Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Today’s program features a recording of a morning workshop that Terence McKenna let at the Esalen Institute in August of 1985. As you will hear, it takes place just before their noon lunch break, and there is no lecture per se. Instead it turns into a salon-like atmosphere with no particular topic, other than the then-current concerns about the millinium and the year 2012.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:08 ►
Alpha Shades.
00:00:17 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And as we are in the process of wrapping up 2023,
00:00:28 ►
I hope that it hasn’t been as difficult a year for you as it has been
00:00:31 ►
and continues to be for far too many of our human sisters and brothers.
00:00:36 ►
Let’s see what we can do to make 2024 a big improvement over the past few years.
00:00:41 ►
For my part, I’m going to play an old tape that, in a way, is more of a salon than
00:00:46 ►
a Terrence McKenna lecture. And what I hope you listen for, and then think about, is how the
00:00:53 ►
participants seem to be in a somewhat apocalyptic state of mind. What I find interesting is that
00:00:59 ►
this recording was made in 1985, and that was the year that Bruce Springsteen’s album, Born in the USA,
00:01:06 ►
was released, just to give you a little handle on where you might have been that year. As you’ll see
00:01:11 ►
from the image in the program notes for this podcast, this appears to be tape number two of
00:01:17 ►
an unspecified number of tapes, and handwritten on the label is the word unedited. However, the
00:01:24 ►
only editing that I had to do was to remove some of the scratchy background noise
00:01:28 ►
and amplify all of the voices except for Terrence’s.
00:01:31 ►
I assumed that he was wearing a microphone, and that also picked up the comments from the rest of the room.
00:01:37 ►
Now, the date of this recording is August 19th, 1985,
00:01:41 ►
which is a couple days before the Ralph Abraham recording that we just played
00:01:46 ►
not long ago. And the title for this recording is Shamanism, Alchemy, and the Millennium.
00:01:53 ►
And it was recorded at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. As I said a minute ago,
00:01:59 ►
I was drawn by the concern for the future that I heard in the voices of the participants in this workshop.
00:02:06 ►
Now at the time, 38 years ago, the psychedelic community at large was thinking about the upcoming millennium that would soon be followed by the year 2012.
00:02:16 ►
And in hindsight, all of those concerns and prophecies look a little bit foolish today, but they were all consuming back then.
00:02:24 ►
look a little bit foolish today, but they were all consuming back then.
00:02:32 ►
So it makes me wonder what, if any, of today’s concerns are also going to seem unfounded in 2061,
00:02:35 ►
which is 38 years from now.
00:02:39 ►
My personal opinion, I’m sorry to say, well, it’s somewhat bleak,
00:02:42 ►
but I most likely won’t be here to find out.
00:02:50 ►
And the reason that I say most likely is that the maximum range of human life has been determined to be 122 years.
00:02:54 ►
And if I make it to the max, well, that gets me to 2064.
00:03:01 ►
So there actually is an outside chance of us continuing this conversation 38 years from now.
00:03:06 ►
And now that I’ve gotten my foolishness out of the way, let’s join Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends on a hot August morning at Esalen in 1985.
00:03:16 ►
What do you do? I think that what you do until it happens is there’s a way to help it
00:03:25 ►
and I’m vague on this
00:03:27 ►
but it’s where I’m working
00:03:29 ►
you do something with language
00:03:31 ►
you prepare language to receive it
00:03:35 ►
you build a bassinet
00:03:39 ►
out of language
00:03:40 ►
to receive the alchemical child
00:03:43 ►
and this is what we’re doing out of language to receive the alchemical child.
00:03:47 ►
And this is what we’re doing.
00:03:52 ►
This conversation could not have happened 20 years ago.
00:03:53 ►
Not anywhere.
00:03:58 ►
So that means that we are like summoning the alchemical object
00:04:03 ►
by talking about it. It is becoming more and more inevitable by forming
00:04:08 ►
opinions about it that’s why i have such faith in it because there is a continuous knitting together
00:04:16 ►
around the assumption that it must exist i think things come that’s how things come into existence, through focused expectation.
00:04:28 ►
So we are literally invoking it.
00:04:31 ►
And the way you invoke it is by having the experience through hallucinogens or whatever works for you.
00:04:39 ►
That’s one part of the work.
00:04:41 ►
The other part of the work is the other part of the work, is building a consensus through talk
00:04:45 ►
so that you and I are talking about
00:04:48 ►
why do you think it’s this way, why does time have to end.
00:04:51 ►
And this is the work itself.
00:04:55 ►
That’s the creation of a myth.
00:04:57 ►
Yes. When the myth is perfect, the myth will be real.
00:05:02 ►
I share Cass’ discomfort about sitting around
00:05:06 ►
waiting for the millennium
00:05:07 ►
and dreaming about it.
00:05:09 ►
It sort of forestalls it.
00:05:12 ►
I just have to look out this window
00:05:13 ►
and just think how
00:05:15 ►
timeless that is out there.
00:05:18 ►
How quite evil and
00:05:19 ►
unchanged the cliff is
00:05:21 ►
in that way.
00:05:23 ►
But what about suffering humanity?
00:05:27 ►
What about
00:05:27 ►
the historical dilemma?
00:05:30 ►
You know, I feel so…
00:05:32 ►
Well, you see it as a dilemma. It’s the way it is.
00:05:34 ►
People have always
00:05:35 ►
suffered, and there’s no reason
00:05:37 ►
to suppose that they won’t.
00:05:40 ►
Well, aren’t we fortunate
00:05:41 ►
it isn’t us?
