Podcast 708 – Beyond Realism

Program Notes §

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

AI-GENERATED Conversation about this podcast. The transcript was input to NOTEBOOKLM.google.com and this “podcast” was automatically generated:

In this podcast, Terence McKenna discusses various topics, including the search for the identity of the ancient entheogen Soma, the history of LSD’s discovery and research, and the potential of psychedelics to enhance creativity and understanding.

The discussion also touches upon the role of heresy in intellectual and cultural progress, with specific examples like Giordano Bruno’s discovery of the infinity of the universe and the impact of gnosticism on early Christianity.Among interesting revelations, Terence talks about his boyhood dream of moving to New York and becoming a famous avant guarde artist. While he never excelled at the visual arts, I think that it is fair to say the art that Terence McKenna practiced was one of a kind.

Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Hertha von Dechen (Author) and by Giorgio de Santillana (Author)

The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley

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Podcast 707 – After the Escaton

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Podcast 709 – Building Psychedelic Communities

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.

00:00:09 ► §

Helvet Jones.

00:00:14 ► §

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:18 ► §

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23 ► §

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been here,

00:00:25 ► §

but for now it seems like this long

00:00:28 ► §

and in some places very hot summer is finally over.

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So it’s time for me to get back into a routine

00:00:35 ► §

of producing these podcasts more regularly.

00:00:38 ► §

And thanks to Frank Nuccio,

00:00:41 ► §

who organized and recorded a fantastic lecture series

00:00:44 ► §

for this year’s Blankay Norte talks at Burning Man.

00:00:47 ► §

Well, thanks to Frank, I’ll be podcasting this year’s program, and hopefully at the rate of two per month.

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And now for today’s program.

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This is Terence McKenna Lecture, and it was actually on three tapes from his June 1989 Scholar in Residence series at the Esselin Institute.

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Now, in July of 2012, I podcast most of the other talks that he gave during these sessions,

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and you can find them in podcasts 367, 368, 369, 373, 377, and 378.

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That’s the whole workshop. 369, 373, 377, and 378.

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That’s the whole workshop.

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Now, the talk that I’m about to play for you right now was recorded on June 15, 1989,

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and it appears to be a wrap-up session for the entire series.

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The tapes that this came from were simply labeled discussion,

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and when the tapes came to an end and had to be turned over or changed,

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well, there were some gaps that I’ve done my best to patch.

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One of my favorite stories that he tells here is of his dream as a young boy

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of moving to New York City and becoming an avant-garde artist.

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And I can actually see him in this role.

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Now let’s join Terence McKenna and a few of his friends at Eslin on a sleepy Thursday in June of 1989.

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You’ll have two copies of the invisible landscape in the Xerox form left, if anybody needs to get one of those.

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Well, yesterday I talked for two hours uninterruptedly,

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so I’m hopeful that there will be a sufficient response to that

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that we can have some discussion about it today.

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We just wanted to get all that down.

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Now I see that everybody who was here yesterday isn’t here today,

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probably because they fear that I might speak

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for two hours again.

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But

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this would be, if you have an interest

00:02:56 ► §

in that material and you

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either want clarification

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or have some

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correction

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that you want to make,

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why this would be the time for that.

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Nothing.

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It was very thorough.

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It was a very thorough.

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It was thorough.

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Well, it was pretty thorough.

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When I thought about it late last night,

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I realized I had made one mistake,

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which is at the very end,

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when I talked about the synergy between recepine

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and Pagaman Harmala,

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I meant to say between

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reserpine and Arjuria

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Nervosa

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that both of those

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are Indian plants

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that

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the LSD

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like compounds

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in the Arjuria

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would presumably

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be synergized

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in the presence

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of the

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serotonin

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binding capacity

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of the

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Reserpine

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also being a native Indian plant,

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occurring in Rawolfia serpentina.

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I misspoke myself yesterday on that.

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That was right at the end of the tape.

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I want to make a correction is something that I said to you

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after the program that, I mean, after your talk yesterday,

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that Luke Dinanda had told the Groffs that he would divulge what the Soma was,

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the Soma of the VIII priests, and then he died before he had.

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But he did say that it was a vine, but that it grew close to the ground.

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You were thinking of one that went up high,

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and that at a certain time of the year when it blooms at the time when it’s psychoactive,

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and that was the time of their rituals.

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Yeah, I would bet that what he was intending to indicate

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by his description of it as a vine that grows close to the ground

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was a what’s called sacrosema or ephedra.

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Both of these, you know, the closest thing to what I’m talking about

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is this native plant called Mormon tea in California.

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Do any of you know it with the, it has a kind of odd habit of growth,

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long and unbranching stems.

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This is one of the things that is always suggested,

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especially in the Kashmiri-Shiivite tradition,

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as being the Soma source.

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It was more than a day.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And it is a Soma substitute in the reenactment of the Vedic ceremonies.

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Really, it’s pretty unsatisfying to grapple with the Soma problem

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because if you’re true to the evidence that it’s hard to make it fit anything very well.

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This book I mentioned yesterday when I did the survey called Hauma and Harmaline by flattery

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it convinced me that I had been too quick to assume that Pergammon Harmala alone

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couldn’t be a

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reliable halicinogen.

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I never understood why

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Naranho’s patience

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in his book The Healing Journey

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reported ayahuasca-like visions

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when he didn’t in fact give them

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ayahuasca but he gave them

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Harmaline.

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Harmaline. Harmaline.

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Now I understand that what I was in the dark about before

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was the fact that Harmin is not strongly hallucinogenic,

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and that that’s what’s in Banisteriopsis copy,

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activating DMT,

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but not contributing to the hallucinogenic activity, really.

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So it’s entirely possible that Soma was Pergammon Harmala.

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If this is true, it will be of great, and it will inspire great smugness in certain quarters,

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because when you check back through the Soma controversy,

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the very earliest suggestion by a Western scholar was a French character in 1701

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who said it is the giant Syrian Rue, which so it well may seem to be.

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The description of the yellowness of it.

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You see, Wasson felt that he could never…

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The thing that is so peculiar about Amanita Muscaria

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is that the active principle passes out in your urine

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so that you can drink the urine a second time

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and obtain the intoxication.

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Well, this is a pretty extreme aspect to a right.

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So you would expect that if this right were being practiced by thousands of people

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and generating an entire literature,

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that this would be explicitly

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somewhere referred to in some way and in fact it’s impossible to torment the

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text of the Vedas to yield a convincing passage where urine and cattle are

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explicitly connected to soma it just isn’t there what flattery did was he worked from this Avastin,

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Zendaveston material,

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material generated by the religion of Zoroaster,

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that is actually antidotes, this Vedic material,

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and says that all this talk of the pressings and the filters and all that

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only makes sense if Pergamun Harmala is what is being used.

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And so it may in fact be.

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Some of you have heard me talk about Mandayanism,

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which is this fascinating, very old cult in the Middle East.

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They say and said different things in their paragrenations through time,

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but they claimed to be that branch of original Christian intentionality

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that drew itself around John the Baptist.

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They were a baptismal cult pre-Christ,

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but just like 40 years before.

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And they then, in the diaspora,

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they were in Lebanon for a long time,

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and they eventually made their way to the swamps of Iraq and Iran,

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and what their fate there was.

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I have not heard.

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The last anthropology was done in the late 30s.

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But these people, Mandaians, Sabians, have mythology and an ontology of being that is very suggestive of the kind of psychedelic conceptions of the soul in the afterlife that is characterized by the Harmein using groups in the Amazon. For instance, they have the notion of the double,

00:10:55 ► §

the double that one meets at the end of life that comes to join with the departing soul.

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And interestingly, these people have this very strongly held notion of a parallel dimension,

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but not with a lot of value judgment on it as to that it is a superior or inferior plane of reality.

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In other words, it is simply accessible and different.

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reality. In other words, it is simply accessible and different. So this seems to me to suggest that there may have been Pergammon Harmala use all across the Anatolian plateau and the Persian

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plain. This is where this plant is still used in mandayan ceremonies and in preparing the

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Homa in the Parsi sacrifice. And that’s a very old religion that is pre-Zoroastrian.

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And so something there about, you know, the central motif of Iranian religion is undifferentiated light.

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This is what it’s all about.

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In the Tibetan pantheon it is manifest as amitaba, which is boundless light.

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Upamay, U is light, Upamé is boundless light. Upame, is light, Upamé is boundless light.

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And this Iranian

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hypostitization of God

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moved out

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in all directions.

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It infected

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Mandayanism,

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Mandayan communities

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in Central Asia,

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in Samarkand and Koton.

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And it was

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a major focus of the Hellenistic mystical thing,

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especially in certain cults.

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Well, that’s enough about Soma.

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This is all unresolved now, you see,

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because of flattery’s book,

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because it was accepted that Soma was Amanina Muscaria,

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simply on the weight of Wasson’s reputation

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and public relations skill, really.

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But the fact that nobody could ever get high from it

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just was an insurmountable barrier to the theory.

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So now there’s this other idea going around.

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So is there more on any of that ethnographic stuff?

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Well, let’s see.

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No LSD comes after all this,

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and there’s something quite different.

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Can you say anything about that at all?

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You mean in its modern manifestation.

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Well, I talked yesterday about these naturally occurring forms of ergot hallucinogens.

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LSD was invented by Albert Hoffman, a Swiss pharmaceutical chemist.

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He was trying to invent drugs like potosin, drugs which induce labor,

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drugs like petosin, drugs which induce labor,

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because these ergonamine compounds are extremely efficient smooth muscle contractors.

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So they were exploring the possibility

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of a drug patent on a compound that would induce labor.

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And he discovered, and I won’t retell the story, because I’m sure you all know it,

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it’s enshrined in the annals of psychedelic mythology, but of the famous bicycle ride

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through the streets of Basel, where he slowly dawned on him that something strange was going on.

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But it was put away. This was in 37. It was put away on the shelf, basically, until

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43. Then the Swiss began looking at it very quietly. It didn’t begin to surface in the journals

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until 47, 48. And by 68, it was highly illegal and highly, you know, there’s a lot of pressure on it.

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So really, it only enjoyed 20 years as a legitimate object of scientific research.

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So not enough was found out about it. It was all, the astonishing thing about LSD is that

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it’s active in such small amounts, you know, that we talked about this yesterday, that one

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gamma is a millionth of a gram. And what a little bit this is

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when you’re accustomed to measuring drugs in milligrams,

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you know, one milligram is a thousand gamma.

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Well, very few drugs are active even at the one milligram level.

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Most drugs are active at the five to 15,

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some at hundreds of milligrams.

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So what, and this spurred great hope

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and great imagination in terms of experimental strategies

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because people said what this appears to be

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is a

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it affects the mind

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very strongly in these tiny amounts

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so it appears that this is a doorway

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into understanding neurochemistry

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and what we have here is either

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a synthetic neurotransmitter

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or then there was the bad guy theory, which was that this was

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the so-called psychotomimetic. These Russians who were staying with me over the past few days,

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they knew this word. They had learned that psychedelics were psychotomimetics, or the search

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for the so-called schizogen. This was the idea that this metabolism of schizophrenics would be found to differ

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significantly from that of normals and that the culprit would be found to be excess production

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of an LSD-like compound. Well, this is a reasonable hypothesis and money was spent on it,

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but it never came to much.

