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656 - Damer and McKenna Discuss Covid-19

Sep 01, 2020, 56 min read

Program Notes

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Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Dennis McKenna

Date this lecture was recorded: April 4, 2020

Bruce Damer and Dennis McKenna engage in a spirited conversation for a tribute to Dennis’ brother, Terence. This conversation was recorded on April 4th, 2020 at an online event held during the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic. This tribute to Terence marked the 20th anniversary of his death, on April 3, 2000, a day which we have come to call “Terence Day” or perhaps more fun for everyone: “International Boundary Dissolution Day”.

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

00:00:23 ►

salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:28 ►

As I was about to record this introduction just now, however,

00:00:34 ►

I realized that what I was thinking would be a good title for this podcast was actually a little misleading.

00:00:39 ►

I was going to title it, Dahmer, McKenna, and COVID-19.

00:00:45 ►

But after I read it, I realized that somebody might think that Bruce and Dennis had caught the virus.

00:00:48 ►

But, they haven’t.

00:00:55 ►

However, if you know where Bruce lives, then you have most likely been following the news of the wildfires in Northern California.

00:01:00 ►

The good news is that his farm, Ancient Oaks, was spared from the fires.

00:01:05 ►

The bad news is that, well, it could be a week or more until Bruce will be allowed to return to his property. In the meantime, he’d planned on posting a new program on his

00:01:10 ►

Levity Zone podcast, but now it would have to be delayed. So he asked if I would post it here in

00:01:16 ►

the salon since, well, we share a lot of the same listeners. And by the way, if you’re new to the

00:01:22 ►

salon, you should know that had it not been for Bruce Dahmer, these podcasts from the salon would have ended a long time ago.

00:01:29 ►

You see, I did my first few podcasts, well, just to learn how the technology worked.

00:01:35 ►

I never intended on doing this for what has now been over 15 years.

00:01:39 ►

But after I had a few programs out, Bruce called me and said to meet him in Santa Cruz where Ralph Abraham lived.

00:01:46 ►

He told me that Ralph was willing to turn over all of his trialogue tapes for me to play in the salon.

00:01:52 ►

And from that beginning, well, the salon was launched.

00:01:56 ►

So a big thank you from me and from all of our fellow salonners goes out to you, Bruce.

00:02:01 ►

Now, here is what Bruce told me about this conversation that he had with Dennis

00:02:06 ►

McKenna, and after listening to it just now, I’m here to tell you that there’s a lot more to it

00:02:12 ►

than can be said in just a few words. In fact, it was so much like a Terrence McKenna talk that

00:02:17 ►

I’m going to go back and listen to it again to discover what I missed when I was thinking about

00:02:22 ►

something one of them had said. Anyway,

00:02:25 ►

here’s how Bruce suggested that I introduce this talk. Bruce Dahmer and Dennis McKenna

00:02:31 ►

engage in a spirited conversation for a tribute to Dennis’s brother, Terrence. The conversation

00:02:37 ►

was recorded on April 4, 2020, at an online event held during the early phases of the COVID-19 epidemic.

00:02:46 ►

This tribute to Terrence marked the 20th anniversary of his death on April 3, 2000,

00:02:51 ►

a day which we have come to call Terrence Day, or perhaps more fun for everyone,

00:02:56 ►

International Boundary Dissolution Day.

00:03:00 ►

Bruce has spent the past 20 years taking powerful questions and ideas forward, from novelty to the singularity, to pandemics and our evolutionary response,

00:03:11 ►

to our future in the universe, many of which emerged from his late 90s conversations with Terrence.

00:03:18 ►

Before he passed, Terrence asked Bruce to keep telling the story, but tell your own story.

00:03:27 ►

Listen to this conversation then to see how it all turned out, including the cosmic wiggle and how we have all helped to keep the

00:03:33 ►

psychedelic pilot light lit. This is a deep appreciation to Terrence for doing all of that

00:03:39 ►

and so much more. End quote. Although Bruce didn’t have the opportunity to edit this conversation

00:03:46 ►

himself, I nonetheless didn’t feel like I should be the one to make editorial changes.

00:03:52 ►

So we’re going to listen to their conversation as it happened, beginning with the

00:03:56 ►

conversation picking up somewhat after they had already begun talking.

00:04:07 ►

Yeah, so Terrence and I were introduced in 97.

00:04:16 ►

We had numerous conversations and emails, and we kind of then decided to somehow merge efforts. He was interested in cyberspace.

00:04:19 ►

You know, he had read enough Omni magazine articles and things like that,

00:04:26 ►

enough Omni magazine articles and things like that. And he felt that cyberspace was a powerful medium, not only for knowledge and human interaction, but some kind of mycelial network.

00:04:34 ►

And he was talking about it a lot. What I did was we tried to arrange for him to come to our

00:04:40 ►

Avatars conference. That didn’t work out out what he did was he came to the house here

00:04:47 ►

to ancient oaks farm with ralph abraham and finn i think on the day of finn’s 20th birthday

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and i sat him down in front of a big screen right in the room over here and introduced him to

00:05:05 ►

over here and introduced him to a new kind of cyberspace,

00:05:10 ►

virtual worlds with avatars, people embodied visually.

00:05:14 ►

And they were actually the no body people that Terence used to say was under your bed.

00:05:18 ►

And he was kind of gobsmacked about it,

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enough that we decided to do the all chemical virtual powwow experiment,

00:05:29 ►

sort of another experiment like the experiment at La Charrera. But really, it was a practical

00:05:35 ►

experiment for him to see whether cyberspace could convey the psychedelic experience.

00:05:50 ►

the psychedelic experience, late 90s, low res, 3D worlds. Could it really communicate that feeling,

00:05:59 ►

the sense of cyberspace? So we did it. We went to his house in 1999, and we did the alchemical virtual powwow in active worlds. And the can find it it’s a video on youtube called

00:06:07 ►

terence mckenna on the natch being an avatar with finn and me and christy and it’s a tremendous

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little piece uh from his house in hawaii and it it worked to the extent that I asked Terrence, how did this compare?

00:06:26 ►

How did this DMT-inflected world and this hyperboreal gate that everyone went through to enter it, how did it compare with DMT?

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And he replied in a perfect Terrence-ism, it’s not unlike DMT.

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Did he think that this system could supplant psychedelics?

00:06:52 ►

Well, that was his fascination.

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You know, we were tunneled in over that satellite dish from his house.

00:07:01 ►

And we were in a virtual world.

00:07:04 ►

We were also in a, I’d say, an altered state.

00:07:08 ►

So they are related. They really are related. And we talked late into the night about that

00:07:15 ►

and novelty and machine intelligence and the eschaton and singularities.

00:07:22 ►

And that was right in the critical period when Terrence was ill.