00:05:43 ►
Exactly. That is right.
00:05:46 ►
Some suffer more than others, and we are among the fortunate.
00:05:48 ►
For whatever reason.
00:05:50 ►
I think that historically we’re at a point, which we’ve never been before,
00:05:54 ►
where the demonic alchemical changes leading to mass destruction
00:06:00 ►
are a nuclear holocaust that’s never been in existence before in the world and if that’s
00:06:06 ►
not going to get us maybe aids will which is the modern plague right um at any rate i would assume
00:06:14 ►
that you’re talking about the days as ex machina comes from sort of a pessimism that we’ve reached this point in history through technology,
00:06:26 ►
demonic technology, and that we can’t save ourselves.
00:06:33 ►
We can’t save ourselves without contacting our inner resources.
00:06:40 ►
We can’t save ourselves by the methods that are currently being used at the time.
00:06:47 ►
I’m not pessimistic.
00:06:49 ►
I do think people are the sine qua non of it,
00:06:53 ►
so that it isn’t a passive waiting for the millennium.
00:06:56 ►
A friend of mine said once,
00:06:59 ►
and the word apocalypse hasn’t been used yet this morning,
00:07:04 ►
but the apocalypse and the millennium are brother and sister.
00:07:07 ►
He said we must live as though the apocalypse has already happened.
00:07:12 ►
That’s the only way to get beyond its shadow.
00:07:17 ►
And maybe that’s what you’re doing and mentioning,
00:07:22 ►
that you have confronted the problem,
00:07:26 ►
surmounted the problem,
00:07:28 ►
and now live in the post-problem space.
00:07:33 ►
Well, it seems to me that the apocalypse happens every day,
00:07:37 ►
just like the millennium happens every day
00:07:38 ►
for different people in different places in different situations.
00:07:42 ►
The apocalypse has happened in Nicaragua,
00:07:45 ►
and it’s happened in a big way. They don’t need a bigger one than that. It hasn’t happened
00:07:52 ►
here. And to a lot of people in the world, this is the millennium here. California is
00:07:59 ►
just definitely it.
00:08:00 ►
That’s true. That’s true. But when you’re in a apocalypse, then it’s the telling of the story, doesn’t it?
00:08:06 ►
I mean, you can be in a apocalypse of joy.
00:08:08 ►
That’s true. That’s true.
00:08:10 ►
And what we’re forgetting is maybe we’re the ones chosen for the joy.
00:08:15 ►
And we’re not really letting it come through, except as we’re letting a little bit of our jealousy.
00:08:22 ►
To release into the acceptance of your position and language
00:08:29 ►
is very important because going into the work as far as I’m concerned the set
00:08:34 ►
depends on what I intend perfectly wrong the negative and not get attached to it. That’s part of the practice.
00:08:47 ►
And then to see what comes.
00:08:50 ►
The birth of the child in heaven.
00:08:57 ►
I have come to see the suffering that goes on,
00:08:58 ►
especially at this point,
00:09:01 ►
when we do have the resources that we do,
00:09:04 ►
whether that’s external suffering in the form of war or people starving
00:09:05 ►
or interpsychic suffering, as being the external manifestation of what goes on in our collective
00:09:11 ►
human psyche.
00:09:13 ►
And it’s like things originate at that psychic level and then they manifest through the world
00:09:18 ►
and through ourselves.
00:09:19 ►
We’re that vehicle through which it comes.
00:09:22 ►
And whether we look on an individual level at what goes
00:09:25 ►
on in terms of the ego, defenses, I mean, all of that complex of structure that creates
00:09:31 ►
us with the kind of viewpoint that it does manifests in the world and then that gets
00:09:38 ►
reflected back to us. And I mean, I’ve almost come to see the bomb at this point as being
00:09:43 ►
a very graphic and accurate depiction
00:09:45 ►
that is confronting us with what we have done on the intra-psychic level, collectively.
00:09:51 ►
Because we have, in trying to erect a defense, it has itself become the threat
00:09:58 ►
which has cut us off from what we supposedly wanted to protect.
00:10:01 ►
from what we supposedly wanted to protect.
00:10:09 ►
So it seems to me that it’s initially at the individual,
00:10:10 ►
intra-psychic level,
00:10:14 ►
and then by sharing that in some fashion,
00:10:18 ►
it begins to make some energetic alterations in that collective human psyche,
00:10:19 ►
but then the external conditions on this earth
00:10:24 ►
are going to begin to reflect that.
00:10:26 ►
I think it’s useful also to look at this in terms of the model that Stan Grof has put out,
00:10:33 ►
which relates also generally to the process of psycho-spiritual transformation,
00:10:39 ►
which you can see in all kinds of disciplines in yoga and shamanism, and so on, involving the process of birth,
00:10:46 ►
we’ve all experienced
00:10:48 ►
the millennium, the apocalypse,
00:10:50 ►
and the millennium, and so
00:10:51 ►
the simultaneity of the end
00:10:54 ►
of a world when we were in the womb,
00:10:57 ►
we experience that as absolutely the end,
00:11:00 ►
but it’s really getting simultaneous
00:11:02 ►
with the beginning.
00:11:04 ►
So as you were saying, it’s the
00:11:07 ►
to confront that internally so we don’t project it out
00:11:12 ►
in the most competitive way. But there’s something about that
00:11:15 ►
and that’s a kind of biological blueprint
00:11:19 ►
of this, a biological level of this archetypal transformation.
00:11:23 ►
But it doesn’t seem to elucidate certain phenomena
00:11:27 ►
regarding these ideas in psychedelic states
00:11:31 ►
where you’re trying to have the marble spinning in your hand.
