Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this insightful talk, Terence McKenna delves into the intricacies of human cognition, emphasizing the stark difference between smart and less intelligent individuals as a matter of pattern recognition from the same data. He challenges the conventional notion of language being an innate, genetically driven trait by highlighting its unique emergence compared to other natural processes. McKenna further explores the transformative power of consciousness, likening the hunt for arrowheads to an intentional act distinct from natural occurrences like lightning. This discussion underscores the profound impact of human intent and the shaping of our world through conscious action.
Herbert’s books, such as “Quantum Reality” and “Faster Than Light,” brought quantum mechanics to a broader audience and inspired discussions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the EPR paradox, and Bell’s inequality. These discussions, in turn, contributed to the ongoing development of quantum computing by fostering a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles and paradoxes underlying quantum theory.
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Podcast 705 – Terence McKenna – “Don’t Take This One Seriously”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Helpshounds.
00:00:16 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:18 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:22 ►
And we are once again about to listen to another recording that Terrence McKenna gave in October of 1995.
00:00:30 ►
And I should remind you that when you hear Terrence giving what was the then accepted story
00:00:35 ►
about men being hunters and women being gatherers, well, that story has lately been uprooted with some new information.
00:00:43 ►
So instead of taking Terrence’s
00:00:45 ►
version of the story is fact, which is what I’ve done for a long time, it may be worth your
00:00:50 ►
time to do a little reading about the new direction the hunter-gatherer story is taking.
00:00:55 ►
That said, well, there’s nothing wrong with taking Terrence’s version as sort of a high-level
00:01:00 ►
view of what was thought to be true back then. So now let’s listen to yet another Terrence McKenna podcast where he doesn’t miss a beat
00:01:08 ►
and begins by distinguishing between smart and stupid people.
00:01:13 ►
And his distinction, by the way, I find really worth thinking about.
00:01:16 ►
See if you don’t agree.
00:01:18 ►
Oh, and one more thing.
00:01:20 ►
About midway through this conversation, you’ll hear Terrence talking about his website.
00:01:26 ►
When he does, keep in mind the fact that this talk was given in October of 1995, almost 30 years ago.
00:01:33 ►
And back then, the web was only a couple years old.
00:01:37 ►
What he says sounds kind of primitive compared to where we are today.
00:01:40 ►
But at that time, only one in ten Americans were even connected to the net, and most of them were using a 300-baud dial-up modem to connect.
00:01:49 ►
Having his own website meant that, well, he was on the leading edge of this new technology.
00:01:54 ►
It was a really exciting time for us all.
00:01:57 ►
The difference between a smart person and a stupid person is they are coordinating more patterns out of the same data and that’s giving them a better command of the situation.
00:02:12 ►
The problem with thinking of language as innate and hence genetically driven is there’s just nothing else quite like it in nature. All other natural processes
00:02:27 ►
emerge through gradualism.
00:02:30 ►
But what consciousness does
00:02:35 ►
is it descends into the world
00:02:38 ►
and it changes it.
00:02:40 ►
I mean, when you, the way you hunt arrowheads hunt arrowheads, like lightning, except that lightning is not driven by conscious intent.
00:02:53 ►
The way you hunt arrowheads is you look for pieces of rock that were shattered by a blow.
00:03:00 ►
Nothing in nature can deliver a blow like that except a human hand holding another rock this is the clue so a rock shaped by being flaked however clumsily however natural it may look it bears the imprint of consciousness upon it and sound is a medium far more workable than stone.
00:03:32 ►
And so sound can be modulated by conscious intent.
00:03:41 ►
And I’ve experienced, probably you have too too these psilocybin-induced
00:03:48 ►
glossolalias they are ecstatic the problem is nobody they don’t mean anything
00:03:56 ►
and so other people say well you know why are you doing that it’s gibberish and the
00:04:02 ►
answer is I’m doing it because it feels so good.
00:04:06 ►
You say, well, it doesn’t
00:04:08 ►
feel good to me. In fact, it’s
00:04:09 ►
alarming.
00:04:11 ►
You say, well,
00:04:12 ►
you know, if
00:04:13 ►
it meant to you
00:04:16 ►
what it means to me,
00:04:18 ►
you would not be so
00:04:20 ►
alarmed. So
00:04:21 ►
I’m doing it and I’m
00:04:24 ►
thinking of that great antelope we roasted last night.
00:04:29 ►
Now you do it and think about the antelope we roast last night and say, yes, that feels better.
00:04:35 ►
It just doesn’t feel like insanity. It now has content. And one of the things that has really
00:04:42 ►
struck me in this last surge of research that we did on this
00:04:47 ►
is the absolute importance of individuals.
00:04:52 ►
This is obvious.
00:04:54 ►
This isn’t an M. Scott Peck deal or something like that.
00:04:59 ►
This is obvious and true that all change can be traced back to an individual.
00:05:07 ►
We don’t even have to talk about animals.
00:05:09 ►
Let’s think about avalanches.
00:05:12 ►
They begin with the movement of a single snowflake.
00:05:17 ►
Isn’t that perfectly obvious that you have a lot of shit moving at point A and at A minus
00:05:24 ►
one less and at A minus two less.
00:05:27 ►
And you trace that process back to a single particle that begins the cascade.
00:05:34 ►
Well, this language thing must have been like that.
00:05:39 ►
What we accept as a natural talent is someone, a genius,
00:05:46 ►
a stoned genius, a lucky stiff,
00:05:49 ►
figured out how to do this, and immediately it started a cascade.
00:05:55 ►
And it swept through the human world like a virus,
00:06:00 ►
because in fact it was a kind of virus.
00:06:03 ►
It was a virus that had such a positive impact
00:06:07 ►
on the business of being human
00:06:10 ►
that whoever rejected it
00:06:14 ►
has been long, long, buried and forgotten.
00:06:22 ►
But doesn’t that make my point?
00:06:24 ►
Yeah, yeah. No are we are the creatures not only
00:06:29 ►
well we are the creatures of language but language is that basically the the
00:06:36 ►
oldest and neatest and well no let’s stop there the oldest and neatest technological trick we’ve ever put in place.
00:06:48 ►
Every other technology has required an interaction with matter.
00:06:54 ►
So does speech.
00:06:56 ►
But the matter it interacts with is the air.
00:07:00 ►
And it only sculpts it for a moment.
00:07:03 ►
And there’s no toxic byproducts
00:07:05 ►
where the toxic byproducts emerge
00:07:08 ►
is in the meaning
00:07:09 ►
you know nobody was ever poisoned by the sound
00:07:13 ►
nobody was ever had their head screwed
00:07:16 ►
by somebody talking to them in a language
00:07:18 ►
they couldn’t understand
00:07:20 ►
so when you introduce this catalogue
00:07:23 ►
into this tiny gene pool called a human,
00:07:28 ►
and it turns into a human,
00:07:30 ►
then we have to consider the questions of the consequences of consciousness.
00:07:35 ►
Well, yeah, that’s what we’re here to talk about, basically.
00:07:40 ►
I take it as, well, it’s what a long
00:07:46 ►
strange trip it’s been
00:07:47 ►
I don’t want to absolutely
00:07:50 ►
look at 10,000 years
00:07:52 ►
of human and European
00:07:54 ►
history and say it was all a
00:07:56 ►
catastrophe run by
00:07:58 ►
you know testosterone
00:08:00 ►
poison jerks
00:08:02 ►
and no it had a purpose but it hasn’t been pretty.
00:08:07 ►
Well, if we look at the
00:08:09 ►
If you look at what we call maybe the dysfunctional behavior,
00:08:13 ►
the five things that human beings do are eccentric.
00:08:17 ►
And it just can’t.
00:08:19 ►
Here you have a monkey and here you have a human being without
00:08:23 ►
which are essentially the same thing. You have an individual science and now you have a human being without one, which are essentially the same thing.
00:08:25 ►
You have into the same thing.
00:08:26 ►
Now you have a human being in his behavior is very strange.
00:08:29 ►
You have an eccentric behavior, and you compare the two.
00:08:32 ►
There’s categories of eccentric behavior.
00:08:34 ►
For example, accumulation of power beyond survival’s need
00:08:40 ►
or the accumulation of wealth beyond need,
00:08:43 ►
or killing each other or going crazy
00:08:47 ►
or
00:08:48 ►
I forgot what this might be
00:08:53 ►
but you know these
00:08:54 ►
Well see I think those behaviors
00:08:57 ►
are the behaviors of an animal
00:08:59 ►
with much too much power over the environment
00:09:03 ►
gained through having changed itself
00:09:07 ►
for a hundred thousand years into a human being.
00:09:11 ►
In other words, we are in a fallen state.
00:09:14 ►
We are not as good, kind, loving, caring as people were before history.
00:09:22 ►
The fall into history has been a degradation.
00:09:26 ►
And the way to recover it in simple terms is by purging yourself of all these culturally
00:09:38 ►
sanctioned viruses by trying to return to the primary condition,
00:09:45 ►
which is nomadism, psychedelic intoxication,
00:09:50 ►
non-materiality, and polymorphous sexual style.
00:09:55 ►
I don’t know that those people were so kind and loving and sweet back then.
00:10:00 ►
Well, because if they were like us, we’d never been here.
