Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Gary Smith and Terence McKenna
Today’s program features a collection of short Terence McKenna sound bites that may have some relevance to life during today’s pandemic. Additionally, I have included four brief answers to legal questions by Gary Smith, author of Psychedelia Lex and next week’s guest in our live salon.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And this is going to be a short podcast, but I hope it’s going to answer two questions for you.
00:00:29 ►
Number one, what Terrence McKenna talks do I recommend for somebody who’s never heard him before?
00:00:35 ►
And two, legal questions about drugs.
00:00:38 ►
And that’s what I’m going to cover first.
00:00:40 ►
You see, there’s hardly a month that goes by without somebody asking me for some legal advice
00:00:45 ►
about the war on people who use non-prescription drugs. As you know, I’m still a licensed attorney
00:00:51 ►
in the state of Texas, but I can’t legally practice anywhere else. Of course, simply giving my opinion
00:00:57 ►
about certain laws doesn’t come under the ban for practicing as long as I don’t charge a fee.
00:01:06 ►
come under the ban for practicing as long as I don’t charge a fee. However, the larger issue is that, well, drug laws are extremely complex and they are also constantly changing. Since I no
00:01:12 ►
longer keep up with legal issues like this, my opinions and interpretations aren’t current enough
00:01:17 ►
for me to mention them in public, I don’t think. But we’re in luck. One of our longtime fellow salonners, who is also a lawyer, but who is also currently still practicing,
00:01:29 ►
happens to be a leading expert in drug laws and has written the first true compendium of drug laws around the world.
00:01:36 ►
And he has agreed to join us in our live salon tomorrow night to answer your questions.
00:01:42 ►
So, if you were one of our fellow salonners who wrote to me with a
00:01:45 ►
legal question, well this is your opportunity to ask your question to a practicing attorney,
00:01:50 ►
without getting charged by the way. His name is Gary Smith and his law practice is based in Arizona.
00:01:58 ►
Gary also has a YouTube channel and right now I’m going to play a few excerpts of some answers that he gave to
00:02:05 ►
the burning questions that all of us here in the salon have been wondering about for years.
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Here’s a brief sample of the type of questions I expect Gary will be discussing tomorrow evening.
00:02:17 ►
A viewer wrote in to ask, why are psychedelics illegal?
00:02:23 ►
That’s a great question. I don’t know if anybody knows the answer to it. I wish they did,
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but the truth is it’s really complicated. It’s really complicated. But if you look at the history
00:02:37 ►
of the laws that made psychedelics illegal, you’ll be shocked to find there really wasn’t
00:02:42 ►
a lot of science behind it. It was mostly political.
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The 1970s Controlled Substances Act, which is the primary drug law in the United States,
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well, since 1970, so the last 50 years,
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has dictated what is considered acceptable drugs and what is considered unacceptable drugs.
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And the unacceptable ones show up mostly on Schedule 1, somewhat on Schedule 2, and to get
00:03:07 ►
access to something on Schedule 1 is virtually impossible. You fairly well have to be in an FDA
00:03:13 ►
approved study to access Schedule 1 substances or have an exemption such as a religious exemption.
00:03:19 ►
In the case of peyote churches, for example, they generally have that exemption by religion. Same with the
00:03:26 ►
ayahuasca churches, etc. But if you don’t have that religious exemption and it’s on Schedule 1,
00:03:32 ►
it’s going to be illegal. Anyway, if you look at the history of cannabis, for example, marijuana,
00:03:40 ►
it got on Schedule 1 not because of any science or any legitimate policy reasons.
00:03:48 ►
Rather, it was, and there’s historical record to support this, by the way, I’m not just
00:03:52 ►
hypothecating here, it was put on Schedule 1 because Richard Nixon, former United States
00:03:58 ►
president, wanted to get back at his political foes, and he associated marijuana use with those political
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foes, whom he described in audio tapes recorded in the Oval Office as being hippies and Jews.
