Program Notes

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna, Eduardo Luna, Kat Harrison

This is a recording of a workshop session at the Esalen Institute from August of 1985 featuring a conversation between three of the early pioneers of the psychedelic resurgence. The recording begins with Terence postulating the importance of pyschedelics in the early mental development of humans.

Previous Episode

688 - McKenna at Esalen 1985

Next Episode

Podcast 690 – Terence McKenna at Esalen June 1984

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00

Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.

00:00:08

Alpha Shades.

00:00:16

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

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

00:00:22

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

00:00:30

And today I’m going to play the third recording that I have from an August 1985 Terrence McKenna workshop that was held at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California.

00:00:34

And when I first tried to listen to this tape, I realized why I’d never heard it before.

00:00:40

This is how it sounded for the first part of the tape.

00:01:04

And it was even worse in some later spots. As you’ll see from the picture of the cassette that I’m posting in

00:01:05

the program notes, it’s the number six unedited tape from the workshop, and I’ve already podcast

00:01:11

number two and seven tapes, which are the only other ones that I have from this workshop at

00:01:17

Esalen. Now the truth is that I never would have spent the time to edit it to a point where, well,

00:01:22

we can at least make out most of the words,

00:01:31

and I wouldn’t have done that except for Graham St. John. Later this year, MIT Press is going to be publishing a biography of Terrence that Graham is now putting the final touches on,

00:01:36

and the working title is Terrence McKenna, the Strange Attractor. Now, when I told Graham about

00:01:42

these yet unheard recordings, he asked me to do what I could to make them more listenable just because there may be some interesting historical background in them.

00:01:51

And after he listened to the first one that I cleaned up, he was able to tell me that among the small group of people in this workshop whose voices we hear is Terrence’s then wife, Cat Harrison.

00:02:02

Now my guess is that this may be one of the very first recordings

00:02:06

of Terrence that was made at Esalen. And as you listen to this conversation, please keep in mind

00:02:11

that it was made over 38 years ago, and we’ve all learned a lot more about psychedelics and sin.

00:02:19

Rather than tell you what you’re about to hear, why don’t I just play the recording and let you

00:02:23

listen for yourself. And as you’re listening with me, why don’t I just play the recording and let you listen for yourself.

00:02:31

And as you’re listening with me, try to keep in mind that this conversation took place seven years before the World Wide Web was invented. In other words, at the time there wasn’t a single

00:02:37

website anywhere in the world. It simply hadn’t been invented yet.

00:03:08

hadn’t been invented yet. So tonight I thought I would sort of pull back the focus and take the opportunity of having Ben here just to eventually have a dialogue

00:03:13

about some of the more etheric or less quantified aspects

00:03:20

of the psychedelic experience,

00:03:22

and also to try and give an overview of just what is

00:03:28

so great about it on a level larger than the individual.

00:03:33

In other words, what is the impact, what has been throughout prehistory, history, the impact

00:03:39

of these things.

00:03:51

of these things. And I want to pass around some exhibits, which are drawings that Kat made looking at photographs of rock paintings in Central Africa that seem to be primary

00:04:17

that seem to be primary pieces of evidence in a new way of looking at the history of the evolution of human beings and Western consciousness specifically. I talked a little bit about this in the first panel, but tonight I want to go into it in more detail.

00:04:27

The human species as it exists on the earth is definitely the most phenomenal part of the natural history of the plant. I mean, in many, many ontological categories,

00:04:47

we are differentiated from the natural surround,

00:04:52

and this seems to have to do with our ability

00:04:55

to epigenetically code information,

00:04:59

to have open-ended adaptive strategies

00:05:02

which never trap us into evolutionary cul-de-sacs the way

00:05:07

many or most species have come to that kind of process.

00:05:13

Instead, the career of human evolution on the planet has been one of ever-widening options,

00:05:23

ever-great greater sensibility

00:05:25

to a larger number of environments

00:05:27

ever greater command

00:05:29

over

00:05:30

one’s own destiny

00:05:32

and I talked the other day about

00:05:35

the effects of immune

00:05:37

stimulating plants

00:05:39

on the evolutionary

00:05:41

history of evolving primates

00:05:44

and how they can conserve, adapt to the fantasy.

00:05:49

For the last two or three years, Dennis and I have sort of been kicking around an idea

00:05:56

that some of you may have heard part of at the Amupa Lecture.

00:06:01

I’m not going to give a formal presentation of it tonight, but more on this conversational

00:06:08

recitation of the many outlines of it.

00:06:12

It’s basically the idea that if you’re willing to admit how ascending you need to be a body into the body of evidence that can be achieved without the evolution of human beings and consciousness on the planet,

00:06:30

then you can construct the scenario the way a detective would of a crime.

00:06:37

You can construct a scenario of what must have happened on this planet to lead the situation that we’re in.

00:06:45

I don’t find the evolution of intelligence teaching to be something that I can’t conceive

00:06:55

of arising out of the normal set of evolutionary sculpting processes that neo-Darwinianism recognizes, but what has always seemed to

00:07:08

me the improbable part was the speed with which the process occurred, that the human

00:07:19

brain in 30,000 years changed more than it had changed in the previous three million years.

00:07:27

And this seems to me to indicate that there was some kind of radical new factor introduced

00:07:35

and that speeded, if you want to put it that way,

00:07:40

speeded the process of evolution through direction or channeled it in some kind of trio.

00:07:47

And the

00:07:48

scenario seems to

00:07:50

begin in the

00:07:52

inevitable

00:07:55

climatological flux of the

00:07:57

planet that goes on over periods

00:08:00

of millions of years from wet to

00:08:01

dry, so that even as

00:08:04

early as three million years ago,

00:08:07

it’s possible to detect retractions in the African continental forest cover in response

00:08:18

to drought and drying up.

00:08:22

And so the scenario basically is that as the African continents dried, the

00:08:28

arboreal primates were trapped in a shrinking habitat and they began to foray onto the ground

00:08:39

at the same time that grasslands were evolving and with them these large herds of

00:08:47

ungulate animals and also as I mentioned the other day these carnivorous pack

00:08:54

hunting animals like bingoes and dogs the omnivorous habits of these primates put them in a position

00:09:06

to once established

00:09:09

on the ground

00:09:10

as by-hugel hunting

00:09:12

animals

00:09:13

to integrate

00:09:16

the flesh of these

00:09:18

large mammals into their diet

00:09:20

and they began following

00:09:22

these great herds

00:09:24

which were the major concentrations of

00:09:26

proteins in this now grassland environment at that point on a on a regular and reinforced

00:09:36

basis they would have begun to contact any topographic mushrooms mushrooms, mushrooms which grow in the meadow, any coprocytic mushrooms which might have been associated with these animals.

00:09:53

Now, at that point, then, the feedback mechanism comes into play,

00:09:59

where the association of the numinous through the ingestion of the mushrooms,

00:10:06

which are tested, as all plants are tested in that kind of situation,

00:10:11

for their nutritional value.

00:10:13

The integration of the mushrooms into the diet establishes the notion

00:10:18

that the cow is the source of this ecstatic experience

00:10:24

in the same way that it is the source of food and nurturing,

00:10:29

and in fact it then becomes a kind of maternal symbol for Salon.

00:10:35

And my idea, or the idea that we’ve worked out, is that all of these goddesses which can be found in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic period,

00:10:50

if you have a castle and you have a goddess, then you probably also have a polytenogenic mushroom the very component of this trinity. And this guy in bolded, he drives himself as an ethnomythological

00:11:14

art historian, searches the world’s literature for images of mushrooms. And I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Venus of Walling Bear,

00:11:26

which is a very famous piece

00:11:28

of very early A.C. and I.

00:11:31

What he pointed out to me

00:11:32

is that the corn rolling

00:11:34

or the knob on the head

00:11:36

of the Venus of Walling Bear

00:11:37

make it look like the cap of an

00:11:40

animal in mascara that is just warping.

00:11:42

And once this motif

00:11:44

is called to your attention,

00:11:45

a startling number of these objects

00:11:49

take on a new appearance.

00:11:53

Maria von Bruchhaus, in her book

00:11:55

The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe,

00:11:58

shows pictures of mushroom plants

00:12:01

that came out of the ground in Yugoslavia

00:12:04

what, 8,000 BC, very early.

00:12:10

And so, you see, there is an earlier layer of scholarship which overlays the question

00:12:19

of the mushrooms in history, and that’s the work of Jordan Watson.

00:12:30

of the mushrooms in history, and that’s the work of Jordan Watson. He wanted to say that Aminata Muscaria was in the subarctic region, was carried by Indolarian people into the

00:12:37

Indian, the Hindu troops, approximately 3500 BC into Somatoode, and this is then died out in India when the supply

00:12:50

of Soma to India.

00:12:53

The notion that I’m beginning to play with is that actually all religion, well, number

00:13:00

one, that all religion in prehistory,

00:13:05

the self-developed religions,

00:13:07

but that the great world religions of prehistory

00:13:10

were mushroom religions,

00:13:13

and they were not necessarily convivial to each other.

00:13:21

And so what you have in the tropical latitudes

00:13:23

is the evolution of this capital, concretive

00:13:27

capital related to the silent conquest.

