Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this talk, Terence approaches the topic of how little of what was considered to be established science 100 years ago has now been overturned.
One of the things he says in this talk may resonate with you is where he says, “You could almost describe psychedelics as enzimes for the activity of the imagination.”
The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow
The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional transforming musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Helvetians.
00:00:14 ►
Greetings from cyberdallic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we’re going to listen to another talk by the late great Terrence McKenna.
00:00:28 ►
Some of the thoughts that he’ll be passing on to you today include, and I quote,
00:00:32 ►
you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination, end quote.
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And he also says, what is the human enterprise?
00:00:45 ►
What is happening? What is happening on this planet? What the what is the human enterprise? What is happening?
00:00:46 ►
What is happening on this planet?
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What the hell is going on here?
00:00:51 ►
If you didn’t know better, you would think that he probably said this just yesterday.
00:00:56 ►
And yet two days from now will mark the 24th anniversary of his death.
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But in the year that he made those statements,
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here are some of the
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what the hell was going on items. That year, Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan after
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almost a decade. Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbee. The U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian airliner by
00:01:21 ►
mistake and had over 200 passengers on it,
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and uprising in Myanmar was suppressed by the military,
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and the Winter Olympics were held in Calgary.
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I don’t think that I need to remind you of everything else that has taken place since 1990,
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but my guess is that Terrence would still be saying, what the hell is going on?
00:01:44 ►
And rather than try to answer that,
00:01:45 ►
I’ll save that question for tonight’s live salon.
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But right now,
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let’s hear what was going on in Terrence McKenna’s mind
00:01:52 ►
one day over 35 years ago.
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What I sort of want to talk about,
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and I can be led away from it
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if you have other considerations,
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is I want to, it’s pretty clear from how this group is relating and coming on
00:02:12 ►
that everybody has come to some resolution about this in their own lives.
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What’s become more and more interesting to me as I’ve talked to more people
00:02:25 ►
and also
00:02:28 ►
if you stay in a field like this
00:02:33 ►
you eventually get to meet everybody
00:02:35 ►
you get to meet Albert Hoffman
00:02:37 ►
and Sasha Shulgin
00:02:38 ►
and to Leary and Lily
00:02:41 ►
and all these people
00:02:42 ►
and you begin to have a view of how all these people viewed it.
00:02:48 ►
So what I wanted to talk about this morning and lead it toward your concern with the alien intelligence is
00:02:55 ►
I wanted to talk about the effect that psychedelics are having and I believe will have, on society in general.
00:03:07 ►
And at deeper level, simply than drug laws and government campaigns of abstinence,
00:03:14 ►
but more on the level of how it’s impacting in philosophy and science and the social sciences.
00:03:22 ►
Because I think we are winning.
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The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate.
00:03:30 ►
It isn’t, but psychedelic drugs are not.
00:03:34 ►
That’s the odd paradox of it.
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And this has a lot to do with the history of science
00:03:43 ►
over the past hundred years.
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What we call modern science, or which you could almost call super science,
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not the notebook jottings of naturalists and the collated accounts of travelers,
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but big science, where millions,
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hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on instruments
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and coordinated teams
00:04:09 ►
of people attack problem.
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This style of science
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that has grown up in the 20th century
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has had a very interesting consequence
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which, because it is
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spread out over more than a generation,
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we all have grown up with it
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and haven’t really realized
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what an unusual situation we are living in.
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We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution.
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There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen,
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let’s pick a number, a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the worldview of 100 years ago.
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100 years ago, atoms were billiard balls,
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the basic building block of the universe,
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indivisible.
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100 years ago,
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the position of biology
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was that Darwinian mechanics
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had just been enunciated in the 1850s
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and was making its way against an orthodoxy,
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which held that the Earth had been created in 400 B.C.
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100 years ago, when the cave paintings at LaScoe and Alta Mera in southern France and Spain were first discovered,
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and experts came from Paris to view them.
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After looking the caves over, the experts announced that these paintings were obviously done
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by soldiers in the Army of Napoleon who had overwintered there in 1816 and 17.
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Continental drift was unknown. The fact that the continent
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of Africa had an edge which fit exactly against the continent of South America was mentioned in
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textbooks as an example of God’s sense of humor. It was not seen to signal anything.
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I can’t think of an area in science
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where we have retained the vision that we had then.
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The earth was thought to be ultimately stable,
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pretty much as it had been on the day of creation,
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even by the British geologists who were reacting
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against the story of biblical creation.
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But there’s one area where surprisingly little has happened,
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and it is, strangely enough, the area of the human mind.
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Strides were made in the early part of the 20th century
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by describing the unconscious.
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But it’s important to remember
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that some of the hottest therapies
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that pass through a place like Esselin,
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which would be things like hypnotherapy,
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mesmerism.
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Mesmerism had its great heyday in the 1890s of the last century.
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Colonic therapy brought to a peak in Germany in the 1870s.
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Reflexology, a 19th century theory.
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Homeopathy, a theory developed in late 19th, early 20th century.
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So we’ve not had in place really new models of the mind.
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The body, because of Wilhelm Reich and the many, many schools
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that he spawned either as his progeny or in reaction to his thought
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have given us new handles
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on the relationship of psychology to the body.
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But in the area of the mind,
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it’s been pretty much left alone.
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Well, now, to go back to the previous example
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of these other areas
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where scientific revolutions were made,
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they were true revolutions.
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They were not fine-tunings or little additions of details,
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but complete overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new ones.
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The earth went from being a solid body with continents pretty much in the same places since creation
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to a complex system
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of convection flows
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where continents are brought together
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and broken apart.
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Man, instead of being
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seen as the highest product
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of creation, a
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descent slightly beneath the
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angels, is instead seen
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as a primate, a specialized monkey of a certain sort.
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The hard atoms, the indivisible atoms of 19th century physics give way to fields, first of all,
00:09:18 ►
fields which are characterized by action at a distance, which had always been excluded previously. I mean, reason dictated that action at a distance, which had always been excluded previously.
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I mean, reason dictated that action at a distance was a kind of superstition.
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Then James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that these fields really exist.
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So in each of these areas, a total revolution took place.
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Now, the reason that psychology was immune to this, I think,
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was because we did not have the tools to advance it.
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They came to us out of ethnography and anthropology,
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out of the work of Watson and Hoffman
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and earlier Havelock Ellis
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and Weir Mitchell
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Henri Michaud
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all the people who worked
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with psychedelics at first it was
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worked with by artists
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by literary people
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by people who were interested in expanding
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their own sensation
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but slowly it came to be realized
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that it was an insight into the mind,
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not into the nature of it so much,
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which I think still remains a mystery,
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but simply into its size,
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that the mind is a far bigger domain
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than we ever imagined.
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We have somehow the idea that the mind is in the head.
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It’s made by the brain,
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and therefore it must be a smaller and less inclusive domain
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than the domain
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in which it is embedded
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is just how to do that
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how to take a world
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with a world in it
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and put it into the world in it
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and put the world in it
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outside of it
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because what we’re talking about
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and what history is
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I think,
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is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body
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to make the fields of the Lord
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that we all sense inside us
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meadows that we can actually throw our clothes off
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and wander into.
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I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.
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And science, when it examines the psychedelics as it will and must,
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is going to discover a revolution,
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I believe, that we’ll put all the previous revolutions in perspective
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and will show that they were merely anticipations
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of finding out this final unimaginable fact about nature.
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Nature, whenever you scratch its surface,
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has aspects that are
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unanticipated. So when they
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looked at the shape of the continents,
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they discovered continental drift.
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When Wallace and Darwin
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looked at the distribution
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of butterflies over Indonesian
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islands, they suddenly
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had a vision of the origin of
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species and how that worked.
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The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
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And when we scratch it, when we bring that tool to apply, we are not going to recognize ourselves.
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we are not going to recognize ourselves.
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We talked a little bit last night about LSD.
