Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 Psychedelic Salon. Well I'm sorry about being so late getting this podcast out
 again, but there's been a lot going on around here this week. Primarily a
 Plylogue Salon that Bruce Dahmer and Galen Brandt led here in San Diego last
 Monday night. And in a few weeks I hope to play a few selections from that salon
 for you, but today we're going to hear the rest of the Trilogue that we began
 listening to last week when Ralph Abraham presented his introduction to
 today's topic, which seemed to morph into a contemplation of visual psychedelic
 language, something our visionary artists are working on feverishly every day. But
 first I want to thank two people who have sent in donations this week to help
 keep this salon going, and they are Aiden L. and RPC Services. So thank you very
 much RPC and Aiden, I really appreciate your help getting these podcasts out
 each week, and I hope that life is treating you well these days. In just a
 minute I'm going to play today's talk for us, but first I want to say a little
 something about Ralph Abraham, because most of our fellow salonners primarily
 know Ralph as one of Terrence McKenna's best friends and intellectual peers, but
 it is the mathematician side of Ralph that I want to mention right now. Before
 I went to law school I did my undergraduate work in electrical
 engineering, and as a result I took quite a few advanced math courses. Now over 40
 years later I have to admit that all of those long hours of studying math seem
 to have been wasted, because I don't remember a thing about them anymore. And
 maybe that wouldn't have been the case if I'd had Ralph as my teacher, because
 from what I've heard Ralph not only is a world-class mathematician, he also
 excels in his ability to teach math. And my good friend Michael Shields and I
 were exchanging a few emails about Ralph the other day, and here's part of what he
 had to say. I moved to Santa Cruz in 1981 and took the beginning Calculus 1 class
 taught by Ralph Abraham at UCSC. It was the third or fourth time I had tried to
 learn calculus since 1965. Ralph taught the math algorithms or equations by
 drawing with colored chucks and making visual simulated moving graphs, and I
 could see for the first time that all the equations were moving visual events.
 Earlier math teachers had always emphasized the numerical and symbolic
 algorithms rather than the visual movement. I finally got it. Ralph is an
 amazing teacher and he's still going strong as his schedule shows below. And
 then Michael listed a few of the items on Ralph's current schedule, like
 speaking engagements in the States as well as in Greece, Italy, India, and Japan.
 And you can find out more about these events by going to www.ralph-abraham.org
 and click on the upcoming events link. Hopefully a few of our fellow Saloners
 will attend one of Ralph's lectures and send us a report. So now let's pick up
 with the last minute or so from the end of last week's podcast where Ralph
 Abraham posed the question on which this trilogue was to proceed. I should warn
 you that there is a brief break about halfway through this trilogue. Just as
 Terrence McKenna was in the middle of something, one tape ended and the next
 tape apparently didn't begin recording immediately. However, I don't think too
 much was lost, so I hope you don't get too confused when there seems to be a
 little disconnect in one of Terrence's thoughts. Now here is Ralph Abraham
 speaking just where last week's podcast left off.
 I call down then the trilogue mode.
 Psychedelics and mathematical vision. Well the question that you posed in all
 of that, the nuts and bolts question is can it be visualized with technologies
 ranging from paint and brush to supercomputers? I think it can. I think it
 is not in principle mysterious that it's a domain to be explored. It may be
 fleeting like the situation that follows upon the splitting of the atom or
 something like that. It may be remote but it is in principle describable and it's
 simply a matter of paying attention, gaining inspiration, and gaining skill of
 technical execution. I think you think that, don't you? Well I think that any
 models that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical, are really really feeble
 compared to the experience itself. On the other hand, this experience is within all
 and without all and we are immersed in this spiritual world so the
 tiniest resonance from the most feeble model may suffice to excite, as poetry
 excites emotion, to excite spirit. And this is the essence of communication is
 to have a compact representation. So the experience is infinitely complex and the
 representations have to be really simple but the verbal, the representation
 restricted to verbal mode alone might be too feeble, not similar enough to excite
 by resonance the similar state. I mean we have the situation where we agree that
 not every person is going to become a cephalopod, not every person has the time
 to become a shaman, that we need a certain number of shamans in our culture
 to help to reconnect human society and the planet in the sky. So we need some
 kind of amplifying and communicating device between the few people who are