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And President Nixon thought that marijuana consumption was something that was predominantly
00:04:18 ►
done by counterculture people and by intellectuals at universities, and he didn’t like either of those groups. So he
00:04:26 ►
decided to make one of their favorite vegetables, kidding, illegal. And as a result, cannabis,
00:04:33 ►
marijuana, whatever you want to call it, has been on Schedule 1 ever since. And it’s similar for
00:04:39 ►
other psychedelic substances. That being said, it is worth pointing out that not everything that is a psychedelic
00:04:45 ►
actually is on Schedule I. There are substances that, for one reason or another, just haven’t
00:04:52 ►
made it onto any scheduling. It’s typically because the DEA doesn’t perceive these other
00:04:59 ►
psychedelics as a significant threat or insignificant interest in the public,
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and thus they don’t get on to the schedules.
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But at any moment, if the DEA felt that it was appropriate to schedule something
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that hasn’t previously been scheduled, they absolutely could.
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So although there might be some psychedelics out there
00:05:19 ►
that technically aren’t illegal right now, they could be.
00:05:23 ►
So be aware of that.
00:05:31 ►
Why can’t my doctor prescribe psychedelics? That’s an excellent question. A very good
00:05:36 ►
question, in fact. The short answer is because they’re illegal. No, no, no, I’m not going to
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leave it there. I’m kidding. Although that is the actual true answer. They’re illegal. No, no, no, I’m not going to leave it there. I’m kidding. Although that is the actual
00:05:45 ►
true answer. They’re illegal. Most psychedelics, not all, but most are considered to be Schedule
00:05:50 ►
1 substances in the United States, as well as in other nations if they’re signatory to the
00:05:56 ►
Psychotropic Substances Treaty. Substances that are on Schedule 1 are forbidden from scripting
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or compounding or consuming or trafficking in or producing,
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et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, if it’s on schedule one, doctors can’t prescribe it,
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pharmacies can’t compound or issue it, and patients can’t consume it. As a result,
00:06:17 ►
doctors don’t write scripts for prescription psychedelics because there aren’t any.
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I’m going to offer you a bonus part two answer though to
00:06:25 ►
that question because it naturally begs the question of, well, then how are people able to
00:06:30 ►
get medical marijuana in states that have medical marijuana programs? Because marijuana is still
00:06:35 ►
schedule one as well. That’s a great question as well, and I’m glad nobody asked that. Should have.
00:06:41 ►
Shame on you. Anyway, the answer to why you can get medical marijuana in medical marijuana states really has nothing to do with your physician.
00:07:06 ►
regulatory scheme in place that requires you to go and get a doctor’s recommendation so that you can qualify to be a patient under your state’s medical marijuana program. Certainly here in my
00:07:11 ►
home state of Arizona, that is true. However, if you look carefully, doctors are not prescribing
00:07:17 ►
marijuana. Far from it. What they’re actually doing is merely recommending it. And here’s the
00:07:23 ►
nuance of distinction that matters. A doctor can’t
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prescribe something that’s illegal, so you’ll never go into a doctor’s office, at least today,
00:07:30 ►
and walk out with a prescription for marijuana unless it’s one of the FDA-approved marijuana
00:07:37 ►
extract drugs such as Marinol or Epidiolex. But if you just wanted straight up flour or a vape or a tincture, you would not be
00:07:48 ►
able to get that from a doctor, not by script and not from a pharmacist, not by compound or purchase.
00:07:55 ►
So how then does a doctor offer a recommendation as opposed to a prescription? It’s really just
00:08:02 ►
about the First Amendment. There’s a central case called Conant v. Walters that stands for the proposition that doctors have First Amendment rights to talk
00:08:11 ►
to their patients, and patients have First Amendment rights to talk to their doctors,
00:08:15 ►
and they can freely discuss any aspect of medical care that they wish. And in that limited sense,
00:08:23 ►
a doctor can recommend cannabis even though they
00:08:26 ►
can’t provide it or provide a means by which to get it. And that’s how doctors today in states
00:08:33 ►
that have medical marijuana programs are able to provide their medical services without running a EA registration or licensure.
00:08:55 ►
A viewer who I’m guessing is a fellow attorney writes in to ask whether or not I am afraid to talk about psychedelics.