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The data did not support anybody’s model of what was happening.

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DMT, because it is so spectacularly hallucinogenic

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and so rapidly returns you to the baseline of consciousness,

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was early looked at as the possible schizogen.

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But what they found was, yes, people do produce DMT in their brains normally,

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and they do when they are institutionalized for schizophrenia.

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And some schizophrenics have more than normal. some normals have more than schizophrenics.

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No conclusion can be drawn.

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There appears to be no correlation between the presence of DMT and schizophrenia.

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Well, while this kind of research was going on, LSD was breaking out of the laboratory

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and creating a social phenomenon that, you know, for good or ill,

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wafts its gentle waves against this shore to this day and hour.

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The thing about LSD that made it unique in that situation is that because

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you can theoretically get so many doses

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from a gram,

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it becomes a tool, a political tool,

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because a single chemist can produce

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10 million hits.

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Well, this is not some guy getting rich.

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This is about changing history

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when you’re talking about 10 million consciousness-expanding experiences.

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10 million?

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There were only a million students in Tiena Min Square,

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and one guy could make 10 million hits in a 72-hour run.

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And there were dozens of these guys

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with different ethics and different levels of

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sophistication and dedication so it was like a situation where social enzymes

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pheromones signaling change in the hive structure were just overproduced.

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And, of course, there was a recidivist reaction to that.

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And that killed the goose as far as psychedelic research was concerned.

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When talking about these indoles,

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the thing that is important to notice that is not very often stressed is that

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the window of opportunity for research was so short. I mean, LSD was surfaced in the journals

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in 48. By 68, it was illegal worldwide. D.M.T. was discovered in 56 in Czechoslovakia. By 68, it was illegal worldwide. DMT was discovered in 56 in Czechoslovakia.

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By 68, it was illegal worldwide.

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Ebo Gain was never studied at all and was made illegal in 1968.

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I mean, it never was studied by modern pharmacology.

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The last people who looked at it were in the 1920s.

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The LSD history we just covered.

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Cilocybin discovered in 53, illegal by 68, so forth and so on.

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So to pretend, you know, that we fully explored psychedelics

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is like pretending that we fully explored the moon.

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It is, in fact, a fairly apt metaphor

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since the curve of exploratory energy

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in these two dimensions followed each other fairly closely.

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Nobody’s been back to the moon in a while,

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and it would take 15 years

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if a decision, a command decision, were made today.

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And let’s hope that some kind of coming to grips with this psychedelic option

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is not so hard to reach.

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It doesn’t require the technological retooling,

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but it requires ideological retooling to be able to face it again.

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That’s the thing.

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Does that satisfy on that?

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Yeah.

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It just seems like it’s created a social revolution, hasn’t it,

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in a very short period of time?

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Yes, well, it was, if my notion

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that we should view these things as catalysts of memes,

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catalysts of language expansion,

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then though there have been shamans throughout human history using halisinogens,

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there’s never been a situation where hundreds of millions of people over a decade

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opened themselves up to that.

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No, it really put the spin on the situation.

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We’re still reeling from it.

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I don’t know if you’ve been here when we’ve looked at any of these maps,

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but it clearly shows that that’s when the great change came,

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that there was this recidivist upward moving curve

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of conservative tendencies that precisely mirrored the Mycenaean breakup of late Minoan culture

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happening through the late 1960s. That that’s

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where the cultural cascade of

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effects began that we

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are reacting to

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in the same way that the classical world

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had to react to

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Hellenism.

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So, yeah, it made a

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revolution. There’s never been anything

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like it. They’ve never

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stopped congratulating themselves

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for getting the lid back on that one because, you know, those of us who were there could not

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imagine that you could get the lid back on it. It was a sobering, a sobering lesson for those of

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us who have faith in the power of ideas,

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because it’s just like this thing in China.

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You know, millions of people can march,

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and great clarity can be forged in struggle.

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But, you know, when they come with the machine guns,

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the taste for politics turns bitter.

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And they always do come with machine guns.

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This is the thing that we seem to have to learn over and over again about the hand that governs.

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Well, so that’s enough about all of that.

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But again, the thing is, you see,

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one of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience

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is to see it as that it dissolves conventional wisdom.

00:25:03 ► §

It dissolves adherence to group values.

00:25:07 ► §

Because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax.

00:25:11 ► §

It shows the provisional nature of syntax.

00:25:14 ► §

Well, how are you going to hold on to an ideology when, you know,

00:25:19 ► §

the assembly language upon which the convention of ideology depends is dissolving before your eyes.

00:25:28 ► §

So, and I think that was very scary, that kind of accelerated change.

00:25:38 ► §

I mean, obviously it was very scary.

00:25:40 ► §

What I would hope is that we could turn psychology toward looking at these things

00:25:46 ► §

and present it as an enhancement of creativity

00:25:54 ► §

try and look at consciousness as a resource

00:25:59 ► §

for want of which we are going mad

00:26:03 ► §

because we clearly have the technological might,

00:26:07 ► §

the computer power, the managerial skill, etc.,

00:26:11 ► §

to straighten out the mess we’re in,

00:26:14 ► §

but what we don’t have is the will.

00:26:16 ► §

We are just in the will department, a bunch of cannibals,

00:26:21 ► §

and can’t seem to get hold of those levers

00:26:24 ► §

and do anything about it.

00:26:27 ► §

Well, I think it’s because of this malaise or this shift in psychic dominance that has been allowed to go on throughout the whole course of Judeo-Christian civilization that has suppressed experiential access to the sacred.

00:26:49 ► §

And in the absence of this experiential access to the sacred, then you get ideology and doctrine and dogma and pontification

00:27:02 ► §

and to do-or-die philosophies across the entire political, religious spectrum.

00:27:12 ► §

And we’re very afraid to contemplate a restructuring of society that would actually restructure our own authenticity.

00:27:28 ► §

When we talk about social restructuring, we see it in terms often of planting trees in the

00:27:34 ► §

Amazon or getting, you know, figuring out a way to get a free market happening in the Soviet

00:27:41 ► §

Union.

00:27:43 ► §

Doubtless all these things need to be done.

00:27:46 ► §

But the real immediate field where something can be done

00:27:53 ► §

is probably in our own behavior,

00:27:57 ► §

in our own commitment to some kind of authentic activity

00:28:00 ► §

that leads out of this.

00:28:02 ► §

Well, so for me, that has meant

00:28:05 ► §

trying to understand

00:28:07 ► §

this hallucinogenic plant

00:28:11 ► §

option, because, you know,

00:28:14 ► §

I take life seriously as a problem.

00:28:19 ► §

I view it as a puzzle of some sort.

00:28:22 ► §

I believe, I’ve seen things

00:28:24 ► §

which cause me to believe

00:28:26 ► §

that it’s some kind of a conundrum,

00:28:30 ► §

a labyrinthine puzzle, a fitted-together thing

00:28:34 ► §

that if properly understood, will deliver one.

00:28:40 ► §

And, you know, I don’t know whether it’s my proclivity or my birth sign or whatever it is,

00:28:47 ► §

but I have the faith that this is essentially an act of understanding,

00:28:53 ► §

that it is not an act of, let us say, surrender or abandonment or fusion or its control.

00:29:02 ► §

It’s an act of understanding that there is a way

00:29:06 ► §

to break through and then say,

00:29:07 ► §

aha, and I’m illuminated.

00:29:10 ► §

I see what it is.

00:29:11 ► §

How could I have not seen what it is?

00:29:13 ► §

Now I see what it is.

00:29:15 ► §

Well, the only thing which comes

00:29:16 ► §

anywhere near these places

00:29:18 ► §

for the common man

00:29:19 ► §

are these relationships

00:29:22 ► §

to these magical vegetables.

00:29:25 ► §

I mean, it’s not satisfying to just read Meister Eckhart

00:29:29 ► §

and Hildegard von Bing and all these people

00:29:32 ► §

because what their testimony is saying is that it is a birthright of us all, you know?

00:29:43 ► §

I mean, we shouldn’t imagine ourselves as less than the best,

00:29:49 ► §

because if you do that, you have some kind of a loser’s scenario,

00:29:54 ► §

and who wants to have a loser’s scenario?

00:29:58 ► §

Robert Anton Wilson said something like this.

00:30:00 ► §

He said, I believe that the power elite rules the world,

00:30:04 ► §

and I define the power elite rules the world and I define the

00:30:05 ► §

power elite as myself and my friends if you don’t define the power elite that way

00:30:11 ► §

then you have a loser’s scenario and who wants that so think of yourselves as the

00:30:19 ► §

ruling elite and central party command structure of the global family, then act from there.

00:30:29 ► §

I’ve been thinking about, was it you who asked the question about what should we do?

00:30:34 ► §

And is there something to be done?

00:30:37 ► §

Yeah.

00:30:38 ► §

Several people ask you.

00:30:39 ► §

Burley on.

00:30:40 ► §

Yeah.

00:30:41 ► §

Well, I’ve been thinking about it because I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my answer,

00:30:46 ► §

and I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, but here’s the state of play.

00:30:54 ► §

It seems like what the problem is is it’s a tension between immediacy and the desire to plan.

00:31:03 ► §

immediacy and the desire to plan.

00:31:11 ► §

And so I feel all these political obligations that it doesn’t seem right to say that we should just watch the Tao flower of the novelty wave carry us toward the arms of the mother goddess

00:31:18 ► §

at the end of the millennium.

00:31:20 ► §

We know that’s happening, but shouldn’t we do something while we’re waiting for that to happen?

00:31:27 ► §

And it seems to me that maybe the answer is as simple as this slogan,

00:31:35 ► §

which somebody made up, I don’t know who, some of you may know who,

00:31:40 ► §

this slogan, think globally, act locally,

00:31:45 ► §

and that we have a tendency to want to go on crusade

00:31:50 ► §

because the world is in such a state.

00:31:54 ► §

But planning is some kind of a demon in a way

00:32:04 ► §

because our whole problem is that we planned ourselves into this situation.

00:32:10 ► §

So instead of feeding energy to this global image of a homeostatically regulated culture, atmosphere,

00:32:22 ► §

industrial base, economy, so forth and so on,

00:32:26 ► §

it seems like those large-scale control functions

00:32:31 ► §

can be left to the collectivity,

00:32:36 ► §

to the marriage between the unconscious

00:32:38 ► §

and the cybernetic coral reef,

00:32:41 ► §

and that what we really want in the domain of planning

00:32:44 ► §

is an abandonment of

00:32:47 ► §

ideology that ideology is poisonous all ideology is poisonous and that what we are i hope tending

00:32:57 ► §

toward is a kind of evaporation of culture evaporation of culture evaporation of culture.