00:11:35 ►
I had an experience once with LSD in a crystal
00:11:37 ►
where that exactly was the phenomenon.
00:11:41 ►
A woman had dropped a crystal in my hand,
00:11:43 ►
and at that instant, the crystal, the whole universe was contained in the crystal. And it was, at the moment
00:11:50 ►
she did it, it was a very nice sunny day in Santa Cruz, and when it landed in my hand,
00:11:55 ►
it got very windy and sort of darkened all around, and it was a tremendous release of
00:12:00 ►
energy. Up to that point, I think, considering this birth model,
00:12:06 ►
there are many other levels to it,
00:12:10 ►
you know, this sort of biology.
00:12:11 ►
But the biological one is extremely significant
00:12:14 ►
because that is, it’s universal.
00:12:17 ►
It’s something that we’ve all gone through
00:12:18 ►
as a process.
00:12:21 ►
It’s a little bit after 12.
00:12:23 ►
Shall we take a break and come back?
00:12:26 ►
What time do they start serving lunch?
00:12:28 ►
12.30.
00:12:29 ►
Oh, 12.30.
00:12:30 ►
Well, maybe we should just keep after this until 12.30.
00:12:33 ►
Why don’t we do that?
00:12:36 ►
And then what time do we start?
00:12:37 ►
Three, I believe.
00:12:39 ►
Yeah.
00:12:42 ►
Anybody else have anything more on this?
00:12:46 ►
It’s not making a point or a…
00:12:49 ►
It’s like I feel as though I’m becoming something else
00:12:52 ►
in my own nervous system.
00:12:55 ►
Certainly in my mind I’ve seen the process over the last 15 years,
00:12:58 ►
but I feel like my tissues, my nervous system, my cells,
00:13:04 ►
everything’s becoming something different.
00:13:06 ►
And then, while you were talking, I flashed on the Fendor Transformation Missions,
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and they talk about the burning off of impurities in a chemistry lab,
00:13:16 ►
which, if you translated it into Christian terms, would be separating the wheat from the chaff.
00:13:21 ►
And at first I felt very sad about it, and I realized that no energy is destroying
00:13:25 ►
the people who have not passed a certain line of consciousness
00:13:28 ►
and go on to evolve at another point.
00:13:31 ►
But right now it’s like, that’s baggage.
00:13:33 ►
And that we’ve got to go on.
00:13:37 ►
And I don’t know if anyone else has experienced it,
00:13:39 ►
but I’m working a lot with systems that have to do with
00:13:43 ►
really entering your own nervous system.
00:13:46 ►
But I think it’s a combination of things that I feel lighter.
00:13:52 ►
I’m just becoming something else.
00:13:55 ►
Yes, well, one of the ways to think about this alchemical transformation,
00:13:59 ►
which is sort of a middle ground,
00:14:02 ►
is to think of it as a transformation of the physical body
00:14:05 ►
that actually you are changing it’s like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly
00:14:12 ►
but it’s real and these you can make as materialistic a model of it as you want i mean
00:14:20 ►
you can say that psilocybin is a metamorphotic enzyme of some sort.
00:14:26 ►
In the invisible landscape is the most materialistic setting out of these ideas,
00:14:34 ►
because there we believe that it was actually something that you had to do to yourself,
00:14:40 ►
to your body, with sound, in a certain state of biodynamic saturation with these tryptamine
00:14:47 ►
compounds and that then there was a way to lock molecules into the dna to shift the resonant
00:14:59 ►
uh sphere of perception so that you would enter the millennium basically the millennium and becomes a
00:15:07 ►
form of broadcast radiation coming out of your own body and and this
00:15:13 ►
is both a spiritual and a materialistic model for it it makes clear that it’s a state of mind
00:15:21 ►
but it also makes clear that it has a chemical,
00:15:28 ►
molecular and chemical basis for it.
00:15:30 ►
My notion of the millennium is to live in the imagination,
00:15:34 ►
to go where things are
00:15:37 ►
as you think they are,
00:15:39 ►
and then to explore
00:15:40 ►
what that would be like,
00:15:42 ►
not over the first half hour,
00:15:46 ►
but over a long period of time
00:15:47 ►
what you would quickly learn
00:15:52 ►
that I mean
00:15:54 ►
it would be an enormous
00:15:56 ►
uprush of creativity
00:15:57 ►
it’s like in some ways I think
00:16:00 ►
you know the push to go into space
00:16:02 ►
space is
00:16:04 ►
black and empty
00:16:06 ►
and a wonderful place to put things.
00:16:09 ►
It’s sort of like the inside of your mind.
00:16:13 ►
And so these engineering schemes
00:16:17 ►
for these 50-mile-long cities
00:16:20 ►
with gardens and waterfalls and all this,
00:16:22 ►
what they’re saying is, you know,
00:16:25 ►
outer space is the imagination.
00:16:27 ►
We will build these habitats, these structures.
00:16:32 ►
The question is, shall we build them between Earth and space,
00:16:35 ►
or shall we build them north of the amygdala?
00:16:38 ►
And it will be the same kind of thing.
00:16:43 ►
The imagination, as William Blake saw so clearly,
00:16:48 ►
is where we want to be.
00:16:51 ►
We are the creatures of the imagination,
00:16:55 ►
and it is the realm of beauty and fascination and creativity.
00:17:02 ►
And the trick, then, is how to be there and be here and be in Tao in both places.