00:13:30

And in the Arctic region, the mycorrhizae-birch-tamanita-reindeer relationship and the difference in the experiences, if you can make broad comparisons, is that the Amanita. It’s almost like one shapes the other.

00:14:06

On the other hand, the Samoshan cult is a feminine, communal,

00:14:14

it’s more like a mystery religion.

00:14:16

It is not, I think, a violent thing.

00:14:22

I don’t think we’re arguing that it’s an American thing. I don a good article in the book and it was a very significant

00:14:25

and ambiguous

00:14:26

point.

00:14:27

In any case,

00:14:29

this

00:14:30

mushroom

00:14:31

religion

00:14:32

that threw

00:14:33

up in

00:14:33

Africa

00:14:34

and I want

00:14:35

to show you

00:14:36

now,

00:14:36

I’ll pass

00:14:37

you the

00:14:38

link,

00:14:38

these are

00:14:39

stats

00:14:40

of drawings

00:14:41

that Pat

00:14:42

made that

00:14:43

will be

00:14:43

published

00:14:44

shortly,

00:14:49

possibly in a number of places, of these images from the Tselle Foto in southern Algeria. And what the situation there is, is a very

00:15:01

large rock, a starkness, that is cut by the wind both north-south and east-west.

00:15:08

So the aerial photographs of it, it actually looks like a bombed-out European city.

00:15:13

But when you’re on the ground, it’s these endless, over-drooping pangolins that have been cut by the wind.

00:15:21

that have been kept by the wind.

00:15:24

And according to the account we’ve read,

00:15:30

Neolithic chips and shards littered the ground for several feet over huge areas.

00:15:33

And there is an enormous repository of art

00:15:38

spanning four millennia, at least.

00:15:42

And the earliest, at this time itself, no scholar that we’ve

00:15:47

been able to locate has ever called attention to the fact that this clearly depicts the

00:15:54

established use of mushrooms. One of these drawings that’s going around shows a group

00:16:02

of people running in a line with their arms raised, carrying mushrooms,

00:16:07

and surrounded by some kind of network of rods and balls that is actually very suggestive

00:16:15

of the cyber-intimidation of the group of all aliens and humans and such and such.

00:16:21

The other drawing is a shaman facing outward

00:16:26

wearing what I interpret to be

00:16:29

the kind of bone

00:16:30

that you see in the central Asian

00:16:33

shamanism of

00:16:34

Nepal and Tibet

00:16:37

mushrooms are sprouting

00:16:38

out of his body

00:16:40

he holds mushrooms in his hand

00:16:43

and his head has turned into the head of an insect or a wasp.

00:16:52

Oh, the reference is this book,

00:16:56

which is called The Rock Thinking Fixed Spell,

00:16:59

and it is by…

00:17:02

It’s a beautiful book, Andre Leroy Dourban

00:17:08

World Public

00:17:10

Company

00:17:10

I’ll pass this around

00:17:16

to be careful with it

00:17:17

the pages are coming

00:17:19

and

00:17:21

but you can see

00:17:24

that beyond these two examples that we’ve concentrated on, there is an immense

00:17:30

sensitivity to the portrayal of tackle when these people were in the tackle.

00:17:37

And my notion is that they, as the Saharan conditions became more Europe-headed, became more drawn down,

00:17:48

and this is orthodox,

00:17:51

those desert people became settled in the Nile Valley,

00:17:55

basically, and became the proto-Egyptian people.

00:18:00

But not all of them.

00:18:01

Some of them migrated across the Horn of Arabia, which even then, there may have been a land bridge there, even recently with 5,000 to 6,000 people.

00:18:13

This is where the Arabian Sea is swinging out from the African continent. It’s a place where the continental tectonic has been very active. Anyway, these people crossed

00:18:27

then over into the fertile plains in the Middle East, and there they established themselves

00:18:34

as goddess-worshipping, cattle-herding, matriarchal societies, which were in place when these Aryan people swept down and intermingled

00:18:50

with them.

00:18:51

There’s a fair bit of evidence for this in the northern Sumerian cultural area there

00:19:12

was a god named Nanar who was a masculine moon god and in fact the father of Ishtar

00:19:19

which was the most exquisite god He was easily thought of as the goddess

00:19:26

of the ancient Near East, but

00:19:28

actually in an earlier tantrum

00:19:29

he was the daughter of

00:19:32

Nanak. Well, what is the

00:19:34

point of all the archaeological

00:19:36

of your answer?

00:19:37

Basically just to show

00:19:39

that the formulation

00:19:42

of consciousness

00:19:43

in the early stages and in the intermediate stages,

00:19:48

right up until the perception of a useless,

00:19:51

the formulation of the outlines of human consciousness

00:19:54

is being determined by these syntheotic time relationships.

00:20:01

Yeah.

00:20:01

I’m interested in the whole premise of the graph,

00:21:10

Yeah. I was thinking that if you’re a close friend, or at some point in time, you might think that Well, that certainly could be amongst taxonomy by taxonomists by natural selection.

00:21:19

But you see, we make this argument about the mushroom and how it gave greater visual acuity

00:21:22

and therefore there was a feedback mechanism, and so forth and so on,

00:21:25

and then humanists just sculpted out of the monkeys

00:21:28

and it comes forward to a loose,

00:21:30

as we always call it, the mushroom.

00:21:32

But this is just a gloss on the fact that, you know,

00:21:36

we are in the large hands of a very unseen being

00:21:40

of which the mushroom is simply the physical residual. And so the question begins,

00:21:48

you know, who is it or what is it that is causing this accelerated process? It wouldn’t

00:21:56

be so eerie. You could imagine it as simply a confluence of evolutionarily self-reinforcing trends,

00:22:07

except that at the center of the mushroom experience

00:22:10

and at the center of all of these plant hallucinogens

00:22:15

that are the deep ones,

00:22:17

there is an entity, or many entities,

00:22:21

but in any case, minds.

00:22:24

And so there seems to be an older mind on the planet

00:22:27

than the mind of man.

00:22:30

In fact, the mind of human beings seems to be an artifact

00:22:34

created through this interaction

00:22:38

that up until the present moment,

00:22:42

all the manipulation and power has been in the hands of the other

00:22:46

side because we didn’t realize what was going on.

00:22:51

And I find this very curious and I find it interesting that we have arrived at the moment

00:22:59

in the development of thought where we are apparently self-reflective enough

00:23:06

to carry on an analysis of the human situation

00:23:10

and realize that we are apparently

00:23:13

the plaything of some kind of force,

00:23:17

inflective,

00:23:19

that is loose in the natural history of this planet.

00:23:24

And this is what I wanted to point out, that we lose touch with.

00:23:29

There’s too much concentration on the molecular, botanical, ethnographic details.

00:23:35

These are all descriptors of the surface of a mystery, the mass of which is a complete intellectual terror in Kavnika.

00:23:48

I mean, this is the weirdest thing there is.

00:23:52

This is the alien artifact that we search for with our radio telescopes and in the poetic

00:24:01

imagination.

00:24:02

It’s actually staring us in the face.

00:24:09

It’s an adumbration of ourselves.

00:24:12

We are used to paying lip service to the idea that human beings are very mysterious,

00:24:16

and then that you say,

00:24:17

you don’t think too much about it.

00:24:19

But human beings that have biodynamic hallucinogens circulating in their bloodstream

00:24:29

are certainly very interesting, very compelling, very mysterious.

00:24:38

And we have all these assumptions that we understand what we’re doing,

00:24:42

have all these assumptions that we understand what we’re doing

00:24:44

you know, that it’s

00:24:46

a plant, we’re an

00:24:48

animal, this is history

00:24:50

I’m a scientist

00:24:52

all these little stories

00:24:54

that we tell ourselves

00:24:56

to hold it all

00:24:58

together, but the fact

00:25:00

is that

00:25:01

we don’t really know

00:25:03

what we’re dealing with at all.

00:25:06

We have no notion of it.

00:25:09

I mean, if we call down concepts like extraterrestrial or a genus loci or God Almighty, for that matter,

00:25:19

I mean, many people have no trouble believing that that’s what’s going on.

00:25:24

So it is what Jung called the tremendous.

00:25:27

And then the challenge is to carry out an analysis of the tremendous

00:25:33

that is not reductionist.

00:25:35

Because obviously the major ontologically distinguishing factor

00:25:41

about the tremendous is that it is irreducible.

00:25:45

It is

00:25:46

the self-mental

00:25:47

object

00:25:48

that we

00:25:49

have talked

00:25:50

about in

00:25:50

the first

00:25:51

book.

00:25:51

It is a

00:25:52

mental object

00:25:53

even as

00:25:55

the mind

00:25:55

is an

00:25:56

organ of

00:25:57

the human

00:25:58

body.

00:25:59

It simply

00:26:00

is an

00:26:00

organ that

00:26:01

is not

00:26:01

manifest in

00:26:03

three dimensions.

00:26:05

It manifests itself in time.

00:26:08

The relationship of thought to brain chemistry has yet to be demonstrated very convincingly.

00:26:15

I mean, the brain may have as much to do with the real moment-to-moment cognition as the liver does. It’s just a conceit

00:26:26

of neurophysiology,

00:26:28

you know, that they are grappling

00:26:31

with the origin of thought.

00:26:33

But

00:26:34

no less the thinker

00:26:36

on the subject than

00:26:38

Sir John Eckley

00:26:40

decided finally that he could only

00:26:42

embrace a clean do-it-yourself.