00:10:04 ►
If they’d had the values we’d have, they’d have gone extinct.
00:10:10 ►
I mean, they were, they had a greater social cohesion.
00:10:16 ►
We’re in every man for himself, every person for himself society.
00:10:21 ►
This male paternity thing is really critical, and since you raise it, let me go through it.
00:10:27 ►
There’s always details when you ask.
00:10:34 ►
Men and women, evolving their consciousness together, came at a certain point to a certain level of abstraction,
00:10:44 ►
which is where you deal with a cause and an
00:10:48 ►
effect, where the cause and the effect are widely separated in time. And just about the time that men
00:11:00 ►
were figuring out, aha, if I have sex, If I have sex with this woman,
00:11:07 ►
then in the future, long time in the future,
00:11:12 ►
a child will result.
00:11:15 ►
It’s an ability to connect the cause and the effect over time.
00:11:19 ►
As men were puzzling over this, women
00:11:24 ►
who had traditionally been the gatherers in the culture
00:11:29 ►
and had consequently built up over time an enormous database on plants and the environment,
00:11:38 ►
flowering times, localities, associations, what plants have good roots to eat,
00:11:47 ►
what plants you shouldn’t bother with.
00:11:50 ►
Roughly at the same time that men were realizing
00:11:53 ►
that sex causes children,
00:11:55 ►
women were realizing that foods abandoned in the nomadic round
00:12:03 ►
would produce more,
00:12:06 ►
that you could find food where you had discarded food the year before.
00:12:12 ►
It’s the same understanding that inserting a seed into a fecund environment
00:12:20 ►
will cause new life to emerge.
00:12:24 ►
So as men discovered male paternity, women discovered agriculture.
00:12:30 ►
And it was both of these discoveries were catastrophic from, you know, arguably catastrophic.
00:12:38 ►
The discovery of male paternity was catastrophic because suddenly men had the concept of their children, my children,
00:12:48 ►
and consequently my woman, and consequently suddenly a lot of anxiety about female behavior.
00:12:56 ►
You have to watch them constantly.
00:12:58 ►
You can’t be sure.
00:13:00 ►
And women who had been maintaining this very large database about the environment
00:13:08 ►
someone in a well-meaning spirit of efficiency said look we don’t have to know all this stuff
00:13:18 ►
about thousands of plants and their flowering and their location and all that all we have to do is
00:13:24 ►
we have to really concentrate on these five plants,
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emmer wheat, corn, so forth and so on.
00:13:35 ►
And this vast and subtle database was dumped for the much more efficient
00:13:42 ►
but less
00:13:50 ►
multiplicistic strategy of agriculture.
00:13:54 ►
And immediately then all the bad consequences are there.
00:13:57 ►
Agriculture means surplus, it means cities,
00:13:58 ►
it means haves and have-nots.
00:13:59 ►
I went through that list.
00:14:03 ►
So consciousness is this weird thing where it can lead you
00:14:04 ►
into what appear to be error.
00:14:11 ►
In fact, it’s hard to have error without consciousness, serious error.
00:14:17 ►
You have mistakes, but mistakes can be corrected.
00:14:20 ►
Errors persist for centuries.
00:14:24 ►
What’s the point of all this?
00:14:25 ►
Or does it matter?
00:14:27 ►
Well, it does matter.
00:14:29 ►
Because our sexual politics and our societies,
00:14:33 ►
we’re in this nightmarish situation
00:14:35 ►
of having immense power over the environment,
00:14:41 ►
over each other through propaganda.
00:14:46 ►
We have immense power, but we aren’t these more loving, more highly socialized,
00:14:56 ►
more tightly glued to people. We’re more like a tribe of unreconstructed carnivorous baboons,
00:15:09 ►
but now with the hydrogen bomb and nerve gas and all this.
00:15:14 ►
And we feel this in our sexual politics and in our politics.
00:15:18 ►
And, you know, the fact that half of the human race is not fully utilized in the human endeavor,
00:15:22 ►
simply because they’re female.
00:15:24 ►
Do you know of Roman Stone
00:15:26 ►
the feminist prior?
00:15:28 ►
Not.
00:15:29 ►
One book which backs up what you’re saying
00:15:32 ►
when God
00:15:34 ►
was a woman talks about
00:15:36 ►
when males
00:15:38 ►
realized that eternity
00:15:39 ►
that they were the cause
00:15:41 ►
of this seed resulting
00:15:43 ►
in the birth of the child.
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Prior to that, that was unknown.
00:15:48 ►
And women were relegated to this goddess status
00:15:53 ►
as soon as they realized that this consciousness awareness came
00:15:56 ►
that they were responsible for eternity,
00:15:59 ►
then the goddess religion ended.
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It happens exactly.
00:16:04 ►
I mean, that there’s evidence
00:16:05 ►
to back
00:16:05 ►
up
00:16:05 ►
which you
00:16:06 ►
represent
00:16:07 ►
yes
00:16:07 ►
the other
00:16:08 ►
archaeologist
00:16:09 ►
that I’m
00:16:10 ►
more
00:16:11 ►
familiar
00:16:11 ►
with
00:16:11 ►
is Rian
00:16:12 ►
Eisler
00:16:13 ►
whose book
00:16:13 ►
the chalice
00:16:14 ►
and the
00:16:14 ►
blade
00:16:15 ►
and
00:16:16 ►
you know
00:16:16 ►
these people
00:16:17 ►
are not
00:16:18 ►
psychedelic
00:16:18 ►
advocates
00:16:19 ►
I am
00:16:20 ►
but they
00:16:21 ►
aren’t
00:16:22 ►
but they
00:16:22 ►
were pushed
00:16:23 ►
to the
00:16:23 ►
same
00:16:23 ►
conclusions
00:16:24 ►
by a fair examination of the evidence.
00:16:28 ►
So really, we are dysfunctional.
00:16:33 ►
We are dysfunctional because we have been away from this symbiotic relationship to mushrooms and cattle for such a very long time.
00:16:47 ►
Yeah.
00:16:48 ►
Where are we evolving in the scheme of things where we’re very, you know, like if you look at the
00:16:52 ►
comings and goings of species, we’re still just a
00:16:57 ►
falling out of the current sense and maybe we’re at a crucial juncture point where we
00:17:03 ►
make that jump from what we were, what we are, to what we can be.
00:17:09 ►
Yes, we’re at a cusp.
00:17:12 ►
We now, you know, it’s only been since 1952 that psilocybin has been known.
00:17:18 ►
It’s only been since 1888 by Western people, I mean.
00:17:23 ►
It’s only been since 1888 that mescaline, which was the first of the psychedelics, has been known.
00:17:29 ►
We have less than 100 years of experience with these things, and most of that 100 years, they’ve been illegal, and you risked arrest and disgrace if you had anything to do with them, and that’s where we still are.
00:17:43 ►
rest and disgrace if you had anything to do with them.
00:17:44 ►
And that’s where we still are.
00:17:49 ►
So the reason I called one of my books, the archaic revival,
00:17:55 ►
is because I think we’re at the end of the road of male paternity,
00:18:00 ►
male dominance, phonetic alphabets, materialism. It’s all finished.
00:18:03 ►
I mean, this is what it takes you to.
00:18:05 ►
Bosnia is the end result of all of that.
00:18:10 ►
But our technologies are like somehow now our salvation, as perhaps it always was,
00:18:22 ►
is tied up with our technologies.
00:18:25 ►
We cannot go to the stars as carnivorous apes,
00:18:31 ►
but we can go to the stars.
00:18:34 ►
The part of the problem is not the engineering of the hardware,
00:18:39 ►
the propulsion systems, the life support systems,
00:18:42 ►
the problem is the animal that’s going to go.
00:18:47 ►
And we have got to make a transition to some kind of higher consciousness.
00:18:52 ►
If yoga can do it, great.
00:18:54 ►
If TM can do it, great.
00:18:56 ►
If the Pope and the Dalai Lama, fine.
00:19:00 ►
But in my experience, the only thing that changes consciousness as fast as we’re going to have to change it is psychedelics.
00:19:10 ►
We have to change it on the dime because the processes that we have set in motion are going to drag us down.
00:19:20 ►
If we don’t make this higher assent, within 50 years,
00:19:28 ►
all the easily extracted metal will be gone,
00:19:31 ►
the petroleum supplies will be dwindling,
00:19:33 ►
epidemic diseases, fascism,
00:19:37 ►
the erosion of any knowledge by most people of the historical database,
00:19:40 ►
we’re just turning ourselves into victims of our own processes.
00:19:44 ►
That’s why I think this is the choke point.
00:19:46 ►
The next 20 years are make or break for the human enterprise.
00:19:53 ►
And we’re not going to return to the ancient past
00:20:00 ►
or stabilize ourselves in 19th century agrarianism or something like that it’s a
00:20:07 ►
forward escape into a world we can barely conceive of but the only choice is grim
00:20:15 ►
death and extinction yeah it’s a forward chase using the old tool that enlightened us in the
00:20:22 ►
first way just going back to the going back to the heart of psychedelics to enlightened us in the first place. Just going back to the heart
00:20:26 ►
of psychedelics
00:20:27 ►
to save us
00:20:29 ►
in this next epic.
