Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon. In case you're joining us here for the first time, I guess I should point out
 that for the past few weeks I've been playing some recordings that were made at the Esalen
 Institute in the fall of 1989 and again in 1990. The tapes of these conversations, which
 the participants called a trialogue, were loaned to me by Ralph Abraham, who was one
 of the participants in these discussions, the other two being Terrence McKenna and Rupert
 Sheldrake. So far we've heard them talk about topics that run the gamut from creativity
 and chaos to imagination, the world soul, and entities from other dimensions. Today
 we're going to hear the second side of the eighth tape in the series, which is titled
 The Re-Secularization of the World, and we'll pick up where Ralph Abraham was discussing
 the fact that organized religions should acknowledge the validity of the so-called pagan forms
 of worship that had preceded them. I think convergent evolution is a gentler way to go.
 I think that there's a real gap, a conflict, between these two different strategies of
 starting a new system based on the archaic revival or pagan revival on the one hand and
 revolution of the church's re-sacralization by religion on the other hand. And that has
 to do with traditional church practice of denying the validity of previous forms, archaic
 pagan forms, and particularly carried to the point of revising history. I mean, pulverizing
 goddess figurines and statues and so on. What would be necessary besides partnership of
 the genders, local control, a green politic, and so on within the ritual of the church,
 would be an acknowledgment of the validity of the essential religiosity of the pagan
 forms, including the goddess, the worship of idols, and so on. And that means that the
 Bible might have to be, here it is, abandoned. The Bible might have to be abandoned as sacred
 document of the church. No, reinterpreted. Reinterpreted. That's a process that goes
 on continually and the whole development of the Christian religion like any other depends
 on a series of reinterpretations of traditional texts. So the reinterpretation that's going
 on right now is through the process of theologians in an attempt to develop the idea of an evolutionary
 god, of an evolutionary universe. That's one major strand of theological reinterpretation.
 And they have a very strong case because the god of the Old Testament is not a platonic
 transcendent god outside history. He's a thoroughly hands-on interactive god who's present within
 history even arranging details like the passage through the Red Sea. You know, this is an
 interactive process. It's an ongoing providence that's guiding the historical process. That's
 the Jewish conception of God, a kind of process god. They would say, and I think they're right,
 that this is in fact the true Judeo-Christian conception. So a process evolutionary model
 is one revolution going on in theology. Another is the recovery of the feminine and a recovery
 of the tradition of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God. Sophia, the holy wisdom,
 is the feminine wisdom principle. It could fulfil many of the roles of the world soul,
 which is feminine. And a revival of that whole tradition, these revolutions are actually
 occurring in theology right now.
 Well, is there a tradition of Old Testament scholarship that reinterprets stories about
 David and Melchizedek or Jericho? I mean, all these...
 Oh, well, they're all being reinterpreted all the time. Melchizedek is, according to
 Father Eves' reinterpretation of it, the figure of the cosmic priest who represents the priesthood
 of the cosmic religion, which is the root of all religion. And that's the religion which
 links us to the future of the cosmos, to the earth and to the heavens, and to the cosmic
 revelation. And this is also implicit in the Old Testament, you see, because Noah, who
 is saved by God after this catastrophe, is given a promise, the rainbow is the sign of
 the cosmic covenant between God and Noah. But Noah isn't a Jew. He's the only man and
 woman in existence. His family is the only family that survives the flood, and he's like
 the new Adam. He's the father of all humanity, of all races. It's only much later that we
 get to Abraham and the founding father of the Jews. So Noah is a generic father of humanity.
 And so there's a cosmic covenant of Noah, which is the basis of all cosmic religion.
 And one can trace that in the Bible. So it's not impossible, in fact, it's already being
 done to reinterpret the Bible. It's always being reinterpreted. So one place would be
 getting rid of it, the other would be reinterpreting it. But the route that will be followed within
 the organic development of religion is reinterpretation.
 So what's going on then? Is that the basis of optimism about the future of our civilization?
 Well I think it's going on to some extent. I think it needs to go on a great deal more.