00:26:45

And he said, and you’ve probably heard me quote this comment,

00:26:48

he said that, you know, the brain is a piano,

00:26:53

the mind is Horowitz.

00:26:56

And you’re not going to understand Horowitz

00:26:58

by ripping apart pianos.

00:27:00

That’s the puncture.

00:27:03

And yes, it is good because you can carry through the

00:27:07

meaning because it says that the Horowitz who plays quantum mechanical keys and saying

00:27:16

that if there was a force outside the bounds of known physics that could affect a single electron.

00:27:29

If it could find an electron that was poised in a sufficiently uncertain dynamic state,

00:27:36

it could, by moving with one electron, begin a cascade of electrons, which would then become

00:27:43

a self-replicating natural electrical

00:27:47

turn-based force in matter. In other words, we don’t need alchemists

00:27:53

except on the level of being able to put one electron over into a slightly

00:27:59

different type of state. And this may be what’s thought is.

00:28:08

The psychedelics get right down on it.

00:28:11

The reason we can have such empathy with these shamans

00:28:12

is because once you get with the shamans

00:28:17

and get loaded,

00:28:18

the pretension that you are a delegate

00:28:21

from an advanced society

00:28:23

and they are some kind of primity

00:28:26

is perfectly ridiculous.

00:28:28

Clearly nobody knows what’s happening.

00:28:32

Everybody has myths.

00:28:34

They have myths.

00:28:35

We have myths.

00:28:37

But the smart people on both sides

00:28:40

know that the real thing is past telling.

00:28:44

And nevertheless, it’s worth making the effort to do this,

00:28:49

to try and understand what religion is,

00:28:55

how the notion of God is tied into this,

00:29:00

how the modern archetype of the extraterrestrial visitor is priming this,

00:29:08

and most importantly, how language is somehow mediated by psychedelics

00:29:18

and by ordinary thought processes in some way that we don’t expect or understand. The world is malleable

00:29:27

in some fundamental way which we have not yet cognized, and tomorrow we’ll see things

00:29:37

of objects being transformed into hyperspatial objects through computer graphics. This is

00:29:43

in hyper-spatial objects through computer graphics.

00:29:48

This is one model for it. All magic, every magical act you can conceive of,

00:29:52

every miracle you’ve ever heard of,

00:29:55

is trivial if there is one more spatial dimension.

00:30:01

Then all locked boxes are in fact open on one side, and all cast-agants are in fact present, and so forth and so on.

00:30:14

Flatland is an analogous mechanism going downward, and it stays up. well so then if the brain is the hyperdimensional

00:30:25

or more than

00:30:28

three dimensional organ

00:30:29

then isn’t he

00:30:31

this

00:30:32

isn’t our dilemma that

00:30:35

we are somehow caught

00:30:37

in three dimensional

00:30:39

space unable to

00:30:41

explore

00:30:42

the complete expression of our freedom except in the imagination.

00:30:50

And so here is this theme again of the imagination and how psychedelic.

00:30:55

But imagination is a healing-toned word for fourth dimension,

00:31:03

in a way, if you can conceive of it as large

00:31:06

enough.

00:31:07

And in some sense, then, it must be that the inside and the outside are co-mappable upon

00:31:14

each other.

00:31:15

And this was the alchemical notion that has survived for 2,500 years of rational discourse.

00:31:29

for 2500 years of rational discourse, nevertheless the notion that as above so below, that there is mapping from the interior of the human brain and heart onto the larger universe has

00:31:36

been sustained.

00:31:39

So trying to get a grip on it is very difficult.

00:31:48

We need to think about our physics as provisional.

00:31:55

Think about all our models as provisional.

00:31:59

And realize that experiential data, which is primate,

00:32:05

which comes to you from the experience of your being,

00:32:09

supersedes all the myth.

00:32:13

I mean, there is no reason to believe

00:32:16

in the Newtonian doctrine of simple location,

00:32:20

meaning that you can only be in one place at one time.

00:32:24

If you’ve experienced otherwise,

00:32:27

why should you trade in your experience

00:32:29

for someone else who you don’t respect,

00:32:34

their assurance that you’re in error?

00:32:37

And what the psychedelics do

00:32:39

is they make it impossible

00:32:43

to be blasé about experience.

00:32:49

But they don’t follow norms.

00:32:52

They don’t reinforce the idols of the tribe.

00:32:56

Normally, experience does.

00:32:58

But that’s what the school of hard knocks is.

00:33:01

That’s where you keep making mistakes in a culturally unsanctioned way, and then you

00:33:07

start doing that.

00:33:08

You have to admit it.

00:33:09

Well, I mean, you have the experience that the sun goes around the earth, but you

00:33:15

know that it doesn’t.

00:33:16

You know, I mean, you can’t just blindly experience and be quite deceiving.

00:33:21

No, it has to be analyzed. quite deceiving the fact of the matter is that the sun

00:33:26

does not

00:33:27

it is possible to describe a system

00:33:30

when the sun goes around the earth

00:33:32

it’s also possible to describe a system

00:33:35

when the earth goes around the sun

00:33:36

and all practical housekeeping

00:33:38

matters can be

00:33:40

solved equally in both systems

00:33:43

it’s simply the rather abstract notion of mathematical elegance

00:33:48

that causes someone to proclaim that the Earth goes around the sun

00:33:54

rather than vice versa.

00:33:56

From a higher sphere of reference, either description is quite accurate.

00:34:03

So that shows the relativistic nature of these models.

00:34:08

What do you think about the edge of it all,

00:34:12

about the content of the psychedelic experience

00:34:15

and the suggestion that,

00:34:18

or the feeling that pervades it

00:34:20

that it could have an historical impact of some sort,

00:34:24

except that it’s so illusive.

00:34:27

Do you feel that?

00:34:31

My experience last night was like a new re-innovate.

00:34:39

Because I start to understand your theory, Marie, that at the end, this light and sun, one being,

00:34:50

they have high pre-distance, they step too much into the mist.

00:34:55

Everything becomes white, like metallic, it just completely dissolves. From that point, form is very down below the heart.

00:35:10

And centered.

00:35:11

Yes. It’s like a formanger.

00:35:14

And I believe that the Neutron manifestation manipulates the sound.

00:35:20

The magic sound somehow manipulates the business.

00:35:27

And what do you think, as someone who speaks a multiple of languages, how does it affect your perceptions of all these languages, or does it? One thing that I noticed is that my organs began to make another foreign language, which I didn’t understand.

00:35:53

It was like, you know, that form of direct English I had to integrate with English.

00:36:00

And the words like dissolved, it’s something that is one word and the word is solved into this unity.

00:36:09

And then you have to make really a big effort to put the words together and, you know, communicate.

00:36:15

I try to communicate. Just one word has a lot of meaning, but for the other one it’s not.

00:36:21

It’s a light that you’re in the music.

00:36:29

So you hear all the connections in every word.

00:36:32

Yes, I think that, you know,

00:36:35

in Fingon’s way, this attempt, this manner,

00:36:41

to realize the hyper-dimensionality of words, that, have histories, and that you

00:36:46

can see behind a word, another word,

00:36:48

and then another word, and these trees

00:36:50

of connection, to try

00:36:52

and create a language where all

00:36:54

the associations are on

00:36:56

the surface at one time, so that

00:36:58

essentially every word spoken

00:37:00

is a pun at many

00:37:02

levels, and

00:37:03

this is interesting, Dennis.

00:37:06

In this tape that was reconstructed

00:37:09

from the night before we did the experiment

00:37:12

with La Charrera,

00:37:13

a part of the rap,

00:37:15

which I had completely forgotten,

00:37:17

was this whole thing about how

00:37:19

making a fine sausage

00:37:22

is very analogous to making a pun

00:37:26

of some sort

00:37:27

and that somehow

00:37:29

it is a pun

00:37:31

and that if this could be

00:37:34

fully understood, it’s like a pun

00:37:36

in this trans-anguistic visible

00:37:38

language, it’s a pun

00:37:40

not in an audio language

00:37:41

but in a visual language

00:37:43

and the question of whether or not it’s real or not,

00:37:47

or the way that it can be both real and unreal,

00:37:51

is in the same way that the key word in a pun has two meanings.

00:37:56

And one of them is the primary meaning,

00:37:58

and the other one is the other meaning

00:38:01

which causes the pun to come into existence.

00:38:04

And the tension or the humor or the meaning or the vitality

00:38:09

is as the mind oscillates from one to the other.

00:38:14

Okay. So, yeah.

00:38:16

When we were done in Kalpa,

00:38:20

I was surprised hearing that, I don’t know,

00:38:24

that the Enomitibivo, I was surprised that among the Siddhīvā, they consider reality, they consider the brain divided in three.

00:38:33

And there is no reality in either of them. that only they are like oscillating and when they agree about the reality

00:38:46

of something, then

00:38:47

reality will be created

00:38:49

and it will be

00:38:52

then

00:38:53

understood

00:38:55

by the third mind.

00:38:59

So this is life.

00:39:00

And this is the idea

00:39:01

that the only things

00:39:03

which are real are unions of opposites, which are paradoxes.

00:39:10

And in Latin, coincidencia quasi ponem.

00:39:13

This is the idea.