00:20:30 ►
Yeah, to unify
00:20:31 ►
heart and head
00:20:33 ►
in the presence
00:20:34 ►
of super technology.
00:20:36 ►
How about this?
00:20:36 ►
How about if we look
00:20:37 ►
at the issues
00:20:38 ►
that we’re concerned with,
00:20:40 ►
which are the issues
00:20:41 ►
of greed,
00:20:43 ►
dominant,
00:20:44 ►
murder, suicide, and insanity, essentially,
00:20:50 ►
you know, exploded over different circumstances.
00:20:53 ►
And we see if it’s possible to find a key that unlocks each one of them.
00:20:58 ►
And if it’s possible that each of them are woven at the same thread,
00:21:04 ►
maybe that would assist us under unraveling
00:21:06 ►
with this damnation.
00:21:07 ►
Well, for example,
00:21:11 ►
what’s your plan?
00:21:13 ►
My plan is
00:21:14 ►
my plan is
00:21:17 ►
this label here,
00:21:22 ►
for example, this is that my name
00:21:24 ►
is Boyd, this label Boyd, which I accumulate history around and I consider very important, suddenly for some reason becomes more important to me.
00:21:33 ►
My abstraction of myself, my history, my reputation, my name, becomes more important to me than myself, my flesh, my blood, which is true in the case of suicide and all different kinds of things like that.
00:21:44 ►
Like in Japanese culture, which is true in the case of suicide and all different kinds of things like that. Like in Japanese culture, this is true.
00:21:46 ►
If that indeed is my problem, if that were my problem, then I would develop a sense of
00:21:54 ►
a sense of compensation. In other words, I would be confused about whether this was me or that was me.
00:22:02 ►
And in that confusion about which was which,
00:22:08 ►
I would seek to accumulate as much,
00:22:13 ►
I personally would accede to accumulate as much validation that I existed as opposed to not exist.
00:22:17 ►
Because my concern is that I don’t exist.
00:22:19 ►
Therefore, I accumulate wealth and very greedy.
00:22:22 ►
I’ll murder for a number of different reasons
00:22:24 ►
because I’m murdering for the
00:22:25 ►
survival of myself,
00:22:27 ►
which I’m in confusion about.
00:22:29 ►
Which I wasn’t in confusion about as
00:22:32 ►
an animal, so to speak.
00:22:34 ►
So it’s the confusion brought about by the
00:22:37 ►
consequence of consciousness, which is evolved
00:22:39 ►
by language. And if
00:22:41 ►
that confusion can
00:22:44 ►
be removed, then all these plights of the
00:22:48 ►
society would eventually evolve well we’re close but I don’t agree that
00:22:54 ►
language is the culprit I think it’s the degradation of language what has
00:22:59 ►
happened to it what I call viruses. That’s why a radical
00:23:06 ►
psychedelic deconstruction
00:23:08 ►
of the language-created world
00:23:10 ►
seems to me
00:23:11 ►
the most likely
00:23:14 ►
way to move people toward
00:23:16 ►
this in combination with everything
00:23:18 ►
else. But in the absence of that
00:23:20 ►
the problem was my confusion and my need
00:23:24 ►
to preserve myself through these vehicles of
00:23:27 ►
competition and dominance of greed and murder
00:23:31 ►
Well didn’t we touch on this last night in other words
00:23:35 ►
The whole Western world tells you
00:23:39 ►
Permanence matters and you know you’re impermanent
00:23:43 ►
So you have a so you’ve got a huge problem the which boils down to that you’re impermanent so you have so you’ve got a huge problem which boils down to
00:23:49 ►
that you’re going to die alone but but that you may just have to get used to that in other words
00:23:58 ►
there may be a perspective from which that isn’t a problem but whatever that perspective is
00:24:03 ►
it’s very hard to find it inside
00:24:06 ►
Western civilization.
00:24:09 ►
The perspective
00:24:10 ►
amongst those who are spiritual
00:24:12 ►
is that I am not the matter,
00:24:15 ►
but I am really in connection
00:24:17 ►
with everybody else
00:24:18 ►
in some common spiritual entity.
00:24:21 ►
The problem there is
00:24:23 ►
it’s easy to talk a good game.
00:24:25 ►
If we only accepted teachers who were so poor they had to hitchhike to get here,
00:24:31 ►
we wouldn’t have a problem.
00:24:33 ►
But it’s very hard to find people who don’t turn everything into a franchise.
00:24:41 ►
You know?
00:24:44 ►
Well, it’s just that it’s obvious we we are we are all very very
00:24:52 ►
toxified and poisoned by the society we live in we’re all we may you know we’re
00:24:58 ►
critics of it but nevertheless we’re products of it and fortunately fortunately, I don’t believe,
00:25:05 ►
I have managed to transcend the idea that politics
00:25:09 ►
or some social reformation or some Messiah
00:25:14 ►
or something like that is going to bail us out.
00:25:17 ►
The reason I’m an optimist is because I think that nature is about some very complex business here,
00:25:28 ►
and we are its instruments, and 10,000 years of our discomfort
00:25:34 ►
is from the point of view of the planet a small price to pay for what is going to be achieved.
00:25:40 ►
So there’s a greater wisdom out there than ours.
00:25:42 ►
There is an effect of God that sets.
00:25:45 ►
Well, I don’t know about a God, but the laws of physics favor the principles. be achieved. There’s a greater wisdom out there than ours. There is an effect of God that sets.
00:25:48 ►
Well, I don’t know about a God, but the laws of physics favor the production of novelty.
00:25:53 ►
Yeah.
00:25:53 ►
If psychedelics are such a valuable consciousness-expanding tool, how do you explain, at least
00:26:00 ►
what I perceive as the disappointment of the 60s generation?
00:26:05 ►
Well, this is an excellent question and has, you know,
00:26:09 ►
if I put it even harder, I say, you know,
00:26:12 ►
if psychedelics are so great, what’s so great about us?
00:26:17 ►
Are we better than these poor people who have never taken psychedelics?
00:26:22 ►
Are we morally better? Are we wiser? Or are we just some
00:26:27 ►
kind of screwball cult like Mormons or subood who congratulate themselves on having achieved the
00:26:36 ►
supreme understanding? And yet to everybody else, they just look like geeks and we look like geeks.
00:26:42 ►
This really is a problem I carry with me
00:26:45 ►
because I’ve advocated psychedelics my entire life and you know yet I often see
00:26:53 ►
incredible bad behavior and and stupidity and cruelty and insensitivity committed
00:27:01 ►
by psychedelic people and who are afraid they don’t exist I suppose
00:27:07 ►
that psychedelics used as as entertainment and in special indices and anyhow psychedelics
00:27:14 ►
are used for knowledge and what you were saying earlier today was the fact that if you
00:27:22 ►
become more observant then you can assimilate more data and make observations based on not just male-female in the room, old, young in the room, but more observations on each party in the room.
00:27:39 ►
Deeper levels.
00:27:41 ►
So people have not experienced psychedelics, and I’m not saying every single person on the earth who hasn’t,
00:27:48 ►
but as a general rule, have not experienced the boundary disappearing and the additional information coming in.
00:27:58 ►
I think there is an additional wisdom.
00:28:01 ►
No.
00:28:01 ►
I think there is too.
00:28:04 ►
It’s interesting
00:28:05 ►
how subtle
00:28:06 ►
it is to define it.
00:28:07 ►
I mean, where I feel
00:28:08 ►
most
00:28:10 ►
supported by
00:28:11 ►
psychedelics is
00:28:13 ►
when I go
00:28:13 ►
into these
00:28:15 ►
high-tech
00:28:16 ►
development areas
00:28:18 ►
and everybody
00:28:19 ►
all the guys
00:28:20 ►
have ponytails
00:28:22 ►
and everybody
00:28:23 ►
is very smart
00:28:24 ►
and all of the women are perfectly aware of the history of the suppression of women and feminine.
00:28:32 ►
And everybody is sophisticated, and they’re building sophisticated technology.
00:28:39 ►
The bottom line with psychedelics is not how good it makes you feel,
00:28:44 ►
but how creative you are.
00:28:47 ►
And the acceleration of creativity that is taking place is immense, and most cutting-edge phenomena,
00:28:57 ►
if you can get off with the people who are responsible for it, they will admit that it began with psychedelics. I mean, all cutting-edge
00:29:07 ►
science, art, literature, it’s done, it’s driven from those places.
00:29:14 ►
Do you mean, altered states? Well, altered states, but there are so many altered states.
00:29:21 ►
I mean, there are thousands and thousands of altered states. I sort of, I believe that
00:29:27 ►
because we had, because I hypothesize and believe in this relationship to psilocybin in the ancient
00:29:35 ►
past, that we could almost make the tryptamine halicinogens, DMT, psilocybin, the center of our bullseye, our ideal.
00:29:49 ►
And then anything which approximates to that is positive to the degree that it approximates to that.
00:29:59 ►
And to the degree that it doesn’t, it isn’t.
00:30:01 ►
So the altered state of alcohol is, to my mind,
00:30:06 ►
worse than no altered state
00:30:08 ►
at all.
00:30:09 ►
The altered state
00:30:11 ►
of belief
00:30:13 ►
in fascism is worse
00:30:15 ►
than no altered state
00:30:18 ►
at all.