00:07:26 ►

So he probably had bigger fish to fry in some ways.

00:07:29 ►

What happened for the listeners is, well, Jim and I were at Terrence’s house.

00:07:37 ►

And one of the things that Jim said about Terrence was, oh, my God, he doesn’t look

00:07:42 ►

good.

00:07:43 ►

He’s ashen faced. He’s not looking well compared to a year

00:07:50 ►

ago. Terrence actually commented to us that I’m having dreams I can’t explain. They’re so weird.

00:07:58 ►

They’re so strange. And we thought, wow, you know, if Terrence is having dreams that are disturbing to him, then something is going on.

00:08:08 ►

And it was perhaps the early indication of the tumor that was about to erupt.

00:08:15 ►

So about two months after we were there, he had the seizure.

00:08:20 ►

And Christy took him off the mountain and the whole cycle began.

00:08:25 ►

We were all invited and we realized this could be the goodbye for Terrence, for us to say goodbye.

00:08:35 ►

Everyone came, Alex and Allison, Robert Venosa and Martina, Tom Robbins, the writer.

00:08:44 ►

It was a tremendous group.

00:08:46 ►

Constance Demby shipped her space base by ocean,

00:08:50 ►

and it was a tremendous meeting.

00:08:52 ►

At one point, Terrence commented,

00:08:55 ►

posthumous glory, that’s where the action is.

00:08:59 ►

Yes, YouTube didn’t exist when he passed on,

00:09:04 ►

and yet when it did come on, he’s kind of achieved a second, I wouldn’t call it life, but there’s certainly an active presence on the Internet thanks to YouTube.

00:09:16 ►

You know, I mean, Lorenzo Haggerty, I don’t know if he’s on today, but he mentioned last night he has an enormous archive of Terrence’s material from

00:09:26 ►

doing psychedelics to law for so many years. So Terrence is very much part of the cultural

00:09:33 ►

conversation still. The difference is that a lot has happened since he more or less left the stage.

00:09:41 ►

You know, when he died, we were at the end of the millennium and the end of the 20th century.

00:09:46 ►

You know, he didn’t quite make it to the 21st century, but so much of what he talked about and

00:09:53 ►

anticipated was about the future, about what was going to happen. What do you think his perspective

00:09:59 ►

would be now, Bruce, especially that the 21st century is turning out to be pretty grim in a lot of ways.

00:10:10 ►

In some ways, I don’t really agree that it’s turned out to be grim.

00:10:16 ►

I think that there’s so much that is good going on, but it’s overshadowed by the grim narrative, which is a really dangerous thing. Terrence would

00:10:29 ►

have identified something very, very clearly about this day that I think that we’re getting a strong

00:10:37 ►

look at with the COVID-19. Terrence used to say, why are we led by the least among us? Being the least competent, the least conscious,

00:10:51 ►

the least present, the least heart empathic or caring, the least mentally capable, why are we

00:10:59 ►

led by these people? So why is this happening, Bruce? Why is the body politic unable to elect

00:11:08 ►

competent leaders? I mean, why is it so dysfunctional that government is actually an

00:11:14 ►

obstacle to solving some of these problems? You can’t just get rid of government because that’s

00:11:20 ►

the only thing that’s holding anything together. I mean, we’re in a fine mess.

00:11:25 ►

All of these things are coming together in such a way that, you know,

00:11:30 ►

the COVID virus, as we said last night, is, you know,

00:11:34 ►

about as benign a pandemic as it could be in terms of its overall impact.

00:11:40 ►

And yet it’s shutting down global commerce.

00:11:44 ►

It’s shutting down, you know, what holds the world together, transportation, supply chains, all of this.

00:11:51 ►

Is this a message from Gaia saying, basically, look how easy it is to completely disable all your systems?

00:12:00 ►

Yeah, this is very humbling.

00:12:02 ►

What do we do about it?

00:12:03 ►

I’ve been doing a practice that I call realming.

00:12:08 ►

And I started this when I was a little kid, where my consciousness goes through space and time.

00:12:15 ►

One of the things it did was go into the solar system to figure out how to gain access to that in the century.

00:12:23 ►

Another thing is it went back to the origin of life to

00:12:26 ►

try to figure out how we emerged. It smears out through time. Starting about 30 years ago,

00:12:34 ►

I started to see these waves in the 2020s and 2030s, this kind of crazy dynamic. The reason I bought this property here, this farm here, was to prepare for

00:12:46 ►

those crazy waves and to establish a solid base. I stopped listening to news media. I don’t

00:12:55 ►

mainline all that cultural anxious content because I needed to be super clear to be able to see and not carried by the waves, but watching the storm from the prow of the ship or whatever.

00:13:10 ►

As a result, I think that I can get downloads on this thing.

00:13:16 ►

About two years ago, I thought pandemics are coming and they’re going to be like the Spanish flu.

00:13:24 ►

Pandemics are coming and they’re going to be like the Spanish flu.

00:13:36 ►

And we even spun a company out from campus to create a small interfering RNA to prepare to create a universal blocker for viral pandemics. And that’s ongoing. And I’m talking to investors to try to get that accelerated.

00:13:41 ►

But the second thing that happened when COVID was breaking out,

00:13:46 ►

I saw an image. Think of your hair like here. I saw a comb going through hair over and over again.

00:13:55 ►

And I realized this was Gaia or the homeostatic system of the planet doing its natural thing to come back to health and homeostasis,

00:14:08 ►

to start to call out the impact of an overpopulated species. It almost has an intelligence to it.

00:14:17 ►

If you look at all of life as being in one mycelial grid, one intelligence. If you look at life as a single entity, it is going to move,

00:14:28 ►

if it has a stomachache, it’s going to move toward solving the stomachache, which means

00:14:34 ►

excavation. The whole of Gaia may be an internetworked system, and human beings themselves may represent an internetworked superorganism at this point.

00:14:47 ►

This combing through of COVID does several things. Trim our population, but it will trim our demand.

00:14:56 ►

It will trim our number of trips we’re taking, restaurants we’re going to, stuff are orbiting online. It will focus on being with each other, reestablishing eye-to-eye contact,

00:15:10 ►

getting out of this hyper-driven, performative, too much information,

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bring the noise level down.