00:39:15

The alchemical stone is wet and dry, hot and cold, black and white, day and night, love and hate.

00:39:23

So how can it be that things are either one or

00:39:27

the other? But the fact of the matter is that things are never either one or the other.

00:39:33

The idea that things are either one or the other is the elemental error of self-description

00:39:40

that has betrayed us in the history history the fact that we insisted

00:39:45

that it be one or the other

00:39:47

that either or

00:39:49

insistence is lies

00:39:51

at the basis of science

00:39:53

you know, and matter is

00:39:55

spirit is not

00:39:57

not realizing that how can you say

00:39:59

matter is and spirit is not

00:40:01

when you require a perceiving being

00:40:04

to even formulate the dispute.

00:40:07

So it’s the simplification

00:40:10

that is self-destructive

00:40:11

that we are in.

00:40:13

What do you think, Dennis,

00:40:15

about the way

00:40:17

the psychedelic relationship to language,

00:40:20

do you think it’s trivial?

00:40:22

Do you think that it can be analyzed

00:40:24

at the level of disruptive

00:40:26

brain scape like synthetic glossolalia? Or do you think it’s some kind of the… something

00:40:32

more profound?

00:40:33

Well… no, I mean, I don’t believe it’s trivial at all. I do think that psychedelics have something to do with the evolution of mind.

00:40:49

It seems to me that this argument you’re making about evolution, I mean what,

00:40:54

obviously the adaptations that had to take place in order for us to become

00:41:00

symbol-manipulating linguistic creatures,. I mean, they didn’t happen overnight.

00:41:06

They happened over a relatively short period of time,

00:41:10

but not really the 30 past years,

00:41:15

but about a million years.

00:41:17

But I think that, yeah,

00:41:21

but it was a two-way process.

00:41:22

I mean, whether it’s from the ingestion of

00:41:26

glucose-containing plants or whatever there was

00:41:28

for some

00:41:30

reason the brain had

00:41:32

to adapt itself to the manipulation

00:41:34

of symbols and

00:41:36

psychedelics

00:41:37

you know because of

00:41:40

their synesthetic properties

00:41:42

would contribute to this

00:41:44

I mean I think that that basically because of their synesthetic properties would contribute to this.

00:41:50

I mean, I think that basically, you know,

00:41:54

the evolution of a species has been conditioned by all of these chemical interactions that they’ve survived.

00:41:58

And probably, possibly going back, way back.

00:42:02

I mean, in it’s… In other words,

00:42:05

do you think that

00:42:09

the psychedelic experience

00:42:13

was present in the mushroom

00:42:14

before people ate mushrooms?

00:42:18

Or do you think that it evolved

00:42:21

as people ate mushrooms?

00:42:26

Because if it was in the mushroom before people ate it

00:42:28

then that means it’s some

00:42:30

kind of autonomous

00:42:32

intelligent thing

00:42:34

well but I don’t know I don’t think

00:42:36

it’s in the mushroom

00:42:37

it’s in the mind But don’t you think that maybe in previous I think about psychedelics and men and the men in the class. But psychedelics is a divine deal of opportunity

00:43:08

to somebody who comes from a long distance

00:43:10

and you listen to the idea that the world is changing

00:43:16

and everything is changing.

00:43:19

And psychedelics is experiential.

00:43:22

You have no words.

00:43:25

And it gives you an opportunity the age and all of that.

00:43:28

You describe that with your experience.

00:43:30

And you’re sharing that experience.

00:43:32

And I mentioned the sound.

00:43:34

It’s very simple hearing that.

00:43:37

You hear it in a fire record.

00:43:40

You remember when you were a kid and you learned the rap and dancing and so on and so on.

00:43:44

That sound, on a higher level, is sound and confidence. So it’s like a mirror.

00:44:02

Well, it’s like an amnesty.

00:44:04

It’s like the platonic doctrine that everything, that all learning

00:44:07

is remembered in. I don’t know. to look at themselves from their point of view and decide.

00:44:45

Something that’s not known seems to be a strong part of the experience.

00:44:51

So you can note a response of when you come back to the natural state of that difference.

00:44:58

It’s like, wow, you did that as a leader and now I’m here, I’m a self.

00:45:03

because we are non-alcoholic cells.

00:45:10

So you think that by, it’s like, if you have two points to work from, you can describe a space more thoroughly than if you have one point.

00:45:15

So these are points literally mapping, points on a map,

00:45:20

where it’s nice to be very limited.

00:45:23

I mean, in fact, apparently, if you view the way you relate to religion, somehow it

00:45:30

lasts and you have to deal with it.

00:45:32

Do you think, Eduardo, you spent years in monasteries, do you think that the religious

00:45:38

tremendum and the psychedelic tremendum are the same thing aspects of the same thing

00:45:45

and the

00:45:45

scriptures in

00:45:46

Santo Teresa

00:45:46

and

00:45:46

a hundred

00:45:47

of the

00:45:47

mysteries

00:45:49

is very

00:45:51

very much

00:45:52

like

00:45:52

like a

00:45:54

like a

00:45:55

very

00:45:55

profound

00:45:56

experience

00:45:57

the way

00:46:00

a saint

00:46:01

because

00:46:02

these people

00:46:03

not only

00:46:03

these people

00:46:04

were saints

00:46:06

besides the mystics.

00:46:09

John of the Cross.

00:46:14

But anyway,

00:46:16

I mean, I think that there are so many

00:46:17

levels of psychedelics

00:46:20

and consciousness.

00:46:20

You can go, you can explore

00:46:23

this world.

00:46:29

I mean, with the help of psychedelics. I think that what happened with the princess of Ayahuasca is that you don’t get so very high with the gas that you lose consciousness.

00:46:38

The form dissolves, like in the princess the US, my opinion is that you get into another state of consciousness

00:46:47

in which you can handle the environment, the understanding environment, the property

00:46:52

environment. I mean it’s more ecological. You understand the relationship between the

00:46:58

class and the friends of you. So it’s this world? This world. It isn’t personal. Imagine, I was asking a Ritardo about what is the definition of man.

00:47:08

He was a well educated Ritardo in India.

00:47:12

What is the definition of man in the society?

00:47:17

And he said there is no difference.

00:47:20

Man and plant are the same thing.

00:47:22

If you want to define man, you have to define him in terms of the plants around, of the olive oil around.

00:47:29

And if you want to define each tree by itself, it contains a whole tree.

00:47:36

So it was very interesting that they had known this, that they don’t see it themselves.

00:47:42

So, the concept is this. Mm-hmm.

00:47:44

The fact that, um,

00:47:46

well,

00:47:48

there’s all kind of

00:47:50

there’s all kind of

00:47:52

there’s all kind of

00:47:54

there’s lots of

00:47:56

there’s lots of

00:47:58

there’s lots of

00:48:00

there’s lots of

00:48:02

there’s lots of

00:48:04

there’s lots of there’s lots of it’s indistinguishable.

00:48:09

Similarly to the humans and the plants,

00:48:12

the interrelationship is certainly all there,

00:48:15

however that information is built.

00:48:18

That’s right.

00:48:18

Well, and what happens and how you experience what happens

00:48:22

are two different things.

00:48:23

and how you experience what happens are two different things.

00:48:29

The notion that the mushroom consciousness is somehow putting you in touch with a planetary being

00:48:34

or something like the Gaia idea,

00:48:39

but more with a will, is very interesting.

00:48:44

And I think this goddess thing in prehistory

00:48:48

is the way people formulated it

00:48:51

because it was the way they perceived it.

00:48:53

And it still is very much a part of the deep psychedelic experience.

00:49:01

And in fact, part of the social reform

00:49:04

that I hope will come out

00:49:05

of psychedelics is this re-vivifying of this goddess archetype.

00:49:13

Kath, do you want to say anything about that? About how it relates to this African thing

00:49:19

or about your experiences? Well, I don’t have really the archaeological aspect under my belt,

00:49:31

but I know a lot of people, particularly women,

00:49:37

but a lot of people in the left field become aware of the notion of the God of Peace,

00:49:42

and it’s being talked about and written about.

00:49:45

And some people are having direct experience of it, and that’s what I feel lucky to have had a number of times in the past year or so.

00:49:55

On the mushrooms, the mushrooms really change its focus. the mushroom seems to change

00:50:05

its focus.

00:50:07

I was wondering, again, I started to say something

00:50:09

about this, if you can carry on a little bit,

00:50:11

about what the mushroom reveal is credited

00:50:13

with the

00:50:14

PhD initials or something

00:50:17

with having this information and having that

00:50:19

personality. And I

00:50:21

don’t know

00:50:21

if I can do that exactly, but it does seem to at least be a window which

00:50:27

looks out here and then after a while it looks out there and you get to look through it to

00:50:34

see whatever happens to be in that direction.

00:50:37

That seems somewhat risk-setting, so I think that I had this sensation over the years that it has actually areas of interest that skip.

00:50:46

And so there’s a lot of questions that you have to…

00:50:50

that attributes to me.

00:50:52

And I think that’s what I’m most passionate about.

00:50:56

So in the last year and a half of my experience,

00:51:02

it’s been very interesting to see the same people.

