Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California
Although he first appeared at Esalen in the early 1970s, this may be the earliest recording of a Terence McKenna workshop there. It is from June of 1984.
I think this is Terence’s best and most clearly detailed description of the psychedelic experience. And that is why I’m repodcasting it now, rather than refer you to a podcast that I first published in April of 2014.Among other little gem in this talk where Terence said that of all the people he’d given DMT to over many years, only FOUR of them reported an experience like the ones he described. And then, he admitted that, and I quote: “every single one of them had been primed by me.”
Podcast 396 – “A Freely Evolving Topology of Light & Sound”
(This is the first podcast of this talk.(The title on the cassette is Mind, Molecules and Magic)
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Podcast 689 – McKenna at Esalen 1985 Part 2
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Elf machines.
00:00:17 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today I’m going to do something that I’ve, well, I’ve only done it once before as far as I know.
00:00:29 ►
The first time was by accident, but this time is intentional.
00:00:33 ►
I’m going to replay a recording from an earlier podcast.
00:00:37 ►
There’s a long explanation as to why I’m doing this, but I’ll spare you the details.
00:00:41 ►
However, after re-editing it for this podcast, I discovered
00:00:45 ►
that this one is now seven minutes longer than the earlier version, but that’s because I’ve
00:00:51 ►
become better at recovering voices that were too faint to hear in the original recording.
00:00:57 ►
Now, this may be the earliest recording of a Terrence McKenna workshop at Esalen,
00:01:02 ►
and it is from June of 1984.
00:01:11 ►
For me, I think this may be Terrence’s best and most detailed description of the psychedelic experience,
00:01:19 ►
which is why I’m repodcasting it now, rather than referring you to a podcast that I first published in April of 2014,
00:01:21 ►
which is almost 10 years ago.
00:01:27 ►
Graham St. John tells me that this wasn’t Terrence’s first appearance at Esalen, however.
00:01:34 ►
He said that Joan Halifax told him that Terrence first appeared as a speaker at Esalen in 1972 or 73 as a part of a shamanism seminar that Joan and her then-husband Stan Groff organized.
00:01:41 ►
Apparently that event wasn’t recorded.
00:01:44 ►
Of course, it’s no wonder that it wasn’t
00:01:46 ►
recorded, because in 1972, the recorders were pretty pricey back then. The purchase price of a
00:01:53 ►
cassette recorder in 1972 was around 1,250 today.
00:02:02 ►
When I was previewing this recording, it struck me that even from the earliest recordings
00:02:07 ►
of Terrence that I’ve listened to, he was recommending a mushroom dose of five dried grams.
00:02:14 ►
What I’ve never questioned before now is where did this amount come from? Did Terrence and his
00:02:19 ►
friends do an underground study to find the best dose for a mushroom trip? Or did they just casually agree to the 5 gram dose?
00:02:27 ►
Or was that Terrence’s best dose?
00:02:30 ►
If you know the answer to that question,
00:02:32 ►
please leave a comment in the program notes for this podcast
00:02:35 ►
on our site at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:02:38 ►
And now, here is Terrence McKenna.
00:02:43 ►
What I want to talk about, and I don’t really want to,
00:02:47 ►
I would like a discussion about it, if that’s possible,
00:02:51 ►
is those components of the psychedelic experience
00:02:55 ►
which exceed either the psychedelic paradigm
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or raise the issue of violations of some kind of larger
00:03:07 ►
paradigm and there are two areas where this is noticeable and one is fairly
00:03:17 ►
common in the literature and that’s the report of telepathic phenomena and that sort of thing, which has been persistently a repressed sub-theme in psychedelic research
00:03:32 ►
ever since Havelock Ellis began experimenting with mescaline.
00:03:36 ►
And the other thing is a constellation of issues that seem to me related,
00:03:46 ►
although they may not seem related to you.
00:03:49 ►
And we touched on this this afternoon in Stan’s talk,
00:03:53 ►
which is the question of the extraterrestrial connection,
00:03:58 ►
or whatever it is, and what do these things mean.
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The first thing I want to say about all this
00:04:09 ►
is there’s been a phrase used by several people
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which is the full spectrum of psychedelic effects.
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People will tell you at what dose
00:04:19 ►
the full spectrum of psychedelic effects occurs.
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Or we heard yesterday that LSD elicits the full spectrum of psychedelic effects occurs or we heard yesterday that LSD elicits
00:04:25 ►
the full spectrum of psychedelic effects but in fact there is no catalogue of
00:04:32 ►
psychedelic effects and how does one know what the full spectrum is it’s it’s It’s a very tricky matter. What I have encountered at fairly high doses of psilocybin and on DMT,
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but strangely on nothing else, that I find very interesting,
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is the whole problem of interiorized voices,
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relationships with hidden agencies of uncertain parameters,
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and related to that states that I think the vocabulary we inherit
00:05:20 ►
from the religious systems that we’ve recently overthrown leave us with nothing to
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say about them but that they’re states of possession and the word demonic has been used
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but not defined and it’s somehow it’s a form of negativity that does not seem to be operational, but it’s very upsetting nevertheless to people.
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So what I find and what I think is generally part of the shamanic practice of taking mushrooms is that at fairly low doses, meaning I can’t speak of pure psilocybin,
00:06:10 ►
but at five dried grams, it’s very easy to invoke a voice,
00:06:18 ►
a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant. It’s the teaching voice. It’s Virgil
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to Dante. It’s a very large and superior force which takes you by the hand and then narrates
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the various scenarios that you’re conveyed through. the trick of course is the trick
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that’s such a conundrum of the literature of involvement with demons
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and devils which is the trick is to get something out of it and get away clean
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and the way the way that works operationally when tristing with the mushroom voice
00:07:07 ►
is it’s the challenge to get it to tell you something that you’re sure you didn’t know already
00:07:13 ►
so that you can have some validation that you’re not just talking to the back of your head.
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And though this sounds trivial at first, as you move into the dialogue with the
00:07:28 ►
other, it becomes apparent that it’s going to be elusive. Mercurial is a word that suggests itself.
00:07:40 ►
Now, another aspect of the psilocybin intoxication, which may or may not be related to this, and that I have sort of, I guess, insisted upon more than anybody else, is that it triggers phenomena having to do with the language centers.
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Henry Munn, in a book called Taliesinogens and Shamanism, edited by Michael Harner, talks about this.
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And I went to some lengths to talk to him about it.
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And I found out that though he agreed with my opinions on the subject, he didn’t hold them nearly as strongly as I did.
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That for him it had been a fairly elusive and upsetting phenomenon.
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But this is a form of glossolalia that I really am convinced is an affect of tryptamines that is a psychedelic affect that I don’t believe it happens with anything else.
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At least it doesn’t happen in my experience with anything else,
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and the literature doesn’t mention anything like this.
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It does not happen with ayahuasca,
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even though chemically you would think ayahuasca
00:08:58 ►
would have the same properties as the other tryptamine hallucinogens.
00:09:07 ►
And so I want to describe a typical encounter with this phenomenon
00:09:14 ►
because a client has had this experience over a dozen times
00:09:22 ►
and it’s almost always unvarying.
00:09:24 ►
The problem is the
00:09:25 ►
client happens to be myself. So getting independent confirmation that this could
00:09:34 ►
happen to someone else has not been very easy. Nevertheless I operate under the
00:09:39 ►
faith that there’s nothing unique about me, and that anything I could experience is a generally accessible human phenomenon.
00:09:48 ►
I mean, I think it would be preposterous to operate under any other kind of assumption.
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In giving DMT to people casually over a number of years,
00:10:00 ►
only four people have reported the kind of phenomenon that I’m interested in.
00:10:08 ►
And of course, every single one of them had been primed by me.
00:10:16 ►
Nevertheless, the experiences of such an ontologically different modality
00:10:23 ►
that it’s difficult to see how you could cue it to somebody.
00:10:29 ►
They would have to have it.