 And you see, I think that if one's going to have a syncretism, one has to have things
 that can grow together. And there's no way in which a more priestess-based feminist element
 could grow together with this tradition than if it came into being. I mean it has to come
 into being. And if the thing that can raise people to the barricades of this jihad, this
 green crusade, is the flag of Gaia, I mean, that seems to be the unifying banner of the
 present movement. It's the goddess Gaia. It's the Great Mother. And as soon as you mention
 that it's the Great Mother, a lot of people start going off the idea, which is why the
 Gaia hypothesis is preferred by many of its proponents to be veiled in the obscurity of
 an antique tongue as Gaia rather than Mother Earth. Because Mother Earth reminds people
 of mothers and then of their own mother. And it tends to press buttons which many people
 would rather not have pressed when thinking about such abstract issues as the future of
 humanity on the globe. But that's the trouble with these metaphors or the strength of them,
 that they do connect you with these concrete realities of experience. Anyway, if there
 were to be a true Mother Earth religion developed, it would obviously have priestesses rather
 than priests, because its central figure is a goddess. It would be relating human life
 to the Earth first and foremost. And it would tend to, you know, our bodies return to the
 Earth, it would get into the whole material cycle. It wouldn't have much emphasis on the
 stars or the heavens. And I think it would be very claustrophobic for a lot of people
 before very long. And people who'd wanted religion would also have brought in the aspiration
 for the stars, the heavens, the greatness of the cosmos, the space of the heavens. Then
 you'd have the choice of religious things. Is there a god of the heavens or is there
 a goddess of the heavens? Well, in ancient Egypt there was a goddess of the heavens who
 arched over the body of the Earth. And Christianity, in response to that particular question, offers
 one a choice of either, because God the Father is the Father in heaven, who's traditionally
 the sky god. He's the sky god figure. But also Our Lady is Queen of Heaven, having taken
 on the connotations of Astarte and the sky goddesses of the Near East. And her robe,
 of course, is blue in colour, coloured with stars. So she's in a sense the soul of the
 world. She's the Anima Mundi. She's the Anima Mundi or the soul of the world. So these are
 different models. You know, there are different models on the market, as it were, already
 within the tradition. But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine-tuning
 of Christianity. This is at last the overthrow of it. It's hard to paint... Let's call it
 a revolution. Yes, a revolution, an absolute no more, this patriarchal, masculine, dominator
 thing that has descended down through monotheism. I mean, it would be the pluribilities. Well,
 I think it was the Middle Ages, in fact, the Anima Mundi was a widely-known concept. It
 almost broke out, but then it was... But it was compatible with the form of the Christian
 church they had at that time. The Aristotelian view of nature was entirely animistic. The
 Middle Ages had a form of animistic Christianity. But they exterminated all the... No, their
 church didn't exterminate it. The Protestant Reformation tried to exterminate it, and the
 scientific revolution carried that process further. But here's where you have to distinguish
 very sharply between the Protestant tradition and the Catholic tradition. True. Well, we've
 done a good work here. We've dreamed a dream. We've envisioned a revolution of religion
 in which there would be priests and priestesses, and the acceptance of psychedelics as a sacrament
 among some, and local control, and renewal of meaning in rites and rituals and so on.
 And fortunately, we've still got the continual decrease of attendance in these churches, and
 the fact that the revival might already be underway with the reinterpretation of the Bible
 and so on is going to be of no great use, unless, as a matter of fact, it becomes attractive,
 which I think it's not. There's somehow a pretty strong habit of revulsion at churches,
 of hatred for churches and all the sins of the church over these past centuries. Plus,
 there's the competition of scientism as a new mythology, which is totally disjoint from
 the church, and which has so many errors built into it, as far as sensitivity to planet and
 all the Gaia and green concerns, that the syncretism of the revived church with science
 would not be possible without destroying the revived church. So somehow, this competitor,
 so attractive because of the strength of his weapons and so on, the mythology of scientism,
 this would have to be dealt with, or other factors, whatever they are, which disincline
 people to be attracted to church, which makes church repeller for them, whether revised
 or not. What could be done in the way of education, media, what could be done to reverse this?