00:08:58 ►
Well, I’m doing a show here on that topic, so I don’t think I’m afraid to.
00:09:03 ►
But I guess what they’re really asking is, why am I not afraid to talk about it?
00:09:06 ►
Well, quite simply this, I have First Amendment rights to free speech that permit me to be immune from government intrusion
00:09:14 ►
in what I talk about. So for those of you who maybe don’t know this, lawyers are intensely
00:09:21 ►
regulated. I am a member of at least four different bars, and five actually,
00:09:26 ►
and each one of those separately regulates me. And in the instance of me talking about things
00:09:33 ►
that are illegal, psychedelics are of course for the most part illegal, I’m free to talk about that.
00:09:39 ►
What I’m not free to do ethically is counsel people to actually engage in criminal acts. So you’ll never hear me on the show
00:09:46 ►
telling people, hey, go grow mushrooms or hey, go start up your own little LSD lab. I can’t do that
00:09:55 ►
and I wouldn’t do that. But I’m certainly permitted to talk esoterically about the topic. I can
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certainly talk generally about the legalities or illegalities of doing
00:10:07 ►
exactly that, but I could never counsel a client to go do that. That would be crossing the line.
00:10:13 ►
Now, relative to the topic itself and just general discussion, sure, why wouldn’t I talk about this?
00:10:20 ►
It’s a fascinating topic that I think is going to only increase in public interest,
00:10:26 ►
and I personally believe wholeheartedly in the public health benefits that can be
00:10:32 ►
derived from psychedelics, and I support their further study and exploration.
00:10:44 ►
When considering how to get lawmakers to change laws, you really have to consider that you’re dealing with at least five fingers gripping onto you and not just your local laws.
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And here’s what I mean by that.
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When we’re talking about the regulation of any substance, but obviously this show deals with psychedelics, so we’ll just stick with that
00:11:05 ►
as the example, you’re dealing with five fingers gripping onto you. The five regulatory fingers
00:11:11 ►
are international treaties, federal statutes, federal regulations, state statutes, state
00:11:21 ►
regulations. And if you wanted to have sort of an adjunct sixth finger and be a polydactyl,
00:11:26 ►
you could even add local regulations like zoning ordinances, for example.
00:11:31 ►
So if you really want to have a universal change that will allow for
00:11:36 ►
licit use of psychedelics or illicit psychedelics industry,
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you’re really talking about changing five layers of law.
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It’s bloody difficult. It’s
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bloody expensive. People have been trying for 50 years and it still hasn’t happened in any
00:11:52 ►
significant degree. But I don’t mean to sound dour about that because things are changing
00:11:58 ►
and changing for the positive. We are seeing news almost weekly now of various psychedelic studies being approved, gaining advances, heading into phase three.
00:12:10 ►
And even, I believe, just a couple of days ago, Compass Pathways, based out of Europe, has announced an American IPO to raise funding for their phase three studies on psilocybin mushrooms.
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So it is coming.
00:12:24 ►
Change is slow. And the companies and
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research agencies and private groups that are working right now to change those laws are working
00:12:32 ►
within the structures of those laws. But that being said, there is a whole other path by which
00:12:38 ►
you can change local laws in about 24 out of the 50 states. And that’s called the public initiative. And not every state
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has it, not every state offers it. And you need to understand that public initiatives will permit
00:12:52 ►
you in certain circumstances to change your local law, be it at the state or city level.
00:12:57 ►
But what you do at the local level has virtually, if not totally, zero impact on federal law and federal regulations. So you’ve
00:13:07 ►
got to be prepared and understand if you’re going to undertake a local initiative, and that’s a good
00:13:13 ►
thing quite often. In fact, Oregon’s doing it right now with IP34 to try to get psilocybin mushrooms
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legalized within the state of Oregon. Nothing they do and nothing anybody else does with an initiative
00:13:25 ►
will impact that federal law that still is layered on top, and you’re always going to be beholden to
00:13:30 ►
that federal law. A viewer writes to comment that psychedelics grow naturally, so why do they need
00:13:42 ►
to worry about laws or doctors?
