[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 Well, it's good to be back here in the salon with all of you once again.
 I guess that most of the big holiday celebrations and parties are over for a while.
 But it was nice while it lasted. How about you?
 I hope all of you had a few perfect moments during the past few weeks.
 I had a relatively quiet couple of weeks myself and to tell the truth, it's been hard getting back up to speed.
 My plan for this year is to publish a podcast by the end of each Wednesday and Friday.
 And as you can tell, I got it a little closer this week.
 And by the way, that's Wednesday and Friday Pacific time.
 If all goes well, I may actually get them out a little earlier each week.
 But the Wednesday and Friday schedule I think I can stick to at least until further notice.
 Now before I do anything else, I want to thank the people at gigavox.com for making their Levelator product available online and for free.
 As you regulars here in the salon know, I've been struggling with volume levels for quite a while, particularly with these trial logs.
 And the one we're about to hear was the worst one so far.
 The microphone on Terrence was okay, Ralph's voice was in mono and not too clear,
 and it sounded like Rupert's voice was only being picked up by the other two mics.
 In short, this tape was a mess.
 So I just kept putting off doing this show because the cleanup on the file was just going to take so long.
 And then yesterday I was listening to a podcast from podcasttools.com
 and learned about the Levelator from GigaVox.com.
 That's G-I-G-A-V as in Victor O-X.
 GigaVox.com/Levelator.
 L-E-V-E-L-A-T-O-R.
 Now I won't go into a major geek out on you here, but for you other podcasters out there,
 particularly if you're doing phone interviews, you might want to check this tool out.
 All I had to do was drag the audio file to the Levelator and it automatically brought all of the voice levels up to a relatively equal point.
 And it's not perfect, but it's free, and it sure did a better job than I could do manually.
 So a big thank you to the good people at GigaVox.com.
 And today's program, as you already know if you've been listening to this entire series,
 comes from the seventh tape of the trilogues between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
 that were held at Esalen Institute in 1989 and 1990.
 This tape was simply titled "The Unconscious,"
 and sure enough it begins with Ralph Abraham explaining his bifurcation theory of the unconscious.
 But by the time they were halfway into the discussion, their talk had turned to orgies
 and to the competing forms of consciousness brought about by alcohol versus psychedelics.
 And rather than tell you how it ends, why don't I just put it on right now and we can listen to it together.
 I'm going to try today an experiment in rapid induction.
 And then that might fail and we could fall back on it.
 But I think that we haven't tried to push our format in any way.
 But now I'm feeling more confident here at home base at the Esalen Institute.
 So this would be a quick one, two, three,
 where I would try to suggest some actual questions that you could respond to
 as if somebody in the audience had asked questions, you see what I mean.
 And I'm going to, the rocket moves rapidly into the designated point on a target as it were.
 So, the unconscious.
 Here's the one, two, three in summary.
 One is a theory, the bifurcation theory, that the unconscious was created one afternoon in a certain place.
 A curtain which then divided the conscious and the unconscious forever.
 An iron curtain in the species mind.
 And two is a question about the relationship between this bifurcation and other bifurcations.
 And then three is a theory which wouldn't have to be taken too seriously
 as to a particular relationship between this bifurcation and some other one
 that I'll propose for the sake of discussion.
 Well, all of this is very hypothetical.
 So, one, the unconscious.
 Well, I gave a talk recently in the History of Consciousness program
 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
 That's the most successful program at UCSC.
 Internationally known graduate program.
 Thousands of applicants every year for a few places.
 So, to begin with, I challenged them to change the name from the History of Consciousness
 to the History of Unconsciousness.
 So, as long as we restrict attention to the historical period,
 then there's not much to say.
 But all the interesting events I want to point out are prehistoric.
 So, therefore, we have to speculate.
 Among the possibilities are that the conscious mind developed from the unconscious mind.
 Another one is that the unconscious mind developed from the conscious mind.
 And another one is that consciousness existed always
 and that there was never any division.
 All these possibilities.
 So, for the sake of discussion, I'll choose one.
 My favorite one, but only for today.
 And that is the consciousness is always and the unconscious is recently created.
 So, we can view it like this.
 Where we have consciousness going on and then the unconscious begins one day,
 created by an accident, a historical accident or a natural law of evolution.
 In this fantasy, however, because of peculiarities in the evolution of conscious mind
 and culture and civilization and so on,
 more and more things were regarded as illegal in the current world view
 and by the paradigm rejected from above the curtain to below.
 So that as we go along, unconscious begins growing from modest origins
 while the conscious mind correspondingly shrinks.
 So, eventually, it looks more like this.
 Where you have conscious, conscious, unconscious.
 See, but this is growing.
 And in its growing, evolution, further bifurcations, morphogenesis,
 and emergence of form in the unconscious.