 So you see the reason for the lack of attraction to the church is the presence of an alternative
 attractor, is it not, namely the worldview of scientism, which is rather like the person,
 one of the big pluses of scientism emotionally for people, is, which I had, since I was a
 contact of scientism at about age 14, I know very well, is that a bit like you, I mean,
 one can look around and everybody else is praying or appearing to pray, but one can
 somehow see from a higher point of view, because from the point of view of scientism, all this
 is just superstition, we've risen, man has risen beyond it through the advance of science
 and technology, and we're superior to the whole of religion, which is infantile and
 a part of the past. And this is part of the worldview of scientism, and I agree that religious
 revival depends on a collapse of faith in scientism, but I think that collapse of faith
 is happening all around us. Old style humanists, secular humanists, you know, the campaigning
 atheist types, you know, a thing of the past, and there are still a few of the older ones
 around, in America you still find them, but you don't find them much in England, because
 there's no longer much to fight against. You know, it's not as if society is totally strangled
 by the power of the church, that's very far from being the case, it's dominated far more
 by banks, financial institutions, military complexes, and in marginal areas it may be
 affected by the church, but for all intents and purposes it's free of its control. So
 scientism is, I think, losing its impetus. There's a widespread public disillusionment
 with science, which is reflected in cuts in funding for scientific research, and closing
 of science institutions, which is actually happening in the world. But this just leaves
 people stranded, having rejected the church in favour of science, and having rejected
 science in favour of nothing. It leaves us with the dilemma of today. Well, that leaves
 the divide into which, why not psychedelicise and sacralise green politics, which otherwise
 is in the hands of a very boring bunch of materialist, breast-beating neo-Marxists.
 A clever conspiracy between green politics and a revived church.
 Well, I mean, I would say that science and green politics can be sacralised through the
 psychedelic experience. Rupert's example of seeing everyone bowed with their head in prayer,
 and from the point of view of scientism, knowing that this is all superstition. But the next
 level up is the psychedelic person, who knows that the scientist is missing the people bowed
 in prayer, is a poor fool. And so it's... I think that green politics, that what makes
 it so wishy-washy is its lack of a forthright metaphysic, and that they are... they insist
 that they're rationalists, reformed socialists, saw-the-light Marxists, and all this other
 stuff. And none of that is good enough to inspire anybody. But a green party that used
 a mystical language, a psychedelic language, a language of integration and control and
 emotion and all this, would have, I think, a tremendous appeal. That's why Rupert is
 so keen for this ayahuasca cult coming out of Brazil, because on one level it's simply
 a "preserve the rainforest, help out little people, your typical bleeding heart rap." But
 on another level, it's a psychedelic religion that makes claims on the imagination, the
 heart, the soul.
 So here's an attractive partnership, green plus psychedelic. How about the Ellucinean
 Mysteries celebrated in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine?
 Yes, plant psychedelic. It has to be understood that this is the way to the guy in mind, that
 these things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments. And that
 their efficaciousness can have political consequences if the two forces are brought together. Oh,
 it's all going to, everybody's going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will
 be to tell the weasels from everybody else.
 No, but they very well might out-green each other within the current context of desacralization,
 resulting in only a slight extension of time. You see, it's a huge system. And green is
 not enough to recycle the plastic bottles. It's not enough to stop cutting down the Amazon
 jungle. It only earns a slight extension in the time available to evolve a better strategy
 for all the rest, the root, the population explosion, for example, the exhaustion of
 the energy resources.
 This is what will give force to the call for fanatical vigilance. It really is a thing
 that is ready-made for fanaticism, because, you know, people used to say, "If God is on
 your side, what fears do you need to do?" Well, if what your mission is is to save the
 earth, it's very hard to see how you're going to negotiate compromises with people who don't
 want to save the earth.
 Well, the answer is you have a range of people like you have in the environmental movement.
 You have earth-busters who are prepared to go furthest. They're the kind of radical terrorists.
 The commanders.
 And then you have other groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, which has now
 become more moderate, you know, prepared to negotiate with the powers that be. But it's
 the extremists who set the agenda, and then you can only... the others can only moderate...
 How are you talking?
 It's...
 In the wake.
 Yes, the others can only moderate in the wake. And I think that's the right-wing think tanks
 in Britain and America have shown us in the last ten years how a few group of people,
 a few people thinking out extreme policy options, or as they call them, you know, future scenarios,
 just 20, 30 people think out these sort of programs like privatizing things and so on.
 And then they set the agenda, then there's sort of more moderate institutes that when
 the debates and the feelings stirred up and the whole attention of the debate has shifted
 over in that direction through creating that as an option, the debate, then a more moderate
 institute works out the details and they get it achieved.
 This is classical revolutionary theory. If 30 people were willing to wage unconditional
 warfare against anyone who opposed saving the earth, headlines would follow, huge debate
 in the media, the immediate softened position directly behind them, the further softened
 position, everybody would have to be heard from, like these people who blow up lumber
 trucks and dynamite railroads that are used to bring the wood out of the forest. I mean,
 this is all theater.