00:13:46 ►
Well, that’s an excellent question. There are many plant and fungi medicines that produce naturally occurring psychedelics that grow around the world.
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In fact, in the instance of, say, psilocybin mushrooms, there are a variety of species that grow all around the world,
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and there are local species depending on where you live.
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all around the world, and there are local species depending on where you live.
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Here in my home state of Arizona, we actually do have at least one species of psilocybin mushroom unique to Arizona that grows in the wild up in the Coconino Forest.
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Now, as for why you need to worry about laws or doctors, etc., if you’re just going foraging,
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the reality is it’s still illegal whether you find it in the wild or try to create it at home.
00:14:27 ►
Illegal is illegal. Where you got it or how you got it most often doesn’t make a difference.
00:14:40 ►
A viewer writes in to ask, can’t I just use psychedelics under religious exemption?
00:14:47 ►
Well, maybe. Are you a member of a religion that uses psychedelics?
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And is that religion acknowledged by appropriate authorities such as the DEA?
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If not, you probably can’t.
00:15:02 ►
But if you are a member of a religion or if you’re inclined to join a religion that already exists that uses psychedelics and has indeed received some level of acknowledgement or approval from a regulatory agency such as the DEA,
00:15:19 ►
then you probably can use psychedelics legally, provided that both federal and state law where you live say you can.
00:15:28 ►
In the instance of peyote, for example, my home state of Arizona has a peyote protection statute
00:15:34 ►
that permits the religious use of peyote and renders the people within the state of Arizona
00:15:39 ►
who engage in that religious use and religious practice, provided it is indeed sincerely held,
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they will be exempt from the criminal statutes that otherwise remain in effect.
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So if you live in a state like that, where there are state statutes that permit your religious use,
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and you, again, belong to a bona fide religious organization that is also federally recognized,
00:16:02 ►
then yes, you can.
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Otherwise, no, you cannot.
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I don’t know about you, but as I was listening to Gary with you just now, I’ve managed to come up
00:16:12 ►
with a whole bunch of additional questions that I’d like to have answered. And my guess is that
00:16:17 ►
you and our other fellow salonners who join us tomorrow evening will be coming up with things
00:16:22 ►
that I haven’t even thought of myself. And by the way, I’ll also be podcasting a recording of tomorrow’s conversation in the salon with Gary for those of you who can’t make it.
00:16:32 ►
As you know, I’ve been doing these live salons for over three years now.
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But until the pandemic, they were only available to those wonderful people on Patreon who are helping me to keep paying the rent.
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wonderful people on Patreon who are helping me to keep paying the rent.
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However, with the pandemic, some of our supporters have wound up in a worse financial situation than I’m in, and they had to quit sending me their $5 each month.
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However, I don’t want to lose touch with these fellow salonners who have fallen on hard times,
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so with the help of several other salonners, we’ve launched the Psychedelic Salon channel
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on Discord,
00:17:06 ►
and each week I post a link to that week’s live salon there. This way you can join these live
00:17:11 ►
salons without having to make a donation, and it’s my intention to keep doing this until the
00:17:16 ►
pandemic is lifted. So if you can join us on Monday nights at 6 30 p.mm. Pacific Time or on Thursdays at 10.30 a.m., which is 6.30 p.m. in London,
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well, just go to psychedelicsalon.com
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and click on the link for our Discord server and join us.
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Even if you want to just listen in and not talk yourself,
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that’s okay.
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I think you’re going to enjoy it.
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By the way, there are almost 700 fellow salonners
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already using our Discord channel,
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and you can always find about 50 or more people online at any given time. It’s a really great place to find the
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others. Now, let’s talk a bit about Terrence McKenna. If you’ve been with us here in the
00:17:56 ►
salon for a while, you already know a lot about Terrence. After all, during the past 15 years,
00:18:01 ►
I’ve podcast over 300 of his talks. But there are still a lot of people
00:18:06 ►
who have never heard of him. And for what it’s worth, in the year 2000, the Utney Reader included
00:18:12 ►
Terrence in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. So just think about
00:18:19 ►
that for a minute. Now, where to begin? Well, I posed this question several times in our live salons, and
00:18:26 ►
basically there have been dozens of recommendations, but I’ve had trouble in trying to
00:18:32 ►
unify them into a single story of some kind. So, well, I just discarded all of the suggestions
00:18:39 ►
that I’ve received, and I came up with my own. Right now, I’m going to play eight short selections
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from several Terrence McKenna talks,
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and when I return, I’ll tell you which podcasts they’re from.