00:15:20 ►

Guys take a breath and look at each other and it’s a wake-up so it i think that the covid

00:15:27 ►

is a master teacher and it it’s going to be painful covid19 will yield to covid21 and covid24

00:15:38 ►

and all the mutations and the things that will keep coming. There’s going to be wave upon wave of these things

00:15:45 ►

and it’s going to reshape us. And to your point originally, I think it’s going to create a distaste

00:15:54 ►

for the kind of leadership, this sort of extremist leadership backed by fake news and

00:16:02 ►

basically lying, public lying, because people need facts if they’re going

00:16:07 ►

to survive. If a country or a state in the U.S. fell under the ideological influence that said,

00:16:14 ►

well, everyone go out and party and 30% of the population dies, they’re going to lose that ideology pretty fast. It’s Darwinian natural selection

00:16:26 ►

at the species level, at the memetic level and the genetic level to bring the planet and us

00:16:35 ►

into homeostasis. And as callous and cold as it sounds to say it, if 200 million people die,

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as it sounds to say it, if 200 million people die,

00:16:49 ►

that’s a tiny fraction of the population, unfortunately.

00:16:54 ►

You know, and these, now the next pandemic could be much worse and we’ll bring out,

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you know, we’ll take out much higher parts of the,

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you know, portion of the population.

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This is not an outcome that we like to think about

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because we are the species that’s being culled.

00:17:09 ►

But, you know, I mean, Gaia is not sentimental.

00:17:14 ►

What do you do, Bruce?

00:17:16 ►

I mean, you and I are supposed to be people

00:17:17 ►

that are broadcasting a positive message here.

00:17:22 ►

But sometimes I think it’s very hard to do that and not deliberately being

00:17:28 ►

deceptive. I mean, truth is hard. To address your first question, I think that we will go back to

00:17:35 ►

some semblance of normal, and then the metabolic body of humans will start to expect to come back to where it was, right? And it will charge up,

00:17:48 ►

but with less, less veracity. You know, the air travel will come up about 30% and then

00:17:56 ►

people will sort of come back into it. And then if we’re hit again, if there’s an eruption again,

00:18:02 ►

as there was in 1919, with the Spanish flu, it kept erupting

00:18:06 ►

all over the world. My grandmother’s family, a lot of them died in Ladner, BC, by a 1919 eruption.

00:18:16 ►

Then it will shape us again. It’s like, oh, you thought it was safe to go back in the water,

00:18:24 ►

You thought it was safe to go back in the water, but it isn’t.

00:18:29 ►

And then the evolutionary shaping can start.

00:18:39 ►

Viral pandemics are the chosen method to slow the metabolic rate, the rate of consumption.

00:18:51 ►

If you go back to 1980, I think I saw a statistic that in the United States, there was only about 50 percent of the built up retail and restaurants that you have in 2020. But the population is only

00:19:08 ►

about 25% more or so. So all of this was built. And people feel they need it. I mean, they go and

00:19:18 ►

they buy more expensive houses, they buy all this stuff, and they get into deeper debt.

00:19:24 ►

buy more expensive houses, they buy all this stuff and they get into deeper debt.

00:19:30 ►

But back when I was a kid in the 60s, we didn’t go to restaurants at all.

00:19:32 ►

I mean, my mother made everything at home.

00:19:35 ►

So our impact was low.

00:19:39 ►

So what if we did lose 50% of the retail?

00:19:40 ►

50%. And what if we lost 70% of the stuff that is being shipped from China that we don’t really

00:19:47 ►

need? It ends up in landfills. That would be a major follow-on effect for sustainability.

00:19:55 ►

And so perhaps this is the most intelligent, gentlest way to step us off that ledge, you know, because if there’s less demand in the economy,

00:20:07 ►

there’s less reason to burn more of the Amazon and raise more cattle for more hamburgers for more

00:20:14 ►

fast food or whatever you name it. Lower the metabolic rate and you lower the gas emissions

00:20:21 ►

into the atmosphere, as we’re seeing. How do you deal with all the people who are losing their livelihood?

00:20:28 ►

How are we going to take care of the people most at risk?

00:20:33 ►

You know, it requires a change in perspective.

00:20:35 ►

It requires we reintroduce, you know, the notion of compassion into society.

00:20:42 ►

We’re a society that has a serious compassion deficit.

00:20:46 ►

I have a suggestion that it may not matter what leadership does,

00:20:52 ►

that this thing is underway.

00:20:54 ►

So what’s happening here on the farm, here in Ancient Oaks Farm,

00:21:00 ►

people assembled when this thing started.

00:21:04 ►

We just planted a large vegetable garden

00:21:06 ►

out there just literally the seeds went in because it just started raining and what you’re going to

00:21:12 ►

see as you’ve seen the trend in the bay area and also the millennial generation they can’t afford

00:21:19 ►

all the consumerism they don’t have job security. So they live communally. And here at Wildflower,

00:21:28 ►

at the farm here, we’re building a community. We’re going to have half a dozen or eight or

00:21:34 ►

nine people living here. No single family homes. I mean, those are disappearing. Those are going

00:21:41 ►

on the way out. We’re living collectively. When you live

00:21:45 ►

collectively and you buy healthier foods collectively, you grow your food, you share

00:21:52 ►

in finance, everything, you’re much healthier and you’re much more sustainable. So if someone’s out

00:21:59 ►

of a job, others can help. Others are making dinners for them. It’s a new way to live. And yet, it was the old way we lived back in the 1930s. And we lived in communal houses. We lived in villages. That produced robust, sustainable and healthy lifestyles. And this whole separation into the consumer in their box,

00:22:27 ►

working for the corporation in a box,

00:22:30 ►

to do something virtual called your retirement planning,

00:22:36 ►

such that you go to heaven.

00:22:38 ►

You know, when the Temple of Leucis was destroyed,

00:22:41 ►

this is the system that was introduced by the apostolic church, right?

00:22:46 ►

Pay your tithes, and then you get the access to the kingdom of heaven. That’s perhaps a myth

00:22:53 ►

and a lifestyle that’s going to go away because the millennial and iGen generations,

00:23:02 ►

they’re not going to have, they’re not going to be investing in the stock market and

00:23:06 ►

mutual funds and all this this kind of nonsense, because that may be also deflated. So the

00:23:13 ►

institutional investors have lost half their wealth and they’ve lost it permanently.

00:23:18 ►

So their political power is shaky. And you see a new society rising, communal living, group living, using the tools

00:23:29 ►

invented right here in the Bay Area, all this fantastic social networking, using the sharing

00:23:35 ►

economy, and building a new society from the bottom up. And it just pushes the old one off. And it’s already underway. This is underway here and many places.

00:23:48 ►

And I think that comments are raising that issue.

00:23:52 ►

And that political power comes from those who can create wealth.

00:23:57 ►

And I was on a cruise about five years ago called Summit at Sea, where there were at

00:24:03 ►

least $300 billion in private wealth.

00:24:07 ►

The founders of Uber and Google and all were there. And I realized when standing on the deck

00:24:12 ►

of this huge ship, we were watching Edward Snowden on a jumbotron. And everyone in that audience

00:24:20 ►

agreed and supported what Edward was saying. And I realized this is the new power.