 Well, basically this sounds splendidly optimistic. The bad news is good news. The magnitude of
 the problem guarantees a response. The response will probably succeed, the successful Green
 Party will automatically negotiate a new partnership with the reinterpreted church. But frankly,
 I just can't imagine a holy war resulting in a peaceful partnership society.
 Well, I think that this is a very desperate situation. The hope would be that faced with
 the possibility of a holy war, they would just abdicate and the existing institutions
 would say, "All right, we'll save the earth already. Rather than being hung, we'll save
 the earth. Sorry we didn't move faster, didn't quite understand what you were signaling.
 Now we've got it. Now we'll save the earth." By threatening them with chaos, absolute turmoil.
 But anyway, this Green movement, if it's to be effective as a political movement, must
 have a spiritual and a mystical dimension. And I think that's where the question comes
 in of how would it acquire one, without either allying itself to a green form of Christianity
 or Judaism, or without inventing its own kind of priestess or priesthood, and carrying out
 its own rituals. Now frankly, I don't see the latter happening. I can't imagine the
 Green politicians in Germany or Britain...
 Psychedelics is the obvious alternative.
 Well, I think there's a time-scroll problem, because the crisis is coming at a time when
 it's coming upon us with the speed of a tidal wave. I think that in the long run it will
 be compared to the deluge, the flood, and where the abdication of the great institutions
 of society from their present position and the rate at which they can jump onto the Green
 bandwagon is quite fast compared to the time it will take to revitalize the Church, to
 reinterpret the Bible, to obtain the sacred music, to institutionalize the priesthood
 of psychedelic exploration, and so on. And that people had really better get moving,
 I think, in the revitalized Church movement, if they want to be on the bandwagon at all.
 Well, there are probably, if it's to be a psychedelicized Green movement, the people
 who could lead it have been training themselves for years. They just didn't understand that's
 what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so, they could step forward
 and operate in those positions.
 But I think your idea of an order within... You know, you had this model of the Franciscans
 and so on. What it would be... The best model would be one like the Franciscan order.
 Yes, which would be...
 There were a kind of autonomous local chapters loosely affiliated with the Church, not in
 opposition to it, working loosely within it, and therefore being able to affect the whole
 network of it.
 So a priesthood of Greens, especially the psychedelic committee, would keep track...
 Yes, the psychedelic order.
 The psychedelic order, or a Green order. It would be a Green order. And I think it would
 be very interesting to see what happened. I think it would have to have an ecumenical
 quality. In other words, I think it would have to be linked up to a Green order of Judaism,
 because I think they'd have to work closely together. If this movement's to work, it's
 to be one where the Judaic tradition and the Christian world develop together, I think,
 in this process in the West. Because I don't think that it would work otherwise, because
 so many influential people in Western society are Jewish. And if they're always going to
 be pulled towards this old-style Zionist view of Israel and stuff as the sort of ultimate
 in world politics, it's not going to be very helpful. And so to come into this broader
 vision, I think there'd have to be Green Christian and Jewish movement, different orders.
 Yes, different orders. But there need to be a Green mystical order associated with every
 religion that among themselves would have no discrepancy as to their view, based as
 it is upon this pure channel. And therefore, that would serve as a kind of neural network
 connecting up into a new unity, all of these presently very diverse systems.
 That's right. There'd be Green orders of Islam, Green orders of Hinduism, and there'd be Green
 orders...
 ...Neo-Sufi and Neo-Kabbalah.
 That's right. And the Green order in America would have as one of its roles the reconnection
 with the sacred places of America, and their re-honouring and appropriate ceremonies. And
 the Green order in England would have its role of connecting with the sacred places.
 So rather than a Green party, a Green order, party is too much of a...
 The party has already happened.
 Well, the party is already there. There should be a Green order.
 But the Green order is missing.
 Now, I think we're summarising our discussion into an actual proposal for a way that some
 of these goals could be obtained in a reasonable time, and that is through the establishment
 of a neural network, intercommunicating orders associated to the same sacrament all over
 the planet. The entire promise of the intellect has failed us. If it's necessary for the catastrophe
 to actually be upon us before people will act. And yet that seems to be the case. About
 the nuclear power, for example, there's a small number of people who will stand up at
 the barricades and so on, but the majority of people will still continue to buy nuclear
 power. And it's really too late to wait until the tidal wave crashes on the shore. There
 will be no response.
 No, well, we have to...