00:30:21 ►
You can actually argue
00:30:23 ►
this on a physiological level.
00:30:26 ►
We mentioned Prozac last night,
00:30:28 ►
and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on Prozac,
00:30:30 ►
but I’ll just give you my hit on it.
00:30:35 ►
Prozac is presented as an antidepressant drug,
00:30:38 ►
and if you use those words,
00:30:41 ►
you’ve bought into a vast structure of psychoanalytic theory and assumptions about
00:30:46 ►
people and so forth and so on. I tried Prozac for a few months and I noticed several things.
00:30:54 ►
Better digestion, better appetite, better bowel movements, greater endurance, more interest in other people, and an ability to go out in bright
00:31:07 ►
sun without wearing sunglasses and squinting. Now, I know enough about Prozac to know that
00:31:16 ►
it’s a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. It’s targeting the same system that the psychedelics target.
00:31:29 ►
And so here’s a little theory that’s sort of a footnote on the theory of psilocybin.
00:31:34 ►
We evolved in the warm tropics.
00:31:38 ►
We are, in fact, tropical animals
00:31:42 ►
akin to parrots and woolly monkeys.
00:31:47 ►
However, we’ve conquered the planet right to the poles
00:31:51 ►
and the vast mass of human population now lives above or below 20 degrees north or south.
00:32:00 ►
I think that we have not adapted as fast as we’ve expanded our range,
00:32:07 ►
and that, in fact, this phenomenon called seasonal light deficit affects everybody,
00:32:19 ►
and that the rhythm of the seasons which we accept in the northern hemisphere
00:32:24 ►
is an acceptance that six months out of the year you’re accept in the northern hemisphere is an
00:32:25 ►
acceptance that six months out
00:32:27 ►
of the year you’re going to be somewhat
00:32:29 ►
bummed
00:32:30 ►
and we just
00:32:32 ►
call it winter
00:32:34 ►
and you say
00:32:35 ►
well it’s Labor Day
00:32:38 ►
now and summer’s
00:32:39 ►
ending and you can kind of
00:32:41 ►
and you think oh my God
00:32:43 ►
you know from here to April.
00:32:45 ►
What is happening is that we are reacting to this seasonal light deficit, not all of us,
00:32:52 ►
not all as strongly as others, but as a population, it settles on us like a cloud.
00:32:58 ►
And when I noticed two things about Prozac, other than what I mentioned.
00:33:06 ►
One was that if somebody said,
00:33:09 ►
how does it make you feel?
00:33:11 ►
How does it make you feel?
00:33:13 ►
The closest I could come was it makes me feel like it’s summertime.
00:33:20 ►
You know, that wonderful feeling that it’s summertime.
00:33:26 ►
And then the other thing I noticed about it
00:33:29 ►
was it really doesn’t work very well in Hawaii.
00:33:36 ►
It’s superfluous.
00:33:38 ►
Is that why you stop taking it? Do you think?
00:33:40 ►
No, I stopped taking it,
00:33:42 ►
well, first of all, because it messes with your ability to do psychedelics.
00:33:47 ►
And also, it became summertime and it stopped working.
00:33:53 ►
I started taking it in early December.
00:33:56 ►
A drug salesman had dumped a bunch on my brother, and I went back to see him,
00:34:02 ►
and we had a long conversation, and he wanted me to try it, and I went back to see him and we had a long conversation and he wanted me to try it and
00:34:06 ►
I tried it. When spring came, it just stopped working. And so I think, you know, because it affects
00:34:14 ►
your mind in our society, we turn it over to psychiatrists to prescribe and you have to convince them
00:34:21 ►
that you’re depressed to get any. I think you should just dump that whole Judeo-Christian guilt trip and realize that we are not adapted for extreme northern and southerly latitudes, and we need to fiddle with our serotonin mechanism, and psychotherapy is completely inappropriate.
00:34:43 ►
This isn’t because your father was a jerk or you didn’t get enough.
00:34:47 ►
It’s because you’re not living on the equator.
00:34:50 ►
Will that save civilization?
00:34:52 ►
No, but it shows how it, well, it might, because imagine this.
00:34:57 ►
No, no, no.
00:35:00 ►
We’re not like that.
00:35:02 ►
It’s a deeper level.
00:35:05 ►
But imagine now Prozac is the most widely prescribed drug in the world.
00:35:13 ►
Certainly psychoactive.
00:35:14 ►
This is the statistics.
00:35:16 ►
More people take it than any other drug in the world.
00:35:19 ►
I say we should begin seeing some positive feedback from this.
00:35:25 ►
This is helping you and me.
00:35:28 ►
One of the fascinating things about Prozac I found when I was on it
00:35:33 ►
was after it’s established, you don’t really feel it.
00:35:38 ►
Your impression is that other people are loaded.
00:35:43 ►
It seems to be a drug which you take
00:35:46 ►
and other people respond.
00:35:50 ►
And they respond dramatically.
00:35:53 ►
They want to give you money.
00:35:55 ►
They want to take you off and make love to you.
00:35:59 ►
And you’re saying, wow, this is really weird.
00:36:02 ►
Suddenly, everybody is so nice and cooperative and eager.
00:36:06 ►
The problem with it, and I love the problem with it.
00:36:11 ►
The problem with it is it makes it impossible to take psychedelics
00:36:15 ►
because, you know, you go into a hypertensive crisis,
00:36:19 ►
and it’s bad news.
00:36:20 ►
Do not combine psychedelics with Prozac if you’ve been taking it wait a long long time
00:36:26 ►
what about how do you talk about?
00:36:29 ►
Huh?
00:36:30 ►
Depressed breathing and flushing and it’s just very uncomfortable
00:36:37 ►
Yeah
00:36:40 ►
Oh it has weird side effects, it has weird side effects.
00:36:47 ►
It’s not a perfect drug by any means,
00:36:51 ►
but what it tells me is that we really need to study the serotonin, the serotonergic system,
00:36:56 ►
and its evolutionary development,
00:36:58 ►
and what it’s doing.
00:36:59 ►
We don’t know.
00:37:00 ►
We don’t know why there’s DMT in the brain.
00:37:02 ►
We don’t really understand why the melatonin-serotonin conversion takes place. We don’t know why there’s DMT in the brain. We don’t really understand why the melatonin
00:37:06 ►
serotonin conversion takes place. We don’t know why once it has taken place in the pineal,
00:37:12 ►
a large amount of this chemistry ends up on the surface of the skin. You know, if you’re an
00:37:18 ►
evolutionary economist, you know that an animal is an economy of energy.
00:37:27 ►
And if you waste that energy making useless compounds,
00:37:32 ►
you’re going to bite the evolutionary dust.
00:37:34 ►
So there is a very good reason why so much brain metabolism
00:37:40 ►
is devoted to these chemical reactions,
00:37:44 ►
which to us don’t seem to make any
00:37:47 ►
sense by Ornstein
00:37:52 ►
Terrence have you heard that Prozac countenis and your epoxy effects of the
00:38:01 ►
Oh yeah and that’s true it It’s unfortunate, in my opinion,
00:38:07 ►
because what you get here then is just one drug
00:38:10 ►
to do another drug, to fix another drug.
00:38:13 ►
But it is quite true,
00:38:14 ►
because it inhibits serotonin re-uptake,
00:38:17 ►
and because the toxic byproduct is formed from MDMA
00:38:21 ►
in the synapse,
00:38:23 ►
if you inhibit the serotonin re-uptake you can you can go around this
00:38:29 ►
what all this says to me is we just need to put the pedal to the metal up in the
00:38:34 ►
pharmacology department and move past this I mean I think as far as I can tell
00:38:42 ►
psilocybin is a much better way to do it
00:38:46 ►
because then it’s a one-dose deal and it lasts for months
00:38:51 ►
and it clears your system very easily to indolacetic acid and it works.
00:38:58 ►
It’s a flush. That’s what I said last night.
00:39:02 ►
Scrub your disc. Get rid of these viruses by dissolving boundaries.
00:39:08 ►
All these language viruses can only exist in an environment of, you know,
00:39:15 ►
the equivalent of ordinary mental temperature.
00:39:18 ►
And if you put yourself through the fever of the psychedelic state,
00:39:24 ►
you burn this stuff off.
00:39:26 ►
Of course, you’re now useless to capitalism,
00:39:30 ►
useless to the rat race.
00:39:33 ►
You’re a very creative, maladapted, alienated person,
00:39:38 ►
but it feels better than, you know,
00:39:42 ►
being a bobbing head in the vast herds who are consuming these memes
00:39:48 ►
being generated by Madison Avenue and Washington and wherever that make our lives
00:39:55 ►
toxic low-awareness lives. I mean, don’t forget, millions, you don’t have to go to heroin.
00:40:01 ►
Millions of people are leading toxic low awareness lives locked in their apartments
00:40:07 ►
watching OJ and daytime TV. I mean, the number of real players in the human game is very, very few
00:40:17 ►
compared to the billions of us. I read a statement the other day. It said most people in the world
00:40:23 ►
spend their time cooking rice and cleaning their
00:40:26 ►
Kalashnikov. Well,
00:40:28 ►
very few of us
00:40:29 ►
fall into
00:40:31 ►
that category.