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A kind of funny thing about LSD was that it was the right drug for the right time
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in that it fulfilled the psychological theories
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of the world into which it came.
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Now this may have something to do with the fact that it was psychologists who were keen to promote it.
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We’ll never know the thing seems to be inextricably wedded together.
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But LSD made possible the recovery of traumatic material,
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lucid communication,
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re-visioning of self-image,
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and the energy to break out of habit patterns,
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and this sort of thing.
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What was absent in LSD
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was any reference back into the natural world.
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The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s
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happened without the concept of shamanism
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to help it along.
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I mean, maybe Gary Snyder said something about it once
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in a seminar, but it was not heard by most people
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because what was being stressed about LSD
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was its utter newness,
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how this was, I remember people saying
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that it had been created to save us
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from the brink of atomic catastrophe.
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It had come into the world
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at the exact proper time
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to be there when we needed it.
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There was not a sense of history, you see.
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There was not a sense of 20, 30, 50,000 years
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of involvement with the psychedelic state.
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A society, a dominant culture,
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always assumes that it is the most sophisticated
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of a long line of precursors.
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But as a matter of fact,
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the childishness and the sort of fragile,
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uninformedness that the hip people saw in the straight people in the 60s was a phenomenon
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that everyone shared.
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Everyone was naive.
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Everyone was more simplistic than they should have been.
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And that’s why I think the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble because there was no sense of history,
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there was no sense of have societies ever integrated something like this,
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and what then did they become,
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what kind of societies can live in the light of the psychedelic experience?
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There was no real discussion of that.
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Now, because this dimension of Earth crisis has been added in the intervening years,
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this was another aspect that was missing from the hippie thing to some degree.
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Communal living in the country,
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which is tribalism,
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which McLuhan was talking about
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in the 60s, not from the point of drugs,
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but electronics.
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But I think that
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that was the beginning
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of the permission for
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Earth Day,
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ecological sensitivity,
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now the great philosopher of the psychedelic community,
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to my mind, is Rupert Sheldrake.
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And Rupert is a botanist, a natural scientist,
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a man in the tradition of Darwin and Wallace.
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We’re trying to say, and what is being realized, I think,
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is that the psychedelics have always been exerting
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a pressure on human beings
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that we, from about, oh, I don’t know,
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1600, something like that, pick a date,
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from 1600 to 1960, lost sight of that
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because we lived entirely in an industrial, mechanistic, materialistic,
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reductionist, capitalist kind of society.
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But all other societies have had some awareness, at least of nature,
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if not of psychedelics,
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of nature forming the aesthetic.
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Now we’re returning to this.
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There is, I think, an awareness that understanding man’s place in nature is going to require psychedelic integration of the psychedelic experience.
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When we go into nature, and this gets to your question,
00:18:12 ►
when we look hard at these tryptamine psychedelics
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and the plants they come from and the content of the information
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and the fact that it seems to be very hard for people to bring it across,
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even having had 10 or 15,000 years to do so,
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well then the awareness begins to grow
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that there is a presence on this planet
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that we had previously missed,
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that we have been so busy about the ant-hill business
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of building human culture, that we have paid lip busy about the Ant Hill business of building human culture
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that we have paid lip service to the power of nature, to Gaia, to the goddess.
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But I don’t think anybody has realized how real it is.
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If you wanted to talk about Gaia,
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most people would place you in the category of spiritual or religious.
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But I think talking about Gaia belongs in the category
00:19:13 ►
natural science and natural history.
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Gaia is a regulating set of grids that are laid over this planet
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that keep it going in the right direction,
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that stabilize certain kinds of processes and damp others.
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And the expression of Gaia outside of culture
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is the botanical world, the world of plants. I mean, man, woman, animal,
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plants. The plants were the first ones to have a feminine approach, if you want to put it that
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way. I mean, they invented the feminine approach before there was even femininity, if you want to put it that way. I mean, they invented the feminine approach
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before there was even femininity,
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if you want to put it that way.
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In other words, nurturing,
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staying in one place,
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cooperation, integration,
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and regulation,
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rather than dominance,
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conquest,
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mobility,
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these sorts of things
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which then are the animal
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solution
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to the same problem
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and an orthodox
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evolutionary biologist
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tends to sneer at plants
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because we all have
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the built-in assumption
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that the brain is in the mind
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I mean that the mind is in the brain
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and that if you don’t have a brain
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you don’t have a mind
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or if you do have a mind
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it’s so low grade
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that it’s just kind of a shimmer
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of perceptual awareness
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if you examine this proposition
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that the mind is in the brain,
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it doesn’t hold water at all.
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You know, all the miles and miles
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of electroencephalographic tracings
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that have been done,
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nobody has ever correlated a thought
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with an electrical discharge in the brain.
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The closest they’ve gotten is to correlate a kind of state of focused awareness
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with a blip in the electrical activity of the brain.
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When you’re told, prepare yourself for a question,
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then there is a measurable bit of activity in the brain,
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as though you reorient.
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I’m about to get a question.
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It’s, you know, they’ve had 50 years
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to make good on their promise
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that they were going to show us thought in the brain.
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Sherrington and those people,
00:22:04 ►
what was the famous Spanish neurophysiologist, Ramonton and those people, what was the famous
00:22:05 ►
Spanish neurophysiologist,
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Ramon de Cajal,
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and Sherrington and those people,
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announced all of this
00:22:13 ►
in the early 1920s.
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Since then, we’ve had
00:22:17 ►
supercomputers, super
00:22:20 ►
imaging systems,
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micro probes,
00:22:24 ►
vast advances in the technologies they said they needed in order to make this point. They have not made good. It’s interesting there are a couple of areas. In 1952, DNA, the structure of DNA was elicited. Well, the scientific literature was full of predictions
00:22:46 ►
of the cure of all diseases within 15 years,
00:22:50 ►
certainly the elimination of all genetic defects,
00:22:54 ►
a full understanding of what life is.
00:22:57 ►
Well, then as they began to elucidate the mechanisms of DNA,
00:23:02 ►
they turned out to be simply that.
00:23:05 ►
Mechanisms, no more interesting than a water faucet or a torsion belt or a weighted governor.
00:23:15 ►
The life that molecular biology seems to be able to describe is a life of chains and pulleys,
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falling weights and tightening chains.
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There has not been a single step toward delucidating
00:23:34 ►
what it actually is.
00:23:37 ►
Its mechanisms are better understood,
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but not what it is.
00:23:42 ►
The mind even more so,
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to the point now where the people in the field
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to each other will admit
00:23:49 ►
that there’s a problem, there’s a crisis.
00:23:52 ►
This past week there was a conference here
00:23:54 ►
called the Holonomics conference.
00:23:58 ►
Carl Prebram’s theory of brain functioning,
00:24:01 ►
which is certainly state of the art and out there,
00:24:04 ►
but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed of brain functioning, which is certainly state of the art and out there,
00:24:07 ►
but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed,
00:24:09 ►
changed from the holographic theory
00:24:11 ►
to the holonomic theory
00:24:13 ►
because the experimental data
00:24:15 ►
was not supporting the model
00:24:17 ►
that they had.
00:24:19 ►
This happens over and over again.
00:24:22 ►
So I think we’re very,
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we’re too patient with science.
00:24:27 ►
Nobody should be allowed more than 50 years to get their act together.
00:24:32 ►
If somebody claims, I mean, think about it.
00:24:35 ►
We think of the, we think of the 20th century as the most rapidly evolving century that there has ever been.
00:24:46 ►
A few years ago,
00:24:48 ►
Kat and I took the children to Mexico
00:24:50 ►
to wander around
00:24:52 ►
looking at the Mayan ruins.
00:24:54 ►
We were in San Cristobal
00:24:56 ►
de las Casas, which some of you may know.
00:24:58 ►
It’s high up in the mountains of Chiapas.
00:25:01 ►
And there’s an immense cathedral there.