 I don't think it's already too late. The death of species, or 30% of the species, and so
 on, the numbers, the state of advance of the death of the biosphere is already so great
 that the job would be upon us if people were able to understand what they read and to project
 what that means and to respond with their heart.
 All that they need are people and organizations which give permission to do that, and then
 their anger will rise. They won't have to be told what to do. They will know what to
 do if you just connect it up for them. They'll be furious.
 Well, I think that part of the problem is the denial of the problem. And part of the
 denial is the corruption of the news media in not reporting the news.
 Well, and the corruption of science on one level. I mean, for instance, this whole greenhouse
 thing, they've been hemming and hawing for 15 years saying, "Yes, we now do detect,
 and it is true. It's no longer cold or warm. It's happening. We're aboard. We're taking
 this out of the hands of the mystics and the chicken littles and saying, "Yes, we hard-headed
 university scientists, we agree."
 Well, just as the organized religion needs revolution and reinterpretation, science also
 needs revolution and reinterpretation. And the Gaia hypothesis and its accompanying revolution
 in the sciences has forced scientists of different specialty to speak with each other who had
 never spoken with each other before. And that is a major restructuring of science, giving
 it the capacity for the first time to actually appreciate that there was a greenhouse effect.
 Well, science for the first time has the capacity to measure its own impact on the world. I
 mean, the nuclear winter studies plus the CFC problem plus the CO2 problem, it's science
 that created these problems and that now reveals their magnitude as they bear down upon them.
 So the accommodation of scientific view of history, archaeology, and so on in the church
 has to be matched by an equal re-sacralization of science. Or I could say sacralization of
 science.
 Yes, right.
 If we had this connection in the past, that might be an essential connection in order
 for us to have a future.
 Yes, the purpose of science should be the Greek purpose, to understand nature, not for
 technique. That all came later. We need to hold back from applications. That's the problem.
 I mean, let's just assimilate what we know at this level, try and save the earth, but
 not push deeper into application because that is rape. That is this violation thing where,
 you know, Taoists don't do it that way. They just are content to know how it works.
 Well, all right, the catastrophe is coming. The revitalization of the church and the revision
 of science are already underway, and maybe in order to actually nucleate the social transformation
 that's implied, and which will inevitably result if we're lucky, it requires a certain
 nucleation site, a model first exemplar of this coalition. And that might take place
 somewhere, maybe in England, in Holland, or somewhere, I would guess, probably not in
 the United States. And then from this model to spread outward in the rapid diffusion amplified
 by the media and so on.
 Yes, a green party, a psychedelic...
 Maybe we should be working on this model system in some particular time and place.
 Well, I think one local way in which it could be, in which it might happen or could happen,
 is in the northwest of the United States, where there are in place quite large numbers
 of people who've already ritualized mushroom carts. And there's an ongoing ritualized mushroom
 cart there, which is a psychedelically motivated, influenced by American Indian chants and American
 Indian practices, involves an awareness of, in some cases, at least the American Indian
 versions of the four directions and basic principles of localization in sacred space,
 yet which is disconnected from churches, as far as I know, and which is not integrated
 into the green political movement. But there's a sense in which ingredients exist, just to
 take where we are now, I mean, the American West. Ingredients exist, I think, for such
 a syncretic movement to happen. I think influence is direct experience of these ayahuasca churches
 from the Amazon could help to nucleate the synthesis.
 The syncretism that hasn't really happened is the formation, the integration of these
 orders with the Christian world, partly because of a deep suspicion on both sides and a kind
 of stereotyped anti-Christian view that people have developed in some kind of reaction against
 their Christian or Jewish background many, many years before and have very rarely ever
 reexamined. And it's an impenetrable barrier they erect against their ancestors and the
 entire tradition they've come from and try to function somehow keeping it all out. But
 it doesn't, because it comes around the archetypes work unconsciously. And so one gets, I've
 met members of the Mushroom Cult who come across to me very much like Southern Baptists,
 evangelists for it, and on inquiry I find their backgrounds as Southern Baptists. Anyway,
 this is one area where some of the ingredients, namely green politics, the existence of such
 cults and an attempt to reintegrate them with the Judaic and Christian traditions is going
 on. So there's a sense in which this is one area where such a syncretism could emerge.