00:40:34 ►
It’s a certain kind
00:40:35 ►
of Czech field rifle
00:40:38 ►
that has fueled every
00:40:40 ►
liberation movement anywhere in the world.
00:40:43 ►
This is sort of a basic layout
00:40:46 ►
of my thing, because
00:40:48 ►
I really believe our evolutionary
00:40:49 ►
past holds the key
00:40:51 ►
to our evolutionary future.
00:40:54 ►
And drugs and computers
00:40:56 ►
are just two ends of a
00:40:58 ►
spectrum. The only difference between
00:41:00 ►
them is one is too large to
00:41:02 ►
swallow.
00:41:04 ►
And our best people are working on that.
00:41:09 ►
So I really see recovering ancient values through modern technology and a reconstruction of our
00:41:19 ►
lifestyles and our relationships to each other.
00:41:22 ►
This is how to make the ride to the singularity at the
00:41:27 ►
end of time a more pleasant and palatable experience. If you don’t do this, the ride to the end
00:41:34 ►
of time will proceed at the same rate, but you know, you may lose it. It may go from a white
00:41:41 ►
knuckle ride to truly terrifying, because the change that lies ahead is going to require a great deal of flexibility
00:41:51 ►
and open-mindedness and willingness to transform
00:41:55 ►
in order to take place without generating a mega dose of anxiety.
00:42:04 ►
I mean, anxiety is already rising.
00:42:07 ►
Most governments in the world,
00:42:09 ►
their entire function is simply
00:42:10 ►
to manage catastrophe at this point
00:42:14 ►
because they have no plan,
00:42:16 ►
they have no vision,
00:42:17 ►
they’re utterly cluedness.
00:42:19 ►
Basically, they’re waiting for flying saucers
00:42:22 ►
or the second coming to somehow cancel the nightmare that their own
00:42:27 ►
institutions and methods have made inevitable. Remember the little green sheet last night that
00:42:37 ►
not everybody could get one? Well, here is a very large version of the same information.
00:42:44 ►
So I’ll just pass this around this is
00:42:46 ►
for that Palenque thing in January it’ll be the third year we’ve done it there and
00:42:54 ►
it’s a it’s a lot of fun it’s by no means an expedition to the authentic
00:43:02 ►
shamanism of Chiapas or anything like that.
00:43:07 ►
But on the other hand, the Camarone Salaho is beyond compare.
00:43:13 ►
And we can’t guarantee it, but this last time we did get into the ruin at night on a full
00:43:19 ►
moon night, and that was very cool.
00:43:24 ►
So if you’ve been waiting to go to palenke you can combine it with
00:43:28 ►
that and it’s very good this is something somebody is just giving me but i want to mention it in case you
00:43:40 ►
you’re so inspired by all this that you want to stay in touch with the field of psychedelic advocacy and the battle to keep the government honest.
00:43:53 ►
This is the publication of maps, which is, I believe, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
00:44:02 ►
That’s exactly what it is.
00:44:01 ►
psychedelic studies.
00:44:03 ►
That’s exactly what it is.
00:44:13 ►
And it’s Rick Doblin, who’s an activist, a graduate of, I think, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
00:44:15 ►
And he’s done very good work over the years.
00:44:19 ►
Not everybody agrees that we should even have a conversation with the government about
00:44:24 ►
this. It’s so bankrupt. But my thought is, we should even have a conversation with the government about this. It’s so bankrupt.
00:44:27 ►
But my thought is we should work on every front. If you’re a double Scorpio and you
00:44:35 ►
incline to the clandestine, then you can go into production. But we do need people in advocacy and to struggle against these schedules
00:44:50 ►
and some of the more outrageous misapplications of the law and so forth.
00:44:58 ►
Okay, and again, if anybody needs the URL, it’s here.
00:45:03 ►
The reason I keep mentioning it is because I’m just so damn proud of having hacked it in the first place.
00:45:15 ►
It’s my website URL.
00:45:20 ►
And the things we’re discussing here, if you go there, it’s all there in high detail and downloadable, and you can take your time and what you already understand you can skip over and what you don’t understand you can take as long as you like.
00:45:38 ►
I think of it as, in terms of my intellectual life’s it’s more who I am than who I am sitting here
00:45:51 ►
because sitting here I might forget a reference or skip over something or other and if you’ve
00:45:58 ►
never seen a URL before then you know it’s lucky for you it happened here in a family situation
00:46:06 ►
you don’t disgrace yourself out in the world by by not knowing what it is of
00:46:16 ►
this thing I think that we would strain the patience of the office because it’s a
00:46:23 ►
ten it’s a fifteen page booklet’s a 15-page booklet,
00:46:25 ►
but since you ask, here I’ll read the address and you can write to them.
00:46:33 ►
The name of the organization is Maps, 1801, TIPAA, T-I-P-P-A-H Avenue, Charlotte, North Carolina, 28-205.
00:46:48 ►
Yes.
00:46:50 ►
And Rick’s email address is R-I-C-K-M-A-P-S-A-O-L.com.
00:47:01 ►
And send him email, and he’ll send you the news on where to get this and what it costs.
00:47:11 ►
His last name is Doblin, D-O-B-L-I-N, but don’t put that in the email address.
00:47:18 ►
Okay.
00:47:19 ►
Well, before we get started, I was asked on the way walking up to lunch,
00:47:25 ►
what am I reading these days?
00:47:28 ►
So just to take a moment, you’ve all probably read Snow Crash.
00:47:35 ►
I just read it.
00:47:37 ►
It was great.
00:47:38 ►
Loved it.
00:47:40 ►
If you haven’t read it, it’s a great read.
00:47:44 ►
The new book, Snow Crash is by Neil Stephenson.
00:47:49 ►
The new book by him is called The Diamond Age.
00:47:52 ►
It’s not as good as Snow Crash.
00:47:55 ►
It’s out of control at the end.
00:47:57 ►
It just gets, it turns into a mess as some novels do.
00:48:01 ►
But the picture of nanotechnology is very realistic.
00:48:08 ►
It’s the best introduction to nanotech around.
00:48:12 ►
And I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about nanotech,
00:48:15 ►
and it’s hard to visualize it.
00:48:18 ►
I mean, it seems so beyond even some of the stuff we’ve been talking about here,
00:48:23 ►
that you need somebody to take you by the hand and
00:48:27 ►
he’s a good guy it’s a good book it’s worth looking over
00:48:32 ►
architecturalized that’s a few pieces of my brother he suggested forming a nanotech company that would be called IBM
00:48:44 ►
itty-bitty machines in the bested forming a nanotech company that would be called IBM, Itty Bitty Machines.
00:48:50 ►
Karen, what’s the cost on the like you?
00:48:54 ►
Does it not say that?
00:48:56 ►
Did they play games with you?
00:48:58 ►
I think it’s $1,200.
00:49:01 ►
It’s five days or six days, and there will be two courses,
00:49:07 ►
so if you can’t make the first one, the second one follows the following week.
00:49:15 ►
Besides those two science fiction novels I mentioned, I’ve been reading this.
00:49:20 ►
This is just a hoot, this book.
00:49:23 ►
Time machines, time travel in physics, this book, Time Machines, Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science
00:49:28 ►
Fiction by Paul Nahin, and it’s published by the American Institute of Physics.
00:49:35 ►
So, you know, you need not hang your head on the subway.
00:49:44 ►
Just point that out to the doubters.
00:49:51 ►
Okay.
00:49:54 ►
Well, before we go into whatever it is I have in mind here,
00:50:03 ►
it seems like this morning we had a bunch of stuff
00:50:06 ►
pretty well unpacked and out in the open,
00:50:10 ►
but some people didn’t get a chance to say what they had to say,
00:50:13 ►
and I imagine since then you guys have been talking about it
00:50:17 ►
or some of you have been talking about it.
00:50:21 ►
Yes.
00:50:21 ►
You mentioned last night that in terms of a coming apocalypse that people should do things fast,
00:50:31 ►
now I thought that doing things fast was one of the problems that brought us to this place,
00:50:37 ►
and that the end of the slow down and say save the implications of what we do.
00:50:45 ►
Now, maybe we’re saying the same thing,
00:50:48 ►
and I admit to the purpose of me like that.
00:50:52 ►
Well, I didn’t really mean do more and more things.
00:50:55 ►
I said more and more will happen.
00:50:59 ►
I think the thing to do is to eliminate
00:51:02 ►
foolishness and having your time vampireized.
00:51:10 ►
I agree with you.
00:51:11 ►
The goal is not to just jam in as much stuff as possible.
00:51:16 ►
Basically, the reason I moved, one strong motivation for moving to Hawaii,
00:51:22 ►
was just to escape the silliness, the triviality of it all.
00:51:30 ►
And I’ve discovered, you know, there was apparently no information loss.
00:51:35 ►
I can keep up with an OJ discussion, even though I only spent three minutes a week keeping track.
00:51:43 ►
The people who watched every day of the testimony,
00:51:47 ►
my God, they must be slow learners or something. And it’s amazing how many fields you can participate
00:51:58 ►
in as a fully empowered player without investing very much time in it.
00:52:05 ►
Yeah, I can’t hold the whole thing in my mind here.