00:24:26 ►

This is the new political power rising out of the roots of Silicon Valley and creative communities.

00:24:33 ►

You see the old power, the people who decided Snowden was bad, rather than that he was creating

00:24:40 ►

transparency and trying to liberate us. those people are threatened by this new rising power

00:24:47 ►

that is coming from wealth creators who created cyberspace

00:24:51 ►

and are reinventing transportation, energy, everything.

00:24:56 ►

And it’s just really a matter of time before the new rising wealth

00:25:02 ►

plus the new way of living.

00:25:05 ►

And they talk about hipsters, hippies, hackers, right,

00:25:10 ►

are freaking taking over.

00:25:12 ►

I see that as a huge positive thing.

00:25:15 ►

And we’re on this crowdcast platform because of hackers, hippies,

00:25:22 ►

and hipsters who created a new medium that the entire world now depends upon.

00:25:28 ►

Guess who has controlling the levers behind the curtain right now?

00:25:33 ►

And I think if we acknowledge that, don’t pay much heed to the old guard because they’re not serving us.

00:25:41 ►

We say we have the power.

00:25:46 ►

because they’re not serving us. We say we have the power. And psychedelics coming into the culture now is a powerful tool of, from hippies to hackers that help make all this. It’s a hipster tool too.

00:25:57 ►

This is our medicine. This is our elixir. This is going to transform the freaking world. You know,

00:26:03 ►

it started with marijuana. This is sort of bringing the freaking world. You know, it started with marijuana.

00:26:05 ►

This is sort of bringing the conversation back to the subject Terrence loves so much.

00:26:10 ►

It’s all coming to pass.

00:26:13 ►

We’ve always anticipated this.

00:26:14 ►

We always thought psychedelics will be the catalyst that wakes up the world.

00:26:20 ►

And what we have to get out from under is 2,000 years of devaluation of nature, you know, what has been shoved down our throat in the guise of the Abrahamic religions, which is basically an excuse to devalue nature, to approach it as a commodity, something that we exploit.

00:26:40 ►

Nature is bitch-slapping us right now and saying, hey, wait a minute, you’re forgetting

00:26:46 ►

who’s boss here. Nature is the boss. And it’s demonstrating that very clearly and certainly

00:26:53 ►

not as brutally as it might, you know, but that’s a necessary wake-up call. I hope you’re right that

00:27:00 ►

as we develop these new social paradigms, these new frameworks for living together,

00:27:06 ►

I guess you could call it, living communally, consuming less, everyone supports everyone,

00:27:12 ►

the idea that if you don’t have a job, if you don’t go to the work every morning and work in

00:27:17 ►

a cubicle, that you’re somehow not a worthy human being. When you have a more holistic community, there’s a role for everyone.

00:27:26 ►

And there’s a more, you know, room for compassion. And because everyone is faced with the same

00:27:33 ►

challenge. And so, you know, we can have empathy. You know, I mean, I mean, I think a lot of our

00:27:40 ►

problem is that there is not enough, enough empathy in the world. And it’s almost as though to be empathetic with someone is denounced, you know.

00:27:49 ►

And maybe this is more the American mindset than other places, like everyone for themselves.

00:27:57 ►

You know, we’ve always had this preoccupation with individualism in the state.

00:28:02 ►

That’s really shifting now because I’m in touch with all the Silicon Valley ventures.

00:28:08 ►

I do healing work.

00:28:11 ►

I’m in an energy healing and awakening school

00:28:14 ►

that has two venture capital people.

00:28:18 ►

They’re in the healing school with us.

00:28:21 ►

They’re experienced.

00:28:23 ►

They’re really awake. They’re really present. And they’re

00:28:28 ►

pulling the levers of power because they decide on what billions of dollars go into new ventures.

00:28:36 ►

And so as those people become more heart-centered, I’ve watched this over five years. One of

00:28:42 ►

my dear friends in this luminous awareness school that I’ve been in for four or five years, he has transformed. solutions. Beyond ideologies, how humans roll and will roll in the future comes from how they

00:29:09 ►

are feeling down here, how the experiences they had as babies, as five-year-olds, as 10-year-olds,

00:29:19 ►

as 15-year-olds shaped them and their lineage, their cultural lineage, familial lineage going back.

00:29:28 ►

And what we have learned to do in this time is to unravel the OS of humans.

00:29:36 ►

Eckhart Tolle gave us the first glimpse in the early 90s when he talked about the pain body, what he called unconscious.

00:29:44 ►

And they couldn’t believe

00:29:46 ►

that they were taken over. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. That set off a whole inquiry that has merged

00:29:52 ►

neuroscience, pharmacopoeia, the energy and healing arts, the energy healing for real,

00:30:01 ►

which involves attunement and tracking, not fantasy, not ideation in the new age.

00:30:07 ►

This stuff is working. I’m literally, day to day, I watch it. And I watch my own little inner

00:30:15 ►

kindergarten, my little wounded parts running around. And when I see Donald Trump, I see his wounded little boy in there in multiple parts. He reacts based upon

00:30:28 ►

the touching of those painful parts that were created by his father as he was a little kid.

00:30:37 ►

And so I have compassion for the man because he suffers. He’s dissociated all the time. He’s acting out. It’s crazy.

00:30:48 ►

But I have compassion because Donald Trump has the chance in his lifetime of release from that

00:30:56 ►

torment, from those cycling voices, from that me, me, me thing, and from those triggers. He has a chance, just like everyone in the world has a chance,

00:31:07 ►

is released from that wheel of samsara, if you will.

00:31:11 ►

And we’re nailing this.

00:31:13 ►

We’re figuring out how humans boot up.

00:31:16 ►

Plant medicines are a really important tool, and so is Vipassana,

00:31:22 ►

and so is breath work, and so is Wim Hof, and so is extreme sports,

00:31:28 ►

and so is better diet, because our gut biome drives our psychology so much. And we’re learning

00:31:35 ►

that the gut biome is attached to disease and how you feel and how you react emotionally.

00:31:48 ►

feel and how you react emotionally. It’s incredible. So as we enter the 2020s, we have all the tools we need to help create generation upon generation of healthier and healthier and

00:31:56 ►

saner and more compassionate human beings. We can do this thing. We can do it if we as techies, hackers, hippies, and hipsters say, this is our project.

00:32:10 ►

It is the healed human.

00:32:12 ►

It is the high-functioning, beautiful, whimsical human who is not triggered all the time, who’s not triggered by the culture.