00:25:05 ►
It was built in 1511.
00:25:09 ►
Built in 1511, Columbus discovered America in 1492.
00:25:15 ►
So that’s 92, 1502, 1512.
00:25:20 ►
19 years after Columbus had discovered America in a world relying on galleons and horse flesh,
00:25:30 ►
the complete conquest of a culture
00:25:32 ►
was totally fit accompli
00:25:35 ►
and building 600 feet long with 300 foot ceilings
00:25:39 ►
were being put up all over Mexico.
00:25:42 ►
We went to the moon, 69, 79,
00:25:46 ►
19 years ago.
00:25:49 ►
Today, we couldn’t put a lawn chair on the moon.
00:25:54 ►
You would think that by now we would have buildings
00:25:56 ►
600 feet long with 300 foot ceilings,
00:25:59 ►
have the Indians all working for us,
00:26:02 ►
and be looting the place of minerals.
00:26:06 ►
So, see, there is, we tolerate too much foot-drahing,
00:26:13 ►
and these scientists have been pontificating.
00:26:15 ►
A real sore point with me is the claims of quantum physics.
00:26:21 ►
I mean, my God, how many conferences are there going to be on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness
00:26:29 ►
before somebody comes up with something better than a wrap?
00:26:33 ►
And the new position of the particle physics community is just give us $6.5 billion and a machine 19 kilometers in diameter and we will
00:26:49 ►
show you something well but five years ago we gave you four billion dollars and you built the
00:26:56 ►
machine four and a half kilometers in diameter and what you concluded out of that was you need a
00:27:02 ►
bigger one and we’re living in a world where people are starving, where people are dying of AIDS.
00:27:09 ►
I mean, I’m not saying you have to just give the money away to the poor.
00:27:14 ►
Certainly nothing as radical as that.
00:27:18 ►
But if you want a scientific frontier that has positive feedback into
00:27:25 ►
the human experience,
00:27:27 ►
then let’s take the $6.5 billion
00:27:30 ►
and have a full
00:27:32 ►
assault on the mechanism of viruses
00:27:35 ►
in the human cell.
00:27:37 ►
So that we come out of it with an AIDS
00:27:40 ►
cure, of course, but we come
00:27:42 ►
out of it also with a much deeper
00:27:44 ►
understanding of the mechanics of life. I think it also with a much deeper understanding of the mechanics
00:27:46 ►
of life. I think it’s time to begin to call in the chips on these various disciplines that have
00:27:52 ►
been promising great things to us for the past 30 years. Where would psychedelic research be
00:28:01 ►
if it had been going on at full funding since 1960 and hundreds of thousands of people well and healthy had taken it and the plants of the world had been fully surveyed the cultures of the world databases had been built of their folklore and this sort of thing. So we, and even though I think we represent a fairly deconditioned subgroup,
00:28:32 ►
are still enthrall to the promises of a science whose promises begin to sound more and more hollow.
00:28:43 ►
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is
00:28:47 ►
is reclaiming your own experience.
00:28:51 ►
We expect Carl Sagan to explain it to us
00:28:56 ►
or the evening news.
00:28:57 ►
And we don’t realize all these people are just like we are.
00:29:02 ►
All of these people are utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly ordinary, totally ordinary.
00:29:10 ►
I can’t impress upon you enough how ordinary everyone is.
00:29:15 ►
And we drift into the assumption, you know, that great men and women are at the helm
00:29:20 ►
and that deep thinkers are publishing all of these books.
00:29:26 ►
And it’s just not so.
00:29:28 ►
It’s a groping.
00:29:29 ►
It’s a feeling toward it.
00:29:31 ►
And any one of us is competent.
00:29:35 ►
This whole cult of professionalism and elites is just a shell game.
00:29:40 ►
The thing to do is reclaim direct experience and then insist for other people that that be dealt with.
00:29:48 ►
I’ve tried to do that by talking about the part of the psychedelic experience which nobody seemed to want to talk about,
00:29:57 ►
which is it seems to me that it’s not an exploration of our psychology, of our conscious or unconscious mind.
00:30:06 ►
It’s a place.
00:30:08 ►
There’s real estate in there.
00:30:11 ►
It is as profound a dimension as the new world was for Columbus.
00:30:16 ►
We are going to live in the world that the psychedelic experience is revealing to us
00:30:23 ►
because we primarily define ourselves culturally through language.
00:30:29 ►
And the psychedelic experience is, I think,
00:30:32 ►
primarily will be found to be a revisioning of language.
00:30:38 ►
Literally, castles in the air await us in our global future.
00:30:44 ►
We are going to
00:30:45 ►
we are
00:30:48 ►
journeying deeper
00:30:49 ►
and deeper
00:30:50 ►
into the
00:30:50 ►
imagination.
00:30:52 ►
This conference
00:30:54 ►
that just
00:30:55 ►
finished this
00:30:56 ►
past week was
00:30:57 ►
called living in
00:30:58 ►
the imagination.
00:31:00 ►
And its focus
00:31:00 ►
was not strictly
00:31:01 ►
or at all
00:31:02 ►
particularly
00:31:03 ►
psychedelic.
00:31:04 ►
It was
00:31:04 ►
artists, writers, film people, performers,
00:31:09 ►
talking about living in the imagination.
00:31:12 ►
I think you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes
00:31:16 ►
for the activity of the imagination.
00:31:19 ►
And the imagination is a sense,
00:31:23 ►
like seeing, feeling, touching.
00:31:26 ►
It is more than simply an anticipation of the future.
00:31:30 ►
It’s an anticipation of those things which lie outside the forward thrust of the momentum of probability.
00:31:41 ►
The possession of the imagination is what characterizes us and distinguishes us from
00:31:47 ►
other creatures. I mean, you can talk all you want about porpoises and dolphins and all of these things,
00:31:54 ►
but they may have rich interior lives, but there is no trace of epigenetic coding. In other words, they don’t write books, paint paintings, build cathedrals.
00:32:09 ►
These are the things which we do, which have built up a tremendously rich environment
00:32:16 ►
for each succeeding generation so that we do not birth our children into the world of nature.
00:32:26 ►
We birth our children into the world of culture.
00:32:30 ►
And culture is some kind of collective engineering process
00:32:35 ►
that up to this point has been largely unconscious,
00:32:40 ►
entirely unconscious.
00:32:41 ►
I mean, people just thought what they thought
00:32:45 ►
and let the chips fall where they may,
00:32:47 ►
and every once in a while a Christ or a Muhammad or a Buddha would come along
00:32:51 ►
and reshuffle the deck, and then the game would play on.
00:32:57 ►
But we are coming to the place, a great turning place, I would think,
00:33:03 ►
a cusp almost, in the evolution of human psychology.
00:33:08 ►
It’s the self-reflection cusp.
00:33:11 ►
We are beginning to become sophisticated enough with our language and our awareness to stand outside of ourselves.
00:33:21 ►
What is the human enterprise?
00:33:25 ►
You know, what is happening on this planet?
00:33:28 ►
What the hell is going on here?
00:33:31 ►
This planet has supported an endless succession of animal forms.
00:33:37 ►
They can be traced back into the gunflit shirts of South Africa,
00:33:43 ►
three and a half billion years
00:33:45 ►
in the last
00:33:47 ►
million years
00:33:49 ►
phenomena
00:33:51 ►
never before seen
00:33:53 ►
on this planet
00:33:54 ►
have begun
00:33:55 ►
to emerge
00:33:56 ►
not all of them
00:33:57 ►
having to do
00:33:58 ►
with the human species
00:34:00 ►
for instance
00:34:01 ►
glaciers
00:34:02 ►
I
00:34:03 ►
believe and subscribe to the school in geology which says we’re, glaciers. I believe and subscribe to the school in geology,
00:34:07 ►
which says we’re not glaciers a billion years ago
00:34:11 ►
or 100 million years ago.