00:33:08 ► §

Evaporation of culture

00:33:09 ► §

as a product of ideology

00:33:11 ► §

and its replacement

00:33:13 ► §

with natural processes.

00:33:18 ► §

In other words, that there is an obvious

00:33:20 ► §

way to solve certain problems

00:33:23 ► §

because it’s energy efficient, waste efficient, so forth and so on.

00:33:29 ► §

In other words, that pragmatism, if looked upon from the point of view of natural selection or something like that,

00:33:37 ► §

is a fairly profound principle.

00:33:40 ► §

So boiling, I didn’t mean for this to be so long, but what

00:33:45 ► §

it comes out as then is

00:33:47 ► §

where we are most effective,

00:33:50 ► §

where we are most

00:33:52 ► §

clear-eyed

00:33:53 ► §

in sending energy

00:33:56 ► §

correctly from ourselves

00:33:58 ► §

to the world and receiving

00:33:59 ► §

it back is in

00:34:02 ► §

the immediate domain.

00:34:05 ► §

And that means in the immediate temporal domain,

00:34:08 ► §

in the immediate financial domain,

00:34:10 ► §

in the immediate spatial domain.

00:34:12 ► §

And that when we aspire above that to this global control system,

00:34:22 ► §

then it doesn’t work because it’s not really our role to function

00:34:27 ► §

like that. And by us, I mean everybody, because I was amazed to lie in the hot tubs this week

00:34:34 ► §

and listen to various people planning the fates of millions of people, discussing, you know,

00:34:41 ► §

where the economic zones in the Soviet Union should be opened up,

00:34:45 ► §

how the diplomatic crisis in China should be resolved.

00:34:49 ► §

I mean, people who just routinely take it upon themselves to run the world for the rest of us.

00:34:57 ► §

And there’s a deeper level, this is a slight turn on this,

00:35:04 ► §

but there’s a deeper level on this idea a slight turn on this, but there’s a deeper level to this idea of pragmatism,

00:35:10 ► §

which I was thinking about,

00:35:11 ► §

because I was thinking about yesterday’s lecture

00:35:14 ► §

and how it was so, it was a lot of information.

00:35:19 ► §

And I wondered what other lectures might be like that

00:35:22 ► §

that would be so full of information.

00:35:24 ► §

And then I thought, I reviewed in my mind the history of art what other lectures might be like that that would be so full of information.

00:35:25 ► §

And then I thought,

00:35:28 ► §

I reviewed in my mind the history of art from the point of view of realism.

00:35:34 ► §

You know, realism is this funny thing

00:35:37 ► §

where people painted on their bodies

00:35:41 ► §

and scarified themselves

00:35:43 ► §

and painted in styles that have been rediscovered in the 20th century,

00:35:49 ► §

impressionism, symbolism, abstract expressionism.

00:35:55 ► §

We see all this in the cave paintings in Africa and in southern France and so forth and so on.

00:36:03 ► §

But once the Greeks got their camp in order,

00:36:09 ► §

they set off in this funny direction,

00:36:13 ► §

which was they wanted marble to be like flesh.

00:36:19 ► §

They did not want to symbolize the human form

00:36:23 ► §

or evoke it or make an image of it.

00:36:27 ► §

They wanted to find out what it was by duplicating it exactly.

00:36:34 ► §

And they were able to do this and produced, you know, these things,

00:36:38 ► §

which I don’t know if any of you have visited the museum at the Parthenon

00:36:41 ► §

or the Metropolitan in New York City, you get it from this Greek

00:36:46 ► §

stuff. I mean, I think even if you’re pretty lumpen, you suddenly understand what art is

00:36:51 ► §

about, why people pay $11 million for a piece of marble, because what real genius is, is, you know,

00:36:58 ► §

you have to put out your hand to satisfy yourself that this is not real breathing human flesh,

00:37:04 ► §

and these faces, you know, have minds behind them. And when you stand and look at it, you know, to satisfy yourself that this is not real breathing human flesh,

00:37:08 ► §

and these faces, you know, have minds behind them.

00:37:10 ► §

And when you stand and look into them, you say,

00:37:14 ► §

so this is what the thing about Greece is all about.

00:37:19 ► §

Now I understand that some kind of magical thing. Well, you know, Elusis was this central focus

00:37:24 ► §

for the mystical

00:37:25 ► §

intentionality of the Greek

00:37:28 ► §

mind. Is it possible

00:37:30 ► §

that realism

00:37:32 ► §

this ties in

00:37:36 ► §

with this thing that William Blake said

00:37:38 ► §

about attend the minute

00:37:40 ► §

particulars? Remember we talked

00:37:42 ► §

about that? He said this was

00:37:44 ► §

the basis of poetry,

00:37:45 ► §

and understanding reality was attention to the minute particulars. So there is a way of opening

00:37:53 ► §

beyond symbols, beyond language, and we have, we call it realism, but we don’t recognize it for what it is.

00:38:08 ► §

I mean, realism is thought of as another ism.

00:38:13 ► §

But it isn’t another ism.

00:38:15 ► §

It’s an ontos of a completely different order.

00:38:18 ► §

There are isms and there is realism.

00:38:21 ► §

And realism seeks to go beyond isms seeks to go beyondisms, to

00:38:25 ► §

go beyond

00:38:25 ► §

language, to

00:38:27 ► §

go beyond

00:38:27 ► §

expectation

00:38:28 ► §

and the

00:38:29 ► §

forward moving

00:38:30 ► §

net of

00:38:31 ► §

language,

00:38:32 ► §

and to

00:38:33 ► §

present us

00:38:34 ► §

with something

00:38:35 ► §

which is

00:38:36 ► §

shocking

00:38:37 ► §

and

00:38:38 ► §

infinitely deep

00:38:40 ► §

and beyond

00:38:42 ► §

contravention.

00:38:44 ► §

This is the thing.

00:38:46 ► §

And so this thing has been carried forward,

00:38:54 ► §

mostly in art, mostly as an intuition.

00:38:57 ► §

It’s not clear to me that it’s ever been exactly articulated as a philosophy.

00:39:02 ► §

But this is what the light of Caravaggio

00:39:05 ► §

and the recessional

00:39:08 ► §

distances of the brothers

00:39:09 ► §

Van Dyck and

00:39:11 ► §

Turner and all

00:39:14 ► §

of this stuff, it’s going

00:39:15 ► §

into the stuff of

00:39:18 ► §

the world without preconception

00:39:20 ► §

attempting the great

00:39:22 ► §

discovery that shadows

00:39:24 ► §

are not always black.

00:39:26 ► §

You know, somebody had to look to figure that out and then to embody it against the flow of all understanding.

00:39:36 ► §

The discovery of perspective is this peculiar episode in the history of Western thought that is never discussed sufficiently.

00:39:47 ► §

We are asked to believe that somewhere between the death of Jotto

00:39:52 ► §

and the death of Michelangelo,

00:39:55 ► §

European human beings suddenly understood

00:39:59 ► §

that things got smaller the further away from you they were

00:40:04 ► §

and therefore created the world of pictorial space

00:40:09 ► §

that we have inhabited ever since.

00:40:12 ► §

Well, you know, in an earlier lecture,

00:40:17 ► §

I told the story about how Thomas Aquinas

00:40:20 ► §

proved his sanctity

00:40:22 ► §

by being able to look at open books and then later tell what he had read without ever moving his lips.

00:40:32 ► §

This was silent reading, and it was viewed as a miracle by his contemporaries,

00:40:39 ► §

because they all had to vocalize while they read.

00:40:44 ► §

Well, this is a similar kind of phenomenon,

00:40:48 ► §

this sudden popping into existence of the recessional distance

00:40:52 ► §

and the whole set of understandings

00:40:55 ► §

that allows us to navigate three-dimensional space.

00:40:59 ► §

What is happening here?

00:41:00 ► §

Does language make way for this stuff?

00:41:03 ► §

Is it biological?

00:41:25 ► §

Is it just happen to happen during the Italian Renaissance? How can a convention of painters of a courtly class become a way of inhabiting space and time for the entire population of an ancient continent? It defies understanding. What is actually being tracked

00:41:27 ► §

is some kind of recent

00:41:30 ► §

readjustment

00:41:31 ► §

of the information

00:41:34 ► §

processing values in the human

00:41:37 ► §

brain-mind system.

00:41:39 ► §

And these things are very close to the surface

00:41:42 ► §

and very easily perturbed.

00:41:45 ► §

You know, Julian James in his book about the bicameral mind felt that

00:41:52 ► §

there had been a major shift in the construction of consciousness at the time of Homer.

00:42:01 ► §

That before Homer, people didn’t exactly have egos they were sort of like soulless beings

00:42:12 ► §

which when put under pressure by like a tight situation in battle would have a magical

00:42:19 ► §

voice speak to them in their head and tell them what to do and they called this their demon their familiar their titular animal or god and that and then he felt that this autonomous function of the psyche later became incorporated into the larger structure of the human mind as the ego,

00:42:45 ► §

and that what we use as an ego was once a God.

00:42:51 ► §

This is the depths to which we have fallen,

00:42:54 ► §

that we have shackled a God into the service of managing our portfolios.

00:43:09 ► §

Or risen to have you risen to having God’s work for us.

00:43:13 ► §

True, yes.

00:43:15 ► §

I think it’s all right.

00:43:17 ► §

You know, it’s a principle that’s very old in nature.

00:43:20 ► §

For instance, mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the human cell, are these little

00:43:27 ► §

enzymatic engines that were originally free-swimming bacteria that have been through evolution

00:43:36 ► §

incorporated into the dynamics of larger structures and embedded there, and now their energy

00:43:43 ► §

is all channeled to the purposes of the cell.

00:43:46 ► §

And they have their own genetic material and everything.

00:43:50 ► §

They are clearly relicked organisms embedded in cytoplasmic material.

00:43:55 ► §

So this principle of incorporation of the autonomous element to enrich the original structure is pretty well there.

00:44:07 ► §

An instance of that that I’m interested in is this,

00:44:13 ► §

the pregnancy of language in these Amazonian tribes that are using

00:44:21 ► §

banisteriopsis-type halicinogens.

00:44:26 ► §

I mean, something is trying to happen.

00:44:29 ► §

This language is just sub-visible,

00:44:32 ► §

and the whole mystery that haunts the culture is

00:44:36 ► §

that it isn’t always sub-visible.

00:44:39 ► §

That, you know, on good Saturday nights,

00:44:42 ► §

when everything is clicking,

00:44:44 ► §

they can actually drag out this stuff from another dimension and play with it.

00:44:51 ► §

And you just wonder, you know,

00:44:53 ► §

the beta carbolines are so closely related to endogenous brain chemistry,

00:45:00 ► §

and so is the DMT that it’s running on.

00:45:03 ► §

I mean, clearly these people are rubbing up against an evolutionary interface spot,

00:45:10 ► §

a place where human ability, human neuro-processing,

00:45:14 ► §

human signal-making functions are bubbling together

00:45:19 ► §

with the potential of a sudden perturbation

00:45:22 ► §

to a higher and previously unanticipated state of order.

