Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic space. I'm Lorenzo and I'm here to talk about the unconscious. Since I've got a few things I want to comment on at the end of this program, I'm going to keep this introduction mercifully short and get right into today's trial log. What I'm going to do is to begin by playing the last few minutes of the previous side of this tape to give us a little continuity from the last program. We'll begin with Terrence McKenna's thoughts about the drug of choice for Islam. Yes, although whether Islam has a drug at all could be argued. 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 have. 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. Oh, I think in India today there's a very strong cannabis element to Islamic culture. It's the drug that most young Muslims will smoke or take rather than alcohol. Many of them will have tried it and certainly know its use. And there are certain Sufi daggers near Hyderabad where they dance into frenzies and so on on the annual festivals and so on, where in that kind of Sufi shrine, smoking cannabis is quite normal. It's, you know, fakirs smoke it like Hindu holy men. And although it's not exactly all right from the point of view of Islam, it's the drug of choice. And also I went to a dagger in Srinagar in Kashmir where it was a Sufi shrine and in it was the cannabis room where they had it legally on sale, hashish, and people sitting around smoking in the Sufi shrine. There's a special room for smoking room attached to the shrine. So I went with my friend, I was staying with him, we sat down and we had to smoke there. It was a fairly depressing place in the sense that most people there were the derelicts of society. And it was a little bit like a kind of wino atmosphere. And one could see why the prejudice against cannabis develops in Islamic countries as well. Because it's associated with the kind of wino down and out derelict. What's missing is the ritual, the calendric ritual, the ritual use, the guided trip that maintains a culture. Well, Cannabis Day, the Indians have the holy plant Tulsi. I'm sure there's a Tulsi Day and they pay honor to the Tulsi plant every day by walking around it. Women do the Basil. They did it at the house where I lived in Hyderabad. Every morning they'd touch the plant, do a little pooja and walk around it, second ambulate, and light a incense stick, just as part of their morning ritual. So here's a sacred plant associated with fertility and women's rights and powers. It's interesting, it means king, doesn't it, in English, Basil. So if there were, for example, Cannabis Day, you'd have days in which these different principles were recognized. There could be a booze day, that would be okay. There could be a booze day, yes, indeed, there'd be a booze festival, like the Scottish... The Hockenhalian Festival. The Hogmanay, I mean, that's the usual, the traditional booze festival at Hogmanay, New Year's. And addiction would be controlled by rotating it around the different crops, as we're told, to avoid food allergies by changing our staple food every five days. So you'd have a calendar round of intoxicants, each one associated with a particular asterism on the horizon, or something like that. Yes. Since the plants are already associated with celestial bodies and medieval herbals, there's already this association in herbalism. In some cases it would merely be a matter of looking it up, I mean, recovering your perception, because they had perceptions of these relations. Well, maybe we could have a practical step toward the resurrection of this cycle, just through the publication of a calendar, in which the associations are mentioned and recommended. Such things almost already exist, don't they, Sacred Day calendars? I've seen several versions, none with plants. But with plants and addictions, is there a booze day and a candle day? Oh, no, I don't think it's got to the stage of new dates being appropriately... Oh, we'd have to add that in. The choice of dates and everything... I think it means the Alexandria Institute or the Deac Society, or somebody could be induced to publish this project. Well, I think as long as cannabis day occurs more frequently than once in the solar round, I'll be able to... We could associate it with something fast, like mercury. Half a month, one day in the lunar cycle, each lunar cycle, would be cannabis day, I would think. Yes, or possibly... Well, there'll be lobbies, I suppose, for every plant. I think weekly would probably be best, since it would become a foundational thing. You see, the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, taken weekly by most people, involves the sacred sanctification of wine. The ritual element, the central sacrificial element, is wine, and there's no doubt that alcohol has this, and the fermentation and the corn and all those kinds of things are a central part of these mysteries, ancient mysteries, come in the Christian form. Is wine on Saturday, beginning maybe at Friday sundown? Yes, well, I think... Cannabis on Sunday, beginning with Friday. I think cannabis on Friday, actually, because cannabis is the day, the Islamic Sabbath. I mean, it's the Jewish Shekinah day. Friday is this day of prayers of Muslims, and it's their most sacred day, and cannabis is their... If anything's their sacred plant, this is it. Then Friday is also... Friday evening is also the invocation of the Shekinah in the Jewish custom, the invocation of the feminine presence of God, or the Sabbath bride, by the woman lighting the candles at sunset on Friday evening. Well, Robin Sylvan, you know, has re-adopted this invocation of the Sabbath bride, and like other Jews who've been to these Jewish revival weekends led by Lynn Gottlieb and people, it's all to do with reconnecting with the sacred festivals and observing the Sabbath as the first step, and actually sacralizing the flow of time. He's done it by... They light the candles and then they smoke together and talk. And that's Friday evening, their evening for meeting, in a kind of