 So, all what we identify today as fundamental furniture of the unconscious,
 the dreams, the archetypal symbols and so on.
 All of that is evolving, has evolved from simpler origins and so on.
 And this history of the unconscious we seek to discuss.
 So, I call that the bifurcation theory of the unconscious.
 Now, one virtue of this theory before going on to number two
 is that it allows us to see our conscious mind
 in evolution from a universal conscious mind.
 The Gaia mind is then regarded as conscious.
 The animal mind is conscious.
 The mind of plants, all of it.
 We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants,
 the consciousness of Mother Earth,
 the consciousness of Father Sky,
 the consciousness of their partnership in the nuclear family of the all and everything.
 And this is valuable,
 and if we could promote this somehow in terms of our future
 and relating with respect to the mind of all the other entities.
 Now, number two, this question is about the relationship of this bifurcation
 in the history of consciousness and other bifurcations
 in the history of ideas,
 such as the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden,
 the fall of Archangel Lucifer and other angels and so on,
 the creation of the Devil, the growth, the emergence,
 the importance of evil, the empowerment of the negative moment and so on.
 There are a lot of other dichotomies which might have emerged from a unity
 by a process of mitosis as it were in the world of ideas.
 And we could try to relate these bifurcation events to each other in time
 or in space or as waves or causal relationships or whatever,
 your favorite ones.
 But third, just for example, I'm going to recommend an example which for me
 was the source of my thinking about the history of unconsciousness in this way.
 So this is a specific hypothesis on the creation of the unconscious
 by the rejection of something according to dogmatic paradigm.
 And this has to do with Marduk and Tiamat,
 the first creation myth that I know about that has the subjugation of chaos
 by a law and order executive, a cosmic god,
 the war between chaos and cosmos won by cosmos,
 the king of law and order.
 The first one I know about is Marduk and Tiamat.
 And this is historical and is written on tablet.
 It was part of the Akhipi festival that I always talk about
 that was celebrated for 2,000 new years in a row throughout Babylonia
 by the Akkadians, the Semitic successors to the Sumerian civilization.
 And in this horror story, repeated every year
 and actually acted out by the king playing the role of Marduk.
 Tiamat, a dragon, goddess of chaos, is actually divided in two,
 merged with a sword and stretched.
 The two halves open like an oyster shell, forming the sky and the earth.
 That's the beginning of the Babylonian creation myth.
 At this time, this ritual, so in a time when rituals were performed well
 and successfully in stabilizing the evolution of culture,
 chaos, which is essential to life and happiness, was subjugated.
 But we experience it all the time, but that was not allowed by the paradigm.
 And in this myth was created, I claim, the unconscious,
 the negative charge on the serpent image, the snake,
 the innocent, the essential symbol of Mother Earth itself,
 the consciousness of Gaia, that this symbol came to be associated with Hades,
 with evil, with terrorism, with Pluto, with the torture of Erishkigal,
 and submitted the torture of Inanna by Erishkigal,
 and so on in the underworld, somehow is associated.
 Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness,
 giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since.
 And in this gain, also, our life, our history of the human species,
 going more and more into the evil, the demonic,
 the evolutionarily unsuccessful forms of society.
 That's the one, two, three of it.
 I see. So you're in favor of the kind of four theories of the unconscious.
 Yes. One from which, if we adopted, we could seek also to escape,
 we would have a mechanism to escape, because we have a historical map, as it were, of the creation itself.
 How would escape happen?
 We would bring unconsciousness back into consciousness.
 We would take the deck furniture from the lower floors of the boat back up to the deck where it belongs.
 We would take back what's happening if, I mean, this is just an example of the chaos theory
 of the bifurcation or creation of the unconscious.
 In this case, we see that science, which is the main temple of law and order,
 is now having to eat humble pie and to accept chaos again.
 That's a good thing, I think, for our future.
 And this good thing is apparently happening, more or less accidentally.
 But suppose that we had this talk in 1960,
 and we decided that we would try to do something which would,
 something intentional, to restore Tiamat to her throne,
 to bring up chaos from the unconscious and make it okay.
 Then we'd hunt around for these computer people, we'd locate Ed Lorenz,
 we'd popularize his model, we'd revolutionize the sciences on purpose in 1963,
 instead of waiting for it to happen spontaneously in 1973.
 And if we'd done that, we'd never know, but that it would never have happened without our intentional intervention.
 So I'm not recommending an intentional intervention.
 I'm just saying that if some of these things are brought into consciousness,
 that the little that we do in our lives for the future generations,
 that consists of this discussion alone, maybe all that it takes, you see,
 to bring something back from the basement, to put it in consciousness,
 starting a new upward spiral somewhere in the evolution of the spirit.
 Could it be that the unconscious was created?