00:45:27 ► §

And I think that it has something to do with this projective imagination through acoustical sound,

00:45:35 ► §

that this idea has haunted the human mind and certainly the Western mind through the tradition of Pythagoreanism

00:45:44 ► §

and the Orphic religions,

00:45:45 ► §

this tradition of using sound to perform magic and transcend levels and see into the fabric of nature.

00:45:58 ► §

And what’s going on in these Amazon situations where, you know, the conventions of modern physics mean nothing.

00:46:06 ► §

Nobody’s speaking English.

00:46:08 ► §

Nobody knows about the periodic table or Newton

00:46:12 ► §

or any of that.

00:46:13 ► §

They’re operating in another world.

00:46:15 ► §

And what they’re doing is in these states of intoxication

00:46:19 ► §

projecting this phenomenon for which we don’t even have a word.

00:46:25 ► §

I mean, telepathy is a thin notion.

00:46:29 ► §

Telepathy is, I think, you hear me think.

00:46:32 ► §

That’s not what this is.

00:46:33 ► §

This is that these people can project whole scenarios

00:46:37 ► §

of three-dimensional phenomena

00:46:42 ► §

that are part of a group perception

00:46:45 ► §

that is not operating under the will

00:46:48 ► §

of individuals but that is somehow

00:46:50 ► §

the Ilan Vital

00:46:52 ► §

the life force

00:46:54 ► §

of the group itself.

00:46:56 ► §

I mean we don’t have a

00:46:57 ► §

sociological vocabulary for this stuff.

00:47:00 ► §

Anthropologists talk about

00:47:01 ► §

manas and magic

00:47:03 ► §

and you know morphogenetic fields and this

00:47:07 ► §

and that in the other hand. But this is reductionism because the living fact of this stuff

00:47:13 ► §

is pretty astonishing. A liquid in it, it’s called the ton. And this liquid lies very close

00:47:22 ► §

to its chemically of such a nature that its ordinary temperature is very close to the temperature at which it would change into a wax-like paraffine-like substance.

00:47:36 ► §

And these whales have been observed to form these star-like patterns on the surface of the water.

00:47:44 ► §

And after doing this their usual

00:47:46 ► §

habit is to dive very deeply and the calculations show that in these deep

00:47:53 ► §

dives this material in their heads would gel to like the consistency of jello

00:48:00 ► §

and cease to be liquid and the speculation is that this may be an evolutionary adaptation completely unexplored

00:48:09 ► §

in the primates, where by chilling your brain, you can actually examine a concept for a very,

00:48:19 ► §

very long period of time.

00:48:20 ► §

It’s like a freeze frame examination of your own consciousness, that there is a pattern

00:48:29 ► §

which persists for many minutes until this neural material returns to a liquid phase. There’s a lot of

00:48:37 ► §

speculation that liquid crystal states have something to do with memory even in human beings and mammals.

00:48:46 ► §

You see, to explain memory you need to have a series of chemical reactions

00:48:51 ► §

with a very rapid turnover and recovery tone.

00:48:57 ► §

So to change the subject, you mentioned the heretics in your talk this afternoon at Syrian sake,

00:49:07 ► §

was it? The Mandaians. The Mandaians. And we talked earlier before coming in also of the uses of

00:49:14 ► §

heresy and your passion for him. I wonder if you link that to what we should do.

00:49:22 ► §

Link that to what action to take.

00:49:27 ► §

Well, it’s always,

00:49:29 ► §

heresy is always safe if you’re scripting

00:49:32 ► §

your life for the history books.

00:49:34 ► §

You just can’t go wrong

00:49:36 ► §

as a heretic because they’re always

00:49:38 ► §

vindicated. The trouble

00:49:40 ► §

is there can be some rough spots

00:49:41 ► §

along the way.

00:49:43 ► §

A favorite heretic of mine is

00:49:46 ► §

Gerdano Bruno, who some of you

00:49:48 ► §

may know about,

00:49:50 ► §

who was burned

00:49:52 ► §

at the stake as the price

00:49:54 ► §

of his commitment to heresy.

00:49:56 ► §

Bruno discovered

00:49:57 ► §

the infinity of the universe.

00:50:01 ► §

That’s what he

00:50:01 ► §

discovered. He looked into the

00:50:03 ► §

night sky and was the first person in Europe to say,

00:50:08 ► §

those aren’t adamantine shells of Aristotelian crystalline crystalline spherical material. Those are stars.

00:50:20 ► §

Those are suns like our son, and they must go on forever.

00:50:26 ► §

And he, you know, my God, you know, it opened before him.

00:50:30 ► §

And he was burned at the stake.

00:50:32 ► §

But the heresies that are the period that is so rich in heresy

00:50:39 ► §

and has been a great inspiration for me

00:50:42 ► §

is the Hellenistic syncretism

00:50:46 ► §

that follows upon the classical period in Greece

00:50:53 ► §

and the rise of Roman power

00:50:56 ► §

and at the same time ferment in the Jewish end of the Mediterranean

00:51:02 ► §

to create, and all kinds of things were happening, actually.

00:51:07 ► §

There were gymnosophists coming from India, teaching yoga in the second century BC in Rome,

00:51:15 ► §

and there were, you know, Egyptian followers of Thoth and ISIS,

00:51:22 ► §

and there were Dosephians and montanists and followers of Simon the magician.

00:51:31 ► §

And these were a vast spectrum of cults ranging from Orthodox Jewish cults such as the Nabatans and the zealots and presumably the Mandaians that I mentioned earlier.

00:51:47 ► §

And then there were Jewish mysticism infected with platonic ideas, phylo-Judeus, Apollodorus, Museus,

00:52:01 ► §

all these minor philosophers were teaching.

00:52:05 ► §

There were Pythagoreans.

00:52:07 ► §

There were atomists.

00:52:10 ► §

And the most interesting of these were proto-Christian,

00:52:15 ► §

neo-Christian, pseudo-Christian,

00:52:18 ► §

cryptocristian sects that were competing

00:52:21 ► §

with what eventually became Christianity.

00:52:34 ► §

Some of you may know of this sect that did some of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

00:52:39 ► §

the Nabatans who lived outside of Jerusalem and down in the Dead Sea.

00:52:46 ► §

These were the people that James Pike was investigating when he died in the Negev.

00:52:51 ► §

A few years ago, well, actually over many years,

00:52:56 ► §

there was a very important manuscript find in 1948 at a place called a Greek Orthodox monastery called Chenoboskion in Upper Egypt

00:53:04 ► §

that was on a much older site called Nag Hammadi.

00:53:08 ► §

And out of the ground at Nag Hammadi came 43 codices that were, by groups of scholars, coordinated

00:53:19 ► §

worldwide, translated through the 50s and 60s and 70s.

00:53:25 ► §

This is now available as the Nag Hammadi Library.

00:53:30 ► §

And it’s very, very interesting stuff

00:53:32 ► §

because this stuff went into the ground AD 270.

00:53:38 ► §

So the later bishops, the patristic recensionists,

00:53:43 ► §

the didlers and fiddlers

00:53:45 ► §

and all of that were kept away from it.

00:53:47 ► §

Nobody had seen this stuff since AD 280.

00:53:51 ► §

So it was very, very interesting.

00:53:55 ► §

Of the 53 texts, 41,

00:53:59 ► §

were unknown in any other version.

00:54:02 ► §

Of those that were known,

00:54:04 ► §

there was some of the late Plato,

00:54:08 ► §

there was portions of Matthew.

00:54:12 ► §

But what was interesting were these previously unknown texts,

00:54:17 ► §

some of which were very close to gospel-type material,

00:54:23 ► §

a gospel according to Philip, the second known version of the gospel

00:54:29 ► §

of Philip, a gospel according to Thomas, the doubter, my favorite guy.

00:54:37 ► §

But more interesting is the less pseudo-Christian material, this exegetical and mystical

00:54:45 ► §

material that just takes off

00:54:48 ► §

that is proto-hermetic

00:54:50 ► §

some of it

00:54:53 ► §

shows traces of Indian

00:54:55 ► §

philosophies trans-migration

00:54:57 ► §

of souls, yogic practices

00:55:00 ► §

some of it reads

00:55:02 ► §

almost like Maria Sabina’s mushroom chants. There’s one text called, I think it’s called the voice of the thunder that has a meter and a rhythm that is precisely Maria Sabina. So, Gnosticism is the general banner under which all of this stuff can be placed.

00:55:28 ► §

Gnostics believe the central tenet of Gnosticism,

00:55:32 ► §

and it’s hard to put this across because modern Gnostics are such cheerful people,

00:55:37 ► §

but they’ve forgotten their real roots.

00:55:41 ► §

The central perception of Gnosticism, no matter how you slice it, is that we don’t belong here.

00:55:49 ► §

That we are strangers. That something terrible happened, and that accounts for why we’re here,

00:55:58 ► §

that we were destined for a much better deal, something went terribly terribly wrong. It takes different

00:56:08 ► §

forms. Some Gnostic mythologies are fairly straightforward. Some are fairly Baroque. The one that

00:56:17 ► §

I enjoy is one of the more Baroque ones. The second century Gnostic Bishop Valentinius, had this notion that there were 36

00:56:30 ► §

archons. They are demons of progressively lessening power that interposed themselves between

00:56:41 ► §

man and a true vision of God.

00:56:48 ► §

And the last of the archons, the 36th archon, was Sophia,

00:56:54 ► §

and the only of the archons that was female.

00:56:57 ► §

There’s a tremendous sexual ambivalence in Gnosticism,

00:57:01 ► §

which we can talk about, which is resolved in different ways.

00:57:04 ► §

But anyway, the 36th archon is Sophia. in Givolence in Gnosticism, which we can talk about, which is resolved in different ways.

00:57:05 ► §

But anyway, the 36th archon is Sophia.

00:57:08 ► §

She looked upward toward the higher God and saw him bring forth creation,

00:57:15 ► §

of which she was the final manifestation.

00:57:18 ► §

And in her heart, an avarice grew a wish to create in the same manner as the highest and hidden all father.

00:57:29 ► §

And she brought forth, it’s described as an abortion.

00:57:36 ► §

She self-fertilized herself.

00:57:39 ► §

She did not understand the requisites of creation,

00:57:43 ► §

and she turned inward into herself, and she brought

00:57:47 ► §

forth a monstrosity. And this monstrosity is the God of the Old Testament, Yawa, Jehovah.

00:57:58 ► §

And when she saw what she had done that she had brought forth this monstrosity, she flashed through a whole bunch of emotions very quickly,

00:58:10 ► §

horror, guilt, rage, fear, agony, like that.

00:58:16 ► §

And these emotions of the errant Sophia condensed as the material world over which Ildabuath was then made Lord.

00:58:30 ► §

So the entire material universe is seen as the condensed emotional debris of the horror

00:58:38 ► §

of the 36th archon upon witnessing her own creation, who has then made God over this universe.