 Now in England, one would first have to establish the Mushroom Cults and there are lots of people
 who take the native Sinusivi mushrooms, the people who gather them, but I don't know whether
 they've developed into sort of cycles, because the mushroom thing here developed, I suppose,
 under the influence of peyote cycles and living traditions of sacramental use of plants. And
 these living traditions are living in America, but I don't think there are any continuous
 living ones in Europe. Well, the inner order of the proposed church could grow a mushroom.
 It's very easily done. But they'd have to import the ritual from America or something.
 I think they'd have to develop their own. I think the way to do it, at least the way
 that the Ayahuasca church person that we met suggested, as the way this Ayahuasca cult
 happened in the Andes, first somebody took it and Our Lady appeared to him in the form
 of Our Lady of the Forest and told him to go into the jungle for seven days, living
 only on roots and berries and so forth, alone, and at the end to take a large amount of this
 substance, the Ayahuasca. Then she appeared to him again as Our Lady of the Forest and
 revealed the outlines of this ritual and its essential forms. These things have to be channeled.
 They have to grow through a channeling type experience. They have to be revealed rather
 than invented. And so I think that, say, a mushroom cult were to grow up in England,
 it would have to happen spontaneously under the guidance of the... after a suitable prayer.
 I don't know who would be the great patron of it. I mean, Gastonbury would probably be
 one of its sacred centers. But it would have to be revealed, the details of it, I think.
 Well, there is a tradition, I guess, only not continuous, because it became extinct.
 Is that right? So the rediscovery of the Druidic rites or something could provide the model?
 I think that it would have to be... the thing is, the Druidic rites are too far lost to
 be revived. And there was this 19th century-based attempt to revive the Druidic rites, and there
 are Druidic orders in England. There are quite a lot of them. They all quarrel with each
 other and there's a plethora of these Druids. But mostly they've taken their doctrines from
 theosophists and reading esoteric books and so on. It's a kind of menage of Western esoteric
 knowledge that doesn't really have, to me at any rate, any convincing continuity with
 the mysteries of the Druidic past. So in a sense, the tradition is lost and it's hard
 to see how it could be recovered without it being a rather theatrical reinvention.
 Well except...
 Rather mystical revelation.
 If you look how the Mexican mushroom religion does it, it's very logical. I mean, that's
 the way to do it. You do it in small circles at night with intentionality. There's song,
 there's prayer, there's silence. It's not a leap of imaginative vision to conceive of
 one of these ceremonies.
 But there it's very easy to conceive of them, but for them to have a kind of authenticity
 in the eyes of those who participate in them, they have to have been revealed rather than
 invented.
 Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing
 itself. We're not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.
 I know. But the thing is that the ceremony, I think, would need to be rooted in the spirit
 of the place and that sort of thing. There would have to be certain ritual elements for
 it to function rather than to be rooted in the spirit of the place and to be part of
 a larger movement such as we're talking of. Namely, a green order, which would be the
 kind of mystical branch of a larger green movement.
 Well, you see, what I'm trying to do in my book is argue that the mushroom was the earth's
 symbiote of humanity and that thus all human beings in all times and places can actually
 claim it as their...
 So there's a gigantic creode.
 Yes.
 It should be possible to excavate it from any time at any place in the future.
 That was the religion of human beings for the first million years and it underwent a
 diminishing 10,000 years ago. And so the creode is...
 It was commercial.
 Yes. When the desertification of Africa was broken up as recently as 7 or 8,000 years
 ago, there were probably still intermittent mushroom ceremonies when it climatically
 was favored to appear. But I really see it as a restoration of this lost symbiotic partner.
 So it isn't even ultimately a matter of the psychedelic experience per se. It's that psilocybin
 has some unique relationship to the evolution of the human nervous system. It in fact turns
 the human nervous system into an antenna to the guy in mind. And then people behave appropriately
 the same way that termites behave appropriately within the morphogenetic field of the termite
 nest. But if this antenna is not present in the human being, then the human being has
 to think up their own program and it's usually power crazed, lethal, short-sighted and grabby.
 But if that's the case, do we know that the mushroom plants that have sprung up, for example,
 in the northwest of the United States, have these led to... I mean, is your impression
 of the people who belong to them that these are people of an entirely different quality
 from those who don't belong to such groups and that they're appropriate and in tune with
 the guy in mind? Oh yes, they tend to be rural, they tend to
 be communal, they tend to be non-motivated in the economic realm. In other words, they
 are living simply. Voluntary simplicity is a concept they're well familiar with. They
 have and value their children. They're exemplifying the values that peasantry has always exemplified
 because they live near the land, you know. They want for nothing but they have very little.