00:34:14 ►
Glaciers are a recent phenomenon
00:34:16 ►
having to do with the accumulation of instability
00:34:19 ►
in the planetary orbit.
00:34:22 ►
Ice moving southward, miles high,
00:34:25 ►
from the poles on a cycle of 20 to 50,000 years
00:34:29 ►
is something entirely unique
00:34:32 ►
for the biology of this planet to encounter.
00:34:35 ►
That process, which islands and then islands populations
00:34:42 ►
of primates and other animals,
00:34:49 ►
and then recedes so that these intensified islanded genomes then flow back into a general gene pool,
00:34:53 ►
and then islands them again.
00:34:55 ►
This is like kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation,
00:35:00 ►
and it’s out, and it’s in that world of ice,
00:35:04 ►
moving south and moving north, that the human story begins to pick up because the human story is a story that everyone who studies the matter believes began in Africa and
00:35:21 ►
it was the forming and the unforming of the glaciers
00:35:27 ►
that created the cycle of wetness and dryness in Africa
00:35:31 ►
that placed pressure on the evolving primates
00:35:36 ►
in the primary rainforests of the African tropics
00:35:40 ►
to begin to develop a dry grassland or limited resource adaptation
00:35:49 ►
in the background of the arboreal adaptation.
00:35:53 ►
Well, then as the ratios of selective intensity shifted in favor of the dry land situation,
00:36:02 ►
the previous mutation, which had been there all along but had not been prominent
00:36:09 ►
because it was not conferring an adaptive advantage, suddenly came into the fore.
00:36:16 ►
And you get binocular vision, bipedalism, pack signaling, all of these things which are the beginning of the repertoire of our heritage.
00:36:31 ►
Now, up to this point in that story, almost all evolutionary biologists and primatologists agree.
00:36:39 ►
What I’ve recently been trying to say and hope to write a book about is I think that it was the presence of psychedelic plants in that environment that provided the spark to begin to call forth conscious self-reflection out of this primate species. The case goes something like this. The primates evolved. They abandoned their
00:37:08 ►
vegetarian lifestyle as the great forests were reduced to grasslands. They adopted a more
00:37:15 ►
omnivorous lifestyle, which you see in most of the higher primates today. And they began to
00:37:23 ►
hunt the large ungulate mammals that were simultaneously evolving
00:37:29 ►
as the grasslands became a more dominant ecology. In the manure of these ungulate mammals,
00:37:42 ►
cattle, mushrooms find their idealized environment.
00:37:48 ►
Well, if you’ve ever watched a baboon,
00:37:51 ►
the strategy of baboons for hunting food
00:37:54 ►
is they go along and they pick stuff up
00:37:57 ►
and they smell and taste,
00:37:59 ►
and they’re always turning things over,
00:38:02 ►
looking for bugs.
00:38:04 ►
Well, carrion beetles and stuff like that always congregate under cow pies.
00:38:10 ►
Isn’t it wonderful that the evolution of the grandeur of the human mind
00:38:14 ►
begins with what’s going on with doodle bugs under cow pies?
00:38:20 ►
It keeps your humility.
00:38:24 ►
But this, because searching for insect protein, the mushroom is a very conspicuous part of that
00:38:33 ►
kind of environment. I mean, a child of three will run to it in the meadow because it’s
00:38:39 ►
neither fish nor foul, you know. I mean, it is quite an anomalous and striking object.
00:38:49 ►
Cilocybin, it’s been shown, increases visual acuity in small doses.
00:38:54 ►
This is very solid research done by Roland Fisher in the 50s and the 60s.
00:38:59 ►
Some of the last research done with psychedelics, he showed that very small amounts of psilocybin increase visual
00:39:09 ►
acuity before there is any other effect. You don’t feel stoned or anything like that. The way they
00:39:14 ►
proved this is they built an apparatus where there were two parallel metal bars and someone unseen
00:39:23 ►
by the subject by turning a crank could impart torsion to one of the metal bars
00:39:31 ►
so that the two parallel bars would slowly, one would twist and they would cease to be parallel.
00:39:37 ►
So you get graduate students, the favorite experimental animal of the psychology,
00:39:44 ►
and you give them light doses of psilocybin,
00:39:46 ►
and you sit them down in front of this apparatus
00:39:49 ►
and tell them to push the buzzer
00:39:51 ►
when the two bars are no longer parallel.
00:39:55 ►
Very consistently, the people who had been dosed with psilocybin
00:39:58 ►
scored higher on this test than the people who had not.
00:40:03 ►
Fisher, being wishing to be facetious, said to me,
00:40:09 ►
you see, this is a case where we’ve experimentally proven
00:40:14 ►
that drugs give you a truer picture of reality
00:40:17 ►
than being straight.
00:40:20 ►
And for him it was a joke.
00:40:23 ►
See, it was just this cute thing that you say to your academic colleagues.
00:40:27 ►
But I was quite touched and struck by,
00:40:32 ►
this is true what this man is saying.
00:40:34 ►
This is a simple experiment.
00:40:36 ►
It proves that sometimes a drug is better to be stoned than not stone,
00:40:40 ►
and your life could be depending on it.
00:40:42 ►
Because hunting is an activity
00:40:45 ►
where visual acuity is 95% of the game, you know,
00:40:49 ►
and it doesn’t hurt to also have a CNS stimulant
00:40:52 ►
that can give you a running burst if you need it.
00:40:56 ►
So since elicin provides both of these things,
00:40:59 ►
it just, you know, turns you into a real killing machine.
00:41:04 ►
So…
00:41:06 ►
And Fisher never considered the impacts of his findings
00:41:15 ►
in what this would mean in the natural environment.
00:41:19 ►
But I wanted to think about it,
00:41:21 ►
and it seemed to me that that meant that those primates, including
00:41:27 ►
the psilocybin in their food chain, would automatically have a leg up over those that did not.
00:41:35 ►
They would be able to move quicker in the hunting situation and more accurately.
00:41:40 ►
Well, you have to have studied evolution for 10 minutes to know that that means then
00:41:46 ►
that these forms are going to be preserved
00:41:49 ►
and selected in favor of
00:41:51 ►
over those individuals that do not have this in their food.
00:41:57 ►
In the same time, it could have made them a little bit more vulnerable.
00:42:00 ►
In what way?
00:42:01 ►
Well, you eat a bunch of mushroom.
00:42:03 ►
Suddenly you’re just sitting there
00:42:05 ►
watching all these patterns
00:42:06 ►
you’re more vulnerable predators per se or something
00:42:09 ►
Yes, well that’s what I wanted to get to
00:42:11 ►
I don’t mean full trips
00:42:14 ►
I mean that in the process of eating
00:42:18 ►
bugs and roots and stuff
00:42:19 ►
if they ate these mushrooms without even
00:42:21 ►
knowing they were psychoactive
00:42:23 ►
they would have this visual acuity.
00:42:26 ►
Now, somebody, at some point,
00:42:28 ►
ate a lot of them,
00:42:30 ►
and they discovered that they were no good for hunting
00:42:33 ►
or bursts of speed or anything.
00:42:35 ►
They just wanted to lie on the ground
00:42:37 ►
and, you know, be with it.
00:42:40 ►
At that point,
00:42:42 ►
I think this becomes a mystery
00:42:44 ►
for the first human
00:42:46 ►
beings. The cow
00:42:48 ►
is the source
00:42:50 ►
of food,
00:42:52 ►
fuel,
00:42:54 ►
body covering,
00:42:57 ►
milk,
00:42:58 ►
and an image of
00:43:00 ►
nurturing that’s very
00:43:02 ►
important because the birthing of the cow,
00:43:04 ►
it probably was the birthing of the cow it probably was the
00:43:05 ►
birthing of cattle and the observation of cattle probably taught people more about sex than
00:43:12 ►
their own sexuality did you know I mean the husbanding of animals is how the farm
00:43:18 ►
children learn about life once the cycle activity was discovered,
00:43:25 ►
the real visionary potential of the mushroom,
00:43:29 ►
I think it would be connected to the cow.