00:17:10 ►
When you say imagination like that,
00:17:12 ►
do you mean…
00:17:13 ►
I have this sense sometimes that
00:17:15 ►
if or when this planet goes,
00:17:18 ►
we will exist in some kind of
00:17:20 ►
purely psychic or spiritual substratum
00:17:23 ►
like we exist now in a physical one and before that we
00:17:26 ►
were in a sort of a fluid one i guess before that i don’t know so this this evolution in our own
00:17:35 ►
development proceeds from kind of you know physical dense thing when we’re children that’s
00:17:39 ►
what we’re into you know the body senses and then these we ensure we get more intellectual and then
00:17:46 ►
hopefully more spiritual and then
00:17:47 ►
even more.
00:17:49 ►
So when you say this thing about
00:17:51 ►
doesn’t the near-nature then have that idea
00:17:54 ►
that the omega point
00:17:56 ►
or something is just
00:17:58 ►
purely psychic kind of
00:18:00 ►
substratum?
00:18:01 ►
Yes, I mean it’s a physical world
00:18:03 ►
that is only psychic.
00:18:06 ►
It isn’t a land of rakes and shades.
00:18:10 ►
It’s just that physics, it’s this world,
00:18:15 ►
except that physics has been replaced with imagination.
00:18:19 ►
I’m still not clear on the this world part.
00:18:22 ►
Will there be mountains and trees?
00:18:24 ►
If you want them, there will be.
00:18:32 ►
What will nature do if we live entirely in the imagination?
00:18:37 ►
In your version, I have a version.
00:18:39 ►
In my version?
00:18:41 ►
Oh, well, in my best version,
00:18:43 ►
the entire technological backup of the planet, all the databases and everything, is put into a grain of sand, which is put on a beach on a South Pacific island and lost.
00:19:08 ►
and then everybody is naked healthy and happy wherever they are and if you need something it appears at your right hand and if you want to be somewhere you are there if you want to be
00:19:16 ►
something you are it you are you become thought, visualized,
00:19:25 ►
and you are also this perfect being in a perfect world,
00:19:30 ►
living a life perfectly integrated into nature.
00:19:33 ►
Now, to what degree this has already been achieved is a question.
00:19:40 ►
Again, love med, but even more so,
00:19:44 ►
the shamans in the rainforest,
00:19:47 ►
we think of as, you know, however we think of them,
00:19:52 ►
but occasionally they say things
00:19:54 ►
which suggest that for them this is a reality.
00:19:57 ►
I mean, one day we were walking with Don Fidel
00:19:59 ►
to his house in the forest,
00:20:02 ►
and apropos of nothing, he said, this is the path that Christ walked.
00:20:10 ►
And then you look around, say, you know,
00:20:15 ►
damned if it isn’t the path that Christ walked.
00:20:21 ►
Well, it means that Don Fidel lived in the imagination.
00:20:29 ►
Christ walked. Well, it means that Don Fidel lived in the imagination. He saw things this way. He was in all history was present. He only knew maybe a little bit of it, but all
00:20:35 ►
he knew of history was present. So, you know, he was walking with Elijah.
00:20:41 ►
Whose imagination did Don get that living?
00:20:45 ►
His own.
00:20:47 ►
When were you alone?
00:20:48 ►
I was,
00:20:51 ►
this is like the Leibnizian question about the monads.
00:20:54 ►
Every monad had a
00:20:55 ►
unique soul,
00:20:58 ►
but the monads each had
00:20:59 ►
their distinct perspective
00:21:01 ►
in the way that the infinite number
00:21:03 ►
of points that fill this room all have a
00:21:07 ►
definably unique perspective on the room so it isn’t a matter of will you will my dream step on
00:21:15 ►
your dream see that’s what history is one dream and if you don’t agree with my dream i’m gonna
00:21:22 ►
kill you and round up your relatives and because there can only be a few dreams on this planet.
00:21:29 ►
But there should be an infinite number of dreams.
00:21:32 ►
And that’s what the imagination allows.
00:21:34 ►
At my mother’s knee, I learned that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
00:21:41 ►
I am a beggar.
00:21:41 ►
Beggars would ride.
00:21:43 ►
I am a beggar. So consequently, I’m very interested in having wishes become horses and flying saucers and all of these things.
00:21:52 ►
How else can we solve poverty except to make wishes be horses?
00:21:58 ►
And in the practical sense, I’ve had an experience of wishing I could help heal somebody and feeling very desperate
00:22:07 ►
that I couldn’t and finally thinking, well, I can’t do it.
00:22:11 ►
And going off and going my own way and finding I got sick, which I don’t do ever, encapsulating
00:22:21 ►
it and having some experiences there which were very quite
00:22:25 ►
dramatic within a month of that was when I had the chance to go through this
00:22:30 ►
near-death experience with this person and it’s uncanny the experiences that
00:22:35 ►
she went through that in my day and a half of being sick I went through before
00:22:40 ►
and in some way what I cleared I became the seed for something that went out
00:22:47 ►
and i no longer had to worry about what my effect was all that i had to do was keep clear inside
00:22:55 ►
myself and at the end of my illness i felt as if i had had the most wonderful experience in the world
00:23:00 ►
it was hell but it was a relieving experience.
00:23:05 ►
I needed to learn that before I could help somebody else because I loved it.
00:23:10 ►
So it really takes it back to the individual right now.
00:23:14 ►
Alchemical riches are better than gold, but it’s all interiorized.