 real shamans, let's say sacred artists of the future, and the mass society
 watching MTV. And so the question is can these means be of use to the clarion
 call that you've given in your book? Yeah, I mean I think that what makes it
 confusing is when you go into these domains the encounter is an emotionally
 powerful one and the situation is so novel that the experience tends to
 assume that this emotional power is coming from the input. It's not, it's
 coming from the encounter with the input. I mean it's like posing the question can
 you make a stirring record of the Grand Canyon? Yes you can with helicopter
 mounted cameras and this sort of thing, but the emotion you have watching that
 you bring to it. So the psychedelic dimension is objective but it's also so
 awesome and so different from what we know that it encourages and promotes and
 triggers awe in us. And so we bring something to it which we can never image
 or reduce to a verbal description or a piece of film, but in principle I think
 the thing itself is just more of reality. It's like the heart of the cell, the
 radar maps of the Venusian surface, the center of the atom. I mean these are real
 places. But this kind of reality we don't need more of this, we've already got so much. No, we
 need more of this mental logos world. It's the logos world that we've lost the
 connection with. And so these computer programs, psychedelic drugs, dynamic
 modeling schemes are the equivalent of probes like Voyager. But they're
 sent not to an alien planet but to an alien phase space of some sort, but one
 that we need connection to. I agree with Terence. The problem is one of the
 emotional intensity of a psychedelic experience is totally different from
 seeing the computer graphic display, the kind we saw. And it's possible to get
 something a bit like that just by shaking a kaleidoscope and looking into
 it. And in these expensive novelty shops that dot California, one can find fancy
 kaleidoscopes beautifully made and people buy them I suppose and you look
 through them and within a few seconds you're just bored. Nobody ever really
 looks at them for very long. You can see a dazzling series of displays of pattern
 and color, but somehow they have no meaning and don't engage one. And I think
 the difference between a representation of the state and being in the
 state itself is this sense of meaning, engagement and intensity. And that I
 think is the problem because I don't think it's just the graphic
 representation, I think it's that meaning and intensity that we can find in many
 areas. I for one, being a botanist, I'm very drawn to flowers. I love looking at
 flowers and sometimes you can look at a whole garden full of flowers like here
 in Esalen and it's quite meaningless. At other times you can look at a single
 flower for a long time, you can go into it, it's like a mandala, you enter into
 this realm and it takes on incredible meaning, beauty and significance. And the
 realm of flowers is one that's explored these mandala type, almost psychedelic
 spaces if you like. And one can sometimes enter into it and sometimes one doesn't.
 The same with butterflies and many other natural creations. So it seems to me the
 problem is how to enter into that engagement, intensity and sense of
 meaning, rather than representation of the pattern itself, because there's
 plenty of patterns around in the natural world. No, but these are space-time
 patterns and whereas we can say the words space-time pattern, we nevertheless
 have no language for individual space-time patterns. Within space-time
 pattern as experienced by us, as perceived by us, there is a kind of
 resonance between different patterns that we see, let us say the bobbing kelp
 forest in the ocean out here, that somehow makes different elements of that
 space-time pattern make a resonance with different space-time patterns of
 neurotransmitters in the visual cortex or something. So some aspects are
 perceived and other aspects are not. They remain invisible to us and yet we
 don't have any language for what we perceive. So we can't, as Rupert
 suggested, have data storage and retrieval on this level. We don't have
 language for that. You've been, say, speaking of the flowers in the garden or
 the images in the kaleidoscope. These are static patterns. We have an extensive
 verbal language for that. So what I'm suggesting is an expansion of our
 visual linguistic capability in the direction of a universal language for
 space-time patterns, such that we could then speak of our experience. We could
 remember space-time pattern experiences, call them by name. We could mention to
 each other the meardrop of a word or a code, an I-75, the Highway 1, Highway 0,
 and then we would be transmitting a huge image of a space-time pattern along with
 whatever emotion you remember from the time when you experienced that, awakening
 this in the mind of the listener and therefore able to converse,
 intellectualize, understand, and reconnect with the space-time pattern and
 feeling of the spiritual world. I mean, let's face it, we have had the most
 extensive experience of this world through visual metaphors of, well, movies.