sacramental spirit. And so Friday's the cannabis day, and I think that's probably a good day for it. It's also the goddess day, you see, Friday, Freya, Venus day. So I'd advance Friday as my top choice for cannabis day. Beginning Friday at sundown, you mean? Yes. And then Saturday at sundown, alcohol day. Yes, Saturday at sundown, alcohol day. Monday morning, one takes coffee. Coffee day tea. Coffee, yes, Tuesday tea. And Wednesday, presumably DMT. We need rituals so that when consciousness is restored by difference through the change of the medium, as it were, then this consciousness would be focused on some submerged furniture through an actual ritual associated, as this Friday night ritual was associated with the Shekinah. And well, Sunday is the sun, so here we could have the salutation to the sun. Yes, so namaskar. Namaskar. Monday we could have... Sunrise, Sunday sunrise. Monday... Well, moon festivals. We could have a moon observance. I mean, actually it'd be quite easy to reclaim the week because the names are all still there. Yes, the week is a good way to go, I think. Annual is too slow for modern society. Oh, I think annuals are a really good one as well. Yes. Well, you have these many cycles running and then... Well, seasons. For people to be unconscious of the seasons in modern cities, this is really... Well, notice that what you end up suggesting is that the reclamation of the unconscious has to do with directing attention into time. Using these mechanisms... That time is the body of the unconscious, apparently. Well, time is the mediator of the differences. Time is the enemy of habituation. Time is the strategy subverting sensory attention. Time is the theater of habituation as well. So time and attention used creatively banish the unconscious. Well, I don't know how they... They banish it on an annual basis. And they still mean that a lot of these things go unconscious again for much of the year, but they keep each aspect of the collective consciousness, which is far larger than the everyday consciousness, because it includes all the mythic and ceremonial realms, by this annual connection they keep the whole collective consciousness aware and acknowledging on a systematic basis these different dimensions of that. So symbolically the unconscious is death. Symbolically the unconscious is death. Yes, because it's the absence of awareness. Or is it sleep? It's sleep and death, which are often equated. And so then if sleep and death are the principal images of the unconscious, we then have the curious intermediate form of dreams, which are intermediate between unconscious and conscious life in some sense. They're conscious after a form, but not fully conscious, and they occur when we're unconscious and we rapidly forget them. And a role for meditation in maintaining consciousness through voluntary fluctuation of difference in awareness. Well, in the annual cycle, people should become, and we should become, more aware of the zodiacal sign, not the fictitious zodiacal sign of Western modern astrology, but the actual asterism in the sky through which the sun is now passing. And we become much more aware of the movements of the heavens. If for example Thursday, Thor's day, or Jupiter's day, Jover D, is associated with Jupiter as it is, or Saturday with Saturn, that on those days you actually see those planets in the sky, you learn where they are, and you know on those days where to look to them, because you have to direct your consciousness towards them to come under the beneficent influence of their principal. And even if they're up in daytime, you can still be aware of what part of the sky they're in. Exactly. And the rituals of these different days would involve actually connecting with the intelligences of the planets, which is what the names of the days are named after. Which would be sort of accelerators in public places, like a big tube which is aimed at the place in the sky where Jupiter is, and a little clock adjustment, and you just go up when you're passing by, and through looking through it, you're aware of the fact that even if you can't see it, because it's daytime, that's where Jupiter is. That's right. Thursday. And then these things are set either by a technician or by some remote control program more easily. So the next day you'd have Venus, Friday, and then Saturday you'd have Saturn. And each day there'd be a renewed awareness of the planetary bodies, and you might also have to include something for the more recently discovered ones, Pluto, and Uranus, and so on. Well, several days would have two readings. But this then would be returning onto a modern version of those medieval cathedral clocks that show all the astronomical configurations. They should be in towers, but of course these towers will be associated with the stars. They'll be shopping malls instead of the cathedrals and abbeys and so on, because shopping malls are actually the modern equivalent of the medieval abbey. I see. They've always seemed to me the most desolate and desanctified of places. Well, I was at Glastonbury Abbey recently, and they have, you know, in a little museum, and then there are drawings and reconstructions of the place, and there's this huge - outside the wall - there's this huge market which goes on, which is exactly like a shopping mall. They're just all selling things, and shopping malls are really like bazaars, you see, because you have one big building and then you have little shops with no walls around. They're souks. Yes. And the only thing missing, of course, is the actual abbey. A mere detail, because a bank sits in its place. But we'll put that back. We'll know where to put it, you see, because we have to put it back in the middle of commerce where people like to go for shopping. And then between the jewellery store and the grocery store, one would pass by this tower, which if you felt like it, you could ascend and then have, take the Darshan of Jupiter and Pluto. Yes. Somehow I so hate shopping malls that I'd rather be able to go to it without having to go past all