00:23:21 ►
It’s the discovery of feelings explorable dimensions that are where the spirit
00:23:29 ►
literally takes flight you know and and then that anchors a life and we presume it could anchor a
00:23:39 ►
society in fact presume that these shamanic societies in the rainforest, the reason they don’t
00:23:46 ►
have material culture
00:23:47 ►
was because it
00:23:49 ►
clutters things up so much and then you can
00:23:52 ►
only have one culture
00:23:53 ►
you know
00:23:55 ►
their millennium is there or whatever it is
00:23:58 ►
their metastable
00:24:00 ►
magic
00:24:02 ►
is totally dependent on a clear
00:24:04 ►
communication with nature all
00:24:05 ►
the time. They can’t stop paying attention
00:24:08 ►
to every detail, every
00:24:09 ►
plant, every weather, and every animal
00:24:12 ►
and everything. So
00:24:13 ►
relationship, that’s an important element.
00:24:16 ►
And language.
00:24:17 ►
And if they build buildings around themselves,
00:24:19 ►
if they put walls on the buildings which they
00:24:21 ►
don’t, these people that we were seeing,
00:24:24 ►
cuts off so much information
00:24:25 ►
and so much communication,
00:24:27 ►
how can they keep it together
00:24:29 ►
like they’ve got it, you know?
00:24:32 ►
It has to be simple.
00:24:34 ►
If it’s not
00:24:35 ►
simple, you haven’t
00:24:37 ►
gotten it yet.
00:24:39 ►
So I was curious, this is kind of a technical question,
00:24:41 ►
but what I was asking you before is
00:24:43 ►
then you presume that nature exists, that the earth and the nature that it is clothed in exists
00:24:52 ►
apart from our imagination enough that we could all live in our imagination and still
00:24:59 ►
take for granted that nature is here and supporting us, or do we look at a tree and will that it become
00:25:05 ►
something else that pleases us?
00:25:08 ►
No, because this is someone
00:25:10 ►
else’s imagination.
00:25:13 ►
Her
00:25:13 ►
imagination.
00:25:16 ►
So tell us
00:25:18 ►
about that. Well, so we are in
00:25:19 ►
her imagination, trying
00:25:21 ►
to create our own realms
00:25:24 ►
of imagination, which are for us as
00:25:28 ►
much an expression of our self as this universe is an expression of herself.
00:25:36 ►
Not just the earth?
00:25:39 ►
Life.
00:25:40 ►
The earth or the universe?
00:25:41 ►
No, I think it’s everything.
00:25:43 ►
It’s everything. It’s everything. Everything is wedded and wed together.
00:25:49 ►
And it’s like there are layers of connection. Some are dense, some are tenuous, but everything
00:25:56 ►
is connected. And we are simply imaging. And this is a good old alchemical doctrine,
00:26:05 ►
as above, so below.
00:26:07 ►
We are trying to create an arena
00:26:11 ►
where we are the god or the goddess,
00:26:15 ►
but it need not trample on anyone.
00:26:18 ►
But if we could have it, we would be so satisfied
00:26:21 ►
that it might inspire us to decent behavior.
00:26:27 ►
And so it’s this effort to give people what they want so that they will allow other people to have what they want and people are so
00:26:34 ►
acquisitive that apparently you have to give everybody everything well to do that you have
00:26:41 ►
to have a different kind of dimensional space-time manifold than we have here
00:26:47 ►
because here we have the mine yours problem so that’s historical time we have to break out of
00:26:55 ►
that into a place where contradiction is no problem and that’s why it’s so hard to think about
00:27:05 ►
because it transcends the notion of contradiction,
00:27:09 ►
which is a three-dimensional
00:27:10 ►
or linguistically three-dimensional notion.
00:27:14 ►
And because we live on a,
00:27:16 ►
let’s be hierarchically, lower level than that,
00:27:19 ►
I think that we do very much live in our imagination
00:27:22 ►
and that’s what we see manifest.
00:27:24 ►
It’s just that the dark side of human
00:27:25 ►
nature is a force to be reckoned with
00:27:27 ►
and that governs a lot of what
00:27:29 ►
we find ourselves presented with.
00:27:32 ►
That’s right. It’s an aspect of
00:27:33 ►
ourselves that has to be acknowledged.
00:27:36 ►
Shattered. Yes.
00:27:38 ►
And the dark side must be equally
00:27:40 ►
present in the imagination.
00:27:42 ►
So I don’t know. I mean, can we
00:27:43 ►
forever make it happy on a beach
00:27:46 ►
with the wind falling out of the trees
00:27:47 ►
in your imagination
00:27:49 ►
without
00:27:50 ►
scratching yourself?
00:27:53 ►
Won’t it be just like this
00:27:55 ►
except different?
00:27:58 ►
Well, it will be just
00:28:00 ►
like this but different for the
00:28:01 ►
first hour. But then
00:28:03 ►
you begin this notion of being able to do
00:28:08 ►
being able to do everything i mean here’s a fantasy exercise which is very instructive i think
00:28:16 ►
imagine you had a small object that could do anything well then make a list of what you would do with it well so then to say
00:28:28 ►
well I need a blue cashmere sweater so I’ll have it turn into a blue cashmere
00:28:34 ►
sweater done hmm so this game is really not the three wishes game but the 10,000 wishes game well so then you say well
00:28:45 ►
can the walls be water
00:28:50 ►
then it’s done
00:28:53 ►
so and in other words what begins
00:29:00 ►
to happen is you begin to push out against the world and you discover
00:29:03 ►
no limits the impeding
00:29:06 ►
force has been removed so then you say well then what are the limits answer no limits so then you
00:29:16 ►
say well then what can i be answer anything well then what shall I be? And then you say, well, can I be a small dog?