00:10:31 ►
And what it involves is a transformation of language
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into something which is no longer sound decoded by brain through the consultation of a
00:10:49 ►
culturally validated dictionary but instead it becomes sound which is
00:10:59 ►
beheld and meaning which is beheld. And this idea of a visible language, when it first came
00:11:10 ►
to me or when I first realized that that was the phrase I was going to have to use to describe what
00:11:16 ►
was happening, I had never heard or imagined of such a thing. But then I went back into the literature and I discovered that, as usual,
00:11:28 ►
the Greeks got there first, or at least in this case, the Jewish Greeks or the Greek Jews,
00:11:33 ►
because in Philo-Judeus, who was a contemporary of Christ, there’s a discussion of what he calls the more perfect logos and he says the more perfect logos will be apprehended
00:11:50 ►
through seeing not through hearing and yet it will cross from being heard to being seen without ever
00:12:00 ►
going through a noticeable moment when it shifts from one modality to the other.
00:12:07 ►
And this seems to be what is happening in the DMT flash when you smoke the free base,
00:12:15 ►
not the hydrochloride, but when you smoke the free base, you have this spontaneous experience of generating what you identify first as a thought and then as a sound,
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but which eventually becomes some kind of synesthetic linguistic modality for which we don’t have words yet.
00:12:41 ►
Telepathy I always conceived of as looking into your own mind and hearing what someone else was
00:12:48 ►
thinking but the notion that telepathy might be someone speaking and producing a three-dimensional
00:12:57 ►
object in the air that could be rotated and mutually beheld by the speaker and the listener had never occurred
00:13:08 ►
to me. But experiment with the DMT showed that this extraordinary kind of state is actually
00:13:18 ►
potentially triggerable again and again. And it is, as though there is a sensorium of the world,
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which in order to be reconstructed in the interior horizon of transcendence that is the being of a
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given individual, the sensorium has to be arbitrarily broken down into its
00:13:47 ►
perceptual components of sound, sight, odor, tactility, etc. And normally as it enters the
00:13:56 ►
human organism, these categories, which are arbitrary but as old as the human body itself, are maintained.
00:14:05 ►
But they need not necessarily be maintained.
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The incoming sensory data can be recombined in such a way
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that no trace of the portal of entry is left upon it.
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And in that case, you get this freely evolving topology of light and sound that is
00:14:29 ►
translinguistic. It has a grammar of form, if you will, so that it is not
00:14:38 ►
shorn of meaning. It is simply shorn of the kind of particularized meaning that logical necessity
00:14:49 ►
imposes on language. Instead, it has an emotional richness, a kind of poetic depth that is not like ordinary language at all, and in fact causes one to think of discussions
00:15:08 ►
of primary poetic languages,
00:15:11 ►
such as the one that goes on in The White Goddess by Robert Graves,
00:15:16 ►
where he wants to suggest that there is a proto-language,
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an ursprach, that transcends conventionalized dictionaries,
00:15:26 ►
a language which, to hear it, is to understand it.
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And I think that this kind of organization of information
00:15:36 ►
lies at the basis of the psychedelic experience.
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In other words, you can think of cultural conventions and human
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languages as software languages that are historical adumbrations of an assembly language, which
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is prehistoric and probably in the genes and antedates all notion of human conventionalizing of activity and is actually biologically the
00:16:11 ►
basis of language.
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As I said in the opening remarks, that if you want to see the thumbprint of God in the
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world, it seems to me the phenomenon of human language is where you look.
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I mean, human language is a psychic ability.
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I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering certain small mouth noises.
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And the degree of fineness of the images that I can produce in your head
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and you in mine through the use of small mouth
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noises is something which we’re still exploring. I think that, you know, it’s well known that the
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human animal has not appreciably evolved in 50 or 60,000 years, possibly much longer. Once culture was established, the soma of the human species was relatively
00:17:11 ►
stabilized. Then change was no longer genetic. It became epigenetic. And you get, just as the
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stability sets in in the animal form, you begin to get this fantastic proliferation of epigenetic
00:17:28 ►
change in the form of the evolution of culture languages alphabets it all seems to be related
00:17:37 ►
somehow to the encoding of information and in the and the psychedelic state also seems to be about the revelation of kinds of information which are normally either not efficacious or unavailable for other reasons.
00:17:56 ►
And it is not that culture is evolving.
00:18:01 ►
The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of
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language. Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries along.
00:18:15 ►
At the present moment, we are able to speak 21st century ideas to each other, but our culture is
00:18:21 ►
carrying along at about the 1950s level. Nevertheless, it seems to
00:18:26 ►
me that this thing which psilocybin does to the language-producing part of the brain is not then
00:18:34 ►
some mere affect, some trivial affect of an obscure hallucinogen on a peripheral part of the brain,
00:18:45 ►
it means that it is in fact a catalyst for evolution
00:18:50 ►
because it is a catalyst for the evolution of language.
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We are not going to move into the future
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until we create that future through language.
00:19:03 ►
And the hardest thing to cause to change is language. It has an immense
00:19:09 ►
inertia because it is so unself-reflective of itself. And this is what we need to inject into
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it, is an element of self-reflection so that the evolution of language can become more conscious and less random,
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because it’s the non-randomizing of the evolution of language
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that will give us a real hold on the kinds of social modalities
00:19:35 ►
that we want to produce in the future.
00:19:38 ►
Now, I don’t know if the tryptamine-induced glossolalia
00:19:44 ►
will have a major role to play in that.
00:19:48 ►
It may be simply one of the many promising scintillas or sparks
00:19:55 ►
thrown off by the psychedelic experience that invites exploration.
00:20:00 ►
But certainly all of these things,
00:20:03 ►
the chanting, the glossolalia, the inner discourses with alien forces, the self-examination of one’s own motives, all of these things are linguistic activities andgize is cognitive activities of all sorts.
00:20:27 ►
This is why originally they were called consciousness-expanding drugs.
00:20:32 ►
And this synergy of cognitive activity has to be taken very, very seriously
00:20:39 ►
because it’s having a massive effect on our society. As individuals, we tend to concentrate on the
00:20:47 ►
six to 12 hours following the ingestion of a given drug. But the real impact is a societal
00:20:55 ►
impact that is spread out over decades. And I don’t think that there’s any question at all but what the the best part of the social program of the LSD
00:21:07 ►
reformers of the 60s has been enacted in large measure it’s simply that it’s at a
00:21:15 ►
profane level not pleasing to the purest but I see I believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor.
00:21:26 ►
I think people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity.
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I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction
00:21:38 ►
simply because so much LSD was taken in the 60s.
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And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.
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Our language is largely in the place where it was left by about 1969.
00:21:57 ►
But from the period of 1959 to 69,
00:22:01 ►
dozens of concepts and notions,
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1969, dozens of concepts and notions, ego trip, bummer, flashback, rupture of plane,
00:22:26 ►
all of these terms were invented that allowed a handle on the experience. And essentially, Essentially, the whole 20th century cultural experience has been an effort to create languages
00:22:30 ►
of sufficient power to give descriptions
00:22:36 ►
of the internal transcendence of being
00:22:39 ►
as we experienced it in the present at hand.
00:22:42 ►
And Stan touched on this this afternoon. The
00:22:45 ►
Freudian interest in the repression of desire and the placement of the critical period in
00:22:58 ►
childhood, in other words, out of the present but still within the context of the life of the experience.
00:23:06 ►
And then Jung, trying to say, well, it’s that, but it’s more than that,
00:23:13 ►
and bringing in the notion of a collective unconscious.
00:23:17 ►
But it isn’t that these guys were describing the unconscious,
00:23:22 ►
or limiting or delineating the unconscious. It was that they
00:23:26 ►
were going through linguistic forms of metamorphosis in an attempt to describe what was a black box,
00:23:34 ►
which essentially, I think, still eludes them. Because though the Jungian model was fairly satisfying, I think, by, we’ll say, the middle 40s. It was just at that
00:23:50 ►
time that then these psychedelic agents began coming on. And what they show is that if we keep
00:24:00 ►
the Freudian term, the unconscious, then huge portions of the unconscious seem to
00:24:07 ►
have very little to do with human beings, individually or collectively, and that
00:24:15 ►
large portions of the unconscious present themselves more like a
00:24:19 ►
topological manifold, in other words more like a place that is no more interested
00:24:26 ►
in the traumas or repressed wish fulfillment of human beings than boulders
00:24:32 ►
wildflowers and waterfalls are interested in these things in other
00:24:37 ►
words the unconscious began to take on the character of a dimension rather than a repository of energy.