 We experience the logos as movies. We don't experience this at words, although
 there are sounds and there are words pop up from them. Sometimes there's writing
 on the wall like graffiti. Basically it's an infinite field of consciousness, of
 vibration, of waves moving, of intelligence which may be disconnected
 in different parts. And when we travel in this realm, we go somewhere we've been
 before and we recognize it and that excites in us memory which is reinforced,
 which is extended, upon which we can do further experiment because we do
 remember that somehow our mental faculty, individually and within, it has data
 storage and retrieval and it has a language or something, and yet we can't
 share it. Even let us just say, us three, we've had our many experiences which I
 trust, I have great faith, are similar, that are universal experience and yet we
 are absolutely speechless in verbalizing them to each other so we could see
 whether we had or didn't have any similarity in this certain, I'm sorry,
 words fail me. Well, I don't know, it seems to me that art or that mind
 responds, it has an affinity for itself and if it's universal then it has an
 affinity for the universal mind. What's interesting about the example of the
 kaleidoscope is it's boring after a few minutes, we all agree on that. If you
 analyze how it works and take it apart, the base units in most kaleidoscopes are
 pieces of broken glass, pebbles, things like this, detritus, junk, and somehow
 splitting this into six sections with a mirror and putting it in heavy oil is
 supposed to bring you to the realm of something watchable and interesting but
 it isn't. The brain machines being produced in Germany are the same way. All
 pattern seems to be to quickly lose its charm unless it's pattern that has been
 put through the sieve of minds, any mind, so that when, so that we enjoy looking at
 ruins and the artifacts of vanished civilizations a lot more than random
 arrangements of natural objects. So it seems to me what we're looking for when
 we say it's like a DMT trip, the MPPI data on chaos, then what we're saying is
 aha, here in this pattern there is the footstep of the footprint of meaning. It's
 as though an architect passed through here and so we can appreciate it. So we're
 always looking for the betraying presence of an order that is more than
 an order of, I don't know even how to say it, economy I guess. We look for an
 aesthetic order and when we find that then we have this reciprocal sense of
 recognition and transcendence and this is what the psychedelic experience
 provides in spades. Now a critic of the psychedelic experience would object, of
 course it's made of mind, it's made of your mind, but for the psychedelic
 voyager this does not seem to be obvious. The intuition is it is made of mind but
 it is not made of my mind. So then either there's an identity problem or a real
 frontier of communication is being crossed. But I think when we say we look
 for living pattern or aesthetically satisfying order, what we really mean is
 we look for the sign that mind has somehow touched the stochastic processes
 of nature. Yes, but still the limiting factor seems to be neither the richness
 of display we find in nature nor even the language that we can communicate
 with, but rather the ability to go into something with intensity of vision.
 Because I don't think language is a limiting problem. I mean for example
 music can be written down in a language. You can get a score of Beethoven
 symphonies or Mozart piano concertos. I mean I can read music but for me it
 doesn't come to life from this language. I have to hear it for it to come to life.
 The language is indeed a kind of communication but it has to come to life.
 Presumably mathematical notation is a form of notating things in the
 mathematical landscape which mathematicians can see. And take the
 realm of plants again. If you look at the incredible richness of botany of flower
 forms, this is or there is a language for this. It's used by botanists in florists.
 You've got books about that there are words for these different kinds of
 flowers and for a botanist the whole thing can be written down in the
 specialized language. But even so it doesn't mean that most botanists spend
 most of their time contemplating the beauty of flowers. They're sort of
 rushing to the next committee meeting or getting their paper ready for the next
 public journal or something. Somehow there isn't much time spent in
 actually entering into these realms. Even for people whose profession it is to be
 concerned with them. So we're neither short of images nor of languages in many
 realms. But rather of the time, the space and the inclination to enter into these
 realms to be within them. Well this is a good metaphor I think the musical
 metaphor. Let's just think of this for a minute. I don't propose that a
 mathematical model of a brain or a plant or something would be as wonderful as a
 brain or a plant. Life will not be replaced by language. We never demand
 that much of ordinary language or poetry or of the graphic arts. Nevertheless the
 evolution of music has been greatly aided by musical notation. Because we
 wouldn't like music to end and simply be left with a library of musical scores.
 Nevertheless the evolution of music, the evolution of culture has been enormously
 facilitated by having a graphic language that can to some extent recall the
 actual musical experience. And this is the role that I'm proposing for
 mathematics not to replace the earth or the heavenly realms but just somehow to
 facilitate the traffic through let us say simply an analog on the same level
 of musical staff notation that pertains to the visual experience of space-time
 patterns. Whether a flowering garden or the waving sea or the psychedelic vision.
 Maybe I need to tell you of last week in Denmark I intended a conference about
 chaos theory and its applications and I showed this video. And there was in the
 audience another speaker who is the world expert on algorithmic information
 theory. This is a way of telling the difference between chaos and randomness.