00:29:29 ►
So then you’re a small dog. And you say, well, but then can I be 10 small dogs? Yes. Can
00:29:36 ►
I be 10 small dogs in a coral reef? Yes. Well, 45 minutes of that and you can’t remember
00:29:42 ►
where you started.
00:29:43 ►
Well, 45 minutes of that and you can’t remember where you started.
00:29:46 ►
I also said, can I be a pirate?
00:29:47 ►
Can I be a murderer?
00:29:49 ►
Can I be a slave driver?
00:29:51 ►
Can I be a robber?
00:29:55 ►
Yes, and you would be all those things, but these are sort of… Can I do anything with them?
00:29:56 ►
But those are the suggested roles that come with the instruction.
00:30:03 ►
Be a mass murderer, pirate, Nazi general.
00:30:08 ►
Okay, I’ve been all of those things,
00:30:11 ►
but now I want to be something else.
00:30:13 ►
And what it does is it begins to unfurl the imagination.
00:30:19 ►
You say, now I know what I want to be.
00:30:21 ►
I want to be a swarm of space-going cetacean cybernauts
00:30:28 ►
able to move vertically in five dimensions,
00:30:32 ►
able to say, oh, wow, now I’m getting the feeling of what this thing is.
00:30:37 ►
And then you begin to move out into discovering what are we really what are we if we could
00:30:48 ►
what is it it says in finningham’s wake it says if you want to be phoenixed come and be parked
00:30:55 ►
meaning die up the end prospector you sprout all your worth and whoop your wings. So it’s this notion of if you want to be phoenixed,
00:31:09 ►
meaning if you want to become a transformative mythical creature
00:31:13 ►
unlimited by any constraints,
00:31:15 ►
he’s saying you have to die.
00:31:17 ►
I’m saying maybe we can find a slightly less drastic way,
00:31:22 ►
but you must die to history.
00:31:29 ►
History has to be put behind i love that exercise this what could you be if you could be anything because so quickly everything becomes unrecognizable
00:31:36 ►
i mean imagine the kind of design your home this is an exercise in vajrayana Buddhism. They say the method of the Anudottara Yoga Tantra is they say,
00:31:48 ►
imagine yourself to be a god.
00:31:50 ►
They invite, in other words, what is called schizophrenic delusion of grandeur.
00:31:55 ►
They say, imagine yourself to be a god.
00:31:57 ►
Now imagine the abode appropriate to this god.
00:32:02 ►
You say, well, it begins in some kind of arabian knights extravagance let the floors be
00:32:08 ►
carpeted in emeralds let damask hangings but then you really soon exhaust all architectural styles
00:32:17 ►
precious stones and all and hollywood and you begin to push off, and you say it’s unlimited. The beauty of the imagination is
00:32:26 ►
unlimited. I mean, maybe for 10 minutes, I want to be a Nazi general. But for 10,000 years, I want
00:32:33 ►
to be the nine dimensional cetacean philosopher in the planet with the triple suns and the so forth.
00:32:42 ►
and so forth.
00:32:47 ►
So realizing how beautiful things could be if we were released from the constraint of three-dimensional space.
00:32:52 ►
This is why I don’t think heaven is easily imagined,
00:32:55 ►
because after anybody has been there an hour,
00:32:58 ►
they don’t look much like Uncle Ned or Aunt Freda anymore,
00:33:02 ►
because they’ve begun shedding and shedding and shedding.
00:33:06 ►
And what is emerging is the soul, and it becomes less and less recognizable to people.
00:33:15 ►
It is the secret self, the anthroposophic atom that is being carried around within us.
00:33:26 ►
anthroposophic atom that is being carried around within us and the psychedelic experience is so powerfully related to this because if you get it right meaning not every trip and at some
00:33:34 ►
dosage level and whatever is right for you you enter that place you say i can do anything with my mind if i want to recollect past memories i can but what i really
00:33:48 ►
want to do is see things that i could not previously imagine i want to go beyond myself
00:33:56 ►
show me that which i cannot conceive and then it does but you’re right I couldn’t conceive it show me another
00:34:05 ►
and another
00:34:06 ►
so in that sense
00:34:09 ►
it seems to anticipate
00:34:10 ►
this ocean of
00:34:13 ►
imagination into which
00:34:15 ►
the post historical person
00:34:17 ►
could
00:34:18 ►
could swing
00:34:21 ►
what if history is just one element of this thing?
00:34:28 ►
And we’re just stuck in this…
00:34:31 ►
It’s the edge of a cube. History is the edge of a cube.
00:34:37 ►
Because as you described all these things, you’re still
00:34:39 ►
talking about it through a time. So I want to be this nine-dimensional
00:34:44 ►
thing. But what is talking about it through a time so I want to be this nine dimensional thing
00:34:45 ►
but what is
00:34:48 ►
the implication of that
00:34:51 ►
well the implications
00:34:53 ►
are what I’m making a living out of
00:34:55 ►
the implications of all this
00:34:59 ►
what are
00:35:01 ►
the implications
00:35:02 ►
of the endless self transforming capacity of the human mind
00:35:08 ►
for imagery i mean why is it on a on a psychedelic drug you can see more art in 25 minutes than the
00:35:18 ►
human race has been produced in 5 000 years just tearing past you you know it means that we are operating in a
00:35:31 ►
very limited dimension these are the our capabilities we have great hearts and
00:35:38 ►
great souls and only very rarely do we get a chance to unfold them.