00:43:31 ►
It would be viewed as a product of the cow
00:43:34 ►
in the same way that the manure,
00:43:35 ►
the hide, the milk, the blood, and the flesh was.
00:43:39 ►
And it’s significant that in the Middle East,
00:43:42 ►
at the very earliest stratum of culture that is anything other
00:43:47 ►
than the chipping of Flint, there are images of cattle. Cattle everywhere. Cattle at Altamira,
00:43:56 ►
cattle at LaScoe, painted very, very sensitively. What the ancient cave art of North African
00:44:04 ►
Southern Europe is, is a celebration of women and cattle.
00:44:09 ►
Men appear as stick figures wielding spears.
00:44:14 ►
Women are drawn as filled in curvilinear structures, their fecundity, their pregnancy, in many cases, their physical beauty.
00:44:25 ►
I don’t know how many of you know the paintings of the Tesselli frescoes in Algeria,
00:44:31 ►
but there are paintings of seated women that are as good as anything Monet or Gaghan did.
00:44:38 ►
I mean, where it’s feeling, you know, it’s the curve of the hip
00:44:42 ►
and the in-curve of the back and the swell of the
00:44:46 ►
belly under the breast. I mean, this is, it’s figurative drawing as good as we do today. So,
00:44:56 ►
women and cattle at the very earliest stratum of consciousness are mixed together. We always talk about this early
00:45:07 ►
level of culture as hunting, gathering, and I think that we drop our voices. We say it’s a
00:45:14 ►
hunting, gathering culture. If you’ve spent time in the Amazon, you know that what this means
00:45:21 ►
is once a month or once every six weeks,
00:45:25 ►
the men get their acts sufficiently together,
00:45:29 ►
and they make up enough coca that they all get their bows and arrows,
00:45:34 ►
and they go off for a hunt and leave the women and the children behind
00:45:39 ►
and get all coked up and hunt and party all night.
00:45:46 ►
And then when the coca is all gone, because usually women make the coca,
00:45:51 ►
when the coca is all gone, whatever they’ve captured on the hunt,
00:45:54 ►
they triumphantly carry back to the village.
00:45:57 ►
And often, you know, it’s garbage.
00:46:00 ►
And the women will be waiting at the village for them to come back and say, you know,
00:46:06 ►
eight days in the woods and you bring back one maggotie, a gutti, you know, what kind of
00:46:12 ►
clowns are you people? But this is the hunt, you know, and the hunter is the hero and they’ll
00:46:19 ►
tell the story around the campfire. Meanwhile, what is really going on, as is always the case,
00:46:27 ►
is that women are gathering.
00:46:29 ►
And gathering is a highly conscious activity
00:46:33 ►
where, you know, this plant is okay, that plant is bad,
00:46:39 ►
the root of this plant is poisonous,
00:46:41 ►
but if pounded with water and washed becomes edible, it’s an
00:46:47 ►
intelligence that demands discrimination, intelligence, a body of lore, memory, powers of observation,
00:46:59 ►
so forth and so on. It is, fact serious business while this hunting thing
00:47:06 ►
exists almost to keep the men
00:47:09 ►
out of the women’s hair.
00:47:11 ►
So
00:47:12 ►
you can imagine that
00:47:15 ►
the visual acuity thing had as great
00:47:18 ►
an impact on the gathering
00:47:19 ►
as it did on the hunting
00:47:22 ►
because many plants
00:47:24 ►
it’s very hard to tell the poison
00:47:26 ►
from the non-poison
00:47:27 ►
and also
00:47:28 ►
you gain, there are forms of visual acuity
00:47:31 ►
that are so removed from our awareness
00:47:34 ►
that we don’t even recall them
00:47:36 ►
such as being able to track an animal
00:47:39 ►
or being able to tell where animals have been
00:47:43 ►
or being able to tell
00:47:44 ►
just by the color of a landscape
00:47:47 ►
where the water is flowing under the ground
00:47:51 ►
and therefore where certain kinds of plants will occur.
00:47:55 ►
All of these cognitive activities,
00:47:58 ►
these integrative activities that rely on observation and memory,
00:48:03 ►
were tremendously aided by the presence of an imagination-enhancing enzyme in the food chain.
00:48:11 ►
And the goddess religions of the ancient Middle East are nothing more than the tail end of this.
00:48:21 ►
It went on for 15,000 years, and then it began to fade out about 5,000 years ago.
00:48:27 ►
The Imagination, the Living in the Imagination Conference we just had, we were very, very fortunate
00:48:33 ►
to have Rianne Isler come in and talk to us. If you’re not aware of her work, I urge you to look into it.
00:48:42 ►
Rianne Isler wrote the chalice and the blade
00:48:45 ►
and she is a brilliant woman
00:48:48 ►
archaeologist, a refugee
00:48:51 ►
from Nazi Europe and her
00:48:54 ►
notion is
00:48:55 ►
you know that not that there was a
00:48:59 ►
patriarchy in prehistory
00:49:01 ►
and then we fell in, I mean a matriarchy
00:49:04 ►
and then we fell into patriarchy and that this has been the problem.
00:49:07 ►
She has managed to de-genderize the cultural debate
00:49:12 ►
by inventing the terms partnership, culture, and dominator culture.
00:49:20 ►
We live in a dominator culture, and so to the English, in spite of Margaret Thatcher.
00:49:26 ►
It’s not about women, and it’s not about men.
00:49:30 ►
It’s about feminine and masculine attitudes.
00:49:35 ►
And Rian, using the work of Maria Gambutas and other people,
00:49:40 ►
has made a brilliant case that the natural equilibrium state of human society
00:49:51 ►
is to be in a partnership culture where the only hierarchies are hierarchies of function.
00:50:01 ►
People do what they can do well.
00:50:03 ►
But an administrator
00:50:05 ►
is not a more advanced
00:50:08 ►
member of society
00:50:09 ►
than a gardener.
00:50:12 ►
Nothing is seen to be
00:50:13 ►
intrinsically somehow higher or lower.
00:50:16 ►
There are just functions
00:50:17 ►
performed by people.
00:50:19 ►
Well, the great hope that she holds out
00:50:22 ►
is that if we recognize that what happened was simply a mistake,
00:50:28 ►
the allowing of the dominator model to come into being, then recognizing it as a mistake,
00:50:35 ►
we can simply correct the mistake. So she offers tremendous hope. It’s not a we are doomed
00:50:43 ►
and, you know know the selfish gene that
00:50:45 ►
rap or the territorial imperative
00:50:48 ►
that rap or all
00:50:50 ►
of these we’re doomed
00:50:51 ►
kind of wraps that come out
00:50:53 ►
of sociobiology and that
00:50:55 ►
kind of thing. We’re not doomed
00:50:57 ►
at all. Now what I’ve
00:50:59 ►
hoped to do and
00:51:01 ►
want to do is
00:51:03 ►
accept Rion’s premise that there was a partnership culture
00:51:10 ►
that around 1500 BC died out completely, its last stand being Minoan Crete, and that it was then
00:51:18 ►
replaced by a dominator culture. What I accept all that. What I want to know is why? How could such a thing have happened?
00:51:28 ►
If a
00:51:29 ►
model of culture, an adaptation like that, had been perfected that worked, what factor could then come into the picture and overturn it and cause it to be lost?