00:24:49 ►
It seemed to be instead something deployed spatially that could be entered into.
00:24:55 ►
And immediately, of course, the literatures and traditions and mythologies of the world were searched.
00:25:02 ►
And we discovered, yes, shamanism.
00:25:06 ►
mythologies of the world were searched and we discovered yes shamanism there is a tradition of a of a therapeutic practitioner who in order to cure his patient or himself goes to a place
00:25:15 ►
and then there are many descriptions it’s either an ascent through cosmic levels or a descent into an inferno
00:25:26 ►
or into the center of the earth or into a cavern.
00:25:29 ►
But the stress was on the spatial metaphor that it was a place.
00:25:36 ►
And I think that the psychedelics are beginning to confirm this
00:25:42 ►
in a way that’s very hard for us to assimilate.
00:25:46 ►
In other words, it seems as though the science fiction metaphor of another dimension is actually
00:25:54 ►
in some ways more applicable than these reductionist models which wanted to say, well, it’s a representation of a certain symptomatology
00:26:07 ►
or it’s a representation of a certain past event system. It doesn’t seem to be like that.
00:26:13 ►
And it raises questions about the relationship of the mind to the body, which I talked about
00:26:19 ►
the first night, that are very interesting. One of the things, again, that Stan touched on this afternoon
00:26:26 ►
was what he called synchronistic events attendant upon taking psychedelic drugs. And this means
00:26:34 ►
that you take a psychedelic drug and then someone you’ve been thinking of who lives far away
00:26:40 ►
shows up at your doorstep, this kind of thing of thing Jung the word synchronicity was
00:26:47 ►
coined by Jung and it means a meaningful coincidence but I think it was P.D.
00:26:52 ►
Bridgman who said that a coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. And there can be just so many of these meaningful coincidences
00:27:11 ►
before somebody has to stand up and say,
00:27:15 ►
hell, this can’t be coincidences, meaningful or otherwise.
00:27:19 ►
Something else is happening here.
00:27:22 ►
And on psilocybin, and I think it’s based on anecdotal material,
00:27:28 ►
but I think it’s generally true of other psychedelics in varying degrees,
00:27:34 ►
the synchronistic component is more like a poltergeist phenomenon.
00:27:39 ►
It’s as though there are small eddies of autonomous psychic energy
00:27:44 ►
that disturb the periphery of awareness.
00:27:49 ►
It’s the rats-in-the-wall phenomenon.
00:27:53 ►
The scratchings, the rustlings,
00:27:56 ►
fire-flarings need to be studied.
00:28:01 ►
The phenomenon of people lying on floors silent for hours and then sitting up
00:28:09 ►
at the very moment that the fire flares, the window blows open, the baby cries,
00:28:15 ►
almost as though there are waves of compression of coincidence, connectedness, what is it,
00:28:24 ►
coincidence, connectedness, what is it? I’m not sure.
00:28:25 ►
Coincidence control. Something like that, that move through a modality.
00:28:31 ►
So all of these things suggest that actually we don’t know what we’re doing with the psychedelics,
00:28:40 ►
that because things that you put into your mouth that are not foods must necessarily be medicines,
00:28:49 ►
we have assigned these things to our doctors to explain to us.
00:28:55 ►
And I noticed in the first talk this afternoon, it was said,
00:28:58 ►
well, there’s the schizotoxin theory, the psychotomimetic theory.
00:29:07 ►
Then there’s also the theory that these things induce religious experiences.
00:29:13 ►
But so did the psychiatrists who figured this out
00:29:16 ►
immediately step aside and make room for priests?
00:29:20 ►
Or what was the conclusion of that model of how it should be done.
00:29:27 ►
So I don’t think they are…
00:29:29 ►
I think it’s odd that our reaction to them was to immediately say,
00:29:34 ►
well, if you’re dying of cancer, we’ll give it to you.
00:29:37 ►
If you’re seriously neurotic, you can be put on the waiting list.
00:29:42 ►
Everybody else hit the streets if you’re interested.
00:29:47 ►
There is this notion, you know,
00:29:50 ►
that what we all experience is mental health
00:29:57 ►
and certainly doesn’t require any drug intervention
00:30:02 ►
because it, in fact, is normality.
00:30:07 ►
But Jung and others have had you know the more the idea of an open-ended process that there is an
00:30:14 ►
unlimited potential for understanding and for coming to terms with being in
00:30:20 ►
the world and for opening up to other people. And I think that it would be very interesting
00:30:29 ►
to take the approach that these things should be restricted
00:30:35 ►
to people of proven exceptional ability,
00:30:40 ►
that going along with winning the Nobel Prize
00:30:43 ►
was your license to possess and take psychedelics
00:30:49 ►
and to hand them out to your friends.
00:30:52 ►
It’s interesting that when this was all being hashed out
00:30:58 ►
at the very beginning,
00:31:00 ►
it was Huxley, it was Aldous Huxley’s notion
00:31:03 ►
that this is how it should be done.
00:31:06 ►
He said, you know, engineers, artists, diplomats, administrators,
00:31:11 ►
people must be exposed to these things.
00:31:14 ►
And then somewhere along the line, I think,
00:31:16 ►
personalities arose with messianic tendencies,
00:31:21 ►
and the notion became that you would count success in millions of followers rather than
00:31:29 ►
in the quality of the people who were taking it and that proved you know a sad thing because the
00:31:37 ►
society in which that conception arose had a demographic bulge in the 12 to 30 year old group and it just all ended rather badly.
00:31:50 ►
So as I said at the beginning, there’s no conclusion about all of this stuff.
00:31:57 ►
It is the frontier.
00:31:59 ►
There is a very large frontier.
00:32:02 ►
We’re very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding,
00:32:09 ►
but has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding,
00:32:15 ►
necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger.
00:32:30 ►
frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger. So, you know, it’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there is an awful lot of darkness. So
00:32:38 ►
I think, you know, the key to getting around the cultural momentum that has placed us in this position
00:32:49 ►
is to return to the Baconian method which is simply the collection of facts and the examination
00:32:57 ►
of them until patterns emerge and that then the major datum for thinking about the psychedelic experience
00:33:07 ►
should be the experience. And that the pharmacology and all of these things,
00:33:15 ►
they will elucidate operational details of how these things function at the wetware level, but they will never elucidate
00:33:28 ►
the
00:33:29 ►
component which is beheld by the
00:33:32 ►
Experient in confrontation with the drug in fact
00:33:35 ►
It’s silly to demand that of them because that’s not the kind of information that they are able to deliver
00:33:42 ►
in fact, no system of thought is able to deliver that kind of a description.
00:33:50 ►
That has to come from the individual.
00:33:53 ►
And that’s why I am fond of speaking of these things as deconditioning agents,
00:33:59 ►
because what they show you is that, you know, each man, each woman, their own Magellan.
00:34:07 ►
You need no longer participate in a pyramid of information
00:34:12 ►
where it’s filtering down to you
00:34:15 ►
from the scientific, medical, governmental, and military elite
00:34:19 ►
being explained by CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time, you can discover, actually,
00:34:27 ►
that the adventure of being is not a cultural adventure.
00:34:32 ►
It’s not a societal adventure.
00:34:35 ►
It’s a personal adventure.
00:34:38 ►
And that this is what you really need to be involved in.
00:34:42 ►
And all this is happening.
00:34:45 ►
This is why shamanism has gained such a hold,
00:34:48 ►
because it’s a metaphor for personal responsibility.
00:34:54 ►
And I think we all take personal responsibility
00:34:56 ►
for the evolution of our worldview.
00:34:59 ►
Psychedelic people, I’m referring to,
00:35:02 ►
take responsibility for the evolution of their worldviews. But still,
00:35:06 ►
we operate under the shadow of what’s right to say about it and what’s not right to say about it.
00:35:14 ►
For instance, the UFO thing is a cultural taboo and not believed in by nice, intellectually nice people.
00:35:28 ►
It’s more the province of telephone line repairmen
00:35:31 ►
and that sort of slice.