00:35:49 ►
The poor and hungry and downtrodden and oppressed of the world never, we the privileged elites, the educated,
00:35:54 ►
occasionally and fleetingly,
00:35:57 ►
but the real potential and capacity of the species
00:36:03 ►
is not being tapped at all i mean we are not recognizing that
00:36:09 ►
the greatest resource that we have is humanness and that it isn’t what we think it is you know
00:36:16 ►
the extraterrestrial fantasies we have of alien contact and that sort of thing are pedestrian indeed compared to the real nature
00:36:27 ►
of human beings which we need which history is the very ugly way of handling the debate about what
00:36:38 ►
shall we be because those who have the guns decide and and those who don’t go along.
00:36:46 ►
Robert.
00:36:51 ►
Don Pratt and that sort of thing.
00:36:53 ►
Last time I was sent to Teresa,
00:36:56 ►
and she was a good lady.
00:36:58 ►
That’s not a word for that.
00:36:59 ►
She was asked, she had a tour going,
00:37:03 ►
and she was talking about
00:37:05 ►
how beautiful these people were
00:37:07 ►
don’t you see the beauty in
00:37:08 ►
the lepers and she was
00:37:11 ►
asked, she says, well if they’re so
00:37:13 ►
spiritually uplifted
00:37:15 ►
how come we don’t have this kind of stuff in the United States
00:37:17 ►
and they said
00:37:19 ►
a tear came to her eyes, she said
00:37:20 ►
because you’re not worthy
00:37:21 ►
yes, but Motheresa is a saint
00:37:26 ►
well you mean what did you mean that we’re not worthy? You know, we think we got everything. I mean, if they had
00:37:45 ►
done something, we would seem to take
00:37:48 ►
this attitude.
00:37:50 ►
But in fact,
00:37:52 ►
you know, what did she mean when she said that we weren’t
00:37:53 ►
worthy to have that kind
00:37:56 ►
of stuff?
00:37:58 ►
What did she mean, Lauren?
00:37:59 ►
Well, I was just thinking of the Chronicle,
00:38:01 ►
which is a paper which we didn’t want to read,
00:38:04 ►
but I did happen to see an article yesterday which took a lot of courage to look at.
00:38:10 ►
And it’s a story of a little child who was badly burned in some island.
00:38:14 ►
I don’t know who was burning it, but somewhere.
00:38:16 ►
And brought here for endless operations.
00:38:19 ►
She was two and she was burned in her crib.
00:38:23 ►
And two people, foster parents parents have taken her on and i mean to
00:38:29 ►
even look at the pictures of her was hard for me but evidently her eyes and it worked to open her
00:38:36 ►
eyelids but her eyes glow and she dances around and she laughs and she just went to bed with a thing in her mouth to stretch her lips.
00:38:46 ►
And she burnt brown.
00:38:49 ►
And I thought about those parents.
00:38:52 ►
And the story of them is they couldn’t have done it except that all of a sudden the man had some kind of a mystical experience.
00:39:01 ►
God came and spoke to him.
00:39:02 ►
He knew his life was changing.
00:39:04 ►
And a few days
00:39:05 ►
later, somebody said something about needing a foster parent, and there he is. So something’s
00:39:11 ►
changing. We are becoming worthy. And the Chronicle published it. Something is really
00:39:18 ►
changing.
00:39:19 ►
See, I think it’s something about me returning us to our source. Like you were saying, the millennium is the end, historical time,
00:39:29 ►
and you were saying something that I was hearing,
00:39:32 ►
that we are living our end, our beginning, and the transition all of a sudden
00:39:37 ►
changes over and over and over again.
00:39:40 ►
And as the earth grows and travels, we suffer, we also are giving birth to a memory of our source.
00:39:55 ►
When you were talking about, I don’t remember what it was you were talking about, it was a series of images of I want, it’s there.
00:40:08 ►
That is how I’ve heard a number of spiritualists describe what it is in the beyond, however
00:40:16 ►
you want to define or characterize that, that soul substance, which is, you know, at times
00:40:24 ►
we look like Uncle Ned
00:40:25 ►
as you were crossing the threshold,
00:40:26 ►
but for a while there was just this vibration,
00:40:30 ►
whatever that is,
00:40:31 ►
where all is possible.
00:40:36 ►
And babies, I wonder if you had this experience,
00:40:40 ►
babies, as they are born,
00:40:43 ►
still have a memory of that,
00:40:54 ►
Babies, as they are born, still have a memory of that, of the immediacy of a desire and its fulfillment. And I don’t have, I can’t articulate what it is.
00:40:57 ►
You mean because the uterine environment would be like that? I’m saying beyond that. I’m saying before the New World experience. Before incarnating.
00:41:14 ►
Well, we come and go to that cosmic ocean. I mean, maybe the thing that we don’t want to face is that the solution is directly in front of you
00:41:26 ►
that you’re going to die you know and then you’re going to find out why it all makes sense
00:41:34 ►
and that the transhistorical dimension that’s it and that that’s what joyce meant when he said if
00:41:41 ►
you want to be phoenix and be part. That all the
00:41:46 ►
anxiety, that what we are
00:41:48 ►
really trying to do is
00:41:50 ►
remove
00:41:53 ►
the barrier between the
00:41:55 ►
distinction of living and dying.
00:41:59 ►
You know,
00:42:00 ►
that history is where the living are.
00:42:02 ►
The millennium
00:42:03 ►
is where the dead are. millennium is where the dead are
00:42:05 ►
and we want to somehow tear down the distinction
00:42:08 ►
between these two places
00:42:10 ►
and we can’t
00:42:14 ►
well our best people are working on it
00:42:18 ►
either we can or we can’t
00:42:20 ►
but we are working on it
00:42:22 ►
isn’t that what we are doing when we meditate?