00:32:24 ►

It’s not triggered all the time who’s not triggered by the culture it’s not triggered

00:32:25 ►

by fake news they’re they are wise but they’re super present and they’re fun to be around and

00:32:32 ►

they’re really brilliant at leadership and at science and everything we can do this if we

00:32:39 ►

own it as a project and this is this is the work I’m taking on in the world

00:32:45 ►

is that we can, we can create that that beautiful world we

00:32:50 ►

that our hearts knows is possible. And to quote Charles

00:32:55 ►

Eisenstein, we can do it, we have all the tools and we have

00:32:58 ►

smartphones and we we have this and we’re we’ve never been

00:33:03 ►

better prepared. But we just have to take ownership.

00:33:07 ►

This is our project.

00:33:09 ►

The scenario that you describe is going to take decades, possibly generations, to really come into flower, right?

00:33:18 ►

The path toward planetary disaster and total collapse of all the systems is, is,

00:33:26 ►

is it’s on a fast track.

00:33:28 ►

It’s accelerating.

00:33:29 ►

So my first question is,

00:33:34 ►

do we have time enough to evolve into this or will,

00:33:36 ►

will events overtake us? And despite the best of intentions,

00:33:38 ►

will we be unable to do it?

00:33:41 ►

This is my concern about,

00:33:43 ►

about plant medicines too,

00:33:47 ►

you know, apart from how we’re going to make those sustainable and so on, those problems can be addressed. But can you get

00:33:52 ►

enough people to plant medicines in time to get enough people to wake up to make a difference?

00:33:59 ►

So that’s one question. The other thing is the entrenched power structures, the power hegemony right now that’s working under the old model, they’re not just going to quietly, you know, say, okay, we screwed it up.

00:34:15 ►

Now you guys can take it over and fix it.

00:34:17 ►

And they will not go quietly or peacefully.

00:34:21 ►

How do we deal with those two things?

00:34:26 ►

or peacefully, how do we deal with those two things, the acceleration and the reluctance of the entrenched power structures to yield the floor, as it were?

00:34:30 ►

If I realm forward into, say, the 2060s and 2070s, when I’ll be 100 and you’ll be like

00:34:38 ►

300 years old, what I’m seeing in the 60s and 70s, because the projects that I undertook, like how did we

00:34:48 ►

begin as life on this earth? And therefore, how does evolution work? That was a 90 year project

00:34:56 ►

I took on when I was 14. And then when I was 16, I took on the project of how do we expand Gaia herself into the solar system

00:35:07 ►

and extend life and build more worlds for her, duplicate the cell, the supercell of

00:35:14 ►

Earth and make new ones.

00:35:16 ►

The technical solutions I presented in 2015 in two TEDx talks listeners can see on damer.com. And those are underway. And I’m counting on those

00:35:28 ►

two things help lift human beings into a new sense of hope. In the origin of life, what we may have

00:35:36 ►

shown is that human beings and all of life did not start as competing individuals duking it out, the first simple protocells four

00:35:47 ►

billion years ago. It started as a communal complex of simple protocells in collaboration.

00:35:55 ►

And we may be able to show this in the 2020s. And it’s as powerful a cultural idea as Albert Einstein’s proof of general relativity in 1919 that created

00:36:08 ►

this revolution of modernism in the 1920s. This powerful idea that we emerged from a common

00:36:17 ►

community, not from competing ancestors. And we can show this chemically in the lab.

00:36:26 ►

competing ancestors. And we can show this chemically in the lab. That’s that one.

00:36:33 ►

To your original question, I think there’s a bigger plan for us and that there’s some script writer somewhere who said, this is the ultimate Hollywood thriller. Human beings and their

00:36:41 ►

relationship with their world as they grow up and shape up and stand up

00:36:47 ►

and get wise, it’s a Hollywood thriller. And there’s going to be a car chase at the end.

00:36:54 ►

It’s always going to come down to that stressful, dramatic thing that is all the way evolution always works so if you if you look at a gazelle

00:37:07 ►

being chased by a cheetah for example it’s dramatic there’s initially the the gazelle

00:37:13 ►

makes some progress and then there’s a moment of decision the gazelle slips or the cheetah

00:37:22 ►

pauses somehow and either the gazelle is captured or the cheetah runs out of

00:37:28 ►

energy, always that knife edge. And that’s what I think we’re headed toward. We’re headed toward

00:37:34 ►

where we stack up all the things that can help us survive that cheetah chase and all the things

00:37:41 ►

that we’re facing. And we have awareness, burning rainforests,

00:37:45 ►

consumption, crazy weather patterns, pandemics.

00:37:48 ►

And then we have all these tools here.

00:37:50 ►

And we write a script that says,

00:37:53 ►

we’re going to, when the stress gets intense,

00:37:57 ►

we’re going to punch through because we have all the tools.

00:37:59 ►

We have awareness, Hollywood thriller ending.

00:38:03 ►

And we have several more decades. I mean, I think we have

00:38:07 ►

the entire run rate of this century, because I don’t see the signs of really severe climate change

00:38:14 ►

yet. The second to the second question is the power structures. Well, what I’ve been doing in the last year or so is working with an admiral from the Pentagon, who I met in Qatar in the Middle East about a year and a quarter ago.

00:38:32 ►

And what we cooked up was something called Climate Mitigation Associates, a huge global effort involving trillions of dollars of finance to transform, to protect infrastructure, that’s

00:38:48 ►

what attracts companies and cities, but to transform economics. And every time we’ve put

00:38:55 ►

the CMA vision, which we call climate moonshots, every time we’ve put it out there? I put it to bankers. I put it to generals and admirals. I put it to government.

00:39:09 ►

I’ve put this vision out to Silicon Valley VC and our whole group has. There’s a huge uptake on this,

00:39:18 ►

like how do we sign on for climate moonshots and the CMA? How do we, and it’s across the board. If we create an

00:39:26 ►

other, if we create separation, say there is a mysterious power structure out there that will not,

00:39:33 ►

they have these secret meetings and they have their own, their own Zoom sessions now, and

00:39:38 ►

they’re trying to do their own thing. I don’t think that exists. I think it’s individuals

00:39:44 ►

and their little stovepipes trying to get their kids through college and trying to do their own thing. I don’t think that exists. I think it’s individuals and their little stove

00:39:45 ►

pipes trying to get their kids through college and trying to do their best. And if we create

00:39:52 ►

this ogre, if we create the bogeyman that there is such a power structure and it’s all so

00:39:58 ►

intelligent, I think we’re deluding ourselves. You know, for the last 20 years, I’ve moved in

00:40:03 ►

and out of all those communities and I find human beings. That’s what I find there is human beings. Engagement,

00:40:10 ►

engagement in the common vision. If we have to spend 15 trillion, we’ve got 15 trillion. It’s

00:40:18 ►

all locked up in these ridiculous funds that are underperforming. So you can change your language and talk to a finance

00:40:26 ►

person. You can change your language again and talk to somebody who’s heading a corporation,

00:40:32 ►

change your language again and talk to the hippie, hipster, you know, techie. And they’ll all just

00:40:39 ►

say, yeah, we want this beautiful experiment in the human experiment at Earth, at Terra, to continue.