00:51:10

It’s instead of taking us into the bizarre, the unthinkable and out of state, it’s realized

00:51:18

maybe through this symbiosis which has grown so much in our usage of it in recent years, the number of people on earth speaking into mushrooms

00:51:27

and all. So maybe it’s appreciating us. And I don’t know where, what’s the God of

00:51:35

these relationships to the mushrooms? But anyway, my little tea-taker, a long time ago,

00:51:42

I said a few words, sort of like he was saying about the pond being the spaces, you know, a few

00:51:47

words of invitation, asking for this experience of the goddess because, you know, you ought

00:51:55

to ask for this. And she came. And I was just astonished. For a second, there she was, you

00:52:04

know, looking through the mirror. There she was all stuck in there. There she was, looking at the ceiling,

00:52:06

and there she was all over the side.

00:52:08

There she was for hours, just ringing in my ear.

00:52:10

I could feel her breathing, and I was watching her,

00:52:12

and she was me, and I asked many questions.

00:52:15

And I thought, I should write an article.

00:52:17

I interviewed the goddess.

00:52:19

It was great.

00:52:21

And it was just like, very…

00:52:23

I had my wish about me enough to ask these these questions and she was real, you know, just happened to be about a million times bigger than I was.

00:52:32

And answered. And since then, on mushrooms I’ve had a number of contacts with her.

00:52:39

But before that I had no predilection to believe that there was a goddess underlying everything.

00:52:46

One of the first questions I had was, what about gods?

00:52:50

What about all the gods and goddesses?

00:52:53

And we talked about this a bit earlier at a meeting last year or so,

00:52:58

but quickly I’ll say, she said about that,

00:53:02

that everyone has many gods and goddesses. We do now too, we just name them different things.

00:53:07

But that they’re all really fragmentations of her, that they are broke her up into many parts, you would have these many forms of the ways that she can be manifested.

00:53:32

That’s what the Greek gods were as well, and historically we know that in fact there was of course the mother goddess,

00:53:39

and then there were the ones who became her lovers and her babies and her adversaries and her self and her lesser and less

00:53:46

psalm of foreign songs. But I guess what I feel about this, because I’m not really academically

00:53:56

oriented to it at all, I always find myself saying to the people I’ve talked to at a time,

00:54:10

myself saying to the few people I’ve talked to at a time. My experience is this is not an important perception about history or an important metaphor for the life force or the great spirit, but that

00:54:19

whatever we want to call it, this is a living being, force, in all of us, as you were saying. It is the fact that we don’t, that when we perceive

00:54:31

directly, we don’t see with ourselves some abode of glass, of fish, or another person. And the way that I have seen it is that the goddess is this ever-influx, life-affirming energy

00:54:55

which has an insatiable appetite for experience.

00:55:03

And that’s one reason we’re all here,

00:55:06

is to experience through each of us

00:55:09

our own particular kink on the whole thing, you know?

00:55:13

How we work together, and it’s as though she has, like,

00:55:15

a billion fingers in each one of us.

00:55:18

There’s a finger shift, you know?

00:55:19

That night, I was blessed to have her be looking

00:55:22

at my finger shift, you know?

00:55:24

But that’s why I just was out here with TV and TV. And I was blessed to have her be looking at my fingers, just me, you know?

00:55:25

But that’s why I could rely on her to see me and see you. Yes.

00:55:30

So I feel this is my poetic mission recently, to turn people on to the idea that it is a living goddess,

00:55:38

and everyone, that’s my meaning to enjoy it.

00:55:42

And that visualization is such a powerful thing that if we can shift our models that

00:55:47

were imposed from the South and are so strong that even when we take psychedelics, we’re

00:55:51

always still under the thumb of those models.

00:55:54

If we can shift our models to something else, something like this, or however you want to

00:56:00

envision it, if it gives you that feeling of the great life force welling up

00:56:06

through you all the time.

00:56:08

That’s part of the work.

00:56:09

That’s part of the big work, which helps to answer the question, what do we as individuals

00:56:14

who love psychedelic plants do to save the world?

00:56:19

I think it’s asking.

00:56:22

I think it’s awesome. Yeah.

00:56:24

I think that, just to add one thing, it’s not just women and it’s not just now.

00:56:32

The reason that I’m here and the reason that Ellen’s here and that Psychedelic Threat is the first profound shift I ever had in the contact experience that I had.

00:56:40

Never having had a voice in my head for the in advance on psychedelics, but the goddess showed

00:56:45

up to me and gave me a real long laugh about how I could change my ass.

00:56:50

And including a long discussion about, you know, what about God, what about goddesses,

00:56:55

what about the tradition of whatever.

00:56:57

And that was November 1981. 1981 and my first profile trip was similar in content but different and had to do with

00:57:09

the unity of the data with the technique with the male principal striving on stuff

00:57:15

this may sound a little posh but I was to the last meeting of the model race

00:57:19

because the setting was fantastic and I found a real great memory out of it and they happen within weeks of each other.

00:57:27

And they were the first time any of us had ever seen the vision.

00:57:34

Yes, it’s not just women, it is this feminization of the earth, of our awareness of Gaia’s birth and our need to nurture ourselves

00:57:48

throughout the earth so that we don’t do ourselves in.

00:57:52

I asked her, you know, and I asked about the gods, what are all these gods,

00:57:55

and what about them, and what are they for, kind of, you know.

00:57:58

And there was this talk about the feminine being the ground

00:58:03

and the masculine being what manifests out of the ground, and that it requires, of course, both.

00:58:10

It would be to be laid back if there were only feminine.

00:58:13

Yes.

00:58:14

A lot of possible, but not a lot of…

00:58:16

The rap that I got is that males provide everything.

00:58:19

Provide everything.

00:58:21

Well, it’s more or less for the gods.

00:58:25

But then I, and then as we talked about this, you know, I looked out over the horizon,

00:58:30

I was way up the coast, and the cabin burned itself out by the ocean, and I looked out over the horizon,

00:58:38

and I saw, and she was black and jeweled and fantastic, and went from horizon to horizon over my head, you know, like the great Egyptian.

00:58:54

And, um, out on the horizon was this guy, great, classic, sweet, beautiful man in armor made of stars.

00:58:55

He was like that tall, with maybe a six, her size, you know.

00:59:00

Just really, the beauty of Damascus and shone, you know, it was fantastic.

00:59:07

But he was also totally honored and weaponed and everything, and I said, who is that?

00:59:12

She said, that’s Mars, and I love you dearly, and he is my son, and he is my lover,

00:59:18

but he also is just kicking me in constantly, and that’s who is causing so much of the trouble right now.

00:59:27

And it’s just no joke, we can really make trouble.

00:59:31

So this is what we have. Then I went outside a little while later and I saw that Mars actually was

00:59:36

the connection to the Eclan, where I had this net loop.

00:59:42

I don’t know how to put this.

01:00:08

Can you ask, um, you know, can you go into a session with an intention, you know, with a stated intention, like I would like, I want to evoke, invoke the goddess, you know, or I did that with Adam when I was just with him as a friend of his girlfriend, and I asked him to send a relationship and other things, and it came,

01:00:14

even the teaching came from him. Can you also do this with that love?

01:00:20

That’s what I did with this, and I’ve done it done it many times. Yes, it doesn’t always work.

01:00:25

Sometimes we think, you know, we need an extra.

01:00:29

And I didn’t find out what we needed.

01:00:30

But it does often happen.

01:00:33

I find that if I put myself in building this oscillation from my dyslexia,

01:00:39

which keeps me like that,

01:00:41

then I could see it through the system.

01:00:47

It also helps if you do fairly lengthy, serious talks.

01:00:52

For example, we could usually on Saturday, and the week before is the preparation for the trip,

01:00:59

which may be, if it’s purely chemical or plant-oriented, preparing.

01:01:04

But if it’s on a particular mix, you want

01:01:07

to explore a question, if it matters, what should I ask and should I go in for?

01:01:11

And that seems to work a lot better.

01:01:13

On occasion, you get really slammed around and you get to do that sort of cosmic joking

01:01:18

answer to the question you asked.

01:01:20

It’s much cleverer than that.

01:01:22

Yeah.

01:01:23

That’s what you needed, though.

01:01:24

Mm-hmm. And the conventional magical tools would be a call to a certain center,

01:01:28

a call to a certain place, and invocation.

01:01:34

Invocation, you just talk to it.

01:01:36

You just say, you know, thing, show yourself, come forth, thing, Unfurl. Show. Show.

01:01:48

And it just…

01:01:50

Good story.

01:01:52

It also works beyond just the word, not motion.

01:01:58

It works, I found, it works without love.

01:02:02

Well, yeah. Thank you.

01:02:06

Well, if you make contact with the student,

01:02:08

or with our doctors,

01:02:10

you’ll be fine.

01:02:12

And for me, it’s a kind of like

01:02:14

a sound that’s a bit of a

01:02:16

distinctive way.

01:02:18

Occasionally, when you’re straight, walking down the street,

01:02:20

you will get a little

01:02:22

burst of control.

01:02:24

Yeah.

01:02:31

So invocations work.

01:02:33

They work.

01:02:34

Oh, I have an experience.

01:02:35

Not too well.

01:02:38

I have an experience with the goddess

01:02:39

which is somewhat different.

01:02:42

I’m somewhat different.

01:02:45

But I, last summer, it was actually, I think it was the same weekend,

01:02:50

Kat went away to get stoned and I was left in the house.