00:58:47 ► §

Well, even though this is this really bad scene, it still nevertheless has this extremely

00:58:57 ► §

tenuous connection to the highest and hidden all-father in the form of what is called the

00:59:03 ► §

scintilla, the spark, the soul spark of divinity.

00:59:07 ► §

So then the goal of Gnostics born into this unfortunate world is to gather the light together,

00:59:17 ► §

to save the light.

00:59:18 ► §

The light is defiled by its presence in the world of material existence, and the light must be gathered.

00:59:26 ► §

Well, so then the central satirological concern,

00:59:30 ► §

that means the central salvational concern of Gnosticism,

00:59:35 ► §

is how shall we gather the light?

00:59:38 ► §

And their whole theology, then, is what is the light?

00:59:42 ► §

How should we gather it?

00:59:43 ► §

And once we have it it what do we do

00:59:45 ► §

with it and then there were various answers I mentioned the sexual tension inside

00:59:51 ► §

Gnosticism it took two forms both wild extremes in one case Gnostic hermeneutics

01:00:01 ► §

reasoned along the following lines.

01:00:12 ► §

Life is defiled, the light is defiled by the material universe.

01:00:17 ► §

Therefore, we should withhold entry of the light into matter.

01:00:20 ► §

Therefore, we must be celibate.

01:00:23 ► §

We must have no children.

01:00:25 ► §

And in some cases this took the form of saying, and we sanction no form of sexual union which could lead to procreation.

01:00:33 ► §

So they were kinky in that style.

01:00:38 ► §

The other direction that they took was extreme celibacy just simply

01:00:46 ► §

no sexual contact whatsoever

01:00:49 ► §

and then the third option

01:00:52 ► §

and these options

01:00:54 ► §

had differing percentages

01:00:56 ► §

of loyalty as Roman society

01:00:58 ► §

underwent exterior transformations

01:01:01 ► §

the third Gnostic stance

01:01:03 ► §

was man is divine.

01:01:07 ► §

We are of the light,

01:01:10 ► §

and nothing in the universe of Ildabaoth can pollute the light,

01:01:15 ► §

for it is of a higher order,

01:01:17 ► §

and therefore we can do anything we want.

01:01:21 ► §

Yes, so you could be a Gnostic and line up for scourges and heavy dieting

01:01:27 ► §

or you could line up for total libertinism and eating and drinking anything you want

01:01:33 ► §

and any kind of so this was the spectrum and this was of course very baffling to Christian

01:01:39 ► §

morality but Christianity has an incredible debt to Gnosticism. I mean, the Gospel of John and

01:01:49 ► §

revelations. I mean, this whole bit in the beginning was the word, this notion of the going

01:01:57 ► §

forth of the word, this is thoroughly Gnostic, and the struggle between light and darkness.

01:02:03 ► §

You know, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended not.

01:02:09 ► §

This is essentially the Manichaean thing, which is a form of Gnosticism.

01:02:18 ► §

Manichaeanism is a dualistic Persian religion that had great sway in Persia through this slightly later phase.

01:02:30 ► §

Mani was its prophet.

01:02:33 ► §

Mani was a Mandayan.

01:02:35 ► §

His father was a priest in the Mandayan faith.

01:02:40 ► §

Well, why talk about this so much?

01:02:44 ► §

Well, I don’t know.

01:02:46 ► §

Permission for heresy is never a bad idea.

01:02:50 ► §

And I think this is an important issue which is not resolved.

01:02:54 ► §

I mean, we are all love bunnies of one sort or another.

01:02:59 ► §

But what do you do about this thing?

01:03:01 ► §

Are we of the earth?

01:03:03 ► §

Is it our charge and our destiny or are we

01:03:07 ► §

from another place how can you can’t have it both ways this is a pretty pretty

01:03:13 ► §

clear division what are we to be are we to integrate with nature or are we to

01:03:22 ► §

transcend it through an act of conjuration out of the self, which is what

01:03:29 ► §

culture is?

01:03:30 ► §

I mean, apparently we have made the choice and all we’re doing now is the philosophical dotting

01:03:35 ► §

of the eyes.

01:03:36 ► §

Our commitment to technology is thoroughly gnostic.

01:03:40 ► §

Our commitment to, we believe that nature is something that withholds secrets from us,

01:03:50 ► §

that we must rest the secrets of nature from it in order to somehow complete ourselves.

01:04:00 ► §

And, you know, modern Gnosticism plays all this down.

01:04:04 ► §

Modern Gnosticism is existential and capitalizes more on the idea of abandonment.

01:04:11 ► §

They’re less interested in the program for returning to the higher and hidden All-Fother

01:04:16 ► §

and much more interested in talking about how we are abandoned by the All-Father

01:04:21 ► §

and therefore what a drag it is and what can we do about it

01:04:25 ► §

so that people like Heidegger

01:04:27 ► §

are thoroughly Gnostic

01:04:29 ► §

in their thinking. I mean

01:04:31 ► §

anybody who is not

01:04:33 ► §

because you see what Gnosticism

01:04:35 ► §

denied was the presence of God

01:04:38 ► §

in the world. You need

01:04:39 ► §

to understand that, that it was an

01:04:41 ► §

article of faith of Gnostics

01:04:43 ► §

that this is really a long way from God,

01:04:49 ► §

that we are really off, way, way out, over, away from it. And Christianity preserves this

01:04:58 ► §

dualism in the eternality of evil, in the idea that, you know, there isn’t a final fusion.

01:05:08 ► §

They preserve the distinction down to the last knell of recorded time.

01:05:16 ► §

So that’s a thorough going dualism.

01:05:20 ► §

My approach…

01:05:21 ► §

Huh?

01:05:22 ► §

They offer a way out of it for individuals.

01:05:24 ► §

It’s like 1984 where you go to Mexico

01:05:29 ► §

and then suddenly you’re not in the system anymore.

01:05:32 ► §

Well, yeah, they offer that way out,

01:05:35 ► §

although they waffle.

01:05:40 ► §

But my approach to this kind of thing is basically Jungian.

01:05:43 ► §

I mean, that’s where I got my interest in all of this material.

01:05:48 ► §

See, I think that what we’re always seeing is psyche,

01:05:52 ► §

that we’re always seeing a mirroring of the intentionality of ourselves

01:06:00 ► §

to concretize consciousness, to put a name on it.

01:06:04 ► §

And so I have called myself at times

01:06:08 ► §

a noetic archaeologist.

01:06:11 ► §

What I like to do is go and dig up,

01:06:15 ► §

not pot shards and glass beads,

01:06:18 ► §

but ideas,

01:06:20 ► §

old, old ideas that have been under the dirt

01:06:23 ► §

a long, long time.

01:06:25 ► §

And this is what I essentially did here with the E. Ching.

01:06:28 ► §

And Gnosticism is another bone yard.

01:06:31 ► §

And alchemy is another bone yard.

01:06:35 ► §

And the Maya are another bone yard.

01:06:38 ► §

And ancient Hawaii is another.

01:06:40 ► §

And I love to go into these things and draw conclusions, you know.

01:06:50 ► §

It’s all very pregnant with intention toward the person who comes to it with an open mind.

01:06:58 ► §

I mean, everything wants to speak, everything wants to guide us.

01:07:04 ► §

I haven’t talked much about it, but I always think there are

01:07:08 ► §

so many ways in which it’s true that it would have been so much different if Aldous Huxley

01:07:13 ► §

had guided things through the turmoil of the 1960s. Aldous Huxley was, you know, a British intellectual, a novelist, a social critic.

01:07:29 ► §

But even before he wrote The Doors of Perception, he wrote a book called, or an essay called The Art of Seeing.

01:07:38 ► §

And, you know, this was gospel as far as my mother was concerned.

01:07:44 ► §

I mean, my mother was an extraordinary woman.

01:07:46 ► §

I don’t know how she had the intuition to be into the things that she was into.

01:07:51 ► §

But it’s this thing about seeing.

01:07:55 ► §

And this goes back to what I was saying about realism,

01:07:59 ► §

training the eye.

01:08:00 ► §

What these Renaissance people and these Greek people were doing

01:08:04 ► §

with the recessional distances

01:08:06 ► §

and the nudes was

01:08:08 ► §

they were really looking.

01:08:10 ► §

They were really seeing.

01:08:12 ► §

They were not painting

01:08:14 ► §

stories

01:08:15 ► §

that they were telling

01:08:17 ► §

in their minds, but they were actually

01:08:20 ► §

paying attention to

01:08:22 ► §

texture and shadow

01:08:23 ► §

and light.

01:08:31 ► §

And this learning to see taught very early is a tremendous inoculation against cultural viruses, value viruses and linguistic viruses.

01:08:40 ► §

And you don’t see if you grow up with television.

01:08:44 ► §

You know, television is something that you look at.

01:08:48 ► §

It’s like it has this flat quality.

01:08:52 ► §

It is undemanding.

01:08:53 ► §

Everything has been stripped of depth before it ever reaches you, even to be offered for your perception.

01:09:02 ► §

I think it’s a key place, the place of silence of the void,

01:09:06 ► §

and then you step out into,

01:09:08 ► §

because then you can be humble or quiet or receptive enough

01:09:11 ► §

for your eyes to actually open,

01:09:13 ► §

for your ears to actually open,

01:09:14 ► §

in order to see what already exists,

01:09:16 ► §

but you don’t pre-determine the form

01:09:18 ► §

or the shape that they’re going to take

01:09:20 ► §

by your belief system, you strip it all away.

01:09:24 ► §

Yeah, I think silence in wilderness is about as fast a way

01:09:29 ► §

to fall into a sense of the larger self.

01:09:35 ► §

It’s hard to still the mind.

01:09:37 ► §

I mean, it’s certainly hard for me because I am so linguistically oriented,

01:09:43 ► §

and I have great faith in language but only seen as a net

01:09:47 ► §

over emptiness and it’s the emptiness you know the the silence what do you think about

01:09:58 ► §

the more cubist once you know Casso brought in cubism and changed the entire

01:10:05 ► §

direction of art

01:10:07 ► §

away from realism

01:10:08 ► §

and into a different view

01:10:11 ► §

of seeing things

01:10:12 ► §

from many facets

01:10:15 ► §

and broken down into

01:10:17 ► §

other

01:10:18 ► §

in a sense from other dimensions

01:10:21 ► §

well I’m surprised

01:10:23 ► §

at my stirring defense of realism

01:10:26 ► §

because I’m much more sympathetic to my interest in art history

01:10:32 ► §

was always 20th century art,

01:10:35 ► §

and what I loved was the upheaval

01:10:37 ► §

and the screw-you attitude.

01:10:40 ► §

I mean, I was thinking today, as I thought about this lecture,

01:10:44 ► §

about myself as a 13-year-old kid and who were my heroes.

01:10:50 ► §

You know, it wasn’t baseball players and it wasn’t even astronauts.

01:10:54 ► §

It was Jackson Pollock.

01:10:56 ► §

And, you know, that’s what I wanted to be.