these shops. Yes, I would too, but... So we have to have the freestanding version, or the ancient sacred site version as well. Yes. Because if these things are placed on sacred sites within each, you know, like each town had its temple or sacred site. You could have a sacred centre of each place where this is. Well, in North America we don't have sacred sites. Only in Europe you have them. Here we have... Well, these would be on Native American sacred sites. Disneyland, and, well, there's Yellowstone, there's big mountains, geysers, and some natural features where people go. But we don't have this thousands of historical sites that people like to visit on the weekends. All right. Well, then we just have a few of these. And they'd be made for a limited edition to start with, and they'd be installed at Esalen, Hollyhock, Omega, etc. Yeah. Places where a daily ability to be related to the reigning planet would actually intrigue a lot of people who came here to look through. And it would be a novel feature. Everyone would talk about it. It would be extremely... it would be fairly easy to make, especially if it were meant to be operated. It would have to be a staff position, you see, where these work-study scholars, they call them here, rotate. They're quite happy at their work because they rotate the job. So they have this novelty factor. Five days of dishes, and then suddenly you're doing the sheets. Then you're out cutting the lawn. Well, one of the jobs would have to be the maintenance of the tubes pointing at the heavens. And the person who did this would have a, you know, a dunce cap and a long robe of linen, and go about setting, you know, maybe there'd be a little pyramid, a truncated pyramid with a top, and you'd climb up the stairs like in the Yucatan. And then you have these tubes pointing and a little plaque that explains. So one person would come properly dressed every morning and adjust them for the day's planet. Like those Arabic or Mughal observatories like you see in Delhi. You know, they're like parks where there's one where you go up a long ramp and that gives you a view on something. And then there are all these different ramps and tubes and sort of semi-circular, so you can get all different viewing angles. That's exactly it. It's a kind of astronomical theme park in a way. You've got all these apparatuses which actually enable it to become a reality for you, in relation, by walking into it and climbing up stairs and moving around in it. They're like revival parks. So I think Stonehenge and those places must have had something of this quality. They still function in this way for a lot of people. So the thing is, it's not difficult to construct Henge-like structures or these astronomical tube setups. So we'd start with a few selected places. A kit that could probably be mounted on a sort of couple of yards square area. A Henge kit. A Henge kit. Well, this would first be the tube kit, the celestial observation kit. With mini-Henge would be the first product. Yes. And then we'd have the complete Henge kit, which for use at schools, institutions, etc., where people have got commanding views and large... or farmers or open-air entrepreneurs in the countryside. You'd have these Henge kits established, where you've got the entire line of view of... if you sit in the centre of the exact horizon position of midsummer sunrise, equinoxes, the rising points of the moon through its 18-year cycle of moving along the different points. All these marked out by the coordinates of Henge with a booklet, maybe a computer program explaining exactly which ones to look for when. And then relation to the heavenly bodies through sitting in the centre of a Henge could become, again, a living experience for millions of people. Civic parks could have them. I think people would go for it too, because they would find out through experience that something actually does happen to you when you look at that part of the sky, that the direct sight, personal observation of the sky has this effect on consciousness that's cheap, it's easy to obtain, and it's fun, it's popular as Disneyland. Exactly. So if this kit were designed, first the tube kit and then the Henge kit, based on a reliable study of ancient Henge monuments, including woodhenge, the materials used, it could be wood you see, because woodhenge, or it could be stone, in which case we would have to send out just a, it would simply be an instruction manual for the kind of local stone to use. A computer program could be used too. Yes, and also help with the alignment of the stones, although the best way in fact to do it would be to do it in reality, to go to the central point and observe the sunrise on the summer solstice, and mark the point, and actually do it by observation. Sunrise observation is the easiest one to understand. So a live arising of Venus, that's harder. Somewhat tricky. You have to recognise Venus. And you have to watch for several days. And then so much would be reclaimed, which the remnants are still there in the names of the days and the months and all these saints' days and so on. The remnants are everywhere. They're reclaimable. It's probably not too late. That's right. And the other thing is that the idea of a quality of time, which is what this is about, the idea that time has its qualities, is something that already has a popular following, and millions who follow astrology in a vague or professional, more professional way. Well, the horoscopes and the newspapers. Exactly. There's a vast, I mean, it's not as if this is a new or esoteric idea. It's in fact much more popular among uneducated than among educated. Any other pagan element suppressed by modern science, this is the most popular one, is political astrology. The popular faith that time does in fact have variable qualities. And the times of birth, etc., moments of important events, etc. Judicial astrology. I mean, who is doing the horoscope of August 2nd and the invasion of Kuwait and so on? Someone, I'm sure. Oh, I'm sure they are. But probably the United Nations is