00:40:48 ►

And we’re listening.

00:40:50 ►

They’re looking for leadership, too.

00:40:52 ►

They’re looking for clear, compassionate, and logical, not made-up stuff, like real engineering solutions is what they’re looking for.

00:41:04 ►

You know, again, I think this is a beautiful vision,

00:41:07 ►

and I hope this is where it’s evolving.

00:41:09 ►

I’m not sure that radical climate change is that far away.

00:41:15 ►

You know, it depends on who you believe, what the projections are.

00:41:20 ►

Maybe we have till 2050.

00:41:22 ►

Maybe we have till 2100.

00:41:24 ►

I don’t know. But it’s going to get worse

00:41:28 ►

before it gets better. As far as the political changes, I guess we’re experiencing that right

00:41:34 ►

now. I mean, we’re in a place now where, at least in the States, because of the virus and all that

00:41:42 ►

that’s affected, the electoral system is apparently completely dysfunctional.

00:41:47 ►

It will be very interesting to see how it turns out.

00:41:52 ►

I’m afraid it may turn out not in a way that most of us would want to see it,

00:41:58 ►

you know, because this is an opportunity for essentially to retreat into authoritarianism you know

00:42:08 ►

this seems to be a trend in many parts of the world you can see if government is going to

00:42:14 ►

you know solve some of these problems they have to have centralized power to do it

00:42:21 ►

maybe assuming that they have some element of compassion.

00:42:26 ►

But how do you see us avoiding that?

00:42:28 ►

I think that what we have to also realize is the authoritarianism of the 1930s, for

00:42:37 ►

example, where there really was an effective secret police system in many countries leading up to World War II.

00:42:47 ►

I lived in Czechoslovakia starting in 1990, just as the Berlin Wall had fallen.

00:42:54 ►

I went to Eastern Europe. I went to Yugoslavia during the war in Yugoslavia.

00:43:00 ►

And I saw what authoritarianism looked like from its immediate aftermath.

00:43:07 ►

And we are nowhere near that system.

00:43:10 ►

In fact, we don’t have a referent for that type of authoritarian system.

00:43:18 ►

And the people that I knew, I employed people who had been through what was called Absurdistan after the Prague Spring.

00:43:28 ►

And they said, basically, you can’t do this.

00:43:32 ►

You couldn’t do this again because everybody carries in their hand a supercomputer that is a window on the world.

00:43:40 ►

Exoterianism needs absolute control of information.

00:43:44 ►

And the Soviet Union typewriters were illegal, for example, for the public or copiers of any kind.

00:43:52 ►

The cat is out of the bag on that one.

00:43:55 ►

We are interconnected.

00:43:57 ►

What you see in the world today is would-be authoritarian figures have a very limited range of power, very limited ability to move. In fact,

00:44:09 ►

Dennis, you might recall in our fireside chat at Wilkatika, I had had that experience with the

00:44:16 ►

lakuma tree one night. It was a beautiful download vision of a dance with her. I think I might have shared it the next day. I showed her

00:44:26 ►

what psychopathy was in the human soul. What is the psychopathic response? And I danced out to

00:44:35 ►

the end of one of the shadows of the limbs. I said, and it’s getting less intense. The psychopaths, their teeth are kind of a little bit worn down compared to Putin in Russia or Trump in America compared to predecessors like Stalin.

00:44:54 ►

Their power is being contained by this massive network of a sharing network, which in the origin of life field, we call the progenote. The progenote

00:45:05 ►

is the network system we think led to the booting up of the living world 4 billion years ago. And

00:45:12 ►

the progenote is coming into its dominance. It’s saying everything’s inter-network now,

00:45:19 ►

and it’s moving toward health. So if there’s local issues, those are dissolved and moved as this thing

00:45:27 ►

rolls. In a way, anyone in this room could take one of the elixirs and go into a state,

00:45:36 ►

and I know you’ve done this, Dennis, because the plant showed you one night how photosynthesis worked and how food was made.

00:45:46 ►

We could all use the doorway available to us to talk to Lacuma trees, to talk to Gaia herself, the whole thing, to show Gaia where this thing is now.

00:46:00 ►

Ask for intelligent guidance and ask for help from Gaia.

00:46:06 ►

Clues, little clues.

00:46:09 ►

Paul Stamets, for example, one of the clues,

00:46:12 ►

learning one day that if bees ate these mycelial secretions,

00:46:18 ►

it helped them deal with colony collapse disorder.

00:46:22 ►

You know, that was an important clue. And perhaps we can reverse

00:46:27 ►

the collapse of the bee population. It’s his intimate connection with that fungal

00:46:34 ►

intelligence of Gaia, a lifetime of work that led to this clue that Gaia is helping us deal with this

00:46:43 ►

stress on bee populations.

00:46:45 ►

So it’s listening.

00:46:47 ►

And in a way, to go back to Terrence,

00:46:50 ►

is to say, is to open oneself,

00:46:53 ►

even beyond what Terrence would say,

00:46:56 ►

to open our hearts and our minds

00:46:59 ►

to the totality of what is,

00:47:03 ►

of Gaia, of the complexity of human beings, of the human heart, of the human trauma, help us forward.

00:47:11 ►

And I call this the field, this huge interconnected intelligence that arranges all the synchronicities that seem to govern our lives.

00:47:20 ►

I talk to this field all the time.

00:47:23 ►

And I say, hey, buddy, can you help us out?

00:47:26 ►

Can you help guide us?

00:47:28 ►

Send us more synchrony.

00:47:29 ►

Shape probability.

00:47:31 ►

Get us through.

00:47:32 ►

We’re not alone.

00:47:33 ►

We are not alone.

00:47:34 ►

This field is working for us.

00:47:38 ►

We can reach out to and ask it to help and guide us.

00:47:42 ►

This is inspiring.

00:47:50 ►

So we are, Gaia does have compassion by this perspective. It is actually trying to help us along its most problematic species.

00:47:57 ►

I mean, Gaia must wonder,

00:47:58 ►

geez, I really screwed up when I came up with these monkeys,

00:48:02 ►

but maybe something good could come out of it.

00:48:05 ►

What do you think he would have made of social media, Bruce?

00:48:08 ►

Sitting in his house, watching him on his Mac, on his weird satellite connection,

00:48:16 ►

he was absolutely entranced. Many of you may not know that terence was a hunt and peck typer he used two fingers

00:48:26 ►

it is so crazy that he wrote all these books hunt and peck to to to this is how he this is this guy

00:48:35 ►

i did it there was we had a mailing list that he was on he was so uh attached to it

00:48:42 ►

uh i don’t think he was ever on the well on forums and stuff,

00:48:46 ►

but the guy was, he was a natural hermit.