01:10:58 ► §

I wanted to be a kid from Wyoming who went to New York

01:11:01 ► §

and drank hard in bars and produced paintings that 99%

01:11:07 ► §

of everybody hated and that I would insist were in fact works of staggering genius.

01:11:15 ► §

And I would triumph and this would, and it was this whole thing.

01:11:19 ► §

I mean I was living in a small town in western Colorado, you have to understand.

01:11:22 ► §

I mean, the notion of a man hurling paint at a canvas.

01:11:27 ► §

It just outraged the inner amish of the place where I was living.

01:11:33 ► §

No, I think all of this stuff is very important,

01:11:38 ► §

and that art, I didn’t mean to suggest a value judgment in favor of realism

01:11:44 ► §

over other artistic styles,

01:11:46 ► §

because I think by the time the 20th century came around,

01:11:51 ► §

realism had grown self-defeating.

01:11:55 ► §

It was something which had to be pried loose and perfected.

01:12:01 ► §

And for me, I think it’s probably perfected in Jan Van Eyck, the altar pieces of the Van Eyck brothers, or Caravaggio, or, you know, by the time you get to Belathkev and the mannerists, something else is happening.

01:12:23 ► §

It’s like they’ve overshot the mark.

01:12:25 ► §

With mannerism, it’s getting weird.

01:12:28 ► §

It looks at first like realism,

01:12:30 ► §

but then you realize that bizarrely morbid distortions are taking place

01:12:37 ► §

and that what is seeping upward into the realist canvas

01:12:43 ► §

is the unconscious,

01:12:50 ► §

and that these odd intimations of sadomasochism and mania and all this stuff that you’re getting off of this stuff

01:12:54 ► §

it’s not you it is there they’re trying to make it like that

01:12:59 ► §

and the mannerists set the stage for full permission

01:13:04 ► §

to push off into then romanticism, really.

01:13:09 ► §

The evocation of emotion through the manipulation of image, of natural image, but it’s really,

01:13:22 ► §

the thinking is not realistic.

01:13:24 ► §

The thinking is not realistic, the thinking is

01:13:25 ► §

allegorical. Romanticism

01:13:28 ► §

always tends toward

01:13:30 ► §

allegory. That’s why these islands

01:13:32 ► §

sucked at by

01:13:34 ► §

blackened water and

01:13:35 ► §

covered over in fallen

01:13:37 ► §

gardens and crumbling ruins.

01:13:40 ► §

These don’t exist anywhere.

01:13:42 ► §

This is not reportage

01:13:44 ► §

of the natural world.

01:13:45 ► §

These are dreamscapes of a morbid imagination.

01:13:52 ► §

Okay, well, so then it all runs out in the 19th century.

01:13:57 ► §

I mean, for my money, 19th century art is pretty dismal.

01:14:01 ► §

It’s very much of the academy.

01:14:04 ► §

In France, you’ve got Wattot and Fragonar,

01:14:06 ► §

and in England,

01:14:08 ► §

you have, you know, Reynolds

01:14:11 ► §

and all of this stuff going on,

01:14:13 ► §

until this romantic morbidity

01:14:20 ► §

gives rise to, like,

01:14:23 ► §

out of the, really, the recrudescence of that movement,

01:14:28 ► §

come people like Redon and Moreau, the French symbolists.

01:14:35 ► §

This is consequent upon, interestingly enough, an interest in psychedelic drugs.

01:14:41 ► §

These people are smoking hashish and drinking absinthe

01:14:44 ► §

and are familiar with

01:14:47 ► §

opium and this kind of thing. And they set the stage then for the pre-Raphaelite thing and which,

01:15:02 ► §

I don’t know whether you view that as design or art

01:15:05 ► §

but simultaneously impressionism is happening

01:15:08 ► §

and impressionism strangely enough

01:15:11 ► §

is like art in the service of the realist ideal again

01:15:17 ► §

but in strange clothing

01:15:19 ► §

because what they were trying to do was shed

01:15:23 ► §

this academic allegorical symbolic stuff and just show light.

01:15:33 ► §

It was an effort to do that.

01:15:37 ► §

And it gave permission for, well, an other thing than…

01:15:42 ► §

So there were two simultaneous tendencies there,

01:15:45 ► §

the impressionists with their concern

01:15:47 ► §

with what the eye sees and light,

01:15:51 ► §

and then operating in the background,

01:15:53 ► §

stuff like the patophysicians

01:15:55 ► §

and the Dadaists later,

01:15:59 ► §

where it was all about, again, the unconscious

01:16:02 ► §

and bringing that in.

01:16:03 ► §

The same tendency which had infected mannerism then came in as surrealism in the 20th century

01:16:12 ► §

and because of Freud and Jung and all this stuff.

01:16:15 ► §

So I think that the whole history of 20th century art is a reaction against morbid romanticism,

01:16:22 ► §

which was probably a pretty good thing to overthrow.

01:16:27 ► §

But I saw people like Pollock, or specifically Pollock,

01:16:32 ► §

as in a sense realists in that what they were showing us was chaos.

01:16:38 ► §

Yeah, that’s what I was just going to say.

01:16:40 ► §

You know?

01:16:40 ► §

In a way, our, what we could see expanded.

01:16:45 ► §

That’s right. We’re seeing a realism, our, what we could see, expand it.

01:16:46 ► §

That’s right. We’re seeing a realism,

01:16:47 ► §

but it’s a realism of,

01:16:50 ► §

we’re not seeing

01:16:51 ► §

this world.

01:16:54 ► §

We’re adding flavor to it.

01:16:57 ► §

We’re adding,

01:16:59 ► §

you know,

01:16:59 ► §

whether this,

01:17:00 ► §

you know,

01:17:00 ► §

the surrealist,

01:17:01 ► §

sort of the psychedelic.

01:17:04 ► §

Yeah, and see…

01:17:07 ► §

It’s like once you control reality

01:17:09 ► §

by being able to print.

01:17:10 ► §

I mean, that’s sort of the evolution

01:17:13 ► §

of an artist as you gain

01:17:15 ► §

more and more ability.

01:17:16 ► §

It’s, you know,

01:17:17 ► §

you get past the symbols

01:17:19 ► §

and you get into realism.

01:17:21 ► §

But then you take the realism

01:17:22 ► §

and you use it as a… You can use it as a fiction in a sense,

01:17:28 ► §

so you can do what the mannerist did and go into a green state.

01:17:34 ► §

So it becomes a language, a visual language that can describe things that our words can.

01:17:41 ► §

Well, Pollock made an immense intellectual journey

01:17:45 ► §

because he started out

01:17:47 ► §

not, I mean, he was born

01:17:49 ► §

in Cody, Wyoming.

01:17:51 ► §

This is a strike against you

01:17:52 ► §

in the first place.

01:17:54 ► §

And he studied art

01:17:56 ► §

under Thomas Hart Benton,

01:17:58 ► §

who was the absolute

01:17:59 ► §

epitome of the American

01:18:01 ► §

Realist School.

01:18:02 ► §

I mean, if you don’t know

01:18:03 ► §

Thomas Hart Benton,

01:18:11 ► §

he did WPA murals of women bringing jugs of cider to men in the fields at noontime.

01:18:16 ► §

In other words, glorification of the American working class

01:18:20 ► §

in a style almost reminiscent of the Mexican mural style of Diego Rivera. Paula

01:18:28 ► §

came out of that, you know. He used a screwdriver was his major instrument and he stood back or stood

01:18:39 ► §

over his canvases on step ladders and whipped paint across them and built up these layered things

01:18:47 ► §

that were just amazing. And what they were, they were the abstract expressionist equivalent

01:18:54 ► §

of an atomic explosion. This is what the 50s was all about. So realism came to mean looking

01:19:03 ► §

into many strange parts of reality.

01:19:08 ► §

I wonder, you know, you were talking about that the ego appears out of, from these people,

01:19:19 ► §

you know, back in a certain age feeling like it’s the voice of God.

01:19:27 ► §

And so I wonder what, you know, in a sense,

01:19:30 ► §

our dreams now come to us as a mystery.

01:19:32 ► §

You know, like, where do these things come from?

01:19:36 ► §

I mean, it’s sort of a different subject, but it’s like… Well, no, I think it’s…

01:19:37 ► §

Where these…

01:19:38 ► §

You know, at what point does a dream get integrated to where it’s us?

01:19:44 ► §

At the point where we control it, like we control our voice and our head?

01:19:49 ► §

Well, we have this admiration for the Australian style of relating to the dream time.

01:19:56 ► §

But if we continue to develop our technology the way we do, you know,

01:20:03 ► §

we have our own dream time.

01:20:04 ► §

It’s watching television. And it’s probably going to deepen.

01:20:09 ► §

I mean, I think that our appetite for sensation and entertainment is driving that industry

01:20:20 ► §

to develop itself almost more rapidly than any other.

01:20:27 ► §

How do you connect television in the dream time? to develop itself almost more rapidly than any other. Because it’s all mythic what’s on television.

01:20:31 ► §

Because it’s all mythic what’s on television.

01:20:35 ► §

Television is not reality.

01:20:37 ► §

Television is the cultural myth about reality.

01:20:40 ► §

This is where the archetypes in the American unconscious are to be met

01:20:47 ► §

you know tough cops and jiggle blondes and all these people that are in our

01:20:54 ► §

cultural mass programming are running around in there oh it’s terrible it’s

01:21:02 ► §

just that we have such a tacky set of images.

01:21:07 ► §

It could be epical.

01:21:09 ► §

Imagine if we were 19th century Germans.

01:21:12 ► §

Television would be like Wagner.

01:21:15 ► §

You just did it.

01:21:17 ► §

I wanted you to switch

01:21:18 ► §

and do a similar kind of historic

01:21:21 ► §

analysis

01:21:22 ► §

which you did for narcissism

01:21:24 ► §

and for art

01:21:25 ► §

on music as well.

01:21:27 ► §

Overbue and shifts.

01:21:30 ► §

Well, I don’t really

01:21:31 ► §

I don’t claim to know a lot about music.

01:21:34 ► §

What did Wagner represent you?

01:21:37 ► §

Well, Wagner comes late.

01:21:40 ► §

What I would say about it,

01:21:42 ► §

I mean, I think music is very important.

01:21:45 ► §

We said in here on a different day that architecture was frozen music,

01:21:52 ► §

and therefore music must be unfrozen architecture.

01:21:56 ► §

And what did you mean?

01:21:58 ► §

What could you say about that?

01:22:01 ► §

This Pythagorean thing, this very old thing, this discovery of these apparently natural relationships that are very mysterious between the plucked strings so that if you stretch gut between bone antlers and you pluck certain strings, other strings, in a perceived-to-be

01:22:30 ► §

natural relationship called an octave, will also vibrate in harmony. This is the key concept here,

01:22:39 ► §

harmony. People saw this, and Pythagoras or, you know, apocryphally, what Pythagoras did was he filled

01:22:49 ► §

glass tubes with water, and when he had two glass tubes tuned so that they were an octave apart,

01:22:59 ► §

it was observed that the amount of water in them could be expressed as a mathematical ratio.