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However, as you listen to them right now,
00:18:53 ►
you may want to keep in mind that these recordings were made 22 years ago
00:18:58 ►
and Terrence died over 20 years ago.
00:19:01 ►
With that in mind, see if you can listen for any words of wisdom from the past that
00:19:06 ►
may still be of benefit to you in this situation that we’re now in.
00:19:12 ►
Well, I talked this morning about how the story of the universe is that information,
00:19:21 ►
which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy,
00:19:28 ►
and that this process, which informs the whole history of the universe on all scales,
00:19:33 ►
chemical, biological, cultural, etc., is accelerating, speeding up.
00:19:40 ►
And it seems as if what wants to happen is the whole cosmos wants to change into information
00:19:48 ►
or put another way in a geometric model all points want to become connected the thing is
00:19:56 ►
achieved through connectivity the path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together. Well, if that’s true, then you can imagine
00:20:07 ►
that there is an ultimate end state of that process.
00:20:12 ►
It’s the moment when every point in the universe
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is connected to every other point in the universe.
00:20:19 ►
And if that’s what the universe is trying to do
00:20:22 ►
to overcome its dissipate state,
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its spread out state,
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and somehow function as a unitary monad,
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then this point does not lie too far ahead of us in time,
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given the acceleration rates of all these technical processes so at least locally so on one level I think there is a
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cultural singularity a cultural so what I mean by that is a place in our
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cultural development where we can’t predict or understand what will happen
00:21:02 ►
to us a kind of flip point, if you want,
00:21:05 ►
or doorway, if you want,
00:21:07 ►
or revelation, if you want.
00:21:09 ►
And it’s built in to the structure of space and time.
00:21:16 ►
It’s that novelty in its emergence
00:21:18 ►
is now operating at such a fine scale
00:21:22 ►
that it’s actually reflected in the lives of individual people.
00:21:27 ►
The human adventure has become the cutting edge of cosmic destiny. But it won’t always be so.
00:21:36 ►
It will actually move through the human domain and into smaller and more rapid and compressed domains of concrescence,
00:21:48 ►
and probably in our lifetimes.
00:21:50 ►
And what will this mean, or what will it look like?
00:21:53 ►
It seems to me it’s just not possible to say,
00:21:57 ►
because we’re too far away from it,
00:21:59 ►
that right now in time we can’t see around the corner.
00:22:04 ►
that right now in time we can’t see around the corner.
00:22:10 ►
We’re summoning strange helpers to our aid. The machines that we had such confidence in controlling
00:22:16 ►
are actually a kind of intellect of some sort
00:22:21 ►
that is alive and with us in the historical continuum and evolving at a far faster
00:22:27 ►
rate than we are. And what all this leads to and how it works is very, very difficult to predict.
00:22:36 ►
And I’m not a paranoid. I think it’s very difficult to predict. I think we wished for transformation.
00:22:46 ►
Western civilization built it into its cultural agenda.
00:22:50 ►
Science delivered far more than we ever dreamed
00:22:53 ►
in terms of understanding of matter and energy and space and time.
00:22:57 ►
And now, under the aegis of market capitalism,
00:23:02 ►
where everything is in a state of furious competition, somebody
00:23:06 ►
is going to put something together that is just going to completely redefine and rewrite
00:23:13 ►
the nature of reality itself. And my bet is it will be some kind of a technology. It could
00:23:21 ►
be a drug. It could be a machine. It would be nice to think that it could be a drug it could be a machine i would be nice to think that it might
00:23:27 ►
be a technique or a teaching but just looking at the history of the human race i’ll bet you it’s
00:23:33 ►
some kind of technology slash drug type thing that is just going to be plugged in to us and
00:23:41 ►
our consciousness and our aspirations and it may already be here it may be the internet
00:23:47 ►
it may be nanotechnology it may be biotechnology and cloning and quantum teleportation and
00:23:57 ►
virtual reality and all the rest of this i mean we are just at the brink of taking these various pieces of the
00:24:06 ►
god-magician puzzle and putting them together and figuring out, well, what can you do? What
00:24:12 ►
do you do if you can do anything? I mean, that’s really the question at the end of history.