 That's my impression. Are they having to plan to take over the Christian
 churches? No, they are beyond it. They are in the thrall
 of their religious relationship to the mushroom. The "save the earth" part is sort of the political
 agenda. But they're going to be absorbed by this political
 program sooner or later as the acid rain destroys their mushrooms.
 Yes, well, I think they are more and more alarmed. My audiences, until very recently,
 preferred me to dwell on the mystical, the trans-historical. They loved that. And about
 a year and a half ago, people started questioning why there was no political content. Now they
 demand political content. There is definitely a shift on to make whatever your position
 is relevant to the encroaching crisis which everyone feels. I mean, we may imagine because
 we're intellectuals and because we deal with this data that it's more on our minds. But
 the housewife doing her ironing, the schoolchild on the bus, people worry about the fate of
 the earth because the collective information field has now shifted its attention to this.
 The only competition for that focus on the need to save the earth is this stupid anti-drug
 thing which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences or something
 like that. And in a way, the two are opposed. It's an issue of how we relate to the vegetable
 matrix. Yes, well, there we see the forces in opposition
 to the re-sacralization program gathering and arming themselves.
 Yes, in their usual fashion. But you see, I think the psychedelic world
 is only one aspect of the re-sacralization program. The other one, as I suggested the
 other day, is a revival of pilgrimage and sense of sacred time. And this can be done
 in many contexts and it can be easily incorporated into people's lives. And moreover, I find
 that it immediately makes sense to most people. I mean, most people, you say, you know, that
 the quality of time, certain times are better, and to be conscious of these, and to the kind
 of historical fields attached to them, is better than to be unconscious of them. I mean,
 most people can see that and they say, of course. And the same with sacred places. Most
 people can see that the reason why pilgrims and tourists go to these places is because
 of some quality of the place which is special. And so do you relate to the quality of the
 space consciously and ask the spirit of the place to inform and illuminate you on your
 visit there and give you its blessing? Or do you treat it unconsciously and say, well,
 people looked that way in the past, but now we're scientific, we've risen above all that,
 that's just superstition, but we're interested in coming to this place anyway for historical
 or archaeological reasons and taking photographs of it and going home. But without opening
 oneself to the spirit of the place, it wants relation to it being one of attraction to
 it and yet an unconscious barrier between one. Now, if one puts it like that, I think
 most people can see that because most people really are going to sacred places and really
 are going to the wilderness and so on because of a desire to make some such connection.
 It's part of the romantic, private, subjective tradition of our culture. But I think that
 making it explicit and pointing it out and showing how, in simple ways, how pilgrimage
 can be revived. I mean, simple principles like going with an intention, taking some
 offering, if possible circumambulating the place to make it the cosmic centre before
 entering it, simple principles of that kind. It's fairly easy to re-sacralise tourism and
 that's something which is immediately available as a mass movement and through the impetus
 of the Green Movement I think could be spread very rapidly.
 Well I think we've arrived at a certain vision, characterised by, to me, surprising optimism
 about the possible outcome of this programme involving the Green, the sacralisation, the
 psychedelic orders and the successful escape of the downward spiral, up the down staircase.
 We're talking about up the down staircase and the way it's emerged in our trilogue,
 I think it sounds fairly plausible that it's possible and it's underway.
 You've got a summary.
 I haven't the energy to summarise this because every time I try to summarise it you've added
 something further.
 I think it's in good shape unless you feel a summary coming on and I'll just shut up.
 Well a diagram. Ralph has this great knack to turn everything into diagrams.
 Yes, well we have a diagram in mind definitely. We have, through poking around, rediscovered
 the basic institutions of civilisation, the religious, the political or the state and
 the relationship to the earth. And then we've proposed a revitalisation of each of these
 areas and found them already underway and then we've seen that the connection of these
 root revolutionary movements needs to be provided as a kind of a matrix between them which would
 then integrate them into a new social form with a chance of having a future.
 And this intracellular matrix between the roots could grow by evolution from a kind
 of a nucleation event.
 And so we've pinpointed something that actually we could do to provide this nucleation and
 that would be a pilgrimage involving some small number of people from the green political
 movement and others from the new religious movements, for example the councils of Ayahuasca
 and peyote cults in the Americas to give them a joint experience sharing the spirit of the
 field of a traditional sacred place, particularly of the oldest roots of Western civilisation.