01:23:07 ► §

Well, this touches on a very mysterious aspect of things that nobody quite understands

01:23:17 ► §

and you don’t even hear people talk about it because it’s so problematic.

01:23:22 ► §

And that is this.

01:23:24 ► §

Why does mathematics have something to do

01:23:28 ► §

with nature why does mathematics have anything to do with nature think about what

01:23:36 ► §

mathematics is mathematics is the operations you can perform on numbers well

01:23:42 ► §

nature isn’t you don’t see numbers.

01:23:46 ► §

And yet this has been the fundamental insight of the Western mind

01:23:52 ► §

that has allowed miracle after demonic miracle

01:23:57 ► §

to be conjured out of nature,

01:24:00 ► §

the discovery of the curious parallelism between nature and operations performed on numbers.

01:24:10 ► §

Well, it comes out of this Pythagorean religious mentality,

01:24:14 ► §

which observed these ratios and related them to the sounds and said,

01:24:22 ► §

well, then there can be a mathematical theory of music. And then they observed

01:24:28 ► §

regularity and other phenomena. The stars had long been observed to be regular. Well, so then

01:24:35 ► §

they began to think in terms of regular, perfect things versus irregular, mundane things.

01:24:46 ► §

And in this climate, Platonism was able to come into being.

01:24:50 ► §

And Platonism makes an absolute division, you know,

01:24:54 ► §

between the world of archetypal perfect things

01:24:57 ► §

and then the lower slice of reality.

01:24:59 ► §

Music was carrying all of this along.

01:25:04 ► §

And if you’re interested in ancient music

01:25:09 ► §

and its impact on ancient philosophy,

01:25:15 ► §

these books by McLean,

01:25:18 ► §

the myth of invariance is one of them.

01:25:21 ► §

It’s a study of mathematics in Plato and the Rick Vedah,

01:25:25 ► §

and it’s all musical mathematics.

01:25:29 ► §

They were studying proportion, harmony, relationship.

01:25:34 ► §

Now notice that in this situation where the string is plucked

01:25:40 ► §

and the other strings in octaves above and below vibrate.

01:25:47 ► §

This is a very cogent demonstration of action at a distance,

01:25:53 ► §

something which is very troubling even in modern conceptions.

01:25:59 ► §

But it’s a very cogent demonstration of action at a distance.

01:26:03 ► §

It shows that there need not be a connecting medium for force and activity to be transmitted across space.

01:26:13 ► §

In other words, it is an argument for magic, for etheric influences, and this sort of thing.

01:26:24 ► §

And so then the theory quickly grew

01:26:27 ► §

that obviously then the way to influence these things

01:26:31 ► §

was through music, through sound,

01:26:34 ► §

and theories of tone grew up.

01:26:36 ► §

And the seven planetary bodies

01:26:41 ► §

that were familiar to the astrologers

01:26:43 ► §

were connected to seven tones. and then a correspondence was recognized between seven metals and a map of the world was slowly constructed that had music at its ultimate basis there’s a wonderful book that deals in part with all of this that some of you may know called Hamlet’s Mill.

01:27:07 ► §

Hamlet’s Mill is the story of this very old myth that occurs all over the world

01:27:21 ► §

about how somebody has a mill,

01:27:25 ► §

a little grinder, and somebody else steals it.

01:27:29 ► §

And then the thief rose across a body of water

01:27:33 ► §

with the mill in a boat, and the mill sinks the boat,

01:27:38 ► §

and the mill is grinding out salt.

01:27:42 ► §

And this is in one version, the explanation

01:27:44 ► §

for why the ocean is salty.

01:27:46 ► §

It’s because off the coast of Norway in that place called the Maelstrom, that is the mill.

01:27:55 ► §

And down at the bottom it is grinding out salt.

01:27:58 ► §

And Giorgio de Santayana, who wrote this book, Hamlet’s Mill with Hilda von Dechen,

01:28:06 ► §

talked about it as a myth of a movement of the stellar machinery

01:28:13 ► §

that stars which were near the pole moved beneath the surface of the sea,

01:28:20 ► §

and the mill was lost, and a whole world age was thrown into confusion.

01:28:28 ► §

And a lot of the discussion of this hinges on looking at Rig Vedic and Platonic musical theory.

01:28:38 ► §

These ayahuasca songs in the Amazon are visually intended.

01:28:44 ► §

They are to be seen, not to be heard.

01:28:47 ► §

I mean, the people have criticized them that way.

01:28:51 ► §

They critique them that way.

01:28:54 ► §

Voice is primarily a vehicle imagined to affect color vision.

01:29:01 ► §

And, you know, if we could see what we meant, the ambiguity would leave our intention to communicate with each other.

01:29:11 ► §

This would be a kind of telepathy, the seeing of meaning.

01:29:17 ► §

Well, when you think about what meaning is, there’s no reason why it should be processed through hearing

01:29:25 ► §

it’s not particular it has nothing particularly to do with hearing

01:29:30 ► §

meaning is a much fuller and richer signal than hearing

01:29:35 ► §

why shouldn’t it be conveyed visually all kinds

01:29:38 ► §

when I look at this room I’m not listening to it

01:29:42 ► §

I’m looking at it you know and the meaning of what is going on comes to me through my eyes.

01:29:50 ► §

This is how the meaning of the world presents itself. We don’t listen to the world, but we listen to speech for its meaning.

01:29:59 ► §

And this closes us toward many things and pushes us in a certain direction.

01:30:05 ► §

We don’t have any medium that we can physically produce,

01:30:09 ► §

you know, other than our electronic medium

01:30:12 ► §

that we can easily produce a visual image to share.

01:30:16 ► §

Print?

01:30:18 ► §

We read.

01:30:19 ► §

But you mean conversationally and instantaneously, right?

01:30:23 ► §

Like you can with speech.

01:30:25 ► §

Well, yeah, this is where you have to take drugs to push the argument further

01:30:29 ► §

because what you have to hypothesize is that it might be possible to generate an acoustical

01:30:38 ► §

hologram with your voice or something like that.

01:30:41 ► §

In other words, when you take ayahuasca with these people in the jungle

01:30:48 ► §

and you see the songs, the reason you see the songs is because you’re loaded. Well, how

01:30:56 ► §

loaded do you have to be to see the songs would be a good question for researchers to ask?

01:31:04 ► §

Maybe you don’t have to be overtly stoned at all.

01:31:08 ► §

Maybe you could have a sub-threshold amount of Harmean in your system,

01:31:13 ► §

and when they started singing, lo and behold, here it would appear.

01:31:19 ► §

So, I don’t know if…

01:31:21 ► §

We’re talking about the loss of symbol for a table

01:31:25 ► §

and that we don’t actually

01:31:27 ► §

speak a table.

01:31:30 ► §

Well, if we were to become realists

01:31:33 ► §

in this sense, we would.

01:31:35 ► §

We would speak a kind of rebus

01:31:37 ► §

language of a visible flow

01:31:40 ► §

of intentionality. I grant you,

01:31:42 ► §

it’s hard to understand this. It sounds a little

01:31:44 ► §

nutty. It’s this. It sounds a little nutty.

01:31:47 ► §

It’s fascinating. It is fascinating.

01:31:51 ► §

In a description in some way, I can’t… Of a visible language?

01:31:53 ► §

No, I understand. I cannot make a picture of seeing a song. Can you describe that in some way?

01:32:03 ► §

Well, yes, I guess for me what it’s like is they’re like three-dimensional Persian carpets.

01:32:12 ► §

It weaves itself.

01:32:14 ► §

It’s like a three-dimensional Persian carpet, but it’s not standing still,

01:32:19 ► §

and it’s coordinated and keyed somehow to the tones and the levels of the song.

01:32:28 ► §

So when they hit a certain series of notes, that ripples through as a Chartreuse line with a blue trail.

01:32:37 ► §

And it’s constantly coming and going.

01:32:40 ► §

It’s both, it’s kind of hard to describe because you can

01:32:46 ► §

see into it and yet

01:32:48 ► §

it’s all around you. So it’s

01:32:50 ► §

sort of like being a Persian

01:32:52 ► §

carpet, you know.

01:32:53 ► §

Oh, they’re wonderful and they’re

01:32:56 ► §

so clearly intentional.

01:32:58 ► §

I mean, people will clap their

01:33:00 ► §

hands with delight when it’s over with

01:33:02 ► §

and everyone will say, the yellow,

01:33:04 ► §

did you get the yellow

01:33:05 ► §

and I say yes some yellow yes it’s wonderful yeah is it not possible is it not possible

01:33:17 ► §

theoretically possible at any rate that once this has happened in your system whatever

01:33:24 ► §

this has gone through physiologically

01:33:26 ► §

and whatever other way,

01:33:28 ► §

that the path is there,

01:33:30 ► §

that there would be a way to learn that thing

01:33:33 ► §

that you could do it on Thursday morning

01:33:36 ► §

on the night.

01:33:37 ► §

Isn’t that what your brother was trying to do with the sounds

01:33:41 ► §

and the Amazon?

01:33:42 ► §

See, there is something going on here

01:33:44 ► §

because in the pineal gland

01:33:48 ► §

Harmein is produced and DMT is produced in the brain too.

01:33:55 ► §

So the chemical prerequisites for the brain state are there.

01:33:59 ► §

I think the first meeting we held, I talked about the fact that people who have smoked DMT,

01:34:07 ► §

then report months, years later, dreams in which they smoke DMT, and it happens in the dream.

01:34:17 ► §

Okay, this is a major piece of evidence. This means it can happen, that it’s not chemically exogenous, but then the question

01:34:28 ► §

is, how the hell do you get to the same place as you are in a dream when someone passes you

01:34:35 ► §

the glass pipe? But the very fact that it can happen, and so then the…

01:34:44 ► §

Wonderful.

01:34:45 ► §

Of course I know that that’s true.

01:34:47 ► §

Here’s the path that I would like…

01:34:50 ► §

So it lies very close to the level, to the level of consciousness you see.

01:34:57 ► §

And these people who’ve been in the Amazon all these 20,000 years that we’ve been calling primitive,

01:35:03 ► §

while we’ve been inventing technology and doing all this other stuff,

01:35:07 ► §

what they’ve been doing is every Saturday night

01:35:10 ► §

exposing themselves to a linguistic catalyst.

01:35:14 ► §

Well, so we think, well, maybe they have a really far-out language.

01:35:18 ► §

No, they don’t have a really far-out language.

01:35:20 ► §

They have an entirely ontically transformed linguistic ability that we don’t

01:35:26 ► §

even have a suspicion

01:35:27 ► §

of that is

01:35:30 ► §

learnable. I don’t

01:35:32 ► §

know, because they put so much

01:35:34 ► §

stress on this diet.

01:35:36 ► §

It’s very clear that

01:35:38 ► §

they are diddling

01:35:40 ► §

towards something. They have a goal

01:35:42 ► §

that they’re trying to maximize.

