is insisting on being born.
00:38:30 ►
And so in terms of political obligation, in terms of reforming and trying to save the soul of psychology,
00:38:39 ►
in terms of trying to goose along, connecting up the end of history with the beginning of
00:38:45 ►
history all of this impels us I think to look at shamanism as the paradigmatic
00:38:54 ►
model to take its technique seriously even those which challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary.
00:39:07 ►
Because if we don’t do that, as I said, we’re not playing with a full deck.
00:39:14 ►
You know, years and years ago, before the term psychedelic was settled on,
00:39:20 ►
there was just a phenomenological description.
00:39:23 ►
These things were called consciousness-expanding drugs.
00:39:28 ►
Well, I think that’s a very good term.
00:39:32 ►
Think about our dilemma on this planet.
00:39:37 ►
If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future
00:39:47 ►
What kind of future is it going to be?
00:39:54 ►
Now to my mind, but the psychedelic position
00:39:59 ►
is most fundamentally threatening when fully logically thought out
00:40:06 ►
because it is an anti-drug position.
00:40:12 ►
And make no mistake about it, the issue is drug.
00:40:16 ►
How drugged shall you be?
00:40:19 ►
Or, to put it another way, consciousness.
00:40:22 ►
How conscious shall you be?
00:40:25 ►
Who shall be conscious?
00:40:28 ►
Who shall be unconscious?
00:40:31 ►
And imagine if the Japanese had won World War II,
00:40:39 ►
taken over America, and introduced an insidious drug
00:40:43 ►
which caused the average American to spend six and a half hours a day
00:40:49 ►
consuming enemy propaganda
00:40:52 ►
But this is what was done not by the Japanese by ourselves. This is television
00:40:58 ►
six and a half hours a day
00:41:03 ►
Average that’s the average so there must be people out there hooked on 24
00:41:08 ►
hours a day or i visit people in l.a who have one set on in every room so they’re racking up a lot
00:41:14 ►
of time for the rest of it uh you see what is needed is an operational awareness of what we mean by drug.
00:41:27 ►
A drug is something which causes unexamined, obsessive, habituated behavior.
00:41:37 ►
You don’t examine your behavior, you just do it.
00:41:41 ►
You do it obsessively, you let nothing get in the way of it.
00:41:53 ►
This is the kind of life we’re being sold on every level. To watch, to consume, to buy.
00:41:57 ►
The psychedelic thing is off in this tiny corner, never mentioned. And yes, it represents the only counter flow
00:42:08 ►
toward a tendency to just leave people in designer states of consciousness. Not their designers,
00:42:17 ►
but the designers of Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, so forth and so on. This is really happening. I mean, it’s only a matter of how tight
00:42:29 ►
you draw the metaphor that you realize, you know, I’ve been coming and going from Los Angeles
00:42:35 ►
recently a lot. And when the plane swings out over the eastern part of the city. Looking down, it’s like looking at a printed circuit. All these
00:42:49 ►
curved driveways and cul-de-sacs with the same little modules installed on each end of them.
00:42:55 ►
And you realize, you know, that as long as the Reader’s Digest stays subscribed to and the TV stays on.
00:43:06 ►
These are all interchangeable parts.
00:43:08 ►
This is this nightmarish thing which McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw,
00:43:14 ►
the creation of the public.
00:43:16 ►
The public has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit
00:43:25 ►
which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized.
00:43:31 ►
This is the ultimate consequence…
00:43:34 ►
This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.
00:43:55 ►
This is what ended partnership.
00:43:58 ►
This is what ended balance between the sexes.
00:44:03 ►
This is what set us on the long slide we can now
00:44:07 ►
examine the options available and put in place archaic options which will restore
00:44:18 ►
this balance and to the good credit of people like Dick Schultes and Gordon Watson and Albert Hoffman,
00:44:26 ►
we have, in this century, taken into our hands the tools, the information, and the means to do this.
00:44:36 ►
But psychology, there had better not be a Nuremberg, because not enough people have stood up for this. People have contented themselves
00:44:47 ►
with ratomorphism for 25 years when they knew in their hearts that it was wrong.
00:44:56 ►
Feeling guilty, I’ll say.
00:45:04 ►
You could cheer to show that it wasn’t you
00:45:06 ►
so now i think uh you know the culture crisis grows ever more uh intense the stakes rise
00:45:21 ►
ever higher if there were ever a time to be heard and be counted and try and
00:45:27 ►
clarify thinking on these issues it would be now because uh you know there is a major attack
00:45:38 ►
on the bill of rights underway in the guise of a so-called drug bill and somehow the drug
00:45:48 ►
issue is even more frightening than communism even more insidious McCarthy
00:45:54 ►
told America that communism was under the bed he was wrong Ronald Reagan and
00:46:00 ►
George Bush tell America that drugs are in the living room and they’re
00:46:05 ►
right it is here it is real it is the hydrogen bomb of the third world and the
00:46:13 ►
quality of rhetoric the quality of rhetoric emanating from therapists and
00:46:21 ►
psychologists and psychoanalysts is going to have to
00:46:25 ►
radically improve or we are going to have happen to us what happened to
00:46:30 ►
genetics in the Soviet Union we’re going to be like centralized we’re going to be
00:46:35 ►
made lily-white and all opportunity for exploring this dimension is going to be
00:46:42 ►
closed off almost as a footnote to the suppression of
00:46:46 ►
these synthetic poisonous narcotics which are mostly dealt by governments anyway but the psychedelic
00:46:55 ►
issue as i said it’s a civil rights issue it’s a civil liberties issue The reason women couldn’t be given the vote in the 19th century,
00:47:07 ►
there was a very simple, overpowering reason that was always given.