00:48:50 ►

This was comfortable for him.

00:48:52 ►

So seeing him upstairs in the library on virtual worlds,

00:48:56 ►

on chats, on lists,

00:48:58 ►

I think he would have swum like a fish in it.

00:49:01 ►

It would have allowed him the freedom to stay at home

00:49:04 ►

and not travel as much because he was getting totally burned out in it. It would have allowed him the freedom to stay at home and not travel as much

00:49:05 ►

because he was getting totally burned out on it. When we arrived at Captain Cook, he said,

00:49:13 ►

I am so tired. I am so tired. All this travel and stuff. I think he would have just embraced it.

00:49:21 ►

I wanted to bring this up because Terrence and I had practically an all-night

00:49:26 ►

conversation on this. It started out with him saying, and there’s actually recordings of this

00:49:32 ►

online, he says, you’re not one of those people who believes that suddenly one day technology,

00:49:40 ►

software will wake up, become super intelligent, and have no more use for us.

00:49:46 ►

Because he kind of sensed that I’m a hard, I’m a hardcore reductionist. I need to see

00:49:52 ►

evidence. I’m an engineer. I build a lot of software. I know how fallible it is. And he

00:49:59 ►

knew that I was not in that whole thing. So I spent the next hour explaining to him

00:50:06 ►

the difference between computing systems

00:50:08 ►

and natural systems.

00:50:10 ►

And the computing systems were brittle,

00:50:12 ►

usually single threaded,

00:50:14 ►

usually extremely one dimensional or two dimensional.

00:50:19 ►

They didn’t use genes.

00:50:21 ►

They weren’t subject to the laws of evolution.

00:50:24 ►

And they did everything

00:50:26 ►

in what’s known as a predictable method, not using what’s called stochastics, where things

00:50:33 ►

are kind of random. That a glass of water does more computation than all the Macs, like

00:50:41 ►

Terence’s Mac, in the world. And that the medium of life is vastly different

00:50:47 ►

from the medium of computing.

00:50:50 ►

And that I spent the next 20 years working on this,

00:50:54 ►

working on what is novelty?

00:50:56 ►

How do things can crest into novelty?

00:50:59 ►

We talked about that night.

00:51:01 ►

Worked it out.

00:51:01 ►

We worked out a formula by 2011.

00:51:04 ►

We found a formula called the

00:51:07 ►

Cosmic Wiggle in honor of Terrence’s cosmic giggle. We worked it out. And because of that

00:51:15 ►

conversation that night, but what I brought to Terrence was, Terrence, there is no way that

00:51:21 ►

there’s going to be a technological singularity.

00:51:26 ►

No one understands consciousness.

00:51:28 ►

No one understands the complexity of biology.

00:51:31 ►

It’s a sci-fi idea, and we shouldn’t be worried about it.

00:51:36 ►

We should focus on different things, which is how do these systems serve humans in synergy,

00:51:43 ►

in marvelous synergy with human beings for our survival and

00:51:47 ►

our joy and our entertainment, things like this. And by about two in the morning, Terrence said,

00:51:54 ►

well, because he also asked me about Y2K. And I said, Terrence, nothing is going to happen in Y2K.

00:52:01 ►

It’s a big overblown thing. And nothing’s going to happen in 2012 either.

00:52:07 ►

And Terrence kind of sat back and took another toke and said, well, I hope they don’t take it

00:52:15 ►

all too literally. You know, it was his shtick. It was his thing. It got butts in seats and

00:52:22 ►

everything. And it was just kind of like, it’s just, it’s entertainment.

00:52:28 ►

And, but, you know, and nothing did happen at Y2K and nothing happened at 2012.

00:52:33 ►

And I think we got cured of that.

00:52:35 ►

You contributed quite significantly to the collapse of Terrence’s worldview. What I can say is that conversation that night of Terrence saying,

00:52:47 ►

what is novelty? How do things get together and form more complex things and not break apart?

00:52:55 ►

And because of that conversation, because of Terrence, in the last time that I saw him,

00:53:05 ►

in the last time that I saw him, Terrence said to me,

00:53:10 ►

keep telling the story, keep telling the story, but tell your own story.

00:53:13 ►

And I took that to heart that Terrence had asked me to carry this work on

00:53:18 ►

these questions. And as a result of that,

00:53:22 ►

it resulted in, in 2017, a scientific revolution.

00:53:29 ►

This is our work on the cover of Scientific American.

00:53:34 ►

And I have really Terence to thank because he passed in April 3rd, 2000.

00:53:41 ►

And then I said, you know, I’m going to continue to do this.

00:53:46 ►

And we did a massive computational research called the Evolution Grid. And then we turned

00:53:52 ►

it into chemistry when we realized computers couldn’t help us solve the mystery of the

00:53:57 ►

origin of life. We found that we found a cycle in nature, wet, dry cycling and hot spring pools.

00:54:04 ►

Found a cycle in nature, wet, dry cycling in hot spring pools.

00:54:07 ►

We went to those pools and introduced the reagents,

00:54:12 ►

reagents that can come from space and form protocells. And we drove it all the way to the point where we saw novelty.

00:54:17 ►

Novelty emerging from basic chemicals,

00:54:20 ►

cycled in a system with energy, stepping up in the cosmic wiggle. And we could see that

00:54:27 ►

this is how life can get started. My God, I mean, now we’re mining this vein for more goodies.

00:54:34 ►

You know, we’re finding that, wow, life has three components. It has wiggling together,

00:54:41 ►

which is collaboration. It has memory writing and reading because we’re

00:54:46 ►

seeing the first genetic polymers possible in the system. And it has this kind of overall field

00:54:53 ►

effect that Rupert Sheldrake will talk about in two weeks called the morphogenetic field.

00:54:59 ►

And he and I have talked about this now, how the origin of life is the origin of this field.

00:55:07 ►

So we’re in huge pay dirt.

00:55:09 ►

If Terrence was around today, he would be absolutely fascinated that we decoded this and we’re proving it in hardcore science.

00:55:22 ►

But it has impacts in philosophy and even spiritual pursuits.

00:55:27 ►

And we are carrying forward Terrence’s questions, his burning questions. And to me, it’s very

00:55:35 ►

gratifying that to have had the short amount of interaction with your brother. I feel so grateful

00:55:42 ►

to have encountered him. I miss him. We were going to go

00:55:46 ►

on tour together. We were going to go to Esalen in 2000, and we were going to co-present.

00:55:54 ►

But I’m faithful to his request. And also how to merge the magic state, how to merge the magic with the mundane, if you will,

00:56:08 ►

and how to bring the Chalcedony jewels back from the machine elves to make them manifest in the world.