not consulting it. Probably not. But maybe Saddam Hussein is. Maybe he is. But elective astrology, which is the kind most commonly used in India, like picking the right date for a wedding or for starting a new business or something, I suppose it may be, I don't know whether Saddam Hussein is using that kind of astrology. Maybe not. Well, if hengekets were about, and people then became, recovered their consciousness of the sky, then they'd be more interested in elective astrology because it would mean something in terms of their experience of watching the sky. That's right. And present day astrology has got detached from observation. It's detached. It may be detached from the sky. My complete, my endless complaint to astrologers is that I've never found one who can actually point to me the positions of the planets. If I ask, "Where's Jupiter tonight?" Astrologers don't know any more than anyone else. Hardly anyone knows. No, because the official zodiac has got separated from the real zodiac by the procession of the equinox. So this thing with these henge monuments would have, they'd connect us with the sky, and in that sense, through making us conscious of the quality of time and the relationship of the Earth to the larger celestial organism, would obviously create, by direct experience, some awareness of the heavens. I think people are probably even more, they're more unconscious of the heavens than the Earth right now. I mean, most people literally don't know what the different constellations are, what phase of the moon it is. Modern city life leads to an almost unconsciousness of the heavenly realm. Whereas we're very conscious of the Earth realm in terms of we know about the cause of the Earth, we know about, you know, everyone knows geology and tectonic plates and stuff. Our attention is Earth-directed, very much so. So this heavenly connection is obviously an important step. And then there's the only other question I can think of, is the realm of psychedelics and the rediscovery of the realms of the unconscious. Presumably different drugs, different psychedelics and different other drugs, tune one into different realms of the otherwise habituated or possible, or areas of more morphic fields. Different spheres of human experience, there's the alcohol sphere, there's the LSD sphere, there's the heroin sphere. Incidentally, the heroin's legal too, if you think about it, it's legal for people who are dying. Yes. In our society, it's the officially recognized drug of death. And it's admissible to use it in hospices, heroin and morphine, to dying patients, to ease them through the pains of death. So it is legal in our society, but it's the death drug. Yes, you have to retain a certain, not only age, but a state. Yes. Of death, or near death. So it's interesting, that's another example of a legal drug that's legal under certain conditions but not others. It occurred to me that heroin and opium, easing the pains of death aspect of those drugs, has a kind of traditional lineage of, you know, opium is a kind of pain killer that's long been known, and as a visionary substance, it's a long... A dream drug. A long lineage, it's a dream drug, dream and death drug. Whereas cocaine, because in its original form taken by Indians when climbing hills and so on, was a work drug, and indeed that's what it still is for the yuppie cocaine takers that we read about in magazines. That's right. So they have qualities, drugs have qualities, and they open up different realms of experience. And so there'd be different drug days and different thresholds, initiation through life and that kind of thing. But still we'd have to ask the question, how do these visions, which are the most intense that certainly I've experienced, how do these visions relate to the actual unconscious or consciousness of the natural world? Or how much are they mansions created by the human imagination? That the astral plane, as it were, has a cumulative memory of all previous journeys on it, and certain recurrent kinds of dream fantasy, adventure, dream archetypal progress, a kind of morphic fields in that realm. So there's all these things that have ever happened in that realm, including adventures, constructions, creations, experiences, surprises, interpretations, that have occurred to previous psychedelic voyagers. So there's this cumulative geography. A kind of a Kafschick record. Yes. And the unconsciousness contains all this, and different drugs give different accesses to different parts of it. And so the question is, how much of it would be a kind of cumulative record of this creative edge of the human imagination? Or how much of it is a communication through that openness from the spirit of the plant or of the earth or... Or the spirit of a star. Or the spirit of a star. Or whatever is invoked. You see, I suppose that given the laws of ceremonial magic and indeed of prayer in all traditions are that whatever power or presence or being you want to speak to, you first invoke our Father who art in heaven, hail Mary full of grace, Om Shivaaya. You start by invoking the being or entity to whom you're addressing yourself by name. And so what would happen if, for example, one took a powerful psychoactive that opened one to the astral realm in the starry sense, and then invoked a particular star by name, and tried to journey or connect with or become open to influences from that star? This would be the way, one way of doing it. I'd be rather frightened to try it myself. Well, these are the questions only the future will answer, that kind of thing, because... You mean this kind of research requires... Yes, this kind of research has to lie in the future. Well, I think we should maybe come back to your starting point about this bifurcation theory. Because you started with a bifurcation theory model of consciousness and the unconscious. And I think this bifurcation is happening the entire time. It's the basis, it's the habituation process, which is the kind of opposite of bifurcation. What you have in habituation is like we have an awareness