00:35:36 ►
But the fact of the matter is that no matter how much
00:35:41 ►
it may discomfort drug researchers and UFO people,
00:35:46 ►
because each is struggling to gain respectability in an inherently dubious field,
00:35:53 ►
but actually, you know, there would be a, I think there would be a fertile advance made
00:35:59 ►
if these two groups could talk to each other.
00:36:08 ►
two groups could talk to each other. Some people hearing me say that must wonder what in the world I’m talking about. How can a problem of unidentified aircraft
00:36:14 ►
be related to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience? But you see it
00:36:21 ►
isn’t so much a problem of unidentified aircraft, it’s a problem of not recognizing that the entire spectrum of existence
00:36:31 ►
is embedded in a linguistic model that is created by the workings of minds,
00:36:40 ►
and that mind is an imponderable, and yet it’s set at the beginning of the equation.
00:36:47 ►
In 1978, a very spectacular daylight meteorite
00:36:55 ►
crossed the United States from east to west,
00:36:59 ►
required about 35 seconds for it to go from one side of the country to the other.
00:37:06 ►
There was no warning that this thing would occur. And in the 35 seconds that it was over the continental United States,
00:37:14 ►
thousands and thousands of people saw it. But we got 32 very good photographs of it from different
00:37:23 ►
points along the ground, two movies of it from two
00:37:27 ►
different points along its pathway, and it was very well documented. UFOs have been visiting
00:37:37 ►
people and appearing all over the world for 30 years, and the hardware faction can’t come up with anything. So it seems clear to me that
00:37:49 ►
what we’re dealing with is a kind of mass psychic phenomenon of some sort. And it’s very interesting
00:37:57 ►
that one of the anecdotal things in circulation about psychedelics
00:38:05 ►
is that they are actually catalysts for this kind of thing.
00:38:11 ►
And what this means is not clear,
00:38:15 ►
but it should certainly be investigated.
00:38:17 ►
I mean, if there’s a chemical agent
00:38:18 ►
which can repeatedly trigger a phenomenon that bizarre,
00:38:23 ►
it should be looked at. Jung very early suggested
00:38:28 ►
in a book called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky that he published in 1948,
00:38:36 ►
that it was in fact a projection of the mass psyche, that it was assimilable to the goals
00:38:47 ►
of alchemical transubstantiation.
00:38:51 ►
He called it the rotunda, the scintilla,
00:38:54 ►
the spark, the spinning thing.
00:38:57 ►
And it’s all these things,
00:38:59 ►
but it is the clue that we are somehow trapped
00:39:04 ►
inside some kind of artifice,
00:39:07 ►
that the world that we’re inside of is much more like a work of art
00:39:14 ►
than it is like the smooth-running mechanistic machine
00:39:19 ►
that Newtonian science describes.
00:39:22 ►
That description works very well for all low-grade phenomena
00:39:28 ►
up to about the level of the weather. But from there on, the notion that the world is simply,
00:39:38 ►
you know, probabilistic processes following these various creodes of least resistance becomes very untenable because
00:39:48 ►
each of us in our experience of being lives in a highly theatrical world and what i mean by that can see a woman at a great distance from you
00:40:06 ►
in class, in opportunity, all of these things,
00:40:11 ►
and you fall in love with this woman,
00:40:15 ►
and it’s hopeless.
00:40:16 ►
But of course, as we all know,
00:40:19 ►
it’s also inevitable.
00:40:21 ►
And that inevitability totally violates physics, because it really is hopeless.
00:40:28 ►
How is it then that each of our lives is a work of art, of unbelievable chance encounters,
00:40:37 ►
coincidences, and wishes projected onto the world, but never spoken and strangely fulfilled in the oddest ways.
00:40:48 ►
I think that it’s because the world is made of language and that if the eastern conception
00:40:56 ►
that the universe is mind has any operational impact in the world. It will be through conceiving of mind
00:41:06 ►
as the underlying, self-aware,
00:41:13 ►
self-active, world-forming grammar of being.
00:41:19 ►
So that what Freud called the superego,
00:41:22 ►
what I call the overmind,
00:41:24 ►
there have been different ways of talking about it,
00:41:26 ►
has to be seen not as a passive homeostatic controlling device,
00:41:32 ►
but actually as the most intelligent organization on this planet.
00:41:39 ►
And we are all only components of this,
00:41:42 ►
believing ourselves to be the highest expression of
00:41:46 ►
freedom. But it is actually at the species level that organization is controlled. And that’s why
00:41:53 ►
the emergence of ideas like the calculus or the invention of LSD or the steam engine,
00:42:00 ►
why these things have this curious property of being regulated from above?
00:42:11 ►
It’s because the world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose We are actually trapped inside a giant organism and it is not Gaia
00:42:17 ►
That’s a much larger organism. We are trapped inside a large organism
00:42:22 ►
Which is the human collectivity and that’s why we are such different monkeys,
00:42:28 ►
because there is this group mind which none of us is aware of
00:42:35 ►
or has ever perceived that is actually mediating the human experience.
00:42:41 ►
And it is no more apprehendable to us than the group mind of an
00:42:46 ►
anthill is apprehendable to us it can’t be seen what it is is it’s an interlocking set of
00:42:54 ►
conventions linguistic directions genetic components assumptions what, for lack of a better word,
00:43:07 ►
you would call innate tendencies.
00:43:10 ►
And these things, which we wear
00:43:12 ►
as the clothing of our specieshood,
00:43:16 ►
are actually the constraints directing us
00:43:19 ►
first one way and then another.
00:43:22 ►
And if we want to take control of our destiny, we are going to have to rise
00:43:27 ►
into empathy with this overmind, this super ego. And there’s no reason to think this can’t be done.
00:43:37 ►
I’m sure you’re all familiar with Julian Jane’s theory that until very recently, in fact, until Homeric times, everyone heard voices
00:43:46 ►
in moments of crisis. If you were in a moment of crisis, suddenly and quite naturally,
00:43:54 ►
a voice spoke in your head and said, you know, get the hell out of there or do something.
00:44:01 ►
or do something.
00:44:04 ►
And everyone understood that this was God or the king or the dead king.
00:44:09 ►
It depended on where you located in the Middle East.
00:44:13 ►
But there were people who traded
00:44:17 ►
between these various locations.
00:44:21 ►
And the first cynics is what they were
00:44:24 ►
because they noticed that over at Ur, God spoke to everybody.
00:44:31 ►
But down at Nineveh, it was the dead king who everybody heard in their head. This logical discrepancy cast doubt and they became the first people to not hear the voice
00:44:49 ►
but to assimilate it.
00:44:51 ►
And this is what we call the ego.
00:44:54 ►
It is what we experience as the self.
00:44:58 ►
Something which 2000 years ago was a god, which only intervened in human affairs to save lives and give heavy advice
00:45:07 ►
has become for each of us the central focus through which we mediate our sensorium
00:45:16 ►
and project models of the world.
00:45:20 ►
So it is not, we are far more plastic than we realize.
00:45:27 ►
And I think what Stan was saying tonight about how the goal is to be in the,
00:45:31 ►
I forget the term, the hylolytic,
00:45:34 ►
the matter-oriented side of it,
00:45:37 ►
but to have this awareness,
00:45:40 ►
a complete awareness of the other side
00:45:43 ►
so that you are simultaneously locked in Newtonian space-time
00:45:48 ►
and the parameters of the situation,
00:45:50 ►
and you are simultaneously liberated into a complete awareness of the other potential.
00:45:59 ►
And the way I recognize that state, and this may be idiosyncratic,
00:46:28 ►
but I can tell I’m in that state when no matter what I’m doing and no matter where I go, I can see the earth hanging in space by simply referencing that image and discovering it present in my head in a way that is not like a thought or something artificially induced. It’s a real modality that is present and accessible. And I think that means, you know, that you have
00:46:34 ►
enough of yourself committed to the overmind that you’re operating in the light of it.
00:46:40 ►
And then many consequences flow from that that are efficacious at the personal level for
00:46:50 ►
instance there’s something which has been called the Tao of the ancestors what that means I think
00:46:57 ►
is simply that for each one of us there is a way to do the things we must do that is the most energy-efficient way to do it.
00:47:08 ►
And I’m talking about opening a door, picking up a fork.