 Could it be that there was a time in history before which there was no unconscious,
 there was no split, there was only one,
 which you wouldn't know whether to call it conscious or unconscious.
 I mean, we don't know what consciousness means,
 except to say it's the other one from unconsciousness.
 What do you imagine caused this bifurcation?
 I don't know.
 I know that in historical time we have this horrific story,
 Babylonian myth, in the sense of myth as the lyric of the opera,
 which is a ritual,
 and that all the rest of this story had Sumerian precedence, and this part didn't.
 So I'm not able to say, to speculate, that this had a 2,000-year history before Marduk.
 Marduk was the city god of Babylon, and there was a time when Babylon didn't exist.
 Other towns existed. Eridu existed in 2000 B.C.
 Ur existed in Sumerian time, and they had their city gods.
 Every city in that early urban revolution,
 every city coalesced around a god or goddess,
 and the form of the goddess was materialized in the form of the city,
 and this is the whole idea of the sacred city.
 The god concepts, or goddess concepts, which were successful, which were attractors,
 created cities, and the other ones didn't,
 and you had, therefore, a kind of a morphogenesis
 in the full complex of population movement, urban technology, city design,
 and religion, ritual, and so on,
 and the successful ones accreted with other ones,
 and syncretism was the way in which empires were created.
 So before 2000 B.C., we didn't have Marduk. This didn't exist.
 Belmorodach, he was called, and this was a synchronism from previous elements.
 So there are books about the serpent, about dragon image in mythology,
 and many cultures have dragon images,
 and they're all associated with chaos, and basically they're okay.
 Suddenly, we have St. George killing the dragon.
 We have St. Michael with his foot on the dragon's throat.
 We have all this energy given to killing the dragons in Celtic mythology in England,
 coming over into Christianity, and so on.
 Now, I think it's important that that be undone.
 I think we want St. George and the dragon getting it on together
 in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted.
 I think it's possible that this particular bifurcation has to do with the patrilineal necessity
 of knowing who is the father of the children,
 and therefore the rejection of the ritual in which sexual license was an important part of the play,
 and that this patrilineal structure involved with the creation of the nuclear family
 brought about the rejection of the dragon, and the killing of the dragon, and so on.
 But this is a speculation. I don't know.
 Lately, I've come to think it'd be nice to have a competing theory.
 I'm not sure we can blame everything on the patriarchal structure.
 But now you're suggesting that it was the concern for male paternity that drove the breakdown of this whole thing.
 That drove the goddess, yes.
 We couldn't have this goddess around who liked to seduce young men, and so on.
 Well, the suppression of psychedelics comes at that same phase,
 because the orgies driven by the psychedelic religion
 completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity.
 The rejection of psychedelics and shamanism and so on could be likewise associated.
 So now we're getting a certain collage of bifurcation events.
 And only so-called primitive societies have shamans.
 They have psychedelic rituals on a weekly basis.
 And they believe that spirits are alive in rocks and plants.
 And they believe this because they've seen them.
 And they believe in the reincarnation of the spirit,
 and that a human soul could reincarnate in an animal, and so on.
 So it's possible that a whole complex of things all disappeared at the same time
 because of some evolutionary selection, some unnatural selection, as it were.
 And it might be important to try to figure out the mechanism of this fall,
 because this is a really big fall.
 And now, since these thousands of years,
 we're suffering from the loss of this whole complex of ideas together.
 And I don't know if there's any one of them which is the cause.
 I'm not sure they were simultaneous,
 or if there was one place in the world where they were simultaneous.
 I can't accept blindly the theory of the Kurgan waves, the three Kurgan waves, and so on.
 I think that over time, these mushroom-using people in the Sahara
 were transformed unwittingly into mead cults by a scarcity of mushrooms,
 and the recognition that honey was a potential preserving medium for the mushroom.
 So as the mushrooms became rarer and rarer,
 the effort to preserve them in honey and to concentrate the use of them into large festivals intensified.
 And finally, what you had were mead festivals,
 where mushrooms were no more than a flavoring and ultimately no more than a memory.
 And that the shift from the psychology of a psilocybin mushroom cult
 to the psychology of a beer mead intoxicating cult
 is precisely the difference in emphasis of inner dynamics that would shift you
 from a partnership arrangement sensitive to social cuing
 to a patriarchal relationship insensitive to social cuing,
 and that's precisely the effect of your biology.
 So first the mead, then the patriarchy?
 The patriarchy and the mead evolved together along with the concern for male paternity.
 It had to do with the suppression of orgies.
 This was a critical decision that had to be faced.
 Basically, the choice was between fun and full knowledge of the flow of your genes.
 Once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue,
 then the concept "mine" comes into existence.
 My women, in this case. My women.
 And then my children, and then my food, my weapons, my land.
 And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundary-dissolving mushroom religion
 was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention
 to keep that kind of a psychology from getting at all.