00:47:13 ►
It would destroy society.
00:47:16 ►
And that’s the reason given.
00:47:19 ►
This was also the reason why the king could not give up a divine right,
00:47:23 ►
the right of consanguinity.
00:47:25 ►
Chaos would result and this is why we’re told drugs cannot be legalized because
00:47:32 ►
society would disintegrate. This is just nonsense. Most societies have always
00:47:38 ►
operated in the light of various habits based on plants. The whole history of mankind could be written
00:47:49 ►
as a series of made and broken relationships with plants.
00:47:55 ►
Think about the influence of tobacco on mercantilism in 17th and 18th century Europe.
00:48:02 ►
Think about the influence of coffee on the modern office
00:48:05 ►
worker, or the way the British influenced opium policy in the Far East to rule China,
00:48:12 ►
or the way the CIA used heroin in the American ghettos in the 1960s to choke off black dissent
00:48:19 ►
and black dissatisfaction with the war. History is about these plant relationships. They can be
00:48:28 ►
raised into consciousness, integrated into social policy, and used to create a more caring,
00:48:37 ►
meaningful world, or they can be denied the way sexuality was denied until the force of the work of Freud and others
00:48:45 ►
just made it impossible to maintain the fiction any longer, this choice of how
00:48:52 ►
quickly we develop into a mature community able to address this issue is
00:48:59 ►
entirely with us, I think. And certainly people like Stan Grof and others have worked
00:49:06 ►
valiantly to keep
00:49:08 ►
this kind of thing alive.
00:49:10 ►
But my God, you can count
00:49:12 ►
them on the fingers of one hand.
00:49:16 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:49:18 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:49:20 ►
one thought at a time.
00:49:23 ►
Well,
00:49:24 ►
fortunately, today there are many more scientists and doctors investigating psychedelic
00:49:29 ►
substances than I have time to list right now.
00:49:32 ►
At least things have been improving in that area, as well as in regards to the legalization
00:49:37 ►
of cannabis.
00:49:38 ►
However, as Terrence just said, our moment is now, and so let’s press on, my friends.
00:49:44 ►
Now, after I sign off, I’m going to play one more thing for you.
00:49:48 ►
It’s a song that Queer Ninja once told me had more impact on his early life than any other piece of music.
00:49:55 ►
The song is Small Town Boy by Bronski Beat, and someday I’ll tell you the story about it that he told me.
00:50:01 ►
But right now, it’s music that we need to hear.
00:50:04 ►
And I’m going to let the ninja himself introduce it.
00:50:07 ►
Kind of, at least.
00:50:08 ►
You see, I’ve taken a short soundbite
00:50:10 ►
from his normal introduction
00:50:11 ►
to his Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast,
00:50:14 ►
and I’m inserting it here
00:50:16 ►
so that we can remember how wonderful we felt
00:50:18 ►
when one of the ninja’s new podcasts arrived.
00:50:21 ►
And we heard that laughing voice once again.
00:50:26 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
00:50:27 ►
from cyberdelic space
00:50:29 ►
sail on queer ninja
00:50:31 ►
sail on dear friend Easy, man. This is Queer Ninja.
00:50:54 ►
And you are listening to a very special resurrected sounds of worldwide weed. Thank you. We own it a little by the case Alone on a platform
00:52:06 ►
The wind and the rain
00:52:07 ►
On a sad, lonely face
00:52:13 ►
The farmer will never understand
00:52:21 ►
Why he had to leave
00:52:24 ►
But the answers you seek I don’t know. Run away, run away, run away, run away, run away.
00:52:51 ►
Run away, run away, run away, run away, run away.
00:53:00 ►
You pushed around and kicked around, I was the only boy.
00:53:07 ►
You were the one that they talk about Right down where they put you down And the others, they would try
00:53:11 ►
They’d love to make you cry
00:53:14 ►
But you never got to land
00:53:18 ►
Just to your soul
00:53:20 ►
No, you never got to
00:53:25 ►
That’s just to yourself
00:53:27 ►
Run away, turn away, run away
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Turn away, run away
00:53:34 ►
Run away, turn away, run away
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Turn away, run away
00:53:41 ►
Oh, I’m crying
00:53:43 ►
Run away, turn away, run away Run away, run away
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Run away, run away
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Run away, run away
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Run away, run away Bye. my
00:54:59 ►
Even a morning with everything you own And a little black case
00:55:02 ►
Alone on a platform
00:55:04 ►
The wind and the rain on the sand Bye. run away turn away run away run away
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turn away
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run away
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turn away
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run away
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run away
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turn away
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run away
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turn away
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run away
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run away.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d.d