00:47:11 ►
The best way to do it is to follow the creode
00:47:17 ►
that is the Tao of the ancestors,
00:47:19 ►
to recognize that you are a genetic expression,
00:47:22 ►
a partial genetic expression of a gene pool which has
00:47:26 ►
received genetic expression at each generation in your family for thousands and thousands of
00:47:32 ►
generations, and that you are just the latest recension of this gene pool, then you release
00:47:40 ►
the ego and you act with this awareness. These are psychedelically induced states of being
00:47:48 ►
that I think make it easier to live in the world.
00:47:51 ►
And how many of them are there? Who knows?
00:47:54 ►
For instance, under the influence of Silla Simon in the Amazon,
00:47:58 ►
I noticed what I am completely convinced is an atrophied human ability. It’s a very simple ability,
00:48:08 ►
but we have lost it. It’s the ability to know how to walk from point A to point B,
00:48:17 ►
not following the shortest distance, but following automatically the path of least resistance
00:48:26 ►
so that you don’t go down into valleys and then climb hills.
00:48:31 ►
You automatically stay on ridges
00:48:33 ►
even though you take more circuitous paths to your goal.
00:48:38 ►
And I could feel this sense working.
00:48:40 ►
It was just like a part of the dashboard
00:48:42 ►
that had previously been covered up was uncovered.
00:48:46 ►
Here was the human sense, which we don’t particularly need because we’ve erected linear cities where the path of least resistance usually is a straight line.
00:48:58 ►
But you can imagine people in rugged country, this is a sense which would confer great survival adaptability and be
00:49:06 ►
tremendously important. So I think that what we need to do is tease these human abilities out of
00:49:18 ►
the psychedelic experience, that really the psychedelic experience is like an intimation of immortality.
00:49:25 ►
And at varying distances in time from the point you occupy,
00:49:30 ►
it shows you ever more vague intimations of the future,
00:49:34 ►
but they are there nevertheless.
00:49:37 ►
Language is probably somehow related to the endogenous hallucinogens in the human brain.
00:49:47 ►
The evolution of culture is probably related to these things.
00:49:52 ►
It’s been suggested that DMT in the brain is mediating what we experience as attention,
00:49:59 ►
that when you look and look hard, something is happening in the brain having to do with DMT, that it mediates
00:50:06 ►
awareness in a very moment-to-moment way. The future evolution of mankind is going to be based
00:50:16 ►
on these states, but the last point I want to make is one about how evolution occurs.
00:50:34 ►
It isn’t that a mutation happens and it confers greater adaptability upon an individual and therefore that individual and his offspring numerically gain over competitor individuals of the same species.
00:50:45 ►
This is not how it works.
00:50:48 ►
The way it works is you have constant mutating of a gene pool
00:50:53 ►
from the influx of cosmic radiation and other factors.
00:50:58 ►
There is always a low level of mutagens, of mutants in a population.
00:51:06 ►
But they are of no consequence as long as the selective parameters remain the same.
00:51:15 ►
But when the selective parameters change suddenly,
00:51:19 ►
these individuals who were previously masked in the general population,
00:51:24 ►
who were previously masked in the general population,
00:51:29 ►
the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the fore,
00:51:32 ►
and they act very quickly and critically
00:51:34 ►
to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction.
00:51:41 ►
This is why the fossil record progresses in fits and starts, because
00:51:48 ►
sudden shifts of environment cause the apparent emergence of new types. It isn’t that they cause
00:51:56 ►
it, it’s that the new types were always there, but not with any advantage. It’s that the new
00:52:02 ►
situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them and they
00:52:06 ►
are moving then into positions of dominance in the population or in society if we’re talking
00:52:13 ►
about human beings. I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level. level it has conferred there is a population of different people in the
00:52:28 ►
general population and as conditions change these people will be seen to have
00:52:37 ►
adaptive advantages without being metaphysical about it, an obvious adaptive advantage is
00:52:46 ►
what I call the deconditioning effect.
00:52:53 ►
That we live in a jungle of propaganda,
00:52:57 ►
you know, buy this, believe this, wear this.
00:53:00 ►
If you have a symbiotic relationship with a deconditioning agent, you’re much more
00:53:07 ►
likely to thread your way through that with your soul and your bank account intact. So
00:53:17 ►
this is one way of thinking of it. What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery
00:53:25 ►
and put you right up against the human essence
00:53:29 ►
and say you no longer have to pretend that you’re Scotch-Irish or Wetoto or Jewish.
00:53:36 ►
You can actually explore the human modality
00:53:40 ►
independent of the inertia of these exterior labels.
00:53:46 ►
And so it places responsibility,
00:53:49 ►
it raises questions of validity,
00:53:52 ►
existential honesty with oneself,
00:53:58 ►
and I think it promotes the moral life,
00:54:03 ►
which I don’t think happens if you buy deeply into myths of the
00:54:09 ►
tribe, if you’re a devoted practitioner of Marxism, fascism, capitalism. I don’t think
00:54:16 ►
these things will lead you to the moral life because they don’t arise out of experience. Experience is everything.
00:54:27 ►
These are drugs of experience.
00:54:33 ►
It’s very important to take the moment seriously.
00:54:36 ►
Reincarnation and all these things aside, what if this were your unique opportunity to unravel it all
00:54:43 ►
and not to be caught in dissolution. Because I think that there is
00:54:49 ►
a potential for immortality, but it isn’t assured. It is something which comes to the courageous.
00:54:59 ►
And somehow in the historical experience, we’ve gotten the idea through orthodox religions
00:55:06 ►
that salvation comes to the subservient, and this is totally wrong.
00:55:12 ►
It is more like the Greek ideal of the hero, that if you are heroic enough, once you’re dead, you’ll be a god.
00:55:22 ►
And I think this is what these things summon us all to.
00:55:27 ►
And the thing to look at are the things which don’t fit any paradigm.
00:55:32 ►
The anomalies, the paranormal things,
00:55:35 ►
the self-transforming elf machines,
00:55:39 ►
the UFOs, all of these things.
00:55:42 ►
What?
00:55:43 ►
It didn’t tell the story, the UFO story.
00:55:45 ►
Oh, which UFO story?
00:55:47 ►
It started off.
00:55:51 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:55:54 ►
It has to do with this whole thing.
00:55:55 ►
See, the alien is an archetype
00:55:58 ►
as well as whatever else it may be.
00:56:01 ►
I mean, if aliens didn’t exist or don’t exist,
00:56:07 ►
we would still invent them,
00:56:15 ►
because it’s the other. You know, I’ve made the metaphor that we have arrived at some kind of collective puberty, where we now are fascinated by the notion of a non-human partner.
00:56:28 ►
We’re obsessed, as an adolescent is obsessed with sex,
00:56:33 ►
we’re obsessed with the notion of alien love.
00:56:37 ►
We want this, and yet we have all the feelings about it
00:56:43 ►
that an adolescent brings to the early sexual experiences.
00:56:47 ►
It seems like an abyss, a devouring, a kind of giving up, impossible. And yet our historical
00:56:56 ►
development has led us to the place where we now realize this is possible. It’s like finding out the facts of life. The facts of life are that there
00:57:05 ►
could be a girl next door. And now… Who’s an alien. Who’s an alien, of course. What other kind of girl next door
00:57:16 ►
could it be? So then, hmm, there’s a girl next door. And so it’s not all the talk about the wonderful technical benefits
00:57:27 ►
that we would reap and all this.
00:57:29 ►
And obviously it isn’t that.
00:57:31 ►
It’s an erotic fascination with the notion of the other that drives us.
00:57:38 ►
And perhaps this is why in the psychedelic experience
00:57:42 ►
the alien emerges so fully and completely
00:57:45 ►
because it is a repressed notion.
00:57:51 ►
Although I’ve noticed in the history of the phenomenology of UFO contacts,
00:57:59 ►
the theme, it was first a light in the sky,
00:58:03 ►
then we had all these exotic abductions and then the last four
00:58:07 ►
or five years there are more and more persistent stories of sexual relations pregnancies this kind
00:58:15 ►
of thing well this obviously means that you know we’re growing up we’re getting older, the pressure is on to come to terms
00:58:25 ►
with how this thing is going to present itself.