 Well, maybe it was an accident. You see, an accident in the kitchen.
 That mead took over just because, well, the climate warmed up
 and there was no other way to preserve it or something.
 And after the mead entered the kitchen by accident, and then all these other shifts followed.
 So this would be an alternative to the Kergan Wave theory.
 This is an alternative to the Kergan Wave theory.
 Well, I like that. I like that, Terence. I think we need an alternative.
 Well, you see, it would happen quite naturally.
 You have this flourishing mushroom cult on the plains of Africa,
 and then the drying which created that situation continues,
 and you get, first of all, seasonality to the mushroom.
 So that's all right. You just have these wonderful, huge, seasonal celebrations,
 and your psychology can be basically intact.
 But then as the drying continues, and the water holes are further and further apart,
 the need to preserve the sacrament and to spread it ever more thinly...
 I mean, this is how... this is the only scenario I can imagine
 by which psychedelic mysteries are lost,
 is if they actually slowly fade from the zone of occupation of the culture using them,
 and a substitute slowly takes their place in a way that is at least satisfyingly...
 Booze.
 Booze. They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors of orr.
 The two-phase theory, the psychedelic partnership phase or the alcoholic dominator phase.
 This is one of them.
 Drug-driven phase transformation repeating itself endlessly, flip-flop, see-saw,
 in the history of consciousness. I like that.
 And there's historical evidence as well in Crete,
 where we see this phase-reversal phenomenon went on into historical times, ending there,
 because the Dionysian ceremonies were apparently debased into alcoholic revels,
 and Orpheus was a reformer trying to get the Dionysian religion back on track, as it were,
 with psychedelics and away from the booze.
 And it happened again with Pythagoras and again with Buddha and so on.
 Well, and it happened with Dionysius turning into Bacchus.
 Into Bacchus. Then it was the vine. It was wine.
 The early Bacchus is a frightening figure whose practitioners fell into such frenzies of ecstasy
 that it was charged against them that they devoured their own children.
 The late, hairy-footed, lascivious Bacchus is simply an image of the alcohol consciousness made concrete.
 So if we took this theory seriously for a moment, which we won't too seriously,
 this two-phase theory, and then we favored one phase and the other phase,
 and then we would seek the mechanism of a phase transition,
 as you turn on heat under water and it boils or something.
 Then we would try to get psychedelic drugs back into the agenda and somehow get rid of alcohol.
 And this would then explain why alcohol is legal and marijuana is not in these societies and so on.
 There is some self-preservation function.
 There is a phase-maintaining mechanism within this phase, which has made it dominant this past 6,000 years.
 Well, it's because it reinforces male dominance.
 Why? Why?
 Because if you technically analyze what alcohol does pharmacologically,
 it actually does diminish sensitivity to social cuing.
 This is a technical way of saying you turn into a boar and an oaf.
 Zombie.
 No. A libidinally driven oaf is what you turn into.
 And because you now have a reduced sensitivity to social cuing,
 and your normal good sense is impaired, you're prepared to make a sexual conquest.
 And most of the sexual neurosis of the Western civilization
 can be traced to incidents of early sexual imprinting in the presence of alcohol.
 How many women lose their virginity in an ambiance of a drunken, groping encounter?
 I mean, this is how it is normally done in the West.
 So that alcohol is so spun into our simultaneous terror and attraction for the sexual experience
 that it's just become scripted in as part of our cultural neurosis.
 I'm willing to bet that for a thousand years in the West, nobody got laid who wasn't smashed.
 I did.
 This was the period I'm talking about ends before you were born.
 So it's just a matter of-- there's a good point for the discussion.
 The way in which our relationships to the material world, specifically drugs,
 promote or retard the expression of what we're calling the unconscious.
 Because one of the things that I think repels us all about drug abuse
 is that it is unexamined, unconscious behavior.
 And it's worth thinking then about how the unconscious is in a way
 an out-of-dow relationship to the exterior world because we can call it forth.
 We can addict to heroin or television and turn 90% of our lives into an indwelling in the unconscious.
 Yes, well, I do this in my own way.
 I feel that I'm unable to become unaddicted, totally unaddicted.
 But I could be addicted to this or that.
 Right.
 So after I figured that out, I decided not to be addicted to chocolate, ice cream, alcohol,
 and a whole bunch of other things.
 And it seems very easy to make these choices.
 You can replace something with something else.
 You just touch it and it's attractive.
 So then you get pulled away from this one to that one.
 Could this then be inserted in our educational system, rites of passage and so on,
 so that people know that they have a choice
 and they don't have to be addicted only to alcohol and not to anything else,
 and that they could actually choose reclaiming free will without rejecting addiction?
 This is what it has to be because this is the kind of creature we are.