01:02:53

It was the weekend after something.

01:02:54

Anyway, I had these mushrooms that a friend of mine had grown,

01:03:02

and they were, so they were fresh, fresh and they were also they hadn’t been

01:03:05

grown in the conventional way they had sort of grown some material that he had thrown away

01:03:11

so they were just these enormous novel trees and i had taken a trip the week before so i was afraid

01:03:19

that i might have picked up a slight tolerance. So I went high on the dose.

01:03:30

And about 20 minutes into it, I could just see it coming.

01:03:35

And it was like 100 miles wide and 10 miles high.

01:03:37

And it was just rolling toward me.

01:03:41

And I just was in a real state about it. And I, you know, I laid down. I had time to clear my pipes and stuff out of the way and I laid

01:03:54

down and I felt a hand on my shoulder and it’s a very cool voice, sort of like a Lufthansa spirit.

01:04:06

They say it helps if you close your eyes, cowboy.

01:04:15

So I closed my eyes.

01:04:19

It gets better.

01:04:21

So I closed my eyes and the thing just…

01:04:25

You know, first you see what you think it is completely blown away,

01:04:31

and then you see what it is blown away,

01:04:33

and then it’s still, it’s just like nuclear explosion.

01:04:37

I mean, you imagine that everybody from Seattle to Tijuana must have just hit the floor.

01:04:43

You say, my God god this is a mental

01:04:45

event

01:04:46

this is

01:04:47

like a thought

01:04:48

or something

01:04:49

you know

01:04:49

so this is

01:04:51

going on

01:04:51

and after a while

01:04:52

and as the

01:04:53

radiation

01:04:54

and the light

01:04:55

dies down

01:04:56

I open my eyes

01:04:58

and look up

01:04:58

and this

01:04:59

very tall

01:05:00

long legged

01:05:02

woman

01:05:02

with a

01:05:04

green mohawk

01:05:06

and all this body armor

01:05:08

and she’s just

01:05:10

leaning over me,

01:05:11

standing with her legs spread, leaning over me

01:05:14

with her face right down next to mine

01:05:16

and she says,

01:05:17

is it strong enough for you, asshole? Pull back, Dave.

01:05:37

So, I worked on being a better acolyte to the goddess,

01:05:45

and I haven’t had experiences like that.

01:05:49

It’s better to be supplicant than I think.

01:05:53

Maybe it’s that you don’t get what you want,

01:05:56

you get what you deserve.

01:05:58

I’m sad.

01:06:10

so I don’t know you know you just you have a smorgasbord

01:06:13

of metaphysical choices

01:06:15

that’s the flying saucers

01:06:17

the goddess

01:06:18

how does all this work

01:06:20

once I in dialogue with the mushroom

01:06:22

I was asking about all

01:06:25

this and it said

01:06:28

that extraterrestrials,

01:06:30

that all intelligent

01:06:31

species communicate among

01:06:34

themselves, but they don’t

01:06:36

communicate with

01:06:38

individuals, that

01:06:40

we are like cells

01:06:41

in this case, in some vast

01:06:44

organism, and that human history is the human response to an extraterrestrial message,

01:06:53

which is partly us responding and partly the message,

01:06:58

and that it’s a dance, an informational dance,

01:07:01

and that these dances go on between the stars.

01:07:06

But, you know, the mushroom is full of answers it’s like that Robert Graves book of essays

01:07:14

difficult questions easy answers it’s all this book this is what the mushroom

01:07:20

love think of a difficult question it has an easy answer the problem is making sense

01:07:26

of the easy answers i mean it produces aphorisms which are very puzzling which are almost like

01:07:34

colon i asked it once the same question eduardo mentioned what is man i said what you call man is

01:07:42

time what does that mean?

01:07:46

it seems like it means something

01:07:47

it seems like perhaps if you understood it fully

01:07:49

it would be illuminating

01:07:50

on the other hand perhaps it’s gibberish

01:07:53

it’s very hard to tell

01:07:56

the way that language

01:07:58

undergoes transformation

01:07:59

is phenomenal

01:08:01

there can be many kinds of language

01:08:03

not only what we were talking about earlier today,

01:08:07

the sound which becomes visible

01:08:10

where you begin singing

01:08:11

and then slowly the sound condenses

01:08:15

and is beheld,

01:08:17

but in an object,

01:08:19

self-sustaining object

01:08:21

made out of sound and light

01:08:23

or out of your body.

01:08:25

But there can also be more cybernetically related trips with language.

01:08:31

For instance, some of you may have heard me describe an experience I had

01:08:36

where I was sailing along fine, describing everything to myself,

01:08:41

and suddenly every 20th word was made no sense and then every 18th word

01:08:49

and then every 16th word and i could see that it was falling away from me the grammar was just

01:08:55

exploding and sliding and being lost and that i was going to lose it completely and then i did

01:09:01

lose it completely and it was transformed into one of these outbursts of

01:09:06

glossolalia so it’s uh we need we all should give each other permission to explore in terms of what

01:09:16

we do I mean we should not only if we’re going to do these things we should also dance, sing, make love, all kinds of things. We almost never discuss

01:09:29

the erotic potential of psychedelics. That’s just pumping a gasoline on the fire. But Kat

01:09:37

and I, years ago in Hawaii, discovered this thing, which seemed real enough that you could

01:09:42

do some kind of research on it which was

01:09:46

we were taking all these things in various situations and we were newly together and in love

01:09:53

but we noticed that um when we were when we had a lot of skin touching and we were stoned on

01:10:02

psilocybin and it was hot,

01:10:07

this was the thing that made it seem objective.

01:10:09

It required a lot of sweat so that there was actually an electrolytic solution

01:10:13

between the two membranes.

01:10:15

You do merge.

01:10:17

You just merge.

01:10:18

You become electrically a single entity.

01:10:23

And then when you pull away,

01:10:26

you know, it stops. and when you bring the skin

01:10:28

together again it happens

01:10:30

this is at some kind of

01:10:32

limited form of telepathy

01:10:35

because it requires that people

01:10:36

be entwined together

01:10:38

nevertheless it’s proof of concept

01:10:40

in true hallucinations

01:10:43

I described this

01:10:44

amazing incident where an experience that I had had

01:10:50

in Nepal, which you need to pay $80 to find out what it was, was I had never told anyone

01:11:00

about this because it was so shocking and outrageous.

01:11:09

And Dennis was listed as mad and was hanging in his hammock raving one morning at La Charrera.

01:11:14

And I was sitting there fiddling,

01:11:17

and suddenly he locks in to the conversation

01:11:21

between myself and this woman 18 months earlier in Nepal,

01:11:27

and he’s running through it word for word.

01:11:29

First my voice he imitates, then her voice he imitates, who he’d never met.

01:11:35

And, you know, all these other people are working around the camp,

01:11:38

and I look around, and I’m in a complete swivet,

01:11:43

because I realize he’s proving that telepathy,

01:11:46

this absolutely beyond ordinary physical thing,

01:11:49

is happening right in front of me.

01:11:51

But nevertheless, my main concern is to suppress it immediately

01:11:55

because it involves personal disgrace.

01:12:00

So, you know.

01:12:03

Did you get it? Do you remember? No. No, he didn’t. I don’t remember. Did you get it? Do you remember?

01:12:05

No.

01:12:06

No, he didn’t.

01:12:07

I don’t remember.

01:12:08

Yeah?

01:12:09

Yeah.

01:12:10

One additional thing you may kind of accept from Dan,

01:12:13

one of the things we thought we’d done a lot of that when you’re loaded,

01:12:17

is that those are excellent techniques for either controlling state,

01:12:23

when you’re really, really trying to pull something out of it,

01:12:26

or for using it to get higher.

01:12:29

And that’s something that we would suggest to other people if they are working in this area.

01:12:34

Tantric techniques work, dancing techniques work.

01:12:39

In fact, all kinds of techniques work. I mean, mantras work. You know, I mean, if you get into a bad spot on a psychedelic

01:12:48

and you have the most remedial knowledge of mantras,

01:12:54

you know, just whip off a quick om tat sat and see where that gets you.

01:12:58

I mean, it’s almost as if you are inhabiting that energy world

01:13:02

that is the province of classical shamanism and yoga it all works

01:13:08

visualizations mantra mudra all of these things which never got a rise out of me

01:13:16

i’m stoned i mean i just i was in india and did the whole thing and i just had no time for it

01:13:22

you know i mean i’m really fairly critical of, that’s

01:13:26

why I was teasing Ralph about including yoga, because I think that Hindu society is horribly

01:13:33

stratified and xenophobic and conservative. The Mahabharata specifically forbid eating mushrooms. The Mahabharata prescribes the lifestyle of the Brahmins of India.

01:13:49

So, these earlier techniques, it’s a certain anarchy is required, you see.

01:13:58

And politically, I think, what psychedelics push towards is anarchy.

01:14:06

And that it’s an anarchy of the goddess,

01:14:09

the anarchical kingdom of the goddess.

01:14:11

And that’s why America is a place

01:14:14

where the psychedelic thing has taken root so strongly.

01:14:18

Because our governing theory really is, I believe,

01:14:22

that everyone should be able to get away with as much as possible

01:14:28

without driving other people crazy. You know, I mean, that’s really the American ideal.