00:42:26 ►
When we dream?
00:42:28 ►
When we take a psychedelic substance?
00:42:29 ►
We are moving beyond
00:42:31 ►
those watery walls and we are
00:42:33 ►
experiencing it.
00:42:36 ►
Now. Not
00:42:37 ►
in death, not out of the body, but
00:42:39 ►
in our body, in our consciousness
00:42:41 ►
right now.
00:42:44 ►
Accessing either a memory in our unconscious or something else,
00:42:48 ►
but it is happening right now.
00:42:52 ►
I mean, as you were talking, I was experiencing it right now.
00:42:55 ►
And I think that, you know, yes, we are trying to tear down those barriers,
00:43:00 ►
and I think we can.
00:43:03 ►
That that is, maybe that is why we’re all here
00:43:05 ►
that is the quest
00:43:07 ►
no you want to be dead without
00:43:10 ►
dying
00:43:10 ►
you want to be alive
00:43:13 ►
forever
00:43:14 ►
let’s just start cleaning up
00:43:22 ►
your language if you ask the question
00:43:24 ►
show me what I can’t imagine,
00:43:26 ►
maybe what you might say is, show me what I haven’t yet imagined.
00:43:31 ►
Right.
00:43:32 ►
Because everything’s possible.
00:43:34 ►
That’s right.
00:43:35 ►
But it’s just they can’t.
00:43:37 ►
Borges has a story, I don’t remember which one it is,
00:43:40 ►
but the basic idea of it is that no individual member of a species
00:43:47 ►
is freed whatever that means until the species is extinct so that everyone has
00:43:58 ►
is jamming up in some holding area somewhere, trying to push the buttons, basically,
00:44:10 ►
because the completion is, you know,
00:44:13 ►
the earth-swept queen of life.
00:44:16 ►
I don’t say that, and I rarely even mention it in public
00:44:19 ►
because it just drives people over the brink.
00:44:22 ►
I mean, I’ve had people in tears over this one.
00:44:25 ►
But nevertheless, it is odd that death is so persistent.
00:44:32 ►
You know?
00:44:34 ►
Because it’s a living form.
00:44:36 ►
Yeah.
00:44:37 ►
Just imagine how much death is going on in our cells,
00:44:40 ►
and our body is dying, and everything is dying.
00:44:44 ►
So we have an idiocy everything is dying so we don’t
00:44:47 ►
all this
00:44:48 ►
we don’t worry about the consciousness
00:44:51 ►
so maybe
00:44:53 ►
the body is the placenta
00:44:56 ►
of the soul
00:44:57 ►
and that what we are doing
00:44:59 ►
is fussing
00:45:01 ►
you know fussing over the
00:45:03 ►
fact that we can’t have it quite the way we
00:45:08 ►
want but that it will all be unfolded quite the way we want but on somebody
00:45:14 ►
else’s terms this is a possibility I said talk I gave here once what mushroom
00:45:22 ►
is it that grows at the end of history? Is it
00:45:26 ►
the Stropharia cubensis filled
00:45:27 ►
with psilocybin? Or is it
00:45:30 ►
the mushroom of Fermi
00:45:31 ►
and Oppenheimer and Teller?
00:45:34 ►
Or perhaps all
00:45:35 ►
mushrooms are the same?
00:45:40 ►
We should go
00:45:42 ►
to lunch
00:45:42 ►
to have mushrooms
00:45:45 ►
stroganoff
00:45:46 ►
and we’ll regather at 3 o’clock
00:45:50 ►
and hope that Dennis and Sheila
00:45:52 ►
and Eduardo are here
00:45:53 ►
and it will be different
00:45:56 ►
oh and Ralph too
00:46:00 ►
the Mets is scheduled
00:46:02 ►
the body is the placenta
00:46:04 ►
of the soul.
00:46:06 ►
And the real potential of our species isn’t being tapped at all, so says Terrence.
00:46:12 ►
And I have no argument with either of those ideas.
00:46:15 ►
I wonder if you are thinking what I’m thinking right now, however.
00:46:18 ►
As I listen to the participants speak up about their millennial concerns
00:46:23 ►
and mentally compare them to recent
00:46:25 ►
conversations that I’ve had about world affairs with friends, I noticed something strange.
00:46:31 ►
Back in 1985, when it was a lot of supposition and predictions about the years 2000 and the year
00:46:37 ►
2012, well, there seemed to be more fear and worry in people’s voices than I’ve been hearing lately.
00:46:44 ►
And, at least in my opinion, things like the environment and major wars
00:46:48 ►
seem much more problematic today than the problems we were worrying about 38 years ago.
00:46:54 ►
Why do you think that is?
00:46:57 ►
Well, I’ll leave you with that question,
00:46:59 ►
and we can take it up in one of the live salons in the future weeks.
00:47:03 ►
And you can go to psychedelicsalon.com for
00:47:05 ►
the details of those twice weekly events. And by the way, at the end of this recording,
00:47:11 ►
I think I heard Terrence mention that in the next session that his brother Dennis
00:47:15 ►
and Eduardo Luna would be joining him. Well, I happen to have a recording of that session,
00:47:21 ►
at least I hope that’s what’s on it, and the tape that we just listened to was given the number three. The Luna tape is showing number six.
00:47:30 ►
So we’ll just have to wait until I get it digitized and podcast it before we’ll know for
00:47:34 ►
sure. In any event, it’ll be my next podcast. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:47:41 ►
cyberdelic space namaste my friends