 And the addiction of addictions which spawned this itch originally is no addiction at all,
 but rather our natural connection into the hierarchy of Gaia and information
 that was accessible to us when these nature religions were freely practiced.
 A sacrament is not a symbol.
 And the day they were able to sell people on the notion that a sacrament is a symbol,
 they severed the umbilical connection to the logos
 and then ran off the track and screwed everything up.
 Well, to get back to the conscious and the unconscious here,
 I think it's not necessary to destroy the unconscious
 or to make everything unconscious become conscious,
 but I do think some growth of consciousness could be associated with some shrinkage of unconsciousness.
 If we can't undo this bifurcation in which the curtain was developed,
 at least we could rearrange the furniture a little bit.
 So we see one way that might be relevant for doing this is giving people a wider choice of addictions.
 And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions
 is somehow anti-evolutionary in that promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity,
 and danger to life and limb of the biosphere and so on.
 But what could be done besides somehow diminishing alcoholism in society?
 What could be done for the advance of consciousness to develop kind of telescopes,
 constellorators where we can look into the unconscious and the green?
 I mean, dream analysis just doesn't really do it for people.
 Well, your idea, Rupert, about the age-related reestablishment of shamanic sacraments might come in here.
 I think so, yes. This is the idea that came up at PolyHop recently.
 We're modernizing psychedelics in an age-related manner.
 Already we have age-related legislation.
 Before 18 in Britain it's illegal to buy and consume alcohol. After 18 it's OK.
 Before 16 it's illegal to buy and consume tobacco. After 16 it's OK.
 So now what about legislation?
 Before 30 it's illegal to buy and consume mushrooms. After 30 it's OK.
 Before 40 it's illegal to buy and consume, say, LSD.
 After 40 it's OK. After 50 DMT, etc.
 There's a series of age-related, initiation-related legalizations.
 And your ability to purchase the substance legally after you've reached that age depends on being initiated into it.
 You have to go to the elder in fairness, a person like Asimov, PolyHop, etc.
 Your friends for your 50th birthday know exactly what to do.
 They'd have a whip-round to subscribe for the price of a free gift voucher for a DMT initiation.
 It's valid at either Omega, Asimov, PolyHop or the New York Jail.
 This is a vision you understand.
 Anyway, there's an initiation.
 So there's a series of openings into other realms of perception.
 But you see, I don't think that the problem is so much that the unconscious is a kind of conspiracy or fraud.
 It's the fact that the whole way that nature works in all aspects is through the whole formation of habits.
 And as we know from our own experience, that habit formation involves going into unconsciousness.
 The principle model of which is habituation found among animals right down to the level of stentor, in their unicellular ciliates.
 Habituation, where like when we go into a room and there's a funny smell, you notice it.
 Then after a while you stop noticing it, and the background noises.
 Habituation is the way we actually personally experience and share with the entire animal kingdom
 by going into unconsciousness of a large part of the environmental stimuli and what's acting upon us.
 And it seems that the focus of attention is always quite narrow.
 What sensory systems and unicellular organisms do right through the animal kingdom is perceive differences.
 Differences in smell, differences in temperature, differences in pressure when you move your finger over something.
 All sensory systems, differences in movement.
 Sensory systems work on differences and what becomes conscious of differences.
 And on the surface, as if it's on the entire surface of a largely unconscious system, the shimmering surface,
 where you notice differences, there's a kind of awareness or consciousness of differences.
 But the heart of the whole thing is unconscious habit.
 And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit.
 However conscious we become, we don't become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us
 and the unfolding of human instinctive and cultural habits that have so conditioned our development and our culture.
 So, there's these habits inbuilt in the whole of nature.
 And I don't think there's a kind of sinister conspiracy around consciousness.
 It may be that a sharper awareness of the interface developed at some time. I don't know.
 I mean, maybe perhaps through the psychedelic visions themselves.
 The sense that in certain moments you're conscious of things, and in other moments you're not conscious of.
 You become aware of beings and entities and dimensions, etc. which you're not normally aware of.
 So, it's not that you're conscious all the time, you're conscious sometimes.
 The fact that when you start from habit, that habit is a natural process that occurs in all nature.
 Shimmering on the surface of the habits of atoms, of molecules, of crystals,
 disruptions and chaotic perturbations and so on, like crystal faults and fractures that make each crystal different in a kind of static form.
 And there's a kind of consciousness associated with these discontinuities and differences.
 So, everywhere there's this kind of awareness of difference, which is the kind of consciousness level.
 But below that is a large underground thing of habit or unconsciousness.
 And there's a sense in which shamanic journeyings, ritual practices like an annual liturgical year,
 where, like still today, September 29th, the festival of St. Michael and all angels,
 liturgies and masses for the angels, say it all throughout the Christian world,
 a day of invocation and hymns to the angels.