00:52:11 ►
I mean, the feeling I have while I’m here,
00:52:15 ►
pleasant as it is, and I don’t mean Esselin, I mean the states
00:52:19 ►
as we citizens of the sovereign state of Hawaii
00:52:23 ►
refer to your country.
00:52:27 ►
I just feel like I’ve been parachuted behind enemy lines, and this is no time for philosophy.
00:52:33 ►
Let’s blow up the damn bridge and get out of here.
00:52:38 ►
But in Hawaii, I can look at it all and see trends and tendencies and pontificate about it up in my rainforest.
00:52:49 ►
And it all makes sense.
00:52:51 ►
Of course, somebody said to me, yeah, well, it all makes sense because you never talk to anybody else.
00:52:56 ►
There’s probably some truth to that.
00:52:59 ►
Actually, what you said was to cheat the Graham Raker by living in that.
00:53:08 ►
Yeah, I think I’m heavily influenced by reading this book just over the last few days.
00:53:15 ►
There’s a lot of interesting discussion in here
00:53:17 ►
about how a million years in empty space
00:53:22 ►
is rather like 10 seconds in empty space that time really doesn’t
00:53:30 ►
exist without the seriality of events and if there is no if there are no events what does the
00:53:39 ►
word time mean what does a million years mean in a vacuum where nothing happens? It’s things
00:53:48 ►
happening which fills time. And time with no events in it contracts, you could almost say.
00:53:59 ►
So a million years of emptiness passes faster than 20 minutes at a good dinner party.
00:54:10 ►
Time is not a well-understood concept.
00:54:13 ►
It’s not even agreed whether it exists independent of the human mind.
00:54:20 ►
Not as a philosopher, but as a biologist.
00:54:23 ►
The way I think of time is it’s necessary for metabolism.
00:54:32 ►
Metabolism is, you know, we are not in an instant anything to be a person.
00:54:41 ►
You have to spread out through time like a musical composition.
00:55:10 ►
you have to spread out through time like a musical composition and one of the ideas that we’ve sort of kicked around is the idea that the difference between an inorganic thing a chair a beach ball something like that and a human being or a animal is that when you cut into an inanimate object,
00:55:13 ►
nothing very dramatic happens.
00:55:16 ►
But when you cut into an organic being,
00:55:19 ►
its entire integrity falls apart, and it undergoes a phase transition into death.
00:55:25 ►
And so…
00:55:26 ►
Well, when you cut a leg off a chair,
00:55:28 ►
it’s not much of a chair anymore.
00:55:29 ►
It’s not much of a chair,
00:55:31 ►
but it doesn’t…
00:55:34 ►
You now have a chair in two pieces.
00:55:37 ►
You don’t have the corpse of a chair.
00:55:42 ►
So in a sense,
00:55:44 ►
we could almost think, and this was implied in some of the stuff we said earlier,
00:55:51 ►
that an organic being, an organism has a dimension which other objects don’t have.
00:55:59 ►
It exists in the temporal dimension as a changing phenomenon,
00:56:06 ►
while an inanimate object merely persists in time.
00:56:12 ►
And this relates to the question of where do you go when you die?
00:56:19 ►
One way to think of answering that question is,
00:56:23 ►
what is life?
00:56:27 ►
Well, it’s a fourth-dimensional object,
00:56:30 ►
or a fifth-dimensional object, if you prefer,
00:56:34 ►
protruding into three-dimensional space-time.
00:56:38 ►
And when it is withdrawn,
00:56:41 ►
the matter which it is organized just turns into slime.
00:56:47 ►
But, you know, the central question in hermeticism,
00:56:53 ►
that group of pagan matter-obsessed philosophies that arose at the end of the Roman Empire
00:56:59 ►
underwent a further development at the end of the Roman Empire,
00:57:03 ►
the three questions that they were so interested in,
00:57:08 ►
who are we, where did we come from, and whence are we going?
00:57:14 ►
And the idea that we are somehow objects in another dimension
00:57:19 ►
where we are much freer and much more at home and much more comfortable
00:57:24 ►
has been a persistent intuition of all human beings in all places
00:57:29 ►
except certain intellectual elites in Western Europe
00:57:33 ►
over the past 200 years and those people had a different idea
00:57:38 ►
would you say the fourth dimension is a unified field
00:57:45 ►
well if you if you believe that the fourth dimension is a unified field and the fifth dimension? Well, if you believe that the fourth dimension is time,
00:57:50 ►
then the fifth dimension is a fifth spatial dimension
00:57:54 ►
over which the other three are deployed like a surface.
00:57:59 ►
This is…
00:58:00 ►
Pardon me?
00:58:02 ►
Does it have to be spatial?
00:58:04 ►
No, it doesn’t have to be spatial.
00:58:06 ►
And this is a confusion that a lot of people get into.
00:58:09 ►
They think that dimension always somehow implies time
00:58:14 ►
or extension in some way.
00:58:20 ►
A dimension is simply a variable.
00:58:24 ►
I mean, we could analyze an automobile crash in terms of an 11-dimensional matrix.
00:58:31 ►
There’s the health of the driver, the age of the driver, the condition of the car, the speed of the car, the condition of the road, the condition of the oncoming traffic.
00:58:43 ►
You can each one of these variables, in mathematical terms, is a dimension to the problem.
00:58:50 ►
Currently, in I think the reigning paradigm, requires 11 dimensions to describe this universe
00:59:00 ►
and get everything arranged correctly.
00:59:03 ►
And when the question is asked, well, you know, where are the seven or eight we can’t see,
00:59:10 ►
the answer is usually they are implicate dimensions.
00:59:15 ►
And you can think of that as either that they are very small and folded in,
00:59:22 ►
or that somehow otherwise they are mixed in to what is going on.
00:59:29 ►
I mean, when you turn on an electron microscope or a radio telescope,
00:59:33 ►
in a sense you are seeing into another dimension.
00:59:38 ►
Those are dimensions of scale, but they contain variables that are not present on other levels.
00:59:47 ►
When I say, as I think I said or got close to saying this morning, that biology is a conquest
00:59:56 ►
of dimensionality, what I mean is that this mysterious process called biology
01:00:05 ►
seems to be bootstrapping itself
01:00:07 ►
toward a kind of enfolding of time
01:00:11 ►
so that eternity can become part of biology
01:00:17 ►
and it may simply be that that’s the cusp we’re approaching
01:00:22 ►
and that’s why there’s such whoop-de-do,
01:00:25 ►
because, you know, we are about to turn a very large and unexpected corner.
01:00:34 ►
Yeah.
01:00:35 ►
I started thinking of 2012 as some sort of completion date,
01:00:39 ►
and I used to sort of think of it as a starting guy,
01:00:41 ►
and lately I’ve realized that in the last six or eight years,
01:00:44 ►
I mean
01:00:45 ►
the storms
01:00:45 ►
and the rocks and the
01:00:47 ►
crashes and the
01:00:48 ►
bankruptcies
01:00:49 ►
and the stuff’s
01:00:50 ►
going to
01:00:50 ►
the pretty good
01:00:50 ►
has things.
01:00:51 ►
We’re sort of
01:00:51 ►
used to it.
01:00:52 ►
But it seems
01:00:53 ►
to be going
01:00:53 ►
faster and faster
01:00:54 ►
and I’m just
01:00:55 ►
wondering
01:00:55 ►
if it’s
01:00:56 ►
if a lot of
01:00:59 ►
the stuff we’re
01:00:59 ►
talking about
01:01:00 ►
is just sort of
01:01:00 ►
a conversation
01:01:01 ►
on the way down
01:01:02 ►
out of the plane
01:01:03 ►
without a shoot.
01:01:04 ►
I feel like
01:01:04 ►
there’s a I don’t think psychedelics are going to save us.
01:01:07 ►
I think what’s going to, we’re going to hit the reef and crash and millions of us are going to die,
01:01:11 ►
and the ones who survive are going to change.
01:01:13 ►
And that feels pretty negative, but that seems a lot more likely right now than us in psychedelic world.
01:01:18 ►
Well, see, the change is so huge that our normal value system is incapable of judging it.
01:01:27 ►
I mean, you talk about a lot of us dying.
01:01:30 ►
I can entertain the idea that all of us will die,
01:01:34 ►
and that in fact somehow this is what it’s for.
01:01:40 ►
The Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges had this idea that a species is not free until the last member of the species dies.
01:01:55 ►
And that’s a fairly mind-boggling concept.
01:01:59 ►
But on the other hand, when you look at nature, what nature is so adept at is producing extinctions.
01:02:08 ►
And we like to use, you know, the little catchphrase, ontogeny, recapitulates phylogeny,
01:02:15 ►
meaning that the unfolding of the fetus in the womb into life is a recapitulation of the entire evolutionary history of the earth.
01:02:30 ►
But nobody goes on to draw the obvious conclusion.
01:02:34 ►
The fetus continues into life, becomes an adult, and then dies.
01:02:39 ►
Is that also the recapitulation of ontogeny, or phylogeny?
01:02:48 ►
To us, that’s a horrifying notion,
01:02:51 ►
because we have accepted, on some level,
01:02:55 ►
the scientific premise that this is all there is.
01:02:59 ►
And yet, you know, proof, ordinarily,
01:03:04 ►
a useful currency in scientific discussion has not been very evident in that particular discussion.