 And as Terence was saying there is in verbal representation a kind of economy
 that there is a simple formula that calls for the complex experience. And
 this economy is the reason that languages is interesting. Algorithmic
 information theory gives a way of measuring randomness and what seems to
 us as random sometimes can be generated by a very small code or a musical staff
 notation for example. And when data from a scientific experiment looks random
 one can try to test it as to whether there is or isn't a compact economical
 model for it. And if there is it's more chaotic and less random so there's a
 measure for this and a truly according to their definition a truly random
 process which would provide data which could not be represented by any formula
 shorter than itself. But it turns out that the weirdest most random looking
 data from the natural world for example earthquakes sunspots and so on always
 seems to have a very compact mathematical model. Therefore it's not
 truly random it only looks random and this is what is called deep data. So what
 I'm suggesting is an increase in our encyclopedia of models extending
 language so that we can name store retrieve and recreate not the experience
 itself but the data of it as it were for the sake of communication with something
 which is very small so that many of these models can be put in the closet.
 And this is exactly what musical staff notation did for music. It pertains not
 only to the spiritual experience but also to fundamental questions on the
 future of human societies, environmental problems. Can we understand the
 space-time nature of the planet well enough since it's so complex to even be
 sensitive to it and cooperate with it? I mean if we can't even understand what
 we're seeing when we look at the planet then there's not much we can do to
 cooperate. Biogeography for example is a botanical field that could be
 revolutionized by a staff notation for space-time pattern which it doesn't have.
 But surely what we're looking for is meaning that seems to us somehow full of
 significance. I mean in terms of information even patterns we've got
 libraries full. You go into any bookshop and you're just overwhelmed by the
 quantity of stuff there. And the idea of just having more, even more models on the
 shelf, even more somehow doesn't seem very exciting to me. I mean what would be
 exciting would be to see some deep meaning in all of this. And maybe
 mathematics is one way to find the deep meaning in things. But if so I'm not
 quite sure how. Well the taxonomy of plants is not full of meaning and
 nevertheless vocabulary has evolved so the exfoliate and all these words are
 put on a page and then another botanist can read this and actually tell well yes
 this is the plant therefore it's safe to eat it and have an experience. So I think
 the further development in evolution from the stage of having language may be
 the generation of meaning. I mean meaning is not given in the data. We have to
 grok things. We have to struggle and evolve understanding by some
 hermeneutical process. So well our language as people said when printing
 began that would be the end of memory. When writing began that would be the end
 of history. Well in both cases they were correct. Yes but when language began we
 actually that's when we lost our connection with the natural world.
 Well maybe it was a kind of language. Yeah. I mean spoken language. Maybe language
 processed acoustically that it's not in the generation of it that you want to
 put your attention but in the reception and decoding of it. That when language
 became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became
 then the willing servant of abstraction which before had been an exotic and
 little explored branch of linguistic activity that suddenly burgeoned into
 the major concern of a lot of people that language processed visually is here
 and now stuff of great density and acoustical language permits a level of
 abstraction that is creates a higher inclusiveness but a necessary that's
 achieved by a necessary dropping out of detail. I'm glad to hear you say so
 since it always sounds that you think the logos itself is speech but I must
 say I'm astonished at the resistance I'm getting here to the idea of visual
 language. I think that well when I travel in France I'm riding in the train or
 something and I'm really bothered by all the gossip going around because I
 understand French and then I realize this couple is having trouble and the
 train is not stopping in the station that I've expected and so on when I
 travel in Japan I don't understand anything so it seems to me it's really
 silent there it's very quiet I just don't hear anything. And where we have an
 oral language for certain phenomena we then perceive it. It is moved by a
 moving truck this moving van comes along and transports this stuff from the
 unconscious system to the conscious system then we deal with it in a
 different way and these visions space-time patterns which we can't
 recognize for which we have no visual language they are essentially
 unconscious to us so therefore we can't interact with them and this might be a
 fundamental reason that the planet is dying either we shouldn't have verbal
 language or we should have verbal language and visual language as well I'm
 not sure which but since verbal language is so poorly adapted to space-time
 patterns I mean we don't describe music in verbal language we have staff
 notation a visual language for music and and I think that our intellectual
 relationship to the sky and to the earth would be vastly improved by developing a
 larger closet of models for visual processes but I can't get you to to
 agree to this. No I agree I agree I think you're right that seeing language I
 regard language as some kind of project that is uncompleted as we sit here that
 it isn't the transfer of thought and intention into speech that doesn't do it
 I mean clearly you know the whole world is held together by small mouth noises
 and it's only barely held together by small mouth noises if we could have a
 tighter network of communication we would in a sense be a less diffuse