00:58:30 ►
Yes.
00:58:33 ►
So, you know, it’s hardly respectable to say these things anywhere.
00:58:38 ►
I mean, fortunately, I work for a living, so I can say these things.
00:58:52 ►
But the amount of anecdotal material that would come pouring forth if these things were stressed, I think, would shock everyone.
00:58:55 ►
And somehow it has to be taken out,
00:58:58 ►
and this is a really sensitive issue that is very hard to talk about.
00:59:03 ►
How can such a screwy notion be taken out of the hands of
00:59:09 ►
squirrels? In other words, we have no shortage of people assuring us that aliens of all sorts are
00:59:18 ►
channeling left, channeling right, this, that, the other thing. How the problem is the reverse of the problem in radio
00:59:27 ►
telescopy, where they search the skies and get nothing. Our problem is just a cacophony
00:59:35 ►
of hysterical claim making. Where do you begin? You know, the Urantia book, you’ve got the nine, you’ve got all kinds. And this is not a new phenomenon.
00:59:48 ►
It’s, well, you could choose your point, but certainly since the onset of theosophy and
00:59:55 ►
Alice Bailey’s school, and there’s been a lot of channeling in the 20th century.
01:00:00 ►
So the problem is one of filters. Which aliens do you believe and how do you tell
01:00:08 ►
garbage from the real thing? And I think this is a problem for information theorists. It’s a poker
01:00:16 ►
playing problem, essentially, and shouldn’t be difficult to solve if we apply ourselves to it. It’s just that for us, the notion of a dialogue with an interior other is psychopathy.
01:00:32 ►
So we’re very leery of that, or we’re very something of that.
01:00:39 ►
That’s it.
01:00:42 ►
Alfred or Menster?
01:00:44 ►
alfred or mensner anyway i noticed that sasha when he described the phenomenology of psilocybin uh didn’t say a
01:00:54 ►
thing about self-transforming elf machines or whispered messages from gods and demons he did
01:01:00 ►
mention demons so uh you’re free to believe that this is the raving of an unhinged
01:01:07 ►
mind but you know being a jeremiah figure is a great tradition and they usually have the last laugh
01:01:18 ►
are there any questions sort of psilocybin
01:01:36 ►
that’s not
01:01:38 ►
any words that are in any cultures
01:01:40 ►
right now
01:01:41 ►
but that has meaning for you
01:01:43 ►
have you ever heard of, or have
01:01:46 ►
you yourself communicated with another
01:01:48 ►
person in this language?
01:01:50 ►
You mean while I was loaded and they were loaded?
01:01:52 ►
Yeah.
01:01:54 ►
Both of you have had this experience
01:01:56 ►
of shared meaning.
01:01:57 ►
Yes, but see, how can we
01:02:00 ►
check since English
01:02:02 ►
won’t flow back and forth?
01:02:04 ►
I mean, I’ll take your word. If you both experience shared meaning and confirm that that’s about
01:02:08 ►
as far as you could go.
01:02:09 ►
I think so.
01:02:10 ►
But when I listen to recordings of this glossolalia down, it makes me very uncomfortable and I
01:02:18 ►
wonder what could possibly be the matter with me that I’ve placed so much emphasis on this.
01:02:23 ►
And I’ve noticed you know it’ll
01:02:25 ►
clear most rooms in a hurry I mean I mean it’s it’s all people are with it you know and they
01:02:32 ►
say oh it’s far out all this stuff and then you play it and they say well you know I’ve got to go
01:02:39 ►
do something I mean they draw back It seems too quirky.
01:02:46 ►
Too quirky.
01:02:49 ►
So it’s like you do some and they do some back and forth,
01:02:53 ►
except it’s totally unintelligible to the English ear.
01:02:55 ►
Yeah, it’s totally unintelligible to the English ear. What it sounds like when I listen to it down
01:02:59 ►
is it sounds like a language, a human language,
01:03:02 ►
very, very far removed from English.
01:03:06 ►
What you’re talking about really could be the language before we tried to build the Tower of Babel.
01:03:13 ►
We all shared the same language, then it got split up because we were…
01:03:15 ►
The Urschbrock, this is the term for that, Urschbrock, the first language.
01:03:21 ►
Yes, that’s what I mean by an assembly language. Yes, that’s what I mean by an assembly language, but the
01:03:27 ►
things that happen on Psychedelics with Language just defy rational apprehension.
01:03:34 ►
I mean, for instance, there’s a Celtic saying that poetry is made at the edge of running water.
01:03:46 ►
And I’ve noticed on psilocybin at times that as you approach running water,
01:03:53 ►
like a river or a waterfall, you know, there is your, you begin to think in rhyme.
01:04:01 ►
It’s sprung verse.
01:04:03 ►
And it seems preposterous. And You see, you know, this is
01:04:06 ►
too crazy to mention to anyone and you’re right, but nevertheless it’s
01:04:11 ►
happening, you know. I mean, and as you leave the river, thought becomes
01:04:16 ►
perfectly normal and now, and people say, well, white noise is doing this. That’s an explanation.
01:04:31 ►
Or you look at historical phenomena.
01:04:35 ►
Muhammad, it turns out, spoke in verse.
01:04:39 ►
And it was considered a sign of election.
01:04:44 ►
Glossolalia with shaman is not that rare.
01:04:45 ►
Spirit voices.
01:04:48 ►
It happens without drugs all the time.
01:04:51 ►
Yes, although I don’t know if you know this book by Sylvia Goodman called Speaking in Tongues, which is, as far as I know,
01:04:54 ►
the major work in English.
01:04:56 ►
It’s done strictly from the sociological approach,
01:04:59 ►
but there is some physiological data.
01:05:02 ►
The most interesting being that on the floor of these Costa Rican churches
01:05:07 ►
where she did her research,
01:05:08 ►
after these sessions,
01:05:11 ►
they would measure pools of saliva
01:05:13 ►
18 inches across,
01:05:16 ►
deposited by single individuals.
01:05:19 ►
Also, what was going on was
01:05:21 ►
there was a lot of hyped up,
01:05:24 ►
you know, hallelujah type stuff.
01:05:27 ►
And then someone would fall into the glossolalia and utter a burst of it
01:05:32 ►
and then be like almost like a post-epileptic situation.
01:05:38 ►
And they would turn to the people around them and say,
01:05:41 ►
did I do it? Did I really speak in tongues?
01:05:46 ►
This is not what the DMT glossolalia is like. What it is, and I’ll take a minute and describe it because
01:05:51 ►
not with me, but I’ll describe how it comes because I think people often say to me, well,
01:06:02 ►
I took mushrooms and nothing like that ever happened. Well, the first time it happened to me was the first time I smoked DMT.
01:06:09 ►
And I’m not sure that it would happen on psilocybin if you didn’t have a lead into it.
01:06:14 ►
You have to invoke it.
01:06:16 ►
In other words, it isn’t that psilocybin causes it.
01:06:20 ►
And this is interesting.
01:06:32 ►
And this is interesting. It’s that psilocybin carries you to a place where it is possible, given several other things which seem to be necessary.
01:06:45 ►
So psilocybin is necessary, but it’s an attitude of expectation.
01:06:50 ►
It’s an attitude of being on the verge of communication, even though nobody else is present.
01:06:52 ►
In other words, you have to invoke it.
01:06:55 ►
And that word, strangely enough,
01:06:58 ►
has a history related to demonic summoning and that sort of thing.
01:07:05 ►
But that’s what you do. You invoke it.
01:07:07 ►
You feel the load of the psilocybin,
01:07:11 ►
and you say, aha, it’s enough now.
01:07:14 ►
And then you test, you try it,
01:07:23 ►
and you do this by consciously speaking gibberish
01:07:27 ►
In other words, what seems to be happening is that you have to release
01:07:31 ►
your
01:07:32 ►
Brains expectation that sound will have meaning
01:07:37 ►
Because when we all speak we always the words have a meaning attached to them or else there’s something wrong with you
01:07:43 ►
always the words have a meaning attached to them or else there’s something wrong with you.
01:07:45 ►
But if you will speak gibberish for a moment,
01:07:48 ►
just for a moment, it’s like priming the pump.