of that machine. If it were going on all day, we wouldn't notice it. So there's a kind of movement from an awareness of duality, a separation of oneself from what's heard, a kind of consciousness of subject and object, that reverse bifurcates into, unifies into an unawareness of the difference between subject and object, which is the habituated state. So maybe that consciousness by its very nature involves a kind of... No, I think we've missed my initial idea without replacing it, because I agree that the history of consciousness... I mean, I just sort of adopted for the sake of discussion this idea of the consciousness of the planet, and so I agree that the history of consciousness is more properly called the history of unconsciousness. The nature of the mind to be unconscious most of the time, because consciousness is a crowded little window. However, this other idea of experience being denied on basis of authority and dogma and ritual and so on, that which should be ours, our heritage of perception and experience, vanished from us by denial. The idea that chaos is bad, for example, that this is another kind of unconsciousness. This is the unavailable part of the unconscious, over which is illegal, difficult, and perhaps even impossible to fly your plane and look out the window of consciousness and observe it. It becomes unavailable. This is the dark part of unconsciousness, and this kind of unconsciousness, I think, is created at a certain time in history, and there is a bifurcation for it. And previously, certainly in microbial life, we do not have an idea of prohibited experience, of denial of valid experience, and so on. All that can be smelled, eaten, excluded, and so on, exhaled, all of this is okay. Denial I think is a recent phenomenon, and here there is a serious danger for evolution, because once experience is denied, then evolution is shunted off its track. What point in time do you think it was when this happened? Well this patriarchal business, I don't know if the whole complex has a particular element which is the dominant, leading, or causative one, but there is the patriarchy, the patrilineal, the nuclear family, the identification of order with good and disorder with bad, the idea that order is only homeostasis or periodic phenomenon, that which has been associated by Hamlet's mill, you know, with the precession of the equinox, that the order of the heavens is broken by the equinoctial sunrise moving from one constellation to another, destroying all possibility, apparently, of understanding the heavens. Something around there, that is 6,000 years ago, 5,000, 4,000 years ago, that there was a special new mode of thought, prohibition of valid experience, was begun, and I think that's a real fall from grace, and on the basis of that we have real evil now, which is the problem of life. There is this growing evil, there is the destruction of integrity, there is the death of nature, and so on. These are real problems, and I think that they're new problems, and that they have a history, and it has to do with denial. It's not only the Christianity that made certain experiences illegal, the spiritual, for example, deciding that the spirit is illegal in 879, in a synodic council, in a political meeting of bishops, this kind of thing, where the prohibitions of Islam, of Christianity, of Judaism, and so on, of political gatherings, and the repression of psychedelic drugs, of religious fellow, the destruction of the goddess, replacement of the goddess by gods, the destruction, the end of the magical invocation of the plentiful produce in the garden, and there are so many things that became illegal, there's a dogmatic rejection of actual experience, and that creates a situation where we cannot fly our plane over this part of unconscious, we cannot reclaim a view of it, it's not legal to have a spiritual experience, men in this culture can't have an emotional experience. So finally our consciousness is limited in a way which can't be restored simply by a willingness to devote one day to attention, variation, observation of the difference, or amplification, it just becomes unavailable, and I think that we have touched on some means that can be used to restore, when it became legal, to try to heal ourselves from the effect of this denial, then the means are there, and we've discussed them, but there's a certain political step which is necessary that we haven't touched upon, which would legislate into existence these henges, and so on, which would make it legal to henge, would make it okay to henge, we don't know how to produce the station to regain what is lost, after something has become not okay, it's very hard to reclaim it, and the fact that chaos is considered so bad, it's very hard to undo this damage. Except through observing chaos as day, which is like the Saturnalia's, where they had the reversal of the social order and so on, it's like that in India, all these Saturnalia's, like May Day, and May Eve in Europe. They're true goddess festivals, serpents alive and well, dragons on the run, the play in the fields of the Lord, but do these days still exist? Well, they do, yes, I mean, Halloween is one example. And they have Morris dancing. Halloween is one example. Yes, Halloween is on the comeback. And Halloween is, in England, the effect of All Hallows Eve, the reversal of the social order, is celebrated sometimes in many places the night before Guy Fawkes, November the 4th, called Mischief Night, which is when people can carry out mischief that normally otherwise would be extremely prohibitive. In Cambridge, when I was an undergraduate, there were regular fights every November the 4th on Mischief Night between undergraduates and town boys, gathering in the market square and there'd be pitch battles, which culminated in my second year in the burning down of the police shed in the centre of the marketplace, and in something that went too far and involved large-scale police intervention, and the proctors of the university had to act to restore order. And for the following years, all