 species communication the lack of it is what's shoving us over the brink into
 possible planetary catastrophe of the psychedelic experience because then you
 see that if you buy in to the idea that psychedelics somehow are showing you the
 evolutionary path yet to be followed then it seems obvious that what it
 entails is a further completion of the project of language maybe what all this
 technology is about is actually a more explicit condensation of the word I mean
 it is interesting that modernity is characterized by an ever more explicit
 evocation of the image I mean you just have to go back a hundred years and the
 best anything could do is an albumin tint photograph now we have you know
 colorless HD TV HD TV high-speed printing virtual reality it's as though
 you know language is becoming the word is becoming flesh and condensing into
 the visual realm would make it would be almost a kind of telepathy compared to
 the kind of linguistic reality we're living in now I mean glad to hear it
 yeah no no argument on that well I think I mean what we may be doing is returning
 after a detour of centuries into the realm of literacy see I think it's
 interesting that in most of human history and still today for more than
 half the people alive on this planet the literacy is not the big thing about
 language it's spoken language most cultures are originally oral cultures
 still the majority of people can't read and write if you can't read and write it
 means that the visual cortex in the left hemisphere of your brain has not been
 hijacked by the speech centers as soon as you learn to read and write the
 visual part of the left-hand side of the brain gets taken over by the speech
 centers which are to do with sound and the processing of sound and becomes
 adapted to reading and writing letters language and this knocks out one half or
 a large part of half of one's brains visual processing capacity it gets into
 the habit of dealing with linear print well you're afraid I'm going to knock
 out the other half well I think that this this I think that the as far as I
 know there's been very few studies of the difference in thought patterns
 between people who can't read and write and those who can and I'm not now
 talking about people in us in our society who can't read and write because
 they're dyslexic or dropped out of school but whole cultures like many
 traditional cultures where nobody reads and writes or very few do and their
 language has a different role that in India when I lived there I found for
 illiterate people there was an extremely part length language is a very powerful
 medium and it conjures up metas metaphors images in a quite different
 way that it does for people who are literate so you yourself are complaining
 you find new generations of students at Santa Cruz can't read or write anymore
 and it may be that this process of short-circuiting out literacy is already
 well advanced and that a new kind of visual language is developing but but it
 I think that there's been actually a huge amount of discussion about this
 difference between so-called print linear cultures and oral aboriginal
 cultures this is what McLuhan's whole work was about and saying that somehow
 the symbolic signification of language first through writing and then through
 printing has created has had all kinds of effects on the evolution of the
 Western mind that we until McLuhan were totally unaware of I mean he believes
 that the linear uniform quality of print creates the intellectual
 preconditions for the acceptance of an idea like democracy that you would never
 get that notion the Greeks invented it they had a phonetic alphabet modern
 industrial methods of production based on interchangeable parts he felt that
 was inconceivable except by a print culture that had the notion of movable
 type the idea of the citizen is a uniformitarian impulse laid over the
 biological diversity of our individuality that could never have
 occurred in a culture without print so the the bottom line in the McLuhanist
 analysis is that we tend to be incredibly naive about the information
 processing technologies we put in place because all we care about is input and
 output and what we don't understand is it's the plumbing that this between the
 input and the output that gives a culture its whole tone its values its
 implicit political assumptions its attitude toward nature so forth and so
 on and that what we are is a print culture you know linear hierarchical
 what we were what we were yes we're undergoing a transition in the 20th
 century but the intellectuals unfortunately at the top of the pyramid
 are the last to get the news I mean they're still pouring over Locke and
 Hegel when you know what's really happening is guns and roses and Nirvana
 and I don't mean the Buddhist state of transcendence so culture tends to be
 ruled by the people who are the last to get the news in terms of new
 technologies which are reshaping the culture like I think all this beefing
 about the death of literacy you might as well beef about the passing of the high
 button shoe or the beaver hat I mean literacy is finished it was a phase it's
 not to be preserved by anyone other than curators the rest of us are going to
 live obviously in a culture shaped by new forms of media we haven't given up
 reading and writing books ourselves have we well I think we're reactionary it's
 the drugs we extoll that get us called modern not or postmodern well we'd like
 to abandon books and only make documentary videos for PBS and BBC it
 pays so much better work doesn't pay it can support the process so that's at
 best for some time in the future meanwhile the reason that I complain that
 my students are illiterate is that history is unavailable to them there's
 no way to tap tap into it all these fantastic books on the Middle Ages the
 prehistoric the archaeology and so on this stuff is never going to be
 translated into documentary videos it's not enough to just have a few curators
 who are in touch with the Library of Congress and the British Museum I think