00:24:20 ►
Once you have overcome all limitation limitation what is the human agenda
00:24:25 ►
that would do that we think the inside of our heads are all the same but you know when i say
00:24:37 ►
to you that when i smoke dmt it unleashes a niagara of alien. If I had spent the last 30 years building that Niagara of alien beauty
00:24:48 ►
so that you could just strap on the goggles and go,
00:24:52 ►
then we would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going.
00:24:57 ►
And so I really see art as the great searchlight
00:25:03 ►
that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead.
00:25:08 ►
And I think that art is about to get teeth for the first time in human history.
00:25:15 ►
I mean, it’s all very fine scratching on cave walls and film and video and all that,
00:25:21 ►
but it’s always artifice.
00:25:23 ►
and video and all that, but it’s always artifice.
00:25:28 ►
You never are convinced, or only for seconds, that you’re in the presence of reality when you’re in the presence of art.
00:25:32 ►
But we will build art that will literally stand your hair on end.
00:25:37 ►
And the amount of creativity in a single human mind is, as I said,
00:25:43 ►
more than fills all the museums of this planet.
00:25:47 ►
So what we need is to figure out how to get a spigot into that and get this stuff out.
00:25:52 ►
And then, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.
00:26:02 ►
When we actually turn on all the bells and whistles of the historical process
00:26:08 ►
and realize that it is inevitably ramping up
00:26:12 ►
into more and more hypersonic states of self-expression
00:26:17 ►
and that this is what is creating this end-of phenomenon or this eschatological intimation
00:26:26 ►
that now haunts the cultural dialogue.
00:26:31 ►
There is something deep and profound moving in the mass psyche
00:26:36 ►
driven by historical forces long in the process of unfolding,
00:26:41 ►
but now exacerbated and focused by new communications technologies
00:26:48 ►
that are essentially prostheses, extensions of the human mind and body of enormous and
00:26:58 ►
unpredictable power or with unpredictable consequences.
00:27:02 ►
power or with unpredictable consequences.
00:27:15 ►
Well, part of what I’ll say in a larger context is we shouldn’t seek for closure.
00:27:26 ►
We shouldn’t, part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers, just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete
00:27:35 ►
answer. That’s why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity
00:27:47 ►
to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.
00:27:52 ►
These cults, these cultic answers,
00:27:55 ►
always invariably provide a complete set of answers to life’s dilemmas
00:27:59 ►
at the price of being absurd.
00:28:03 ►
But this doesn’t seem to bother people.
00:28:06 ►
So part of what being psychedelic means, I think,
00:28:09 ►
is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
00:28:18 ►
What is the implication for the future of, in this dark hour of complete over-commitment to technology, economic solutions,
00:28:34 ►
rational reductionism, materialism, so forth and so on, in the darkest hour of our commitment
00:28:40 ►
to these things, this news arrives from these repressed aboriginal people
00:28:48 ►
that we have marginalized and humiliated in the process of building our own version of
00:28:57 ►
a global culture.
00:29:13 ►
What we have to deal with in this millennial narrow neck of constricted possibility, where it still feels as though the human race could skid off into the ditch, is we have to deal
00:29:20 ►
with the fact that we have built institutions that do not serve human purposes, but that
00:29:27 ►
are like automata, or golems among us, corporations, religions, cabals, ethnic tribalism, you know.
00:29:38 ►
And these things are like the psychotic architectonics of the unconscious
00:29:45 ►
that the information age is causing to suddenly emerge
00:29:51 ►
for the inspection of those who have eyes to see.
00:29:56 ►
So our humanness is not endangered by our machines.
00:30:03 ►
It’s endangered by these institutional entities.