undergraduates were prohibited to leave their colleges on Mischief Night, or at least had to return by 9pm, and had to be wearing at all times their academic dress and gown so that they could be identified, which of course fanned up town attacks, because undergraduates were... Of course, the easy mark. Anyway, this was all a relic of a kind of one of these reversals. So one is the Halloween on November the 4th, Mischief Night, and the other is the Mardi Gras carnival, Throw Tuesday, beginning of Lent festival. That's the other big one. These exist in places like Brazil. They exist as highly effective dissolvers of the social order into this kind of primal chaos of the carnival. I'd like to see a resurrection of magic as well, and that magic should become white magic. There would be some modern analogue of voodoo in which one would seek to do well to a person. But I think it's possible to raise the frequency, to lighten the dark and so on of many places that had fallen into disuse, and that the garden maintenance had not been done. There's overrun with weeds and so on, as it were, on the magical level that these places could be sweetened with banishment ceremonies and so on, that we'd need to learn a technology that would sort of connect the star magic of the hinges and so on with the progress of daily life and the political events. Because we may have great powers that aren't being used, since we don't believe in them, this kind of reclaiming the denied, the illegal, the rejected, the dogmatically destroyed, the unavailable, unconscious, which contains enormous powers for doing good, as it were, which have been somehow, they've been denied by the forces of evil acting through governments, through constitutions and so on, through councils of bishops, ecumenical councils, putting evil thoughts in the mind of somebody at a certain moment that they begin to lobby for a vote to deny, to reject, make illegal something which is actually an enormous power for good. I think that England is the place where these reversals seem to be going on at the maximum possible rate, involving a lot of people, supported by hinges still exist everywhere. I'm surprised you should think this. This is based on your recent visit to Glastonbury. Yes. And what happened? Well, there's a lot of traffic going up and down Glastonbury Tor. There are people all over Glastonbury Abbey looking at it, loving it, studying the pictures of it restored, getting the feeling of the thing, understanding what it would be like to live in a society that had fantastic spiritual integrity. And particularly the studies of the ley lines and the St. Michael and St. Mary's lines that go up and down in the country there, where places like Aythbury and Glastonbury belong to this line. And so many people are now marching this line, they're flying over it, they're photographing it from airplanes, they're walking along it, they're dousing it, they're having the personal experience of the pagan legacy. And they're re-evoking these things through discussions and publication of books and reading books and having meetings about and actually going to the sites. It's thousands of people and it's a holiday destination, destination resort, Glastonbury Abbey, Dorchester Abbey, Dartmoor. It's incredible. Yes, it's true. And there are a lot of earth mystery circles. I mean, the Ley Hunters, I mean, these are mostly quite small societies, but they do exist. But I'd always assumed there must be something comparable here in the recovery of Native American traditions and sacred places. No, not yet. There are teachers and there are centres like Ojai and so on where they have these people who seem still to be in quite good command of the old traditions. They have workshops and people do come and so on. But it's just nothing like the scale of individual popular archaeology going on in England. It's decades, decades away from that. Really? Well, maybe there's some hope then. I didn't see England as being particularly a centre for this kind of thing, although I think the corn circle mystery, it's perhaps no coincidence that it's happened principally in England because it's a perfect country to intrigue people. I think that whether the corn circles or the world soul or the Gaian soul, rather, working through and training vortices of wind or working by direct kind of psychic kinesis or however they're created, they're obviously a kind of message because they've started quite recently. People would have noticed them before if they'd been going on for years. That in itself is intriguing, that they should start. And they happen near places like Silbury Hill and these ancient parts, mostly in the west of England where most of these power spots are. And everybody in Britain, in every pub up and down the country, and television programs, and from the Queen downwards, there was a report in the papers that she'd taken two books on corn circles with her for Christmas reading last year because she was so intrigued by the phenomenon and often discussed it at the palace. From the Queen downwards, everybody's intrigued by them and there's no clear hypothesis at all. It's kind of a koan that's being posed for the collective consciousness. Well, there's a journal of seriology. I'm a subscriber. John Michel is the editor. The interesting thing is that all of this stuff has been connected up and the whole Earth Mysteries movement, their motto is kind of a general systems approach to all these different things. Try to synthesize the learnings about the ley lines, the hinges, the corn circles into super understanding of the Gaian physiology and the relationship with our evolution and the history of consciousness. It's the only place I know. Maybe in Brittany there's a French equivalent that we don't know much about because we're not knowing French well enough, but that's possible. I think the ley line idea actually occurred first in Brittany. It seems to me that we've obviously been talking about the unconscious in a much wider sense. We've been talking about the Gaian unconscious