 that we need a large number of people who read as a hobby or something
 meanwhile but don't you think Ralph that that's actually a kind of amnesia it's
 not that they're illiterate illiterate is when you don't know the difference
 between Melville and Hawthorne amnesia is when you don't know whether the 30
 years war came before or after the War of the Roses well if you're literate and
 you forgot you could look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica in a hyper card
 I mean there's going to be a CD-ROM for in fact I think you're the manufacturer
 true true so these historical media let us say they don't lose their
 importance just because new media are developed now there's a further problem
 which you touch on extensively in your book which relates television as a drug
 and I think this is interesting that we had you know we had botanical drugs then
 we have chemical drugs now we have electronic drugs what's coming next so
 the fact is that my students have watched television nine seven hours a
 day six and a half according to your book since birth and they are
 unbelievably quick with images and it's great because this is a fantastic advance
 in intelligence and human intelligence and the way that information can be
 communicated in 25 seconds by the best of the television commercials I think is
 truly astonishing and not everybody can't show these commercials in the
 African bush or something and get a response you have to have people who
 have been trained up to it by doing their visual calisthenics six and a half
 hours a day since birth so that's good what's not so good is that the material
 is available in the video store or from the Library of Congress after we get
 FDDI and so on this material is unbelievably poor and the fact is that
 if you make a PBS documentary on food of the gods for example nobody will watch
 it because they're busy watching dynasty or I don't even know the names of them
 that somehow the drug abuse aspect of the new media is has already dominated
 its future so that this creote is already so deep that it's unlikely we
 can swerve the video technology into an interesting cultural resource well that
 is my problem with it with your approach actually the these computer graphics use
 basically television style technologies no the computer graphics you see I'm
 going to be we're only five years away from having supercomputers like that
 that was made on a 200 megaflop machine which cost 13 million dollars three
 years ago and today you can buy them for $500,000 we're using a $500,000 one
 will be delivered to the Cathedral of st. John divine in five years that will
 be in the kitchen keeping track of your recipes and running your microwave so the
 possibility is to interact with this you see it already becomes almost as
 interesting as a psychedelic trip as long as you can interact what's wrong
 with this passive medium is it dead in some idiot programmed it and made it
 available and then it was distributed as a drug and people are actually addicted
 to the passive process of sitting there and knocked out and just like receiving
 somebody else's fantasy so I think that when these super computers are available
 in kitchens and kindergarten playrooms and people are brought up on this is an
 extension of life this is an increase in the size of the playroom the thing is
 you can't underestimate the perversity of people in terms of their tendency to
 prefer this passive thing I remember in 1977 when I bought my first home computer
 you got a manual with it called basic basic and the intent of this manual was
 to teach you how to program your computer well six months of trying to
 peddle that to the American public and they realized they had to completely
 rethink the product that only a vanishingly small number of people were
 ever going to program a computer it's like when you used to buy an automobile
 and you got a toolbox with it well that's not been true since the 20th so
 there's a certain responsibility on the consumer not to demand the pre-packaged
 the pre-packaged stuff it's the MTPI these big machines are to my mind like
 the psychedelic drug state but then everybody's trip is like the software
 they bring to it and run and someone who goes to the MPPI machine to keep track
 of their recipes is essentially trivializing it because they don't know
 what it could do this is probably the equivalent of going to a psychedelic
 drug to solve your relationship problems it's that the question you framed was so
 stupid and mini minded and perhaps the drug the psychedelic can help but what a
 tremendous misappropriation of well every power will be misused as well as
 used will be misused more than it's used and the most popular books are cookbooks
 and nevertheless we write books and to some little extent they participate in
 the evolution of history the fact that most books are used for recipes doesn't
 totally destroy all value of books and so it is with the new media whereas most
 people will use them to hyper card to stack of recipes or sex postures or
 something there will still be a lot of arcane and important available material
 available in this medium which can't be accessed any other way nevertheless I
 must say you're kind of dragging me down here maybe as time I need some help from
 this group I became very depressed this year when I realized that not only my
 students couldn't read or write but also that their interest in computers was
 much less than the preceding generation a year ago which was most likely for the
 last three or four years interesting computers has been on the decline so
 along with the television medium the interactive capability I mean you're
 right about the tool kit that comes with a car and basic and so on not even to
 use tools like Adobe Illustrator or hybrid card or or even make a right or
 any not to use any of those tools be only interested in computer games here's
 the most brilliant kids in high school doing nothing but play Tetron Gameboy
 just think that over I have my colleague brilliant professors of mathematics from
 China who do nothing but after work they play Tetron Gameboy think it over but