01:03:13 ►
Nobody knows.
01:03:15 ►
It’s just more comfortable for science to assume that the visible three-dimensional world is all there is. But actually, you know, that’s an incredibly
01:03:27 ►
19th century and obsolete form of scientific thinking. Science may have gotten rid of the afterlife,
01:03:38 ►
but at the same time that it was hauling that flag down, it was hauling up the flag of quantum physics
01:03:47 ►
which contains such counterintuitive ideas propositions and situations that it’s as though the
01:03:57 ►
court jester had been let loose in the laboratory. Why science is so hostile
01:04:06 ►
to the idea of
01:04:09 ►
the continuity of life
01:04:12 ►
into other dimensions
01:04:13 ►
is because
01:04:15 ►
that was always
01:04:18 ►
an area of concern
01:04:19 ►
that was ceded to religion.
01:04:23 ►
And in the 19th century,
01:04:26 ►
when Darwin and Charles Lyle and Herbert Spencer
01:04:30 ►
and all these people got together
01:04:32 ►
and created modern evolutionary theory
01:04:36 ►
and scientific materialism,
01:04:38 ►
the big enemy that they had to defeat
01:04:43 ►
was Victorian deism. And deism is the idea that the universe is an enormous
01:04:51 ►
machine built by God and then set running and abandoned. And what all those people were
01:04:59 ►
very philosophically concerned to prove was that there doesn’t need to be a god that simply would
01:05:07 ►
matter as we find it and random mutation and natural selection uh all the complexity and all the
01:05:18 ►
systems that we see around us can come into being but it’s really an article of faith and it was hard to hold
01:05:26 ►
the line. I mean in the in the 1860s Darwin’s theory was called the Darwin Wallace
01:05:33 ►
theory of evolution because there was a second person in the picture, Alfred Russell Wallace,
01:05:40 ►
who was from my money a better scientist and for damn sure a better field man than Charles Darwin.
01:05:48 ►
But Wallace, who really invented evolution,
01:05:53 ►
and interestingly enough,
01:05:56 ►
based on last night’s discussion,
01:05:58 ►
he invented it during a fever.
01:06:01 ►
In other words, it was a virus download of some sort.
01:06:08 ►
Here he was on this island in Indonesia.
01:06:17 ►
No communication with England. He plunges into this fever. He sees how nature works. For a decade, there had been talk about what was called the problem of the species where do they come from
01:06:25 ►
and why he saw the whole thing he wrote it down it covers a page and a half well
01:06:31 ►
then he had to battle for his life against this malaria for the next several
01:06:37 ►
weeks when he finally dragged himself back to some semblance of health here he
01:06:44 ►
had this page and a half of writing
01:06:47 ►
with the theory of natural selection right there.
01:06:51 ►
He didn’t know what to do with it.
01:06:53 ►
So being the son of a poor man and a surveyor
01:06:59 ►
and a working class person,
01:07:01 ►
he thought,
01:07:02 ►
what can I do but send it to the greatest scientist of the age
01:07:07 ►
and ask his opinion. So he copies this thing off and sends it off to Darwin. Darwin practically
01:07:17 ►
shits white when he reads this thing because he realizes that 30 years of work
01:07:26 ►
now eight months
01:07:28 ►
from publication
01:07:29 ►
that this guy got it
01:07:31 ►
beat him to the punch
01:07:33 ►
so he goes
01:07:36 ►
to Charles Lyle
01:07:37 ►
who was the great
01:07:39 ►
19th century geologist
01:07:40 ►
who brought back
01:07:42 ►
catastrophism and
01:07:44 ►
overcame the idea of the steady state earth.
01:07:48 ►
They were both members of the Royal Society.
01:07:52 ►
And he says, you know, Chuck, look at this, this letter that arrives from Indonesia,
01:07:57 ►
this Wallace character.
01:07:59 ►
And Darwin said, don’t worry.
01:08:03 ►
We’ll have, I’ll read Wallace’s paper at the meeting of the Royal Society, where you were going to present your theory.
01:08:14 ►
And as you know, we have two presentations at each meeting, and we eat dinner after the first presentation and have cigars and cognac after dinner, and then everybody
01:08:27 ►
sleeps through the second half. So you present your paper before dinner. I’ll read Wallace’s paper
01:08:34 ►
after dinner, and it will become the Darwin Wallace theory of evolution, which it did. Well, then later,
01:08:42 ►
their suspicions of his lack of loyalty
01:08:46 ►
to the true faith of science
01:08:48 ►
were confirmed
01:08:49 ►
because he said
01:08:51 ►
something somewhat similar
01:08:53 ►
to what I’m saying,
01:08:54 ►
he said,
01:08:55 ►
no problem.
01:08:57 ►
Natural selection
01:08:58 ►
and mutation,
01:09:00 ►
that’ll do it
01:09:01 ►
for beavers,
01:09:02 ►
hummingbirds,
01:09:04 ►
honey ants, you know, coral coral reefs but it won’t answer the question of man
01:09:11 ►
and the emergence of consciousness and spiritual values and self-reflection they said well you’ve just you’ve
01:09:19 ►
joined the enemy you know you can’t call yourself a scientist anymore if that’s what you think. And then it was a
01:09:27 ►
sad story. Wallace was denied the credit he deserved. He became a Fabian socialist, and he spent
01:09:35 ►
the rest of his life in a kind of new age stance. I mean, he studied spiritualism. He became
01:09:42 ►
fascinated by mesmer. He looked at all of these 19th century theories of the occult.
01:09:49 ►
It isn’t necessary to get rid of the idea of survival after death
01:09:59 ►
in your mad rush to eliminate a conscious engineer-type God building the universe.
01:10:10 ►
I mean, I don’t find that a very persuasive idea.
01:10:14 ►
But I do think what I find the great principle that I’ve tried to enunciate is that
01:10:24 ►
nature conserves novelty and any complex
01:10:29 ►
structure achieved nature will not lightly give that up to disorder and so if you
01:10:40 ►
take the idea of the morphogenetic field the morpho-a-shaelderick,
01:10:46 ►
the morphogenic field can be imagined to precede birth,
01:10:51 ►
clothe itself with matter for mysterious reasons,
01:10:56 ►
and then at a certain point withdraws from the matter,
01:11:00 ►
and the matter falls back into an entropic state,
01:11:04 ►
and the morphogenic field field whatever it was recedes into the higher dimensions
01:11:13 ►
from which it came that seems more reasonable to me than the idea that all of this
01:11:18 ►
complexity is just for the purpose of you to run around and have a career for a few years,
01:11:26 ►
and then it all is given back to chaos.
01:11:28 ►
Is morphogenetic field, is it just a more palatable word for soul?
01:11:34 ►
No, because the morphogenetic field constructs all of nature.
01:11:39 ►
I used it there in terms of your morphogenetic field,
01:11:43 ►
but the correct way to think of it is as though
01:11:46 ►
you are a kind of a nexus, a denser part of a very large field. I mean, think of the morphogenetic
01:11:56 ►
field as a statistical distribution of novelty. Well, then if you think of this room, where is
01:12:03 ►
the novelty? Well, it’s in you of this room, where is the novelty?
01:12:12 ►
Well, it’s in you and you and you and me, but it’s not here.
01:12:17 ►
And there’s not much of it here, although this is more novel than this.
01:12:21 ►
So you can think of the room as a gradient of novelty. And where is it most novel?
01:12:21 ►
of novelty and where is it most novel
01:12:24 ►
right behind the eyebrows of each one of us
01:12:30 ►
that’s where it’s most novel
01:12:31 ►
in this room
01:12:33 ►
now some people say
01:12:35 ►
I mean a way of attacking
01:12:37 ►
this kind of a rap
01:12:39 ►
is to say well you’ve just completely tossed
01:12:41 ►
out the second law of thermodynamics
01:12:44 ►
which to remind you is the law that all systems degrade into less complex systems
01:12:53 ►
and that eventually all organization dissipates into heat death, and you have nothing.
01:12:59 ►
In other words, the universe is, in this view view just falling to pieces entropy the
01:13:07 ►
second law of thermodynamics is the law of entropy however it turns out that that’s
01:13:14 ►
the way the universe looks if you conveniently overlook biology biology is headed the
01:13:23 ►
other direction and then people say well but what is biology
01:13:28 ►
you know we’ve only confirmed its existence on one planet
01:13:32 ►
and only on its surface and we’re its most advanced expression
01:13:36 ►
and we appear about to blow ourselves to kingdom come
01:13:39 ►
well that’s a superficial reading I mean let’s think about it for a minute.
01:13:46 ►
Fact.
01:13:47 ►
Most stars last less than half a billion years.
01:13:52 ►
The average life of a star is around 500 million years.
01:13:57 ►
We happen to be located in orbit around a special kind of star,
01:14:05 ►
a very stable, slow-burning star,
01:14:09 ►
a star that has been relatively steady
01:14:12 ►
in this part of the spectrum for four, five billion years.
01:14:20 ►
Life on this planet can be traced back
01:14:24 ►
about 4.3 billion years,
01:14:27 ►
and there’s an unbroken fossil record from that point forward.
01:14:34 ►
Well, so that means that life is more persistent than the stars themselves.