or the natural unconscious in a much wider sense than Jung's humanistic idea of the collective unconscious, which, although being unconscious, it's hard to assign it boundaries, is generally assumed by Jung and his followers to be confined to humanity. Yes, a very limiting hypothesis, a dangerous hypothesis. The first one that we want to transcend is the separation of the human unconscious from the other unconscious. Yes, so this is it. So that's a curtain, that's one of the curtains you're talking about in consciousness, because as soon as you say that the human unconscious is separate or the human consciousness was the first thing Descartes said, separate from the entire realm of matter, then you get the idea of the unconscious and extension of mind, and that separate from the unconsciousness of the rest of nature. You cut off human consciousness into a human sphere or balloon with no windows, no true windows or openings to the world of nature. I think one of the important correlates that I always hesitate to mention or mention last is eating meat, domesticated animals and eating them. Like the Maasai, for example, you have dairy, you know, and then you have eating the older animals when they die, that's one thing, but then like breeding them and killing them only to eat them is another. And I think it's impossible to do that at the same time that you imagine a continuity between your own spirit and the spirit of the animal. So associated with this animal domestication and eating habit, addiction, is the denial of consciousness of the animals, which is one of those veils which then excludes microbes, plants and the whole of Gaia. It's a human-centered veil-generating device, is eating these things, or drinking the blood instead of the milk. Yes, I mean, it seems quite... I mean, it's associated with the dominator mode, presumably, this idea that since the dominators came out of herders and hunters rather than the agricultural people, by conquering the fixed agricultural set, the dominators were agricultural pastoralists, and presumably the model there is that just as you break horses and you dominate flocks of sheep and cows by riding around on horseback or by whatever means you use to dominate or frighten, you get the sheep into sheepfolds and shepherds control the flocks and so on. Then it's a short step from doing that to people, where people become the herds and get an empire. Yes, and human sacrifices were common in the rituals, and probably the sacrificed meat was eaten. They used to have a meat shop outside the temple, because after the sacrifice, of course, they'd sell the meat. And that was considered bad for the temple to raise money by selling the meat of the sacrificed animal. So in the case of the human sacrifices, with the Mayans, for example, I wouldn't be surprised if eating the victim was part of the practice. And this certainly must involve a lot of denial, and these denials are kind of one-way transactions. It's very hard to recover. I suppose it takes generations of being vegetarian before you can relate to a food animal like a cow. If you had a friend, Danielle, you'd see a cow, and then the cow would say to Danielle, "Moo," and Danielle would say, "Hamburger." I think we should quit here. Well, I guess if you weren't already a vegetarian, that you're either going to give it serious thought right now, or you're going to put Ralph's comments about eating a conscious animal right out of your own consciousness. It's an interesting choice, don't you think? As I was listening to this conversation with you just now, it struck me how well the subscribers to this podcast would fit into the ebb and flow of the discussion. Some of the emails I've received lately lead me to believe that you guys could hold your own with these trial loggers. Which brings me to a suggestion that Tom made recently about trying to put together a Skype cast with multiple participants. He began by saying, "I continue to enjoy the trial logs, but I must confess I am almost at a complete intellectual saturation with the ideas being presented." Then he went on to propose the Skype cast where we could hear others' takes on the information being presented. Well, Tom, I do like that idea, and in fact, I've already been corresponding with some of the people over at the Cannabis Podcast Network about doing something like that. But I do like your suggestion of expanding the idea to focus on a particular trial log or something like that. I can't say how soon any of this will be worked out, but even though the tech is basically here, it's a matter of finding the time to fit something new like that into our schedules. But eventually, I'm sure we're going to be doing some things like that. In the meantime, I'm about to release the upgrade to the notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog where I'll be posting the program notes to these podcasts in the near future. That way you can all interact at least with the comments section for each podcast. I originally set that up as a wiki, but not many people participated in it. When I upgraded the wiki software a couple weeks ago, it put some kind of a bug in there that has the entire wiki locked up right now. And I haven't taken the time to fix it because I think the blog and comment format will be easier for everybody to use. I also got a nice email from Lauren who asked if I was torrent savvy. Well, Lauren, I wish I could say I was, but that wouldn't be very accurate. I am aware of how BitTorrent works in general, but I still haven't had the time to get into the whole technical details of what needs to be done to make these podcasts more torrent friendly. But thanks to John M., I've begun to look into it and once the new blog is finished, you hopefully will find several options for listening to these podcasts and Torrent will be one of them. I also want to mention an artist who was brought to my attention by Sharon who wrote about Dennis Nomkina whose paintings have been speaking to the subject of the Hopi migration from this, the fourth world, into