 It's a day on which you become particularly aware and open to invoke and talk to and communicate with the angelic orders.
 There's a day for it. It's there. Today it's practiced.
 Then there are other days, like All Souls Day, when you communicate through reprieve,
 reprieve masses and relate to the souls of all who depart it.
 Then there are the various saints' days that relate you to the lights,
 the kind of, as you were saying this morning, each saint representing a kind of Christianization of a sort of spirit principle,
 or in some cases even nature's spirit principle.
 The green men.
 The green men, so.
 So you have all this going on.
 So I think that somehow there's the sense in which, through liturgies, through rituals, through psychedelic visioning,
 it's possible to come to bring to awareness, with a whole liturgical calendar,
 all these different qualities celebrated on different days throughout the year.
 This is found in the Barney today, in the Catholic calendar,
 the saints' days and observances throughout the liturgical calendar.
 And in the major festivals, the solar and lunar festivals, like Christmas and Easter.
 So there is this awareness through ritual of all these different dimensions.
 They're brought into awareness, they're normally unconscious,
 but there are particular days in the year when they're brought into consciousness.
 You can't be conscious of everything all the time, we have a limited focus on it, awareness and attention.
 So you're saying the calendar can be an engine for illuminating the unconscious.
 The calendar of rituals that actually achieve opening.
 I think that the theory of habituation, like sensory inhibition,
 it's a good model for the mind in which the whole thing is viewed as essentially unconscious.
 And the consciousness is a little window which rolls over
 and could be redirected at will by a ritual or something at a certain part of the unconscious,
 which would then become, by a voluntary choice, conscious for a day.
 It would have its day of days.
 Yes.
 The unconscious that I was speaking about before is a region of this whole thing
 in which the contents have somehow become unavailable.
 And it's the unavailability that I would identify that as the ultimate unconscious.
 Let's call that then the unavailable unconscious.
 The unavailable unconscious has been growing since a certain time in history,
 where it's not possible to roll the window over it anymore because it's been declared illegal.
 Because it doesn't, I think perhaps because it doesn't have its day.
 Yes.
 The orgy principle had its day and still does in Indian holy festivals,
 you know, in the sun and throw those, have panic recessions and so on.
 So, and reversals of the social order, those kinds of things are very alive in India.
 There's all these different principles throughout the year,
 which we find mirrored in carnival and Mardi Gras and so on,
 the same kinds of festivals you see suppressed in the Protestant countries
 through the Reformation.
 So no longer does the goddess have her day in the various Marian festivals.
 All these female saints and St. Francis and all the rest no longer have their days.
 The eight days of the angels are not observed.
 Only the most important biblical festivals like Easter and of course Christmas.
 And so there was a great shrinking of the number of observed days.
 And, you know, and St. Mammon doesn't have an observed day,
 and the goddess doesn't have an observed day.
 All these principles are entirely unconscious in our culture
 because they're not collectively and publicly observed.
 So I think that probably the traditional model for bringing to consciousness
 what is so largely unconscious, not necessarily through an evil conspiracy
 or names of ignorance or anything like that,
 but simply through the natural tendency to habituation observed
 in the operation of all sensory systems everywhere.
 Things that remain the same are not perceived, whereas differences are.
 So unconsciousness proceeds by a lack of attention, as it were,
 only by focusing attention and having days and special rituals and so on
 we could maintain consciousness.
 We would have to work at the maintenance of consciousness
 as we work at the maintenance of the garden,
 keep weeding and watering and so on.
 And these mythic festivals you talked about were obviously a way of doing that.
 You re-enact every year the drama of the myths.
 So that you bring the myths to consciousness and make them,
 seen by the senses, heard, enacted and real in the sense of the king's concert,
 the king's margie or whatever.
 Yes, well...
 So, and it happens on particular days in the year, that's how it works,
 that our attention is selective, and this has always been based on seasonal festivals
 and tangible calendars and so forth.
 So you're saying everything tends toward unconsciousness,
 and it's only by this act of awareness, pushing against this universal principle,
 that we illuminate phenomena in consciousness.
 Yes, and I think this relates to Raoul's model of the spirit,
 where he told us that on the one hand you have the soul,
 and on the other hand what you have, the body,
 and the spirit's what mediates between them.
 Well, it's interesting in the late medieval or renaissance theory,
 or certainly the 17th century theory,
 the animal spirits were what mediated between the psyche, the soul,
 or the... of the person, and the body.
 They were in an intermediate position, the animal spirits.
 Nerve impulses were thought to be due to animal spirits by the Incarnate.
 So the spirit is, if it's the surface or the interface between them,
 then it's that part which picks up differences,
 and in which differences can only be known through an awareness of differences.
 Anywhere differences can be perceived,
 or you have to have a larger space within which it's seen as a difference.