01:35:44 ► §

There is something there that they want

01:35:46 ► §

to get. And when you meet

01:35:47 ► §

many Iowa sceros

01:35:50 ► §

and take it with many of these

01:35:52 ► §

guys, the guys who make

01:35:53 ► §

the good stuff are

01:35:55 ► §

all alike. They have

01:35:58 ► §

this weird aura.

01:36:00 ► §

They have a

01:36:01 ► §

voice thing that is hard

01:36:04 ► §

to describe. But you know the concept of voice in Dune,

01:36:08 ► §

where there was a way to just drop down a register

01:36:12 ► §

and speak in a way that people could not resist

01:36:15 ► §

because you set the vibe in this certain way?

01:36:18 ► §

These Iowa Scarros have this, and they have…

01:36:27 ► §

Yes, it’s something so outside our cultural value

01:36:29 ► §

system that we can hardly

01:36:31 ► §

realize what we’re doing with because how many

01:36:34 ► §

of us would go there

01:36:35 ► §

and then how many of us would go

01:36:38 ► §

there and go deep enough

01:36:39 ► §

and then take the drug with

01:36:41 ► §

these people and then be enough

01:36:44 ► §

free of your own stuff

01:36:46 ► §

to pay attention to what they were putting out

01:36:49 ► §

and then to keep it enough together to create a description

01:36:53 ► §

that you could bring back later.

01:36:56 ► §

So, you know, it’s just,

01:36:58 ► §

the world is not empty of the new and the novel,

01:37:02 ► §

these frontiers.

01:37:04 ► §

This is how I ended the lecture yesterday.

01:37:06 ► §

There are just frontiers and frontiers and frontiers in chemistry, in anthropology, in ethnography.

01:37:15 ► §

And some of it, we’re actually talking about, you know, the transformation of the human form.

01:37:22 ► §

And not through technology, but in a cleaner, biologically, a way which celebrates natural process and celebrates the vitality of the minded portion of the planet.

01:37:38 ► §

It’s an attunement, not this gnostic thing which I evoked for you, which is, you know, people used to say of my grandfather,

01:37:49 ► §

where he’d been was so-so, where he was was hell, and where he was going was paradise,

01:37:59 ► §

and he lived his whole life that way. Well, that’s a Gnostic attitude, you know.

01:38:06 ► §

Paradise is just a hit. Well, that’s a Gnostic attitude, you know. Paradise is just ahead.

01:38:12 ► §

I think that paradise is a frontier of language,

01:38:15 ► §

of intentional communication.

01:38:18 ► §

The reason for looking at all these things, for looking at the hallucinogens and the alchemy

01:38:21 ► §

and the mythology and all this,

01:38:24 ► §

is because these are the materials present at hand

01:38:28 ► §

for an assault on the citadel of true being.

01:38:32 ► §

You know, somewhere here there is a clue.

01:38:35 ► §

Somewhere here there is something that we can use.

01:38:38 ► §

It’s going to be an obscure sect, a peculiar mantra, a strange drug, a bizarre plan,

01:38:44 ► §

a forgotten teaching, a lost alphabet,

01:38:47 ► §

something that we can use

01:38:51 ► §

so that, you know, I’ve talked about the tantric nature

01:38:56 ► §

of the point of view that I’m putting out.

01:38:59 ► §

Tantric in the sense of the definition of tantra

01:39:04 ► §

as the short path,

01:39:07 ► §

taking seriously the idea that in a single lifetime,

01:39:10 ► §

a human being might be able to go vast distances in the project of spiritual unfolding.

01:39:20 ► §

That, you know, we are not given or fated to simply incrementally advance ourselves.

01:39:29 ► §

It is some kind of a lottery.

01:39:31 ► §

I mean, there are big winners,

01:39:33 ► §

and I’m just very convinced that the way you enhance your position

01:39:38 ► §

in the probability of all of this is through cognition.

01:39:43 ► §

It will be an act of understanding. The final act of it will be an act of understanding

01:39:45 ► §

the final act of liberation

01:39:47 ► §

will be an act of understanding

01:39:50 ► §

yeah

01:39:53 ► §

what about the Vedic idea

01:39:55 ► §

that above this blending

01:39:57 ► §

above this merging above this

01:39:59 ► §

holistic thing to Sephora

01:40:01 ► §

these days that actually exists

01:40:03 ► §

the transcendental land

01:40:04 ► §

with forms

01:40:06 ► §

and past times

01:40:06 ► §

how does that

01:40:08 ► §

stand up

01:40:08 ► §

under psychedelic

01:40:09 ► §

well I

01:40:11 ► §

yes I mean

01:40:12 ► §

I think that

01:40:13 ► §

what the psychedelic

01:40:14 ► §

shows is that

01:40:15 ► §

anything is possible

01:40:17 ► §

and that these

01:40:18 ► §

transcendent realms

01:40:19 ► §

or parallel universes

01:40:21 ► §

are in fact

01:40:22 ► §

there

01:40:22 ► §

no I’m not

01:40:24 ► §

a merge person.

01:40:27 ► §

It’s not for me the white light

01:40:29 ► §

and everything flowing together

01:40:32 ► §

into some one unnameable unity.

01:40:36 ► §

It’s more like what you’re asking about.

01:40:38 ► §

It’s a proliferation of realities.

01:40:42 ► §

We’re in some kind of a labyrinth.

01:40:47 ► §

There are heavens and hells, and then presumably elevators

01:40:49 ► §

through all these heavens and hells

01:40:51 ► §

to other places.

01:40:54 ► §

It’s removed the dazzling fault.

01:40:57 ► §

Sounds right.

01:41:01 ► §

I’m wondering about

01:41:04 ► §

the role of the shaman in relationship to a synthetic…

01:41:10 ► §

Can there be a shamanic role?

01:41:13 ► §

Yeah, I mean, all these traditions in the Amazon revolve so much around a person, a shaman,

01:41:19 ► §

who, through whatever, their abilities found these plants and had a relationship to them and all this.

01:41:26 ► §

And now, through the laboratory, we can take and extract the most active part of a chemical that you can only find if you

01:41:37 ► §

refined, you know, boiled the bark of such and such tree.

01:41:41 ► §

And so it’s like the shamanism and the search for the drug is out. I mean, we have it in

01:41:46 ► §

these form of LSD, D&T and things like that. So you no longer have to go and find the person

01:41:54 ► §

who can find the… Well, I think that we’ve, in the case, that what you get when you spend

01:42:03 ► §

time with these shamans

01:42:05 ► §

is not, as you might expect,

01:42:08 ► §

with the strong stress on lineage that you get with Tibetan Buddhism

01:42:13 ► §

or any kind of stratified religion,

01:42:16 ► §

what you get with these shamans is a pretty experimental

01:42:21 ► §

and open-ended attitude.

01:42:24 ► §

They’re really courageous souls.

01:42:29 ► §

And what they ultimately teach is not an ideology,

01:42:32 ► §

but courage.

01:42:34 ► §

So I don’t think the fact that we have found

01:42:38 ► §

the compounds that do this

01:42:41 ► §

means that we’ve somehow missed a part of it.

01:42:46 ► §

I think what I realized was that it’s not easy to take these things.

01:42:55 ► §

It isn’t easy for Amazonian shamans.

01:42:58 ► §

It isn’t easy for Tarahumara Indians.

01:43:02 ► §

Everybody approaches it with fear and trembling, if they have any sense,

01:43:08 ► §

because their own cultural values and their own self-myth, whatever it is, is going to be sorely tested.

01:43:16 ► §

So what these guys are is they’re like phenomenologists, which is a point of view that I resonate with.

01:43:25 ► §

In other words, their attitude is, let’s take it and see what happens.

01:43:30 ► §

And then they have a body of tradition built up over thousands of years,

01:43:34 ► §

but still, they’re always experimental and they’re always critical.

01:43:39 ► §

I mean, after you go to Mass, everybody doesn’t congregate outside the cathedral

01:43:46 ► §

and say, well, that was a pretty good mass,

01:43:49 ► §

but I’ve seen better,

01:43:51 ► §

and I remember one, two years ago,

01:43:53 ► §

that was a rip-roar.

01:43:55 ► §

You don’t critique mass.

01:43:59 ► §

But after these ayahuasca things,

01:44:02 ► §

people say, you know, he’s slipping,

01:44:04 ► §

he’s losing his grip,

01:44:06 ► §

this was the second time in a row

01:44:08 ► §

that it’s been garbage,

01:44:10 ► §

or people will say,

01:44:12 ► §

you know, it’s great,

01:44:14 ► §

and he really has the knack,

01:44:16 ► §

but I remember a time,

01:44:18 ► §

and so it’s like this.

01:44:20 ► §

It’s, you know,

01:44:22 ► §

an experimental, open-ended, phenomenal,

01:44:25 ► §

phenomenal

01:44:25 ► §

logical attitude. And they

01:44:27 ► §

don’t have sophisticated

01:44:29 ► §

mathematics or

01:44:31 ► §

sophisticated instruments,

01:44:33 ► §

so they also don’t have

01:44:35 ► §

orthodoxy. There isn’t a

01:44:37 ► §

party line on Amazonian

01:44:39 ► §

shamanism. There’s a

01:44:41 ► §

body of generally

01:44:43 ► §

agreed upon perceptions that each guy interprets

01:44:47 ► §

differently. And it’s a very comfortable environment for someone like us to go into. Because

01:44:55 ► §

they say, oh, you’re curious, we’re curious. That’s the main motivation. Remember what you see.

01:45:03 ► §

Pay attention.

01:45:09 ► §

We know a lot, but mostly we know how little we know.

01:45:12 ► §

And this is the correct stance, you know.

01:45:15 ► §

This will take one far.

01:45:20 ► §

Okay, well, that’s it for today, folks. Well, from the very sparse applause that we just heard,

01:45:31 ► §

it seems that this was a really small gathering

01:45:34 ► §

for his final session of this Esselin residence that year.

01:45:38 ► §

But lucky souls they were.

01:45:41 ► §

And since this has been a very long podcast today,

01:45:43 ► §

I’ll save many comments about it for my next live salon.

01:45:47 ► §

But I do want to leave you with one more thing.

01:45:50 ► §

If you’ve attended any of the live salons, you know that I’ve been spending a great deal of my time involved with artificial intelligence.

01:45:58 ► §

And I’ve posted an interesting little MP3 file in the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:46:03 ► §

And what I did was to input a transcript of this talk into notebooklm.gov.com, which is free,

01:46:12 ► §

by the way.

01:46:13 ► §

And then I asked the AI to create an audio summary of the talk.

01:46:17 ► §

And I think you’re going to be quite surprised at the result, which took less than two minutes to

01:46:22 ► §

create, by the way.

01:46:23 ► §

So if you get a chance to go out to the program notes at psychedelics salon.com and give it a listen.

01:46:30 ► §

I think you’ll be shocked.

01:46:32 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:46:36 ► §

Namaste, my friends.