the fifth, final and most peaceful world throughout his career. And she went on to say that several of his paintings are, and I quote, "on display at the University of Richmond, but are due to be moved, new placement yet to be determined. They are each seven foot by seven foot and full of mythology, symbolism and juicy color. If you want to know more, you can visit the website at www.numkina.com." Thanks for sending that information Sharon and if you find out where the new placement for these paintings will be, please let us know. Now that I've seen some copies of Dennis's work, boy it's really breathtaking in its scope and beauty. I can just hardly imagine what it would be like to experience this art in person, so I'd love to find out where it's going from here. Also I got a nice email from Jeffrey who has been a fan of Terrence McKenna since first meeting him back in 1991. You are really lucky Jeffrey, I only met him for the first time in 1998, so I didn't have all that many opportunities to hear him in person before he died. But I do have a lot of his old tapes because fortunately my wife first heard him speak at a conference in the early 1980s and then she managed to hear him several times a year after that. So I've got a lot of Terrence around here. And Jeffrey by the way, I really also appreciate you mentioning the fact that you used the program notes for one of the trilogues to find a quote that you remembered from the program. Well, for what it's worth, that is the very first mention I've received about the program notes that I've started doing for these podcasts. They still aren't up to the level of the notes that you'll find on the C Realm or over at the Cannabis Podcast Network, but now that I know that they're being used, I'm all charged up about making them better as time goes on. So thanks for mentioning that Jeffrey and also thank you for contacting the Institute of Noetic Sciences about these trilogues. Here's what Jeffrey had to say about Ions. "I've been so captivated by the trilogues that I emailed Ralph and asked him if he would consider granting Ions access to his collection of tapes as well. He replied in the scent." And so, it looks like these trilogues may continue to increase their distribution on the internet. By the way, if you don't already know about Ions, you'll probably really find it worth your time to see what they have to offer. You can find them online at www.ions.org. And I highly recommend their magazine for those of you who are into offline reading as well. Finally I want to comment on a wonderful email I received from Cooper who describes himself as a high school student living under the oppressive educational system. And he went on to say, "I'm sure you may already have some picture of this, but I really just wanted to bring your attention to the fact that your audience is not just comprised of the established core following and the regular burners, but your podcast has succeeded in reaching out to new people, such as myself, who have no prior affiliation with the larger community." Well, it's really good of you to point that out, Cooper, because your generation is exactly who I'm really hoping to reach with these podcasts. Ever since that twisted little mind of Nancy Reagan came up with her "Just Say No" campaign, the schools in the states have been brainwashing the most important members of our society into equating the use of entheogens with the use of things like methamphetamines, crack cocaine, and other non-psychedelic substances. I think it's critically important that your generation reformulate Mrs. Reagan's nonsensical saying by spelling "no" K-N-O-W. And the best place I know of to begin to K-N-O-W more about these important plants, chemicals, and states of mind is at Erowid.org. That's E-R-O-W-I-D dot org. You know, if people don't get anything else out of these podcasts, I hope that they learn that there's a significant amount of good information available about this important subject. Another example of good information out there is the Entheogen Review. This is a little periodical that comes out about four times a year and bills itself as the Journal of Unauthorized Research on Visionary Plants and Drugs. And in the latest edition, you can find articles like one by Dr. Rick Strassman who did the Breakthrough DMT Research Study, and in that he talks about becoming a psychedelic researcher. Also, John Hanna has a must-read essay titled Security Issues in the Underground. And for you kitchen chemists out there, you might be interested in the article titled DMT for the Masses. And there's also a fascinating article about entheogens in video games in addition to a whole bunch of other information that you might find interesting. You can find more about the ER at www.entheogenreview.org. At least if that kind of information interests you, that's a really good periodical, I think. I guess that was just a long-winded way of saying that I really appreciate all of you out there with us here in the psychedelic salon, no matter what your age or experience level with these sacred medicines. Because after all, our focus here in the salon is primarily on the state and evolution of human consciousness and on our own individual consciousnesses. So thanks to all of you for spending a little of your time with us here in the salon each week. It's nice to know you're here. And before I go, I guess I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-A-Like 2.5 License. If you have any questions on that, you can click on the link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon webpage, which may be found at www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts. If you still have questions, you can send them an email to Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com. Thank you to Chateau Hayuk for letting me use your music here in the psychedelic salon. For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. (upbeat music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 1.64 sec Transcribe: 3184.37 sec Total Time: 3186.67 sec