 And that means difference is defined relative to non-difference,
 or sameness, or steady habit, or whatever.
 It's measured against a background of unconscious habit, which isn't changing.
 Or by clock time as a model for that.
 So, that it's differences, and it's therefore differences that would be observed throughout...
 Guy would be very conscious during Ice Ages,
 because things would be changing at the beginnings and the ends of Ice Ages.
 There'd be a tremendous difference going on, and Guy would come to a higher consciousness,
 as Guy must be coming to a higher consciousness now, through these large ecological changes.
 So that's... history is triggering this awareness.
 Something like that.
 But it's to do with differences, and it's to do with rates of change,
 that consciousness or awareness are concerned.
 You know, in sensory physiology, the whole thing is to do with all these laws, logarithmic laws,
 about sensory perception of rates of change.
 Ten times increase in stimulus strength,
 usually represents a two-fold increase in subjective stimulus.
 A hundredfold, threefold. It's a logarithmic scale.
 That the senses work on pretty universally.
 Well, I think this is right. This is good.
 This is a theory of the importance of holidays.
 But there's still something wrong, because through the annual repetition of Christmas,
 which persists to this day, the consciousness is still gone,
 because there's not enough difference, I guess.
 Every year, Christmas is the same.
 I mean, people have... have they not completely forgotten the significance of Christmas?
 It's possible to experience Christmas with full regalia of angels on the trees and so on,
 and still to not have any awakening into consciousness of lost archetypes.
 That's precisely why Christmas is a child's festival,
 and why the delight of Christmas is experienced by everyone.
 The ideal archetypal delight of it is young children waking up on Christmas Day
 and seeing the stars and the angels, the sun and the bells and the presents.
 And the magic of Christmas is considered to work for young children.
 Adults feel somewhat guilty about being jaded about it,
 and it is a great impasse to recapture it through the delight of young children.
 And since it's a young children festival, it's a nativity festival,
 it's a child festival, a sacred child festival.
 That's the pole it touches in us, the sacred child.
 So I think that that's what that particular festival is about,
 and I think that it operates quite well in this way, as a reminder and reactivator.
 So it works a few times.
 I think it has a particular, because of its ritual power,
 there are a lot of people who only go to Church of Christmas, for example.
 It's very common in England, the Church of England,
 you have lots of people go to Christmas in Easter, you never normally go at all.
 And so there are some people whose connection with the Christian faith
 is confined to these major seasonal festivals.
 It therefore still has a kind of pulse, the basic ritual pulse of the seasonal festival year,
 of the liturgical year, is still alive, however sluggishly, in a lot of people.
 So it's not that most people have forgotten it.
 But one thing I think, one of the troubles with Terence and his suggestions is that
 they're usually, the ideal state that he usually portrays,
 like his idea of moving over to an entirely lunar calendar
 to provide feminine virtues and partnership families,
 his ideal predictions usually turn out to be being realized
 and often refuted by the world of Islam.
 Like the lunar calendar.
 That's true, they were big on that.
 And the other thing is that they were big on banning alcohol.
 One of the most important Quranic prohibitions is on intoxicating drink.
 And the result therefore is that many Muslims, mainstream Muslim culture,
 and certainly on the surface of righteous Muslim life,
 alcohol is not consumed.
 But, in most Muslim societies, cannabis has been considered alright.
 It's still an intoxicant and still falls under a kind of Quranic prohibition,
 but not one that's taken as seriously as the prohibition of alcohol.
 That's right. No, that's a good point, you're right.
 So Islamic culture is a culture that the drug of which is cannabis,
 the largest part of Islamic law, rather than alcohol.
 Yes, although whether Islam has a drug at all could be argued.
 I mean, perhaps the drug of the Islamic world is coffee.
 Caffeine is more typical of the state of mind we associate
 with most of the denizens of that part of the world,
 rather than the affable states induced by cannabis.
 It's the shrill argumentative and mercenary arguments of the marketplace.
 And coffee managed to take that basic foothold and ride itself into every labor contract on earth.
 It's the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break.
 They don't have smoking breaks, you mean, at factories in the Muslim world.
 No, they never. That's right. They don't have cannabis breaks.
 Do they have cannabis parties on the weekend?
 I think cannabis is associated with the mystical strain in Islam that's definitely minority
 and doesn't really, when it has shaped Islamic culture, it's been episodic and far in the past.
 Did you catch that part where Terence said that he thought that the only way
 the psychedelic mysteries could have been lost was through climate changes
 that caused the plants and mushrooms to become ever more scarce until they disappeared,
 along with the knowledge about how to use them.
 And it made me think, wonder a little bit about whether the internet might play a role
 in preserving psychedelic knowledge this time around.
 Of course, what if the net goes down in some kind of a new dark age?