 nine years ago it would have been heroin now it's just Gameboy what do you mean
 just Gameboy is much more dangerous hasn't been made illegal yet true they
 can just do it unto death but I mean just one final point I want to make
 this is the model you're suggesting takes us further into the artificial
 world the man-made world of technology and the we still got this incredible
 resource five million species of beetles in the Amazon I mean incredible diversity
 of the natural world that hardly anyone's interested in anymore there are
 these herbarium collections there are all these different plant butterfly
 collections geological museums with rocks and crystals of every kind go into
 them in London or Prague or anywhere they're completely deserted that there's
 an incredible diversity of form in the natural world and we become more and
 more plugged into the entirely human world of technologies and man-made
 patterns models and so on I mean how does this relate towards how could it
 help in a greater sense of connection with the living world well this will be
 maybe a good place to stop I believe that our connection to the natural world
 will be enormously enhanced by the new media and this is in spite of the fact
 that most people will relate to it as a new form of drug I don't feel personally
 responsible for the habits of the human species I think that planetaria for
 example which are artificial models of the sky which are brighter and simpler
 and easier to understand especially along with special programs that show
 only certain motions at one time that planetaria have an enormous potential to
 turn people on to the real sky which after all is the is the ultimate source
 of our mind our intellect our mathematics and language and and so on
 so although the construction of planetaria in big cities around the
 world is an expansion of the synthetic world at the expense of the natural the
 whole idea of it is to try to turn a switch in some few people that makes
 them aware of what was there all the time and I think a hyper card stack with
 high-speed high-quality color pictures and sound giving all the Beatles in the
 Amazon jungle would enormously help me personally to understand what I'm seeing
 when I go there so nevertheless nobody goes to planetaria nobody accesses these
 few school children will go once and nobody will really be affected by them
 so somehow the habits of society are such that we can't make good use what
 could be critical good use of technology and in the meanwhile there are these
 elements that amplify infinitely the bad uses for some kind of piracy I guess but
 then I'd like to defend Ralph to you Rupert I don't think that it's really a
 journey deeper into artificiality I mean science has been dependent on
 instrumentality for a long long time the natural world that Ralph's program would
 reveal is the natural world of syntax that in other words language would
 become a much more accessible object for study if it were visually explicit and I
 expect that this is happening I so it seems to me it's just a new frontier in
 natural history it's this most complex and least understood of all behaviors
 which is language and while the instrumentalities may be computers
 high-speed imaging and so forth it's no more than using the Hubble telescope or
 something like that to to tease data out of a very distant part of the universe
 and then make it explicit and if we could understand language we would
 understand something about our own place in nature that eludes us because it's
 clearly the most complex thing we do and we're the most complex thing we know and
 the feedback from it is culture the most anomalous phenomenon in the natural
 world so I think it's pretty exciting to use these things to try and understand
 and people say spirit cognition consciousness but ultimately just
 language is is what should come out of this a much deeper understanding of
 language well it's the time is this okay yes yeah let's throw a time time to open
 up for our interaction on the larger scale customarily we the whoever does
 the induction also summarizes or concludes I I don't feel I have the
 wherewithal to really conclude this I would like to just end our trial log
 with a kind of emotional reaction to the synthesis of all this what I see as
 negative feedback not only my idea this morning but also my life work
 I'm going to say that I this was kind of a strategy that backfired I chose to
 out of from an initial statement where I put mathematics on a fairly high
 pedestal there as the marriage counselor of father sky and mother earth
 I then for the sake of discussion with these guys for our own group mind I
 scaled down the image of mathematics to an extension of language a kind of
 language of visual language and so on because we have to actually discuss
 mathematics here without really knowing what it is it's a study of space-time
 pattern it's something I just want to end by saying this that mathematics is
 part of the natural world it is not an extension it's just part of the natural
 world mathematics is a landscape which can be explored it simply and directly
 and with much incredible pleasure delight and advancement as the
 psychedelic logos or any other aspect of the intellect mathematical landscape
 does not belong to the human species it belongs not to the earth but to the sky
 it's part of the infinite universe we we live in and whatever microscopes
 telescopes kiosk scopes and computer graphic tools we can devise to enhance
 our vision of the mathematical universe is definitely advantageous how that this
 will fit into society however we admit that we are in a problem we are in a
 cultural problem we are in an evolutionary challenge from which the
 human species may not survive part of our difficulty is the rejection I mean
 this perhaps a small part but mathematics is essential in the marriage
 of father sky and mother earth and our culture has totally rejected
 mathematics so it's possible that that's part of the problem and that's what kind
 of what I've given my life work to as it were so the answer to the question on