00:30:10 ►
And the most spectacular and obvious example, of course,
00:30:14 ►
without getting into the whole thing,
00:30:18 ►
is corporate capitalism.
00:30:21 ►
Simply because corporate capitalism has the intelligence of a termite at the organismic
00:30:29 ►
level and all it understands is its its agenda and its agenda is to take cheaply extracted raw
00:30:39 ►
materials and fabricate them into expensive finished products
00:30:45 ►
which are sold to well-heeled markets in the high-tech industrial democracies.
00:30:51 ►
And it can’t propagate that cycle on the closed surface of this planet much longer
00:31:01 ►
without the contradictions becoming unbearable.
00:31:06 ►
But it doesn’t know that.
00:31:09 ►
It has a very low-grade intelligence.
00:31:12 ►
So how we communicate,
00:31:14 ►
we’re all ready to switch on a dime to the new paradigm
00:31:18 ►
if we can just figure it out.
00:31:20 ►
The problem is to switch these enormous dinosaur-like institutions in which we have invested our lives and our economies and our scientific research establishments and our civil hierarchy and so forth and so on.
00:31:46 ►
To the degree that people are psychedelic,
00:31:50 ►
they will be less anxious about what will happen. Because what psychedelics show you is that there is life after history.
00:31:56 ►
There is something outside of culture.
00:31:58 ►
If you don’t know that by one means or another,
00:32:02 ►
then you will define what is happening as the end of the world,
00:32:06 ►
the literal apocalypse, the collapse of everything,
00:32:09 ►
when in fact that’s not what it is.
00:32:11 ►
It’s just the collapse of historical, print-based, cultural models
00:32:18 ►
and models of the self and the psyche.
00:32:21 ►
I embrace it.
00:32:23 ►
I mean, we’re not about to blow out here
00:32:26 ►
or go extinct,
00:32:27 ►
and we never escaped from the yoke of nature.
00:32:37 ►
The question, you know,
00:32:40 ►
capitalism is so triumphant now
00:32:43 ►
that its salvation will probably have to be self-generated.
00:32:48 ►
In other words, it’s not going to come from slave uprisings or a papal insignical.
00:32:56 ►
It’s simply that capitalism is going to have to grow smarter.
00:33:01 ►
And they’re trying to do this.
00:33:06 ►
smarter and they’re trying to do this and once they smarten beyond a certain point they will carry out what is essentially a marxist analysis of their own situation and realize we can’t keep
00:33:14 ►
doing this because the open system of exploitable natural resources that we are assuming doesn’t
00:33:21 ►
exist anymore and we can’t lift everybody to the level of the American
00:33:27 ►
middle class without cutting down every tree and digging every vein of metal on the planet.
00:33:35 ►
Now there are always, as I’ve tried to stress in this weekend, there are always technological
00:33:42 ►
fixes. And it may be that there will be a technological fix for this as well.
00:33:48 ►
One thing we haven’t talked about at all, maybe it’s been mentioned but certainly not unpacked, is nanotechnology is something as mind-boggling as the internet or psychedelic drugs, and it isn we’re on the brink of an entirely new way of making things,
00:34:32 ►
that things can be made from the atoms up in chemical soups,
00:34:38 ►
that everything should be as small as possible. And these are people who have gotten, you know,
00:34:47 ►
1,500 steam engines onto a one-centimeter chip.
00:34:53 ►
The cover of Scientific American a few years ago
00:34:56 ►
had this one-centimeter chip with over 1,500 steam engines on it.
00:35:04 ►
More steam engines than were operating in England at
00:35:07 ►
the height of the age of steam. Now, of course, each one of these steam engines produced one
00:35:13 ►
ten-thousandth of a millinewton of force. Not much, but at the molecular level, enough to kick a tiny molecular gear into action or throw a switch or something like that.
00:35:30 ►
Nanotechnology is coming.
00:35:32 ►
It’s so mind-boggling that they haven’t spent any money on public relations,
00:35:38 ►
in other words, getting the people ready.
00:35:40 ►
So very few people realize how close this is.
00:35:45 ►
I mean, the AI may be off in the mists of time.