00:56:18 ►

That’s the trick, right?

00:56:20 ►

And with the origin of life work, we’ve done that.

00:56:27 ►

and with the origin of life work we’ve done that we we’ve solved some of the major major questions of the order of life in the space of magic with a directed approach and brought that and made it

00:56:35 ►

work in the physical world and said thank you thank you for being a being a space that we can go and do magic and make it real.

00:56:47 ►

And so Terrence, I think his legacy was to keep the pilot light running for 20 years on this thing

00:56:57 ►

and to tell the tale so well that it attracted people into magic, back to magic, like me.

00:57:06 ►

You know, he enabled my first journey.

00:57:09 ►

Then we could compare notes.

00:57:11 ►

And what a great hyperboreal gatekeeper he was.

00:57:16 ►

And so I just wanted to, if we’re concluding,

00:57:19 ►

just send out a huge wave of gratitude to this man,

00:57:23 ►

despite his foibles and his faults, you know,

00:57:26 ►

and we all have them. But thank you. Thank you for telling the tale in such a joisty and silvery way

00:57:35 ►

of the magic to attract us all to make a signpost to have us all go and seek out the magic,

00:57:45 ►

that there is more than the mundane,

00:57:47 ►

that we can blend them together and make beautiful existences.

00:57:53 ►

You know, Terence remarked to me,

00:57:56 ►

actually I think he made a remark in public,

00:57:58 ►

about the relationship to the mushrooms

00:58:01 ►

and bringing the mushrooms, you know, into society.

00:58:06 ►

He said, we’re involved in a symbiotic relationship with something that’s disguised itself as an alien invasion,

00:58:16 ►

so as not to alarm us.

00:58:18 ►

In some way, his greatest contribution was he gave people permission to play with their imagination, you know,

00:58:28 ►

and he gave people permission to think outside the box because he did it so well

00:58:33 ►

and he was so good at conveying that to people.

00:58:36 ►

And I think, you know, a lot of his specific contributions, they’re interesting the time wave and you know it was very interesting the

00:58:48 ►

bringing the mushrooms into society is certainly something that you know i would say that was a

00:58:53 ►

collaboration between the two of us so if you want to put your marker down and say what are the most

00:58:59 ►

significant things you could look at that i think the most significant thing is that Terrence

00:59:05 ►

enjoyed playing with ideas, you know, and he gave other people permission to play with ideas,

00:59:12 ►

you know, and I think he reached a certain point in his life toward the end of the 80s, early 90s,

00:59:19 ►

where he was having some doubts, some of the ideas that he’d kind of hitched his wagon to. I think people misunderstand

00:59:27 ►

that he took these ideas totally seriously. I don’t think he did. I think they were idea

00:59:34 ►

complexes that he liked to play with. He didn’t necessarily say this is true. He’s just saying

00:59:41 ►

maybe it’s true, or wouldn’t it be fun if it were true i think his playful attitude

00:59:47 ►

toward manipulating these concepts and just throwing it out there not that you’re saying

00:59:55 ►

this is absolute revealed truth but rather here’s an interesting idea what do you think

01:00:01 ►

and then inviting feedback so he gave permission to people to

01:00:05 ►

do that, to learn how to use their imagination. When I hear him start a rap, you know, you just,

01:00:14 ►

you sit back and this man, however he did it, he would take you into a space.

01:00:23 ►

it, he would take you into a space.

01:00:26 ►

He would take you into a new world.

01:00:31 ►

And then he would cycle back magically.

01:00:36 ►

He would come back to the original thing and then he would, he would trip it more and he would cycle it more and cycle it more and cycle it more.

01:00:40 ►

He was an absolute master, an absolute master. I mean, having studied James Joyce and all these absolute masters,

01:00:51 ►

for me, it’s just the high art of his skill and whatever material it was,

01:00:59 ►

just as Dennis is saying, he could be reading from the telephone book.

01:01:03 ►

saying he could be reading from the telephone book.

01:01:12 ►

And for me, he was my mentor in not only the high quality of the telling and the threading of the story and the circling back,

01:01:15 ►

but of his absolute gentlemanly consideration and care for his listeners,

01:01:24 ►

for his audience, his politeness, his patience for

01:01:28 ►

questions. And the fact that he took every question as though it was the most important

01:01:36 ►

question. He never dismissed anyone. He was such a beautiful gentleman in this world. And he’s an example for us talking heads of how to do it

01:01:50 ►

really right. And I guess it comes from experience because he was quite comfortable putting out,

01:01:56 ►

you know, the craziest notions, right? And yet he did it with such skill that people who were

01:02:04 ►

normally skeptical could hear that and say,

01:02:06 ►

hmm, well, maybe there’s something to that.

01:02:08 ►

Maybe mushrooms are from the stars.

01:02:10 ►

It was because of the way that he presented it, just the way he said it.

01:02:16 ►

Because clearly he’s not crazy.

01:02:19 ►

He’s not a raving lunatic.

01:02:21 ►

He talks in a very calm, focused manner. And then when you get to the next level and focus

01:02:28 ►

on what he’s saying, you’re like, what? What is he saying? You know? And so it’s interesting.

01:02:37 ►

I mean, he’s sometimes called the bard, you know, the bard of psychedelics. And I mean,

01:02:47 ►

you know the bard of psychedelics and i mean and i guess he could make a legitimate claim to that but in some way he’s also the trickster you know he’s the person that makes you

01:02:53 ►

doubt what you think you know that challenges your your assumptions and that was a skill that he had

01:03:00 ►

you’re listening to the psychedelic, where people are changing their lives

01:03:09 ►

one thought at a time. And there you have it. Our dearly beloved psychedelic bard was actually a

01:03:18 ►

trickster. Of course, you already knew that because, well, after all, it was that little twinkle in Terrence’s eye that first caught us.

01:03:27 ►

And for a closing message today, Bruce files this report from his evacuation perch on the top of Skyline Boulevard,

01:03:35 ►

just a few miles from the northern boundary of the CZU complex fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

01:03:41 ►

And I quote,

01:03:42 ►

We are safe. The community of Ancient Oaks Farm evacuated

01:03:47 ►

two weeks ago, and the house where Terrence and I first entered virtual worlds together back in 1998

01:03:53 ►

is still standing, along with the Digibarn Computer Museum, Timothy Leary Archives, and Terrence

01:04:00 ►

McKenna Papers, all surviving. This event marks a transformative one for me and a

01:04:06 ►

new life of commitment to keep telling the story, but an even more powerful story. With the plausible

01:04:13 ►

discovery of our origins, of life itself, we can and must survive and the human experiment will

01:04:20 ►

carry on into the cosmos. End quote. And for now, this is Lorenzo,

01:04:26 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:04:29 ►

Namaste, my friends.

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