 I can't really foresee that right now, but hey, then again,
 I never thought my good old 8-track tapes would ever become obsolete either.
 So just to be sure that the core of this vitally important information isn't lost,
 everyone who can might want to think about buying a copy of Pichal and Tikal,
 both by Anne and Sasha Shulgin.
 If you haven't already seen these valuable books, you might want to check them out,
 particularly if you're one of these chemists out there.
 I think the Shulgins still have some copies left that you can order from their publishing company,
 Transform Press, which is at Box 13675, Berkeley, CA, 94712.
 Or if you want to buy them through Amazon, I've put links to them at the top of our Amazon store page
 at www.matrixmasters.com.
 I've kind of let the email pile up these past few weeks,
 but there are a couple of things that came up that I'd like to mention.
 And the first one, I think, is one I've mentioned before,
 but maybe some of you missed that program, so I need to bring it up again.
 And that is the fact that if you write to me and ask about where you can obtain any illegal substance,
 well, you're simply not going to hear back from me.
 At least for the time being, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is still in place, somewhat,
 and it allows us to discuss these sacred medicines in almost any kind of way we want to.
 The thing we can't do, however, is talk about how and where to get them.
 But please don't think that I don't understand how you feel when you're essentially out there on your own
 without any connections to the worldwide psychedelic community.
 I was in exactly the same place about ten years ago.
 I'd moved to a new state, didn't know anybody there,
 I didn't feel like I could trust anybody at work to talk to about it.
 In short, I just thought I'd run out of options.
 So how did things change for me, you ask?
 Well, I went to hear Terrence McKenna talk at Omega Institute in New York.
 And he told me about the Entheobotany Conference in Blanque, Mexico,
 and it was at that conference that the door kind of opened to this community for me.
 Unfortunately, that conference series no longer exists.
 So where does that leave us today?
 Well, here are three events that might hold some promise for you to meet like-minded people.
 And I'm sure that there are more of these going on as well.
 The first one is taking place on April 20th in Amsterdam.
 And you can learn more about this event at www.dopefiend.co.uk.
 And listen to the Dopecast for more information.
 I'm not sure exactly what kind of event this is,
 but it sounds really similar to the Cannabis Cup parties that are held every November.
 And my guess is it won't be as big as the Cup, which had over 2,000 people there the year I attended.
 But with the crew from the Cannabis Podcast Network as a part of it,
 I'm sure that you'll have a great time there.
 Hard not to have a good time in Amsterdam, isn't it?
 And the next big event that I know about will be from June 13th through the 17th in Costa Rica.
 And this is John Hanna's 2007 Mindstates Conference.
 While John does a large conference every other year in the States,
 I've been told by several people who attended the alternative ones out of the country
 that they are the closest conferences you're going to find to the original Entheobotany series in Palenque.
 And I'm not sure where the ticket sales on that conference stand right now,
 but I think John keeps attendance at these out-of-country events down to around 100 people or so.
 So if you're thinking about going, you might want to get your reservation in early.
 And all the information about that conference is online at Mindstates.org.
 And of course the third event that I'd recommend is Burning Man.
 And now the problem is that it's really expensive to go to any of these events.
 And there's no getting around that fact.
 When I was working in the corporate world, it didn't seem too bad.
 I just took several short vacations each year to attend a couple of conferences.
 But now that I'm essentially in the same boat that a lot of students are,
 I don't have much disposable income.
 And so in my case, rather than do something different each year,
 at least for the time being, I've decided to just go to Burning Man each year and pass on the others.
 And for those of you who can't make any events like these this year,
 well, that's one of the main reasons that I'm doing these podcasts.
 At least this way you can get some of the information that's available.
 It's not as good as being there, of course,
 mainly because the thing that sets these other events apart is the people that you're going to meet there.
 They're really spectacular crowds, usually.
 But let me circle back to where I started here and say that you shouldn't expect to find sources for any illegal substances
 simply by showing up at a conference or two.
 Thanks to the draconian laws that have made outlaws out of people who ingest certain plants and chemicals,
 our community has become wary of strangers.
 So my advice is not to be a stranger.
 Attend as many events like these as you can get to and get to know the people there.
 And more importantly, let them get to know you.
 Even the narcs do it this way, which of course makes it even more difficult for good guys like you and me.
 But that's the way the game is being played these days.
 So let's just hope that the rules become a little more sensible before much longer.
 I said that's the first thing I want to talk about.
 And there are a couple of other email topics I'd like to get to today.
 But if I don't quit talking pretty soon, I'm not going to get this program posted.
 So I guess I better sign off.
 Before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the
 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 License.
 If you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
 which you can find at www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 And if you still have any questions, you can send them to me in the email.
 The address is lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 Thanks again to Jacques, Cordell, and Wells for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
 I hope you guys are going to have a terrific year this year.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
 Be well, my friends.
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