00:35:51 ►
Practical nanotechnology is already here.
00:35:56 ►
They make electric motors, 16 of which can fit inside a human hair. And what’s envisioned is a world of aerosol dusts
00:36:07 ►
that are architected machines
00:36:10 ►
that are creeping over our bodies,
00:36:13 ►
through our bloodstream, in our houses,
00:36:16 ►
inside our larger machines.
00:36:19 ►
And everything is made of diamond
00:36:21 ►
because diamond is the easiest material to manipulate at the atomic
00:36:26 ►
level. The holy grail of nanotechnology is something called a matter compiler. A matter
00:36:36 ►
compiler has its nose in a muddy ditch or an ocean estuary or something like that. And it essentially does to matter what
00:36:51 ►
Photoshop 5.0 does to images, anything you want. So what’s being brought in is a kind
00:37:00 ►
of sludge-like raw feed. It could be, in fact, in the nanotechnological future,
00:37:06 ►
the great real estate bonanzas will be toxic dumps
00:37:11 ►
because there you will send the nanotechnologically designed
00:37:16 ►
bacterial machines into the dumps
00:37:19 ►
and they’ll bring out the gold, the platinum,
00:37:22 ►
the phosphorus, the arsenic, atom by atom.
00:37:26 ►
Stack it up for you.
00:37:27 ►
You can have a closed resource cycle based on the standing crop of already extracted metals.
00:37:35 ►
People talk about abandoning agriculture.
00:37:39 ►
Abandoning agriculture because the populations of India and China
00:37:43 ►
will be fed out of matter compilers
00:37:46 ►
that turn seawater directly into rice.
00:37:50 ►
This could be done.
00:37:52 ►
How do we feel about that?
00:37:53 ►
Are we willing to give up agriculture if it means an entirely artificial food cycle for us,
00:38:01 ►
but the restoration of millions of acres of forest and prairie and meadow and
00:38:07 ►
grassland. These kinds of choices lie in the immediate future.
00:38:24 ►
Psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination.
00:38:31 ►
They raise the ante in the historical poker game. They show that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
00:38:36 ►
And we have come to a place of bifurcations, immense choices.
00:38:43 ►
The decisions and the processes that are put in place in the next 20 years
00:38:48 ►
will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and this planet
00:38:54 ►
are made or broken as a cosmic concern.
00:38:59 ►
Well, consciousness is the key.
00:39:02 ►
consciousness is the key.
00:39:10 ►
What is dragging our boat is an absence of consciousness.
00:39:18 ►
We have one foot in angelhood and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape.
00:39:25 ►
And the tension between these two on a global scale is excruciating.
00:39:31 ►
So if psychedelics, if there is one chance in a thousand that they contribute an increased measure of consciousness to this situation,
00:39:37 ►
then they are a precious gift, a resource, an option,
00:39:42 ►
a possibility to be explored.
00:39:44 ►
I don’t advocate these things
00:39:46 ►
because I think it’s a sure thing or a safe path to the eschaton. I advocate them because
00:39:56 ►
they’re the only game in town. You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick,
00:40:02 ►
then the Sermon on the Mount would have been the
00:40:05 ►
turning of the corner. But we have Buddha, we have Christ, we have these examples of
00:40:11 ►
enormously insightful spiritual beings who have delivered their message, and humanity
00:40:17 ►
has continued to flop on the seamy side. So it’s not about an idea. An idea is not sufficient to transform us. It’s about an experience. And this is the only experience I know that in the time given to us, on the scale given to us, we have a hope of actually cutting through the detritus of our historical experience
00:40:50 ►
and building a true human community.
00:40:57 ►
Now, if you would like to follow up on some of those bits of McKenna thinking, well, they
00:41:03 ►
all come from the Valley of Novelty series
00:41:05 ►
that begins with podcast number 27.
00:41:08 ►
The selections are from five talks in that series,
00:41:11 ►
but I’m going to leave it to you to figure out which ones they come from.
00:41:15 ►
Well, I hope to see you tomorrow night,
00:41:17 ►
but for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:41:22 ►
Namaste, my friends.