01:07:51 ►
And the break then is made
01:07:53 ►
with whatever connects language to meaning
01:07:56 ►
and language begins, it begins to flower
01:07:59 ►
and to take off and to develop these abstract modalities
01:08:05 ►
that are free of association,
01:08:08 ►
but that are obviously highly ordered and grammatical,
01:08:12 ►
and going through complicated…
01:08:15 ►
It’s like a sonata.
01:08:17 ►
And in fact, it’s led me to suggest
01:08:20 ►
that probably language existed
01:08:23 ►
thousands and thousands of years before meaning,
01:08:28 ►
that this is what monkeys, these evolving monkeys on the brink of self-reflection,
01:08:34 ►
did for each other as a form of entertainment.
01:08:38 ►
It’s not as much of an energy drain as chanting and singing.
01:08:43 ►
You just carry it on at a conversational level
01:08:46 ►
but you you know it’s word music that can very very fine nuances of the stuff it’s manipulating
01:08:58 ►
which is not meaning but whatever it is this top manifold, very fine nuances can be imparted to it
01:09:06 ►
by these small mouth noises.
01:09:09 ►
Is this anything like what babies
01:09:11 ►
who are about to learn to speak do?
01:09:13 ►
They carry on these things,
01:09:15 ►
and it sounds like a language
01:09:17 ►
that you just don’t understand.
01:09:18 ►
There’s all this inflection,
01:09:20 ►
and it sounds very intelligent.
01:09:22 ►
You could just kind of catch it.
01:09:23 ►
It’s like that.
01:09:25 ►
It is very close to actual language.
01:09:29 ►
It’s like that, only more so.
01:09:31 ►
Only more complex.
01:09:32 ►
Like one of the things that seems to be going on
01:09:34 ►
is there seems to be more phonemes than are actually in any human language.
01:09:39 ►
I mean, isn’t it that there are 52 phonemes
01:09:41 ►
and no language known has more than 41 or something like that. But
01:09:45 ►
because if you do this for a while and it’s so much fun, it’s a kind of ecstasy to do
01:09:52 ►
it that there’s no reason to stop if you’re alone. After you’ve done it for an hour or
01:09:58 ►
so, your face, your mouth is just hanging down to your waist.
01:10:07 ►
I mean, it’s like you’ve just done something to the whole front of your head
01:10:11 ►
and all the musculature has dissolved
01:10:13 ►
because you’ve been making all these sounds that you never make.
01:10:17 ►
And the whole front of your face feels different.
01:10:22 ►
So every language has a set of coded mouth positions which are
01:10:30 ►
expected and easily facilitated through use.
01:10:35 ►
Is there somebody else there to hear it?
01:10:39 ►
No, there’s rarely somebody there to hear it when I do it. I sometimes wish.
01:10:44 ►
Is it easier? in other words,
01:10:46 ►
because I got the impression that there was something
01:10:47 ►
about the attention, the listening of somebody else
01:10:51 ►
that facilitated the channeling through?
01:10:56 ►
Oh, I don’t know.
01:10:57 ►
I mean, for instance, I’m very shy about it.
01:11:00 ►
I feel like it’s a very personal thing to do,
01:11:03 ►
so that it’s hard for me to do it in the presence of other people,
01:11:07 ►
but this is just perhaps my personality or my association with it.
01:11:13 ►
I think you’re a better speaker in English since having these experiences.
01:11:18 ►
Yes, well this is something…
01:11:19 ►
Is there more fluidity that there are, you know, you have developed, you know, your face and your expression.
01:11:27 ►
Well, here’s what I think it is.
01:11:33 ►
And Henry Munn made this point in his article.
01:11:38 ►
And I said earlier that what we need is the evolution of language and it’s all about the evolution of language.
01:11:40 ►
Yes, it’s a continuum.
01:11:45 ►
And I guess it was here somewhere recently,
01:11:48 ►
I said, you know, it begins as a clear thought.
01:11:55 ►
It moves into eloquence.
01:11:59 ►
It then becomes charismatic.
01:12:02 ►
At that point, if it goes any further,
01:12:04 ►
it will be called demonic possession
01:12:06 ►
because it’s happening too much. You’re not supposed to be that compelling. You’re not
01:12:14 ►
supposed to be that powerful a speaker. And if you stick with it past demonic possession, it becomes these objects. It actually crosses over and becomes the topological modality
01:12:31 ►
that I mentioned. Jill and I were talking in the baths the other night because she made
01:12:38 ►
her sounds down there, and I caught it at a certain angle visually and I could see these things coming out of her mouth
01:12:49 ►
which looked like blue smoke
01:12:51 ►
and I’ve seen this before.
01:12:55 ►
It looks like heat waves off a highway
01:12:58 ►
and perhaps it’s nothing more than heated air
01:13:02 ►
that’s been in the lungs heated by the body
01:13:04 ►
has a different refractive index than the exterior air.
01:13:09 ►
It’s probably expelled in a series of waves.
01:13:12 ►
And so if you have the light just right, what you see is a displacement of light,
01:13:19 ►
a flickering in the vicinity of the mouth.
01:13:22 ►
flickering in the vicinity of the mouth. But I think I’ve also, in a stone state,
01:13:27 ►
watched that condense into this more visible language.
01:13:32 ►
And it’s as though there are finer and finer levels of vibration.
01:13:36 ►
The whole notion of the word becoming flesh,
01:13:39 ►
which occurs in cosmogonic myths
01:13:42 ►
as diverse as the Judeo-Christian and the Australian Aborigine.
01:13:47 ►
It’s always about a word.
01:13:50 ►
A word was uttered, and this word was somehow more than a word.
01:13:54 ►
It adumbrated through dimensions and caused the phenomenon of being.
01:14:00 ►
And this is the sort of thing that’s happening.
01:14:04 ►
But to answer your question, yes, I think that I have verbal facility
01:14:09 ►
because I’ve taken so much of this drug.
01:14:13 ►
Maybe I had a tendency toward it at the beginning,
01:14:16 ►
being Irish and not given to hard work.
01:14:20 ►
But nevertheless, it definitely does this, and it does it temporarily.
01:14:29 ►
Like when you take psilocybin, if you actually try to do what we call raving,
01:14:34 ►
which is a high-speed soliloquy, but the raving can just go anywhere.
01:14:43 ►
raving can just go anywhere and is
01:14:49 ►
If it’s true that what we are are creatures of information
01:14:52 ►
Then this is very interesting that it synergizes
01:14:55 ►
this ability
01:14:56 ►
Everything that we are doing is
01:14:59 ►
Informational deployment. I mean we take in raw materials and we excrete manufactured objects, which are
01:15:07 ►
essentially ideas. We take in air and we expel words. Everything we do is about stamping higher
01:15:16 ►
orders of information on unorganized, lower forms of raw material. And it’s moving out of us moving out of our bodies this technical
01:15:28 ►
engine that we have created of computers and scientific institutions and rapacious government
01:15:36 ►
agencies and commercial concerns it has a life of its own it’s defining what humanity will be for itself. It’s a war about language,
01:15:48 ►
about, you know, Joseph Goebbels was the great 20th century thinker who understood this more
01:15:55 ►
clearly than anyone else and set the tone, set the rules of the game so that the deconditioning effect of the drugs, the introduction to alien
01:16:07 ►
modalities, the glossolalia, the accessing of the vision state, all of these things have
01:16:14 ►
to do with information and the life of its own that it is taking on.
01:16:19 ►
And we are like the privileged observers of this. It’s as though, well, no less a psychedelic voyager,
01:16:28 ►
researcher, and bon vivant than William Burroughs said,
01:16:34 ►
English is a virus from outer space.
01:16:38 ►
And that’s what I’ve been trying to say,
01:16:41 ►
and now I’m finished.
01:16:44 ►
Yeah. See, the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about the creative power of sound
01:16:51 ►
or language, for me, is the experience that I had with the holophonic sound, where you
01:17:02 ►
have a sense, you know, that qualities in other senses are created through sound.
01:17:07 ►
Right. And I wonder what would happen if you record this all phonically, and then people
01:17:14 ►
listen to that. Now that’s an idea. That’s a very interesting idea. I heard a lot of
01:17:19 ►
things, you know, it transmits qualities of emotions to people in unusual states and so on.