01:14:35

And that’s a commitment to anarchy. That’s a commitment to kind of ultimate freedom,

01:14:40

that we really wanted responsible anarchy in fact the only kind

01:14:45

that’s possible anarchy through responsibility and you attain this sense of responsibility

01:14:53

because it’s a sense of responsibility to everybody and everything you attain it by

01:14:59

dissolving the body boundary and discovering that you are you, but you could have been him or her or that.

01:15:07

And then the way toward anarchy is possible. These societies, these micro societies in the Amazon,

01:15:15

which we admire so much, you know, its tradition is the only law. And then the mediator, the mediation of tradition

01:15:26

is the power of personality.

01:15:28

So that a person can,

01:15:30

a head man or a curaca

01:15:33

can actually do a non-traditional thing

01:15:36

if his force of personality is sufficient

01:15:39

that he can argue for it.

01:15:41

And these ayahuasqueros have great force of personality.

01:15:44

They are the major innovators in the culture.

01:15:48

So I think anarchy, responsible anarchy,

01:15:53

is what we’re working toward

01:15:55

and what seems achievable on psychedelics.

01:15:59

I mean, it was trivialized in the 60s

01:16:01

when people began running around saying

01:16:04

we can solve all the world’s

01:16:06

problems if we will only take lsb then what it was well it didn’t turned out it didn’t work that way

01:16:13

but the reason those people thought that was because the first 10 000 people who took it

01:16:21

if everybody had been like them that that would have been true, you

01:16:26

know, because Aldous Huxley and Hoffman and these people, they got it to thinkers, mystics,

01:16:34

theologians, artists, poets, managers. If everybody were like the top 5% of the human

01:16:44

race,

01:16:45

we could get them squared away in a big hurry.

01:16:48

With or without LSD.

01:16:50

With or without LSD, that’s probably true.

01:16:52

It was a bad calendar.

01:16:54

But the problem is that there’s a lumpen element

01:16:58

that is much in control and not to be denied.

01:17:07

So how to work around this, I’m not sure. What does the goddess say about that? That was the question I was going to ask.

01:17:13

Good question.

01:17:14

I’m assuming that since you’ve characterized it, it’s such a paradox, you experiences, on the eminence, it seems, of the apocalypse.

01:17:32

Apocalypse.

01:17:33

The apocalypse, yeah, something, some kind of annihilation.

01:17:37

Maybe it’s a personal thing that I’m going through with my mushroom experiences,

01:17:42

but that’s what seems to come up a lot in the shaman’s saying that

01:17:46

no matter what now it’s too late, I kind of think.

01:17:50

Hmm, yeah.

01:17:51

Yeah.

01:17:52

Good.

01:17:53

Well, I…

01:17:54

That’s acceptable.

01:17:55

I’m not that happy with the question, and I hadn’t forgotten that one.

01:18:00

First, the question was why all the diversity and the question came back why not?

01:18:07

And then I was asking about why the adversity, why things are so screwed up and I had a vision very similar to your vision of mine

01:18:15

and she said very clearly what I detected as a motive to tell them that I like heroes.

01:18:20

I like nature, love, curse. That’s how much her and I care about her.

01:18:25

I had the same feeling.

01:18:27

Heroes.

01:18:28

Heroes.

01:18:29

I had that same feeling when she was talking about my childhood.

01:18:34

You know, my child, my lover, my nightmare, you know, we’re all these things and it’s

01:18:41

like we all can be.

01:18:42

Alright, but I have to them specifically with respect to it,

01:18:45

and basically I said, why are things so fucked up?

01:18:48

And that was the response.

01:18:50

Yes, I asked

01:18:51

about this at one time.

01:18:54

The mushroom is not

01:18:55

committed to a single future.

01:18:58

It can show you futures

01:18:59

which are mutually contradicted.

01:19:02

And I said, you know,

01:19:04

why is it this way?

01:19:06

I had just been through this series of hallucinations,

01:19:09

which were like a speeded-up historical movie,

01:19:13

where I saw that North America was somehow the bastion of this struggle

01:19:20

over defining what could be broadly called the rights of human beings,

01:19:28

over-defining what could be broadly called the rites of human beings, and that there would be outbreaks of religious fanaticism, and then ages of fascism, and then outrageous

01:19:35

bloody revolts and new democracies which decayed into imperial systems which were then overthrown. He just went on and on and on, and finally said, you know,

01:19:45

what is the way to avoid this?

01:19:49

And it said, man must have a plan.

01:19:53

If you don’t have a plan,

01:19:56

you become part of somebody else’s plan.

01:20:01

And this is what I think we don’t have.

01:20:03

We do not have a plan.

01:20:05

And when somebody like Jerry Brown,

01:20:09

you know, you’re laughed off the screen

01:20:12

if you try to talk about anything

01:20:14

more than five years into the future.

01:20:16

I mean, I don’t think a space station

01:20:18

is such a mind-boggling notion

01:20:21

that we should just congratulate ourselves

01:20:23

on our poetic genius for thinking about it.

01:20:26

Most people can’t even commit

01:20:28

themselves to something like that.

01:20:29

We need a plan, and there

01:20:32

is no plan. Dog eat dog.

01:20:34

The rule that applies

01:20:35

on the national level is, you know,

01:20:38

the devil takes the hind most.

01:20:40

And yet we’re a global

01:20:41

civilization. I don’t see

01:20:44

any policy- making body moving ahead with any

01:20:48

sort of global conception about where we are going do we want zero growth and ecological

01:20:54

balance and control of industry and restriction of nuclear mining and this sort of thing do we

01:21:00

want to be a space-faring society and export billions in capital investment off the planet?

01:21:08

I mean, nobody knows.

01:21:09

Nobody has a clue.

01:21:11

If you have an opinion on these subjects,

01:21:13

you’re some kind of a nut.

01:21:14

And yet this is what it’s all about.

01:21:18

And the psychedelics, by giving you the big picture,

01:21:21

my God, if they do anything,

01:21:23

they teach you to think in spans

01:21:26

of time and chunks of space larger than yourself.

01:21:29

But they also, as you said, they make you sort of an anarchist. I mean, it’s hard to

01:21:34

organize a group of psychedelicists because they are sort of anarchists. They’re very,

01:21:41

it’s a very difficult thing to do. And many people have aversion to that.

01:21:46

I heard someone say

01:21:47

that if all the

01:21:50

good people in the world organize themselves

01:21:52

into committees, the forces

01:21:54

of evil should surely try

01:21:56

to defend it.

01:21:58

The organization may not be the same.

01:22:00

No, because it has to

01:22:02

go around one person

01:22:03

which by itself will

01:22:05

acquire power

01:22:06

and will

01:22:07

dominate

01:22:07

the minds

01:22:08

of the

01:22:08

others

01:22:09

you can

01:22:10

see that

01:22:11

every time

01:22:11

every time

01:22:12

any psychedelic

01:22:13

gets popular

01:22:14

there’s a

01:22:14

right way

01:22:14

to take it

01:22:15

and that’s

01:22:16

bullshit

01:22:17

and it

01:22:18

happened to

01:22:18

every psychedelic

01:22:19

that’s become

01:22:19

popular

01:22:20

yes although

01:22:21

I think that

01:22:22

Philip Simon

01:22:23

has been

01:22:24

remarkably

01:22:24

resistant to publicity.

01:22:27

Well, that’s the first thing that a drug must be, cannot be destroyed.

01:22:32

It must be a rare and precious thing, hard to get a hold of, not trivial.

01:22:39

I actually see it, what I would say, abused. But it’s been very long ago.

01:22:44

Abused, you mean? It’s been very long ago. Abused.

01:22:48

Abused without the recognition of its significance.

01:22:50

Yeah, but it’s so low. But that’s what we call trivial.

01:22:51

Yeah, trivial.

01:22:53

Not abused.

01:22:55

I mean, it is an abuse of the concept,

01:22:58

but it isn’t the…

01:23:00

But I don’t think that psychedelics necessarily make us

01:23:03

see what is happening

01:23:05

and in a position to step in and take control of our destiny.

01:23:09

I think that what psychedelics make us see is that we never have been in control of our destiny.

01:23:16

I mean, it’s always been orchestrated by someone else, you know,

01:23:21

or some thing else, someone else, or some other set of circumstances.

01:23:27

I mean, in other words, we’ve gotten to this point where we’re clearly ready to step off

01:23:33

the edge in a whole different manner of ways, everything from space travel to genetic engineering

01:23:39

to the merging of cybernetics and neurology and all these things.

01:23:44

And these things have just happened.

01:23:48

It’s almost as though we haven’t had that much to do with them.

01:23:52

They’ve just sort of sprung up as a result of their own momentum

01:23:57

and everybody working in…

01:23:59

Does that sort of mean that they laugh?

01:24:01

Well, no, I don’t necessarily think so,

01:24:04

because there are both good trends and bad trends.

01:24:08

I mean, there are a lot of bad trends,

01:24:09

but I, as well as good ones, you know,

01:24:12

I think it’s basically a race between the two.

01:24:15

It’s either annihilation or transformation.

01:24:18

It’s very much creation,

01:24:21

and you can have a vision,

01:24:23

you can be in touch with a collective voice, you can be a child, you can be a person, and then you evolve and go out into the world and see some mysterious stuff happen.