00:51:43 ►
And I think what it is is the the partnership culture
00:51:49 ►
maintained was feminized in its approach to society because it maintained a
00:51:57 ►
connection to the psychedelic world through plants it kept a proper perspective on the true
00:52:07 ►
rank of import of the structures of the psyche because as soon as you get the
00:52:18 ►
the fall of Minoan Crete what you get is the beginnings of Greek philosophy and
00:52:24 ►
when you get formal philosophy you and you get is the beginnings of Greek philosophy and when you get formal philosophy
00:52:27 ►
and you get the rise of the Homeric period
00:52:32 ►
all this happened about the same time
00:52:34 ►
we’re talking 1,100 BC here in the eastern Mediterranean
00:52:38 ►
you get the glorification of the marauder
00:52:41 ►
the warrior the glorification of the marauder, the warrior, the glorification of the king,
00:52:46 ►
and the evolution of slavery
00:52:51 ►
in the Greek model
00:52:53 ►
that we kept up with right up until 1865.
00:52:58 ►
The slaves of ancient Egypt
00:53:00 ►
were the property of the royal household.
00:53:03 ►
Slaveholding was not something that everybody was into,
00:53:07 ►
as it was later, where wealth meant slaves.
00:53:11 ►
So I think that what the psychedelic thing can be seen as is when it’s done with plants,
00:53:21 ►
is a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.
00:53:27 ►
James Joyce talks about what he calls the Mama Matrix Most Mysterious.
00:53:34 ►
That’s what you’re seeing, those lights against darkness, all that stuff.
00:53:40 ►
It is the potential for creative exuberance that resides in the phonic feminine matrix.
00:53:48 ►
It is the body of the goddess.
00:53:50 ►
And the ego can only create and maintain its tiny world
00:53:58 ►
of self-reflective concerns
00:54:02 ►
if it stifles this connection to the unconscious.
00:54:08 ►
So the terror of drugs that is paralyzing our society is,
00:54:15 ►
there’s really only one terror in our society.
00:54:20 ►
It’s the terror of the feminine.
00:54:23 ►
And the terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control.
00:54:29 ►
This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics,
00:54:34 ►
is the giving up control.
00:54:36 ►
And remember in the 60s it was all about ego loss,
00:54:39 ►
and people strove for it and claimed to have achieved it
00:54:42 ►
and this and that?
00:54:43 ►
And it was never couched in this male, female thing.
00:54:47 ►
But I think that’s a male problem and a male way of sort of setting the table for the banquet to talk about ego loss.
00:54:59 ►
A partnership society is going to involve a lot of ego loss.
00:55:05 ►
It’s going to involve a lot of seeing your brother and your sister as interchangeable with yourself.
00:55:15 ►
It’s going to bring, I think, a major sexual revolution because so much of sexuality over the past 500 years has been based on it was almost the coinage of the egos dealings with the world.
00:55:33 ►
How many women are under my domination?
00:55:37 ►
Are you mine?
00:55:40 ►
Am I yours?
00:55:42 ►
And people have always stressed that the problem was in the possession,
00:55:46 ►
but it’s really in the casting of the subject and the object there.
00:55:51 ►
Me and you, not the relationship.
00:55:56 ►
And so I have, I’m sure you’ve all heard me say this on tape.
00:56:01 ►
To me, the major metaphor that is operating in the 20th century is what I call
00:56:07 ►
the archaic revival.
00:56:11 ►
Our civilization is falling to pieces. Its assumptions are no longer any good. It just doesn’t
00:56:19 ►
work. And by our civilization, I mean from Moscow to the Potomac to Tokyo to Sydney to Bangkok and back to Paris.
00:56:30 ►
Global civilization is not working.
00:56:33 ►
It may still be working in the rainforest, but only if we haven’t reached them yet.
00:56:37 ►
And as soon as we reach them, they’ll be sent to work in sawmills and involved in growing coca for the drug trade and be ruined.
00:56:47 ►
When a society is in trouble, the way we are in trouble,
00:56:52 ►
what it does unconsciously,
00:56:56 ►
just in the same way that a drowning person reaches outward,
00:57:01 ►
is it reaches outward for a previous cultural metaphor to stabilize itself.
00:57:07 ►
We can understand this by looking at the Renaissance,
00:57:11 ►
where as the medieval world began to crack to pieces
00:57:16 ►
and cynicism about the church and the pope and all of this,
00:57:22 ►
and cities began to, and the Jews began to be turned loose
00:57:26 ►
to make money, and trading networks
00:57:28 ►
began to be established.
00:57:30 ►
All of these new things began to be tolerated.
00:57:35 ►
The Renaissance reached back to Greece and Rome
00:57:38 ►
for studying metaphors.
00:57:41 ►
And this is what classicism is.
00:57:43 ►
It’s an effort to be more like Greece and Rome
00:57:46 ►
than Greece and Rome were,
00:57:48 ►
to have their laws, their architecture,
00:57:51 ►
their technologies,
00:57:54 ►
theories of road building,
00:57:56 ►
warfare, politics.
00:58:00 ►
In our situation,
00:58:03 ►
the culture crisis is much worse
00:58:05 ►
because of the bomb, because it is global,
00:58:09 ►
because of high-speed communication.
00:58:11 ►
We can’t reach back to ancient Egypt
00:58:15 ►
or the Anastasi or the Maya.
00:58:19 ►
It has to be something further back.
00:58:23 ►
It actually has to be something outside of history.
00:58:27 ►
And this is what sets the stage for the archaic revival.
00:58:30 ►
We want to return to the cultural models of 15 to 20,000 years ago.
00:58:38 ►
Not that we are going to become Neolithic people,
00:58:43 ►
but we need to cultivate the same things they cultivated for very
00:58:49 ►
different reasons.
00:58:50 ►
They were hunter-gatherers with a deep sensitivity to nature in order that their very small
00:58:56 ►
numbers could prosper and spread.
00:59:01 ►
We must become gardeners of the planet
00:59:05 ►
and ecologically conscious people
00:59:08 ►
because otherwise
00:59:08 ►
there won’t be any land
00:59:10 ►
left to stand on.
00:59:13 ►
Their concern
00:59:14 ►
with myth and ritual
00:59:16 ►
with images from the unconscious
00:59:18 ►
expressed in mask making
00:59:20 ►
and carving and fetishes
00:59:22 ►
we see early in the 20th century’s concern for the great revolution in art.
00:59:29 ►
So Picasso went to West Africa and brought these masks back, and other people brought back primitive art,
00:59:37 ►
and it was seen to be more true to the human feelings of the early 20th century, than the romantic
00:59:45 ►
fin de seacle art
00:59:47 ►
that had come before, which was really
00:59:49 ►
the last
00:59:51 ►
tail wagging of the
00:59:53 ►
Baroque and Rococo era,
00:59:55 ►
which was the come down from the Renaissance.
00:59:58 ►
So, modern art,
01:00:01 ►
the discoveries
01:00:02 ►
of Freud and Jung, that there was
01:00:04 ►
more to life than being awake or asleep,
01:00:07 ►
but that there were, you know, spirits,
01:00:11 ►
the rebirth of a sense of spiritual values.
01:00:14 ►
You know, at mid-century,
01:00:16 ►
it looked like we were all going to become French intellectuals,
01:00:20 ►
existential, atheistic, Marxist,
01:00:25 ►
just this flat, flat, empty thing.
01:00:29 ►
Jean-Paul Sart’s statement on nature is,
01:00:32 ►
nature is mute.
01:00:34 ►
Nature has nothing to say to man.
01:00:37 ►
Well, this is, to my mind, you know,
01:00:39 ►
a monstrous statement designed to lead people.
01:00:43 ►
If nature is mute, no wonder the existentialists felt lost.
01:00:49 ►
They had precluded the one connection to authentic being that was available to them.
01:00:58 ►
So I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life
01:01:07 ►
and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.
01:01:16 ►
I mean, we can imagine fascist futures, futures of vast regimentation and machine-like behavior
01:01:23 ►
where everyone is reduced to just being an automaton within a vast regimentation and machine-like behavior where everyone is reduced to just being an automaton
01:01:29 ►
within a vaster automaton.
01:01:31 ►
But these are not futures we want to live with.
01:01:34 ►
A humane future is going to, as I said last night,
01:01:39 ►
place the expansion of consciousness in its very center.