01:17:29 ►
But there I came as close as I’ve ever been to understanding that there’s something special about the creative power of sound.
01:17:32 ►
Of sound. Yes, I think so.
01:17:34 ►
I always saw it as a metaphor that what science has discovered about vibrations
01:17:38 ►
and when they talk about sound, they really mean vibrations and not sound.
01:17:44 ►
Well, they talk too much about sound, I think, and not enough about language.
01:17:50 ►
Most people, when they think about the creative power of sound, they think about the mantric
01:17:55 ►
approach, syllables, sustained tones.
01:18:01 ►
And what I am more interested in is the the self-transforming power of grammar
01:18:07 ►
that that there is really something going on there
01:18:12 ►
yeah but there’s you know there’s it’s just the next stage right well these things it’s all
01:18:19 ►
gradations this is all of a piece somehow and how the visual cortex and the voice relate to each other is not well understood.
01:18:29 ►
One thing I want to mention, I just thought of it, but because there may be experimentalists in the room,
01:18:35 ►
this appeared three months ago in Scientific American, and to me it just seems astonishing.
01:18:41 ►
It just seems astonishing.
01:18:48 ►
It is that anyone who can sustain a 100 hertz hum, that’s a 100 cycle per second hum,
01:18:51 ►
can look at an electric fan,
01:18:55 ►
and if you can sustain this 100 cycle hum,
01:18:58 ►
you can slow the fan down, make it appear to stop,
01:19:02 ►
make it go backwards.
01:19:03 ►
You can do this to a phonograph record, you
01:19:07 ►
can do it to a spinning wheel. This is not stoned. This is simply using the voice. Well,
01:19:14 ►
it sounds like pure magic. How can such a thing happen? The explanation of the Scientific American was that actually the resonant voice cavity
01:19:27 ►
is imparting vibration to the eyeballs
01:19:31 ►
and that it’s actually this subtle vibration
01:19:34 ►
is breaking up the photon input
01:19:37 ►
and you’re actually getting a stroboscopic effect.
01:19:41 ►
Well, the guy who wrote the article
01:19:42 ►
said that he had no training in music and
01:19:46 ►
was tone deaf. So to test the theory that it was vibration of the eyes, he built a little
01:19:54 ►
machine where he strapped his chin onto a box and by manipulating a dial could make the box Vibrate and impart the vibration to his chin so then and he was using he also used you can make
01:20:11 ►
TV pictures appear to roll or you can fix rolling without getting out of your chair by
01:20:20 ►
And he attached his chin to the box and ran it up to 100 hertz
01:20:25 ►
and lo and behold, this effect was happening.
01:20:28 ►
Well, imagine an Amazonian shaman being able to approach a waterfall
01:20:35 ►
or something like that and make the water stop or flow uphill.
01:20:41 ►
Things like this with no technology except the human voice.
01:20:46 ►
How many things are there like that, you know?
01:20:51 ►
How many human abilities are there that we are just unaware of or have masked?
01:20:58 ►
And what could you do with it?
01:21:00 ►
I mean, I suggest stopping a waterfall because I’ve just given it five seconds thought.
01:21:05 ►
But what if you’d given a millennium of thought to social institutions
01:21:10 ►
and little tricks and party games that could be used
01:21:14 ►
if you could stop time with your voice?
01:21:17 ►
And we bring orthodox physics to bear and say,
01:21:21 ►
well, acoustical vibration, stroboscopic effect, etc., blah, blah.
01:21:26 ►
But what is experientially happening is here’s a man who uses sound to control the speed of passing
01:21:32 ►
time. If that’s not a magical ability, what is? And yet it’s all nuts and bolts. And he hasn’t
01:21:40 ►
even taken his first hit of ayahuasca. This is just on the natch.
01:21:46 ►
Right?
01:21:49 ►
So what happens when you add in, you know,
01:21:52 ►
the exotic psychodynamics of these compounds?
01:21:54 ►
Well, that’s a lot.
01:21:56 ►
One thing that’s come to mind,
01:21:59 ►
one is I understand that Hitler’s generals would go into him,
01:22:01 ►
you know, and they’re going to talk him out of this next invasion because he’s totally off the wall.
01:22:03 ►
And they came out glassy-eyed and convinced they’re going to go invade somewhere.
01:22:07 ►
Well, he’d probably been chatting with Joseph Goebbels before they walked in.
01:22:11 ►
And the other thing is Milton Erickson, who just with his voice does all sorts of things
01:22:20 ►
for people that are totally, totally amazing.
01:22:22 ►
He can’t even speak their language language he can do it to people
01:22:25 ►
that he doesn’t understand them and they don’t understand totally sound and he moves his head
01:22:29 ►
around real unusual ways even after he stopped talking you know who knows what that does
01:22:34 ►
ayahuasqueros are interesting because when you meet a few of them they all have a bunch of
01:22:41 ►
mannerisms which have to do with their voice and a certain sound that they make.
01:22:47 ►
The only honky I’ve ever met who came even close to this
01:22:51 ►
was Ralph Metzner has a curious speech habit,
01:22:56 ►
which is this, it’s a kind of a purr at the back of your throat.
01:23:01 ►
But these ayahuasqueros do it very noticeably,
01:23:06 ►
and when they’re listening to you, you hear them purring, and they have very smooth, liquid, invasive voices.
01:23:15 ►
And of course, ayahuasca, the way in which it’s taken, it’s very interesting.
01:23:20 ►
There’s no drumming, I’ve never seen a musical instrument at an ayahuasca session.
01:23:27 ►
Everything is voice, voice, voice, and that’s what they’re into.
01:23:33 ►
Don Fidel.
01:23:35 ►
Don Fidel is a good example. Many of you have probably heard his tape, but there are many such practitioners.
01:23:42 ►
They also, in the curing process, use very sharp sounds.
01:23:49 ►
And in fact, when you talk to Don Fidel,
01:23:51 ►
he has a very animated style that is not the macho Spanish style at all.
01:23:57 ►
His speech is punctuated with all these aspirations aspiration sharp sounds.
01:24:07 ►
And he obviously has a relationship to sound
01:24:10 ►
that’s very different than we do.
01:24:13 ►
We can play it sometime or in an intermission sometime.
01:24:18 ►
And it’s wonderful to trip to.
01:24:20 ►
It’s very good.
01:24:22 ►
So that’s how the boar ate the cabbage.
01:24:27 ►
Thank you very much. Thank you, sir.
01:24:34 ►
Thank you. For your tolerance.
01:24:41 ►
Now I don’t feel quite so bad about never having seen a machine elf in DMT space.
01:24:46 ►
If you were paying attention, you heard Terrence say that of all the people he’d given DMT to over the years,
01:24:53 ►
only four of them reported an experience like the ones he talked about.
01:24:58 ►
And then he admitted that, and I quote,
01:25:02 ►
every single one of them had been primed by me, end quote.
01:25:06 ►
So maybe we should reconsider the DMT experience
01:25:11 ►
without self-transforming machine elves and other strangeness described by Terrence.
01:25:17 ►
Maybe it’s time for us to become more focused on our own experiences
01:25:20 ►
without comparing them with anyone else’s.
01:25:23 ►
Give this a little thought and I think
01:25:25 ►
that maybe you’ll understand what I mean. I’ve given some thought to Terrence’s idea that each
01:25:31 ►
of our lives is a work of art. Mine seems to be either a work of abstract art or that of a
01:25:37 ►
preschooler, which is probably what most of my family think about my life. In any event, I’d like to think that while
01:25:45 ►
my life lacks an understandable composition, it has at least been colorful. And what do you think
01:25:52 ►
about Terrence’s energy level here in this 1984 recording compared with some of his later workshops?
01:25:59 ►
I guess that the reason I like this talk so much is because it came from Terence before he was really a big
01:26:05 ►
celebrity. When this
01:26:07 ►
lecture was recorded, Terence
01:26:09 ►
didn’t yet have such a large reputation
01:26:11 ►
to live up to, and for me,
01:26:14 ►
this is Terence at his best.
01:26:16 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo
01:26:18 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:26:20 ►
Namaste, my friends.