01:24:34

If you don’t happen, if you don’t connect, then you sort of fall away, so you have to create new average. Yeah. Yeah. Think of the concept of moriah and the Greek tragedy.

01:24:47

Even though they’re populated by Hebrews, you must understand those particular acts.

01:24:52

If they don’t take the act, the action doesn’t go forward.

01:24:57

There’s no underlying metaphysics of those people really acting in this way acting like this so it’s to live out your faith

01:25:07

well I like

01:25:09

I believe actually

01:25:11

I resist the deepest levels

01:25:14

of alarm

01:25:15

because I am basically

01:25:18

I was thinking about this today

01:25:19

basically irrational

01:25:21

and

01:25:23

completely able to believe in impossible things,

01:25:28

completely able to believe that out of nothing could come, you know,

01:25:33

a 10 million ton displacement, seamless beryllium object

01:25:39

filled with all the goodies you could ever imagine.

01:25:42

Well, if you’re capable of believing that, you can believe anything.

01:25:46

It’s just a matter of where you direct your belief.

01:25:49

But somehow it seems clear

01:25:50

that putting faith in the imagination

01:25:53

will not play a fault.

01:25:57

And that, you know, if you read William Blake,

01:25:59

this is what he’s saying.

01:26:00

He’s saying that to be at play in the divine imagination is what is happening and he

01:26:07

even felt that america had a role to play in all that but we must transcend the demonic world of

01:26:16

newton and the satanic mills of industrialism and i am definitely very hopeful but for no good reason, I can tell you.

01:26:28

I just have a very strong feeling

01:26:31

that it is some kind of ordered thing,

01:26:36

that this is a process

01:26:38

and that in fact it isn’t pathological even, it’s necessary

01:26:46

we are going to do

01:26:48

something with all these computers

01:26:50

we’re even going to do something with all

01:26:52

this fissionable material

01:26:54

it will come in

01:26:56

mighty handy at some

01:26:58

point and everybody will be

01:27:00

very glad we have it

01:27:02

so that it’s all…

01:27:06

Hard to imagine, but maybe so.

01:27:08

You can’t imagine.

01:27:08

No, no, I can imagine it, absolutely.

01:27:11

And it can be used to drive starships,

01:27:14

but nothing else.

01:27:15

Well, look at how evolutionary biologists

01:27:18

are beginning to become convinced

01:27:19

that the surface of the Earth

01:27:21

is periodically subject to outrageous bombardment from asteroids

01:27:27

would be mighty handy to have the 20th century’s fissionable material around

01:27:33

to throw at something like that.

01:27:35

If you found out it was on the way,

01:27:38

any time in the next 10,000 years, that’ll be very useful.

01:27:43

You say, thank God those people back in the 20th century stockpiled

01:27:47

all those nuclear weapons.

01:27:48

Where would we be now?

01:27:51

So it is hard

01:27:52

to know.

01:27:57

Does anybody have anything that they want to say?

01:28:01

Maybe it’s an old

01:28:02

question,

01:28:03

but I’ve often wondered

01:28:05

if you think Lewis Carroll

01:28:07

has any access to the body?

01:28:10

Yes, I think somebody’s written about this

01:28:13

and shown that he hung out with some…

01:28:16

That’s a question for Michael Horowitz.

01:28:16

Yeah, that’s a Horowitz question.

01:28:18

This guy knows what Louisa May Alcott was shooting.

01:28:23

He knows what Charles Dickens was into what Louisa May Alcott was shooting. I don’t know.

01:28:28

You know, what Charles Dickens was into and how T.S. Eliot’s wife,

01:28:30

did you know that T.S. Eliot’s wife

01:28:31

was so into Easter

01:28:32

that she used to excuse herself

01:28:34

from formal dinner parties in the house.

01:28:37

It was reeked of,

01:28:38

and it was a scandal.

01:28:42

But yes, Lewis Carroll.

01:28:43

I mentioned Jabberwocky before and that’s his best known experiment

01:28:51

with language and it’s very interesting he was obviously on to something and he knew how

01:28:56

to invoke meaning through sound so that words like slivy toes and gyred and gimballed in the wave these things have

01:29:10

meaning they call up images he does the same thing in the hunting of the snot and the mushroom scene

01:29:16

in alice in wonderland and all that stuff about looking glassy girls and no there’s a strong strain of this. People like H.P. Lovecraft and…

01:29:27

How many of you know that woman who wrote Ice? What is her name?

01:29:35

She has a strange name. Anyway, she was heavily into drugs in the 1920s and in polite society and wrote these bizarre novels.

01:29:49

Niko Valtteri, the Finnish author.

01:29:52

Oh, who wrote the Egyptian?

01:29:54

Amanita Mokheira.

01:29:56

Really?

01:29:58

It’s just that it’s in this context, that it’s in this time and place that because we’re so desperate for social solutions,

01:30:07

you know, that now everything must be looked at for its possible salvational effect

01:30:16

so that things as innocuous as drug habits and things like that

01:30:21

are examined for their application to the culture crisis.

01:30:25

And again, this talk that we were just having before this about apocalypse and how do you

01:30:32

deal with it in your heart and all this, it reminded me of Eric Jancz, who was a friend of ours and made me know I don’t know if you know this book, Designed for Evolution. The Self-Organizing Universe.

01:30:46

The Self-Organizing Universe.

01:30:47

A great system.

01:30:48

Wonderful.

01:30:49

Yes.

01:30:51

And he felt a lot of pain in his life, but he had great flux.

01:30:58

That’s what he would bring out.

01:31:00

Do you remember it that way?

01:31:01

That’s how he would see whatever happened,

01:31:03

and whatever seemed imminent in appalling was fluctuations.

01:31:08

He could always see that over the road and in it. And all time has been and all time will be and surely part of that is fluctuations.

01:31:17

And it just, whenever I start to get panicked like that about, oh wow, you know, it looks like two pipes, it’s really right there, not very far away.

01:31:25

Then I finally remembered that he had just been dropped in the water.

01:31:31

Something went up on the other side and he saw through that.

01:31:35

Yeah, I was really down with him.

01:31:39

I was about to get out of the car and I was taking medicine and had a vision.

01:31:43

And was, so basically, again I got a vision and a female voice came out and said,

01:31:49

what makes you think you’re so special?

01:31:51

And I got this vision of what I think of my ancestors in northern Germany,

01:31:58

the edge of the ice sheet in wintertime.

01:32:00

There was a small group of about 50 or 60 people who basically believed that they were the only close team on Earth, and they were being attacked by wolves.

01:32:10

And they had to survive that particular part of annihilation. And they barely survived. And it was twice made out to be what they see so this is an atomic age

01:32:25

man was formed by nine

01:32:28

ice ages

01:32:29

nine times ice a mile

01:32:31

high has come and gone

01:32:34

from the plains of North America

01:32:36

the planet is very old

01:32:39

and man

01:32:42

is very recent

01:32:43

and he may be very transmissible to the ecology of this planet

01:32:50

but apart from all the apparent damage that we see and the danger that we create

01:32:58

we’ve done a great thing already even if it doesn’t go to what glory we imagine it could go to. And I don’t know, that seems to be a strange thing.

01:33:07

So the IH100 is the best.

01:33:11

Everyone.

01:33:11

We’re there to find it.

01:33:13

Even the ones who didn’t do the thing.

01:33:15

We have to preserve it because we don’t know.

01:33:20

There may be, we don’t know.

01:33:22

The universe may team with intelligent life or it may not, but here we have it and we can see that life, even life that teams with our own, has within it the seed.

01:33:43

and we live on one miserable planet.

01:33:47

So we must preserve the possibility of these higher orders of organization

01:33:51

and self-expression and becoming.

01:33:54

Who knows how often it comes to be

01:33:57

that an intelligent species arises

01:34:00

and to what end.

01:34:03

So I think, you know, we we’re travelers we’ve always been travelers moving first

01:34:08

to the canopies of the trees and moving now through history and we’re going to move off

01:34:15

planet because there’s nowhere else to move and you know someone is going we don’t have to worry about that.

01:34:27

And so then what are we worrying about?

01:34:31

It just becomes more who’s going and am I going and will it happen soon enough?

01:34:34

Well, that’s a big worry.

01:34:36

I mean, you have to get them off as soon as possible.

01:34:40

That is basically what the race is.

01:34:43

History is like the breaking of an egg, you know.

01:34:47

It’s like a pregnancy.

01:34:49

For 10,000 years now, the planet has borne in its body this thing

01:34:55

which is growing larger and larger and taking more and more energy.

01:35:01

As you can tell, I’m not a great sound engineer,

01:35:04

so this is about the best I can do to make this recording more listenable.

01:35:09

And my guess is that this may also have been the first workshop in which Paul Herbert began recording Terrence McKenna.

01:35:16

Fortunately, he got really good with recording as time progressed.

01:35:20

And like you, I’ve listened to a lot of Terrence’s lectures and conversations, and while I’ve probably heard him say it before,

01:35:27

this is the first time that I actually remember him saying it like this, and I quote,

01:35:32

We always call it the mushroom, but this is just a gloss on the fact that,

01:35:38

no, we are in the large hands of a very unseen being of which the mushroom is simply the physical

01:35:46

residuum. I’ll leave you to mull that over as you fall asleep tonight. And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:35:53

signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Namaste, my friends.