01:01:43 ►
And this means accepting the role of the feminine,
01:01:48 ►
not as political rhetoric, but as the facts of the matter.
01:01:52 ►
But I always think of what Chesterton said.
01:01:56 ►
He said, men are men, but man is a woman.
01:02:01 ►
And that’s the fact of the matter.
01:02:07 ►
And by realizing that man is a woman
01:02:09 ►
there’s no debate
01:02:11 ►
it’s not a discussion
01:02:12 ►
there’s no convincing
01:02:14 ►
it’s just a fact
01:02:16 ►
like that water runs downhill
01:02:18 ►
and you’re going to have to get straight about it
01:02:20 ►
then there is a possibility
01:02:23 ►
for
01:02:24 ►
fitting ourselves into a partnership future. Riann has
01:02:31 ►
thought this all out in her head theoretically. I don’t know whether she is a psychedelic traveler
01:02:38 ►
or not, but she and I immediately had lots to say to each other because she has, you could say, found her way there by another route.
01:02:51 ►
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine,
01:02:58 ►
not between the masculine and the feminine.
01:03:01 ►
And everyone who has an ego, and many women in positions of power do,
01:03:07 ►
has an unresolved problem with this ego-feminine thing.
01:03:13 ►
The return to the archaic mode gives permission for this to happen,
01:03:19 ►
and the psychedelic experience stabilizes it,
01:03:23 ►
because women are always at home with the mystery,
01:03:31 ►
probably because they are the ones who give birth,
01:03:35 ►
and they are usually the ones who make dying,
01:03:40 ►
ease the way of the dying.
01:03:42 ►
So I don’t think women have this desire for neatness and closure that dominates men.
01:03:50 ►
Men want it to be straightforward, well-organized, move on time, no mystery.
01:03:57 ►
Science, as the great enterprise of paternalism, has come to the end of its road.
01:04:04 ►
It has not only swept the kitchen,
01:04:07 ►
it’s now sweeping the yard.
01:04:10 ►
And as it sweeps the yard,
01:04:12 ►
it’s sinking deeper and deeper in the earth
01:04:14 ►
because there’s no floor on reality.
01:04:18 ►
There is science, and they are beginning to admit this
01:04:21 ►
and say, well, there’s something wrong.
01:04:22 ►
We thought it would be one more particle or one more something or other, and it just seems to endlessly recede in front of us.
01:04:30 ►
This is not a problem. This is a solution. This is what science has been needing to hear for
01:04:35 ►
500 years is enough already. We now have a science which can do anything or almost anything
01:04:44 ►
we want technologically.
01:04:46 ►
So that’s its tool-making function.
01:04:48 ►
It’s fulfilled that very nicely.
01:04:50 ►
Why do we believe that it will elucidate the mysteries of the soul?
01:04:55 ►
It won’t.
01:04:56 ►
That’s another concern.
01:04:58 ►
It’s a concern of individuals.
01:05:01 ►
You want to understand the mystery of the soul.
01:05:04 ►
You don’t get a $5 billion budget and a team of six
01:05:09 ►
universities linked by computer to attack it. No, you go into the wilderness and you eat mushrooms.
01:05:17 ►
It’s that kind of work. It’s more the work of the poet than the work of the research scientist.
01:05:24 ►
And certainly in the archaic mode, the poet was the model for men and women.
01:05:33 ►
I mean, poet has a masculine connotation in our society, but that’s because we’re so screwed up.
01:05:38 ►
We even had a separate word for women poets, a poetess, you see.
01:05:44 ►
But the making of poetry, the living in the primal world of poetry, can only be done if you have a direct connection to the mystery. And that cannot happen as long as the ego is the God. We were in the conference last week kidding around down at the baths, and I was saying that I had invented the smallest form of memory.
01:06:10 ►
That memories were made of particles, and that the smallest particle of memory was called a mnemon.
01:06:18 ►
And then somebody said, well, if memories are made of particles, then is consciousness made of particles?
01:06:25 ►
He said, well, maybe it is.
01:06:27 ►
Well, then what shall we name the smallest unit of consciousness?
01:06:32 ►
And Kat said, how about calling it the ego?
01:06:41 ►
And I think that’s a good place to begin.
01:06:44 ►
Let’s get it in its proper perspective.
01:06:47 ►
The ego is the smallest amount of consciousness
01:06:50 ►
anybody can deal with in the ordinary world.
01:06:54 ►
But you build outward from the ego.
01:06:58 ►
You put two egos together,
01:07:00 ►
and maybe you’ve either got a conflict,
01:07:04 ►
which is always interesting,
01:07:05 ►
or better yet, a love affair.
01:07:08 ►
Well, you put three egos together
01:07:10 ►
and you’ve got a menagerie,
01:07:13 ►
four, and you have a corporation,
01:07:16 ►
so forth and so on.
01:07:18 ►
So complexity of consciousness arrives
01:07:21 ►
out of building on the atom of the ego,
01:07:25 ►
not trying to squeeze everything down into it.
01:07:29 ►
The intellectual richness of our heritage is unimaginable.
01:07:35 ►
It is our greatest legacy.
01:07:38 ►
I mean, you can forget your fleets of Rolls-Royces
01:07:42 ►
and that Monet that they’re holding for you in Paris
01:07:45 ►
and your summer house on Ibiza, it’s nothing compared to the richness of the imagination.
01:07:53 ►
Not William Blake’s imagination or Donatello or Caravaggio, but your imagination.
01:08:04 ►
There’s more and better art in your head
01:08:06 ►
than is hanging in the walls of the great galleries
01:08:10 ►
of art of this planet.
01:08:12 ►
That’s what makes history so exciting
01:08:14 ►
because we have just begun.
01:08:17 ►
We really are just shaking the leaves out of our hair
01:08:21 ►
and scraping the lice out of our fur
01:08:23 ►
and beginning to talk about how we could have a civilization here.
01:08:28 ►
We could have a sane planet
01:08:31 ►
with sane people living on it, leading happy, productive lives,
01:08:37 ►
with everybody with enough to eat,
01:08:40 ►
everybody getting laid enough,
01:08:42 ►
everybody getting to be famous enough.
01:08:46 ►
Everybody getting what they need by abandoning this, you know, I think it was Freud
01:08:53 ►
who compared the gathering of money to the retention of shit,
01:08:58 ►
to the holding of your stuff, you know, to being that possessive and that crazed
01:09:04 ►
about the products of your own
01:09:07 ►
your own psyche and body. The role that psychedelics play in this, if I haven’t made clear enough,
01:09:17 ►
is that they caused it, they maintain whatever of it has gone on through the dark centuries
01:09:24 ►
of monotheism
01:09:26 ►
when these things were forbidden.
01:09:28 ►
And I put it that way in order to jib
01:09:32 ►
Muslims, Jews, and Christians equally
01:09:35 ►
because we all have shared in the carrying forward
01:09:38 ►
of a really odd idea.
01:09:42 ►
And psychedelics now, as we decondition ourselves from the post-medieval world,
01:09:50 ►
they are present to hand as tools.
01:09:54 ►
And I think people such as yourselves know this.
01:09:58 ►
What we need to do is create a common language.
01:10:01 ►
In the 60s, the odd thing was everybody agreed that LSD was very, very important,
01:10:09 ►
but nobody could really say how it was important outside of the fact that it had been important to them.
01:10:16 ►
And I think if you give permission to look at the role of the plants and of shamanism
01:10:23 ►
and of the mystery religions.
01:10:26 ►
Do your homework.
01:10:28 ►
Go back into history and see how it worked.
01:10:30 ►
Then you see that the real revolution is going to be the realization
01:10:36 ►
that if it weren’t for psychedelics, we wouldn’t even be here.