01:14:42 ►
The stars have come and gone eight times.
01:14:47 ►
The average star has born and died,
01:14:50 ►
gone through its life cycle and died six to eight times
01:14:54 ►
in the time that organic evolution
01:14:57 ►
has been moving steadily, unflinchingly,
01:15:01 ►
in one direction throughout that period.
01:15:06 ►
And life shows no signs of slowing down.
01:15:10 ►
I mean, if we don’t blow ourselves to kingdom come,
01:15:15 ►
the only, I don’t think a steady state is possible for us.
01:15:19 ►
We’re either going to go extinct or go to glory very, very soon. And what going to glory means
01:15:27 ►
is like the head of a dandelion, you know, we will launch ourselves toward a thousand million worlds.
01:15:37 ►
And, you know, there is a very good law used in astrophysics and in physics,
01:15:44 ►
which is you can extrapolate from local
01:15:47 ►
conditions to general conditions I mean it’s arguable but they use it so why
01:15:52 ►
shouldn’t we for a moment anyway and that means that we should certainly assume
01:15:58 ►
life is a common part of the universe wherever it gets hold.
01:16:11 ►
So really what we need to modify the second law of thermodynamics and say, you know, the physical universe is running toward heat, death,
01:16:19 ►
and entropy and dissipation, but embedded within that is a counterflow, another process, which is running
01:16:28 ►
toward higher states of organization and higher states of complexity.
01:16:38 ►
Well, there’s entropy in that direction, too, is systems break down to reassemble at a higher
01:16:42 ►
order and, like, dissipative structures and stuff.
01:16:48 ►
Yes, that’s what I was trying to remember what I wanted to say and that’s what I wanted to say that people say well then how is
01:16:53 ►
the miracle achieved how is this miracle of of steady evolution achieved well
01:17:01 ►
it’s achieved through what is called a dissipative structure.
01:17:05 ►
A dissipative structure, otherwise known as an open system,
01:17:10 ►
is a system that achieves the miracle of advance toward complexity
01:17:19 ►
in a steadily simplifying universe by accepting energy into itself from the outside.
01:17:29 ►
No.
01:17:30 ►
It’s not because I can’t.
01:17:32 ►
It’s because I can’t.
01:17:34 ►
I just don’t know where I’ve been.
01:17:36 ►
Oh, a dissipative structure is a structure that attains its stability by being open to material coming in from the outside.
01:17:48 ►
So, for example, our need to eat, this is how we do the trick.
01:17:54 ►
We take in very highly organized fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and we excrete very low-grade
01:18:03 ►
material, essentially a mud.
01:18:06 ►
And in between the top of that cascade
01:18:09 ►
and all the energy that can be extracted from it
01:18:13 ►
as it rolls down toward an entropic state,
01:18:16 ►
we sustain ourselves.
01:18:19 ►
Well, then somebody might object, well, yeah,
01:18:21 ►
but the longest-lived thing in this world
01:18:24 ►
is a Bristol- Cone pine tree,
01:18:27 ►
and it’s only three or four thousand years old. Yes, one Bristol Cone pine tree. That’s right.
01:18:35 ►
But the species and the order is ancient beyond imagining. I mean, life has been at this game of keeping genes active in an open system far from
01:18:52 ►
equilibrium for four and a half billion years.
01:18:56 ►
We’ve been able to sustain.
01:18:58 ►
It’s almost like walking on water.
01:19:01 ►
For four and a half billion years, we’ve evaded the inevitable law of physics
01:19:06 ►
which says everything must go to equilibrium life doesn’t and now we’re poised on
01:19:14 ►
machine you know human machine interfaces and forms of life which are more gallium
01:19:22 ►
arsenide gold and glass than they are amino acids and DNA and this holds open the possibility of an even greater claim on
01:19:34 ►
permanence exercised by life and consciousness so the physical model of the universe is very uninteresting to us because we are living beings.
01:19:48 ►
And again, if all that has just been said here is true and reasonable,
01:19:55 ►
then it carries an ethical and philosophical implication.
01:20:00 ►
It means we matter because we are at the cutting edge of this non-equilibrium open system
01:20:09 ►
that is striving for ever greater organization and order.
01:20:15 ►
We’re not the chance existential witnesses to a cosmic accident.
01:20:20 ►
We are Hamlet.
01:20:23 ►
The play is about us.
01:20:26 ►
And so our struggles to attain justice and decency among ourselves are not simply a why-not
01:20:36 ►
proposition as Camus thought, but in fact somehow the tone of the universal process is cast by human decision.
01:20:53 ►
I remember when I was a kid and I was heavily influenced by the French existentialists
01:20:58 ►
because they were what my reading matter was telling me was hot,
01:21:03 ►
which was basically the village voice back then.
01:21:07 ►
And Sartra, in…
01:21:10 ►
Is it being a nothingness?
01:21:14 ►
I can’t remember.
01:21:16 ►
Anyway, makes this amazing statement.
01:21:19 ►
Nature is mute.
01:21:21 ►
This is the end of the road for existentialism. Nature is not mute. This is the end of the road for existentialism. Nature is not mute. Existentialism is bankrupt.
01:21:32 ►
Nature is entirely concerned to communicate, and you can only claim nature is mute if you’ve severed
01:21:43 ►
all the incoming lines of connection that are trying
01:21:47 ►
to place you in the context of biology, society, and relationship. It’s really an abomination
01:21:56 ►
what happened to 20th century philosophy. I mean, that branch of it. There are other takes.
01:22:04 ►
But nature is not mute.
01:22:07 ►
Nature affirms the conservation of novelty
01:22:10 ►
and is incredibly interested in our efforts
01:22:18 ►
to make something more of it than has been made in the past.
01:22:24 ►
I thought he was talking from an ethical point of view when he spoke about the moral point of view.
01:22:30 ►
Well, I have to confess I was 14, and I may not have gotten the absolute pith essence of his intent,
01:22:37 ►
but anything more about that?
01:22:39 ►
Or is that self-evident and obvious?
01:22:43 ►
See, the reason it’s important from my point of view is because it lays the basis for ethics
01:22:49 ►
instead of just saying, well, we might as well be good to each other.
01:22:57 ►
Or as some have said, like DeSod, who Camille Pallius said, should have been the philosopher
01:23:03 ►
of the Enlightenment that we took to heart
01:23:06 ►
instead of Rousseau.
01:23:08 ►
But if you take Dissade to heart,
01:23:10 ►
then there is no ethical imperative.
01:23:13 ►
And the pain of others
01:23:15 ►
is a perfect source of your own amusement.
01:23:19 ►
But I don’t think so.
01:23:21 ►
I think the conservation of novelty lays a obligation upon us
01:23:30 ►
to preserve what has been achieved and to go beyond it
01:23:35 ►
and to make a contribution to it.
01:23:40 ►
So if there is an ethic derivative of the psychedelic experience, I think this is it.
01:23:48 ►
Why the psychedelic experience?
01:23:49 ►
Because the psychedelic experience is an experience of nature as a force that adembrates complexity.
01:24:06 ►
What does it mean?
01:24:08 ►
It just simply means it makes it, but it’s a word that Husseril used,
01:24:15 ►
that I like to use, because adambrations sounds sort of like vibrations,
01:24:22 ►
and so I picture adambrations as sort of condensations
01:24:27 ►
of the vibration of an idea system.
01:24:32 ►
Wow, I don’t remember ever hearing Terrence
01:24:35 ►
mentioned his concept of Bell’s super space before.
01:24:38 ►
My guess is that his ideas may have come
01:24:41 ►
from conversations with Nick Herbert,
01:24:43 ►
who was a resident at Esland during the time when Terence was a frequent guest there from conversations with Nick Herbert, who was a resident at Esseland during
01:24:45 ►
the time when Terrence was a frequent guest there. It was Nick Herbert who did much to popularize
01:24:51 ►
and teach about the importance of Bell’s theorem, which basically states that all points in the
01:24:56 ►
physical universe are cotangent. And if you don’t remember what that means from what you learned
01:25:02 ►
in your high school math class, well, don’t worry, there won’t be a test to take before you’ll be allowed to listen to my next
01:25:08 ►
podcast. What I do want to mention, however, is what an interesting and personable man Nick Herbert is.
01:25:15 ►
I’ve had some conversations with him that completely blew my mind, and, well, during one visit
01:25:20 ►
that we had on Bruce Damer’s back porch, Nick took a picture of me that I used as the cover art on the 400 series of podcasts.
01:25:28 ►
Now, after I heard Terrence saying that worldwide anxiety was rising, I paused the tape to see what was going on during September and October of 1995 when this was recorded.
01:25:39 ►
And while I can see why he was worried at the time, well, compared to the situation today, the news back then was almost jolly.
01:25:48 ►
We’re living through a significantly more perilous time right now than Terrence was living
01:25:52 ►
through back then when this conversation was recorded.
01:25:56 ►
And that’s why, at least for me, I find renewed strength in his words.
01:26:01 ►
I hope they give you a little firmer ground to stand on right now as well.
01:26:05 ►
So never fear the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t on the front of a locomotive heading our way.
01:26:11 ►
At least I don’t think it is. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:26:18 ►
Namaste, my friends.