 I don't know if we will actually do this but we have at least dreamed up something
 we could do that has the potential of, has a lot of bang for the buck in terms of giving
 people our idea for a new society.
 Thank you.
 Thank you.
 Well, as the saying goes, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since Ralph's optimistic
 summation of ways to bring the sacred back into human civilisation.
 I guess on one hand you could say that not much has changed, at least on the surface,
 but behind the scenes, at least in the psychedelic community, I can say that my personal experience
 has been to see many of my friends move from using psychedelic substances primarily for
 pleasure into more of a mystical dimension, which really isn't very surprising to anyone
 who has personally experienced these gratuitous graces.
 So maybe the re-sacralisation of the world is actually taking place, just like the trialoguers
 were hoping for.
 I guess my main criticism of this thread of their conversation stems from the fact that
 for the most part they were speaking from a Judeo-Christian perspective, although Rupert
 did try to interject the Muslim side on a few occasions, for the most part they weren't
 able to also touch on the forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the wide varieties of religious
 experience available throughout the Far East.
 And it's not a criticism, actually.
 After all, they were covering a huge topic in just 90 minutes.
 And I'm mentioning this mainly because I know we have a large number of fellow psychonauts
 in that part of the world who also join us here in the psychedelic salon each week.
 And I don't want you to think that your point of view doesn't matter.
 It does.
 Unfortunately, us Westerners sometimes get so carried away with ourselves that we forget
 that we're only one small part of the human experience.
 And I have to admit that I had to smile when Terrence kept talking about "saving the earth."
 While that expression was quite popular during the last century, it's become kind of funny
 now, don't you think?
 I can see talking about saving our species, and to be honest, I'm not sure we're going
 to even make it as a species as long as most mammal species have survived so far.
 But I'm pretty sure that no matter what us humans do, the earth is going to continue
 along just fine.
 There's nothing wrong with talking about saving the planet, but unless and until we humans
 can get along with one another and with the biosphere, saving ourselves seems to be where
 the focus should be.
 And speaking of focus, I better come clean here and admit that my focus on replying to
 your email has really fallen by the wayside lately.
 I seem to go in spurts where for a few days I'll answer email as soon as it comes in,
 but then I'll start putting it off for a day or so until eventually my inbox gets so full
 I realize I'll probably never catch up.
 But this kind of procrastination isn't anything new for me.
 You know, on my last assignment in the Navy, I was the executive officer on a ship, which
 meant among other things that I was responsible for the smooth flow of the mountains of mainly
 unnecessary paperwork that bureaucracies seem to thrive on.
 I can remember one program that the screwheads at the top of our system implemented, and
 it was supposedly intended to reduce the number of reports a ship was required to submit.
 What really amazed me about this program was that the morons who came up with the idea
 required us to submit weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports detailing how we eliminated
 the unnecessary busywork of filing stupid reports.
 So as you can probably guess, my first weekly report was to announce that I'd eliminated
 all of the reports about reducing paperwork.
 For the first few months after refusing to send any more of those stupid forms in to
 them, I was getting all kinds of threatening messages telling me that I was way behind
 in reporting on my paperwork problems.
 But after a while, I guess they just got tired of bugging me and I stopped hearing from them.
 So I expanded that idea and didn't turn in any reports for a few months.
 It turned out that there were actually a few people who seemed to really need the information
 that I was supposed to be reporting on, so I wound up doing about 10% of the required
 paperwork because they were essentially very squeaky wheels.
 I guess this is just a long way of saying that I'm still not very good at paperwork,
 even the digital kind.
 It's rude of me, I know, particularly because I so enjoy receiving your emails.
 So for what it's worth, if you haven't yet received a reply to an email you sent me,
 well, I want you to know that it really bothers me that I don't keep up with my email and
 I even lose sleep about it at night as I lay there and compose responses to the many thoughtful
 messages you've been sending.
 And I promise to do better in my next life.
 Well, I'm just rambling now, I guess, so I'd better close and let you get on with your
 lives.
 Hey, it's been nice to be with you again, though, and thank you all for listening.
 Before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
 And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of
 the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts.
 And if you still have questions, send them to me in an email.
 It's Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 Thanks as always to Jacques, Cordell, and Wells of Chateau-Lahayuk for letting us use
 your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
 (upbeat music)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.64 sec
Decoding  : 1.51 sec
Transcribe: 3042.72 sec
Total Time: 3044.87 sec