01:10:40 ►
This thing that we’re so concerned to deny and repress in our society, which is drugs,
01:10:46 ►
is the sine qua non of being, not bad drugs. I’m not advocating cocaine addiction, heroin
01:10:54 ►
use, that sort of thing. We will talk at some other time about habits and the habit of having
01:11:01 ►
habits. But those are creatures of the laboratory, pernicious imps that have
01:11:08 ►
been summoned forth by the scientific establishment and let loose in society to really confuse the
01:11:18 ►
issue. If I could, by an act of fiat, change the linguistic world around,
01:11:27 ►
I would make it impossible to use the word drugs
01:11:31 ►
to talk about what we’re talking about.
01:11:34 ►
Drugs are things, medicine for ill people,
01:11:39 ►
coming out of the laboratory,
01:11:41 ►
coming out of theories of medicine that come out of mechanistic science.
01:11:48 ►
Plants are what we’re talking about.
01:11:51 ►
And I used to sort of shy away from the word magic,
01:11:56 ►
but more and more I’ve come to like it because it makes the right people so uptight.
01:12:03 ►
And say, just talk about magic plants who’s going to bust
01:12:08 ►
you for magic plants you mean drugs no just magic plants oh i see well you’re a near head so
01:12:14 ►
so what i’m talking about is my hope that the awareness of psychedelics as a personal force in each of your lives,
01:12:25 ►
I don’t think I have to talk to you about that.
01:12:27 ►
You’re self-selected for being here, and you know that.
01:12:31 ►
What I want to talk about is how important it is to re-understand our history,
01:12:37 ►
to re-understand that this is us.
01:12:41 ►
We didn’t get to this place by ourselves.
01:12:44 ►
What distinguishes us from the other primates
01:12:47 ►
is that we formed a symbiotic relationship with a mystery. And the mystery is an intelligence
01:12:56 ►
on this planet. We can’t say how long, at least as long as we have been here, may have come from the stars,
01:13:08 ►
could be an extraterrestrial intellecti,
01:13:11 ►
could be the dark recesses of our own mind that we have evolved so far from
01:13:13 ►
that we cannot recognize.
01:13:15 ►
But we might as well treat it like an extraterrestrial
01:13:20 ►
because no extraterrestrial that we are going to meet
01:13:24 ►
is going to be as alien as this thing that we have found in ourselves.
01:13:30 ►
The aliens of Hollywood who come in metallic ships
01:13:35 ►
with an interest in our atomic power plants
01:13:38 ►
or our redwood trees or whatever
01:13:41 ►
are just like the guy living next door
01:13:44 ►
compared to the entities that we find in our own mind. redwood trees or whatever, are just like the guy living next door,
01:13:49 ►
compared to the entities that we find in our own mind.
01:13:52 ►
So it doesn’t do any good to psychologize the alien and say, as Jung attempted to say,
01:13:56 ►
well, it’s the autonomous other.
01:13:58 ►
Autonomous psychic components in the human mind
01:14:01 ►
present themselves as elves, fairies, sprites, and aliens.
01:14:06 ►
Once you’ve met an elf, a sprite, a fairy, or an alien, you realize that waving the wand that says this is a component of your own psyche is just ludicrous.
01:14:19 ►
It’s as ludicrous as me waving a wand at you and announcing that that’s gotten rid of your existential validity because you’re a part of my own psyche, you know, it’s madness when applied to another person, and I think it’s equally appropriate when applied to these entities contacted in the trance.
01:14:44 ►
To do that, to try to reduce it,
01:14:46 ►
to say, well, it’s just one part of my head talking to another,
01:14:50 ►
is to fall into this paternalistic scientific desire
01:14:53 ►
to have it all be very neat.
01:14:56 ►
How would it be if it’s not neat at all?
01:15:00 ►
How would it be if nobody really knows what’s going on?
01:15:04 ►
How would it be if nobody really knows what’s going on? How would it be if understanding what reality is
01:15:08 ►
actually depended for you upon you?
01:15:11 ►
And that book by Fritj of Capra that you paid 1895 for isn’t going to do it.
01:15:19 ►
And neither is sitting at the feet of some guru.
01:15:24 ►
That it’s serious business,
01:15:27 ►
and the first thing to understand is that nobody knows.
01:15:31 ►
That you’re not looking for a teacher.
01:15:34 ►
It hasn’t been found out.
01:15:35 ►
It’s not sitting on the shelf of some library.
01:15:38 ►
It is being figured out now.
01:15:42 ►
And your job is to die with the state of the art understanding
01:15:47 ►
having emerged into your mind
01:15:49 ►
five minutes before you got there.
01:15:52 ►
And then, you know, that will carry you through.
01:15:56 ►
We need to awaken to the adventure
01:15:58 ►
and the richness and the openness
01:16:01 ►
of the game.
01:16:03 ►
The rules have not yet been forged.
01:16:07 ►
We will forge the rules ourselves,
01:16:10 ►
each for ourselves and each for the rest of us
01:16:13 ►
by working forward through this thing.
01:16:17 ►
I think we’re at the very beginnings
01:16:20 ►
of grappling and dealing with the psychedelic era.
01:16:24 ►
We are like people talking about evolution in 1855.
01:16:28 ►
A few of us have read Darwin’s paper.
01:16:31 ►
Nobody’s sure exactly what it means.
01:16:33 ►
It’s a strong intuition of something.
01:16:35 ►
The species thing is a problem.
01:16:38 ►
Nobody’s quite sure.
01:16:40 ►
There’s a new model of life and culture ahead of us,
01:16:46 ►
and it comes out of exploring with each other
01:16:50 ►
the places we have been by ourselves,
01:16:54 ►
the places that we have gone and been taken by the spirit.
01:17:00 ►
And, yes, so it’s the tension between the ego and surrender,
01:17:04 ►
and the psychedelics mean surrender.
01:17:08 ►
I thought I talked somewhat about the problem of the alien.
01:17:14 ►
It’s a rich problem, and people probably have experiences which weigh upon it.
01:17:19 ►
It’s really in the particulars of meeting this thing.
01:17:23 ►
If someone had never taken psychedelics and had no interest in it
01:17:28 ►
and had come here because they thought this was the traggering group,
01:17:33 ►
I think they would be truly alarmed and disturbed by what they hear
01:17:38 ►
because we appear to be mad people,
01:17:40 ►
because we appear to be fully engaged with an unseen, invisible world.
01:17:44 ►
We’re calling it the cause of history, the purpose for the future, and the basis for everything
01:17:50 ►
going on between us.
01:17:53 ►
But nobody said life was simple.
01:18:01 ►
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if life actually was simple?
01:18:06 ►
Have you wished for a simpler life yourself?
01:18:09 ►
If so, then my guess is that you had something to do with making it complicated in the first place.
01:18:16 ►
And if so, then you are the only person who can simplify it.
01:18:20 ►
A good place to begin, maybe, is to jettison some of your cargo.
01:18:24 ►
It isn’t always easy to do, but I found that after some initial separation anxiety about getting rid of the things that I no longer use,
01:18:32 ►
well, then life suddenly became much more smooth for me, if you know what I mean.
01:18:37 ►
I do, however, want to add a little something to what Terrence was saying about hunter-gatherer societies
01:18:43 ►
because a lot of new research is changing what we know about them.
01:18:48 ►
The work of Graber and Wengrow,
01:18:49 ►
has set out in their recent book, The Dawn of Everything,
01:18:53 ►
is causing some scholars to revise their ideas
01:18:56 ►
of what a hunter-gatherer culture actually looked like.
01:19:00 ►
But that’s just a little knit in what Terrence was saying,
01:19:03 ►
and I’m sure that he had pointed out himself, were he still with us?
01:19:07 ►
But then we would have missed his colorful recounting of how he thought that the hunters behaved.
01:19:13 ►
But for me, his story about the great apes coming down from the trees
01:19:17 ►
and eating magic mushrooms still intrigues me.
01:19:21 ►
In my opinion, this actually may be his best telling of that story.
01:19:25 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Namaste, my friends.