 the psychedelic in the mathematical vision is that there is a relationship
 and is kind of abstract because we're stymied I guess to summarize our
 discussion by bad habits of the human species at the present time so I'll leave
 it there you're listening to the psychedelic salon where people are
 changing their lives one thought at a time
 so what did you think about Ralph's idea that we develop a visual language a
 vocabulary if you will to describe psychedelic journeys in more exact
 detail personally I think it's a great idea and in fact I'd be surprised if
 that project wasn't already underway in more than one place right now I'm I'm
 really tempted to tell a corny joke about the idea of giving numbers to
 various types of experiences but I'll spare you for now ask me the next time
 we meet in person and I'll tell you it really does crack me up though anyway I
 hope that if some of our fellow salonners come across the attempts to
 create a language of the psychedelic experience that they'll post information
 about it on our notes from the psychedelic salon blog which you can
 find at psychedelic salon org as you know and did you catch that part when
 Ralph and Terrence were talking about looking up information in an
 encyclopedia or on a hyper card you Mac heads remember the hyper card so I guess
 it's safe to assume that the date on this cassette tape we just heard was
 correct 1992 shortly before the World Wide Web came on the scene and I have to
 give credit to Ralph here and I guess to Terrence as well where they were
 comparing our evolving digital technology to a drug it was almost eight
 years later when I wrote about the internet being a new psychoactive drug
 in my book the spirit of the internet and as I have come to learn over and
 over again I still haven't had the first original thought in my head it seems
 that maybe what all of us are doing is putting ideas out that we're pulling out
 of the noosphere you know ideas that are floating all around the world in some
 form of collective human holon maybe Teal hards prediction for humans to
 achieve a form of super psychic ability is actually unfolding all around us who
 knows I've also got to give some more thought to what they were just saying
 about the end of literacy while I applaud the evolution to more condensed
 forms of communication like the ones that they were discussing the point that
 Ralph brought up about history not being available to those who cannot read is a
 very serious problem one recent example came a few months ago when the official
 spokeswoman for the man currently occupying the White House had to admit
 that she had no idea at all about what the Cuban Missile Crisis was all about
 granted that happened while I was in college and so it's imprinted on my mind
 pretty clearly but still it remains the closest the world has yet come to a
 full-on nuclear war and that my friends is a little bit of history that one
 would hope that those surrounding the most ignorant president in the United
 States is history would be able to at least fill him in on the five or six
 biggest headlines of recent history but I don't want to get started on down this
 path right now you know it just seems that not having a working grasp of at
 least recent history is a very serious problem maybe some of our great YouTube
 video makers will take up the challenge of producing some interesting and fun to
 watch history lessons for us now as I was listening to Ralph and Terrence just
 now when they first brought up the topic of the end of literacy I first thought
 about some of my friends like Matt Palomari who earned their living by
 writing let's hope that enough people remain literate and keep buying books
 long enough to keep Matt and my other friends out of the poorhouse as they
 grow a little older but my guess is that it's still going to be a while before
 books go away particularly great books like spirit matter which is the title of
 Mateo's new memoir and I'm very pleased to report that at last Saturday's very
 prestigious San Diego Book Awards ceremony Matt Palomari's memoir won
 first place in the spiritual books category now to be honest when Mateo
 first told me that his book had been selected as a finalist in that category
 I kind of groaned inside because I didn't think it had a prayer in that
 category pun intended by the way after all Mateo's story is one of
 transformation that had as one of its primary catalysts our sacred ayahuasca
 ceremonies now just think about this for a minute here in San Diego possibly the
 most conservative city on the west coast home of a huge military and defense
 establishment along with thousands of retired defense and military people you
 know the type cranky old geezers who think us kids shouldn't be fooling
 around with that damn marijuana and let alone things like ayahuasca well
 politically this is a pretty button-down place and yet spirit matters beat out
 all of the conventional spiritual books personally I think this is a very
 positive sign of the change in human consciousness that is now taking place
 just below the surface of our everyday affairs so a big well done to Mateo
 you're doing a terrific job of moving these topics into the mainstream Bravo
 and I have another bit of exciting news particularly for those of you who live
 near Ojai California or can get there for an exciting workshop that will be
 held June 13th through June 15th of this year which is 2008 in case you aren't
 keeping up with trivia like that I first found out about this event from at least
 a half a dozen of our fellow saloners including dr. Charlie Grove and one of
 the presenters of that workshop Dale Pindell the title of this workshop is
 visionary practice ritual and reshaping consciousness and it will include both
 talks and hands-on work I'll put a link to the full details along with the
 program notes for this podcast which you can find at psychedelic salon org this
 really sounds like a fantastic weekend you already know three of the
 presenters Dale and Laura Pindell and Eric Davis and they've all been with us
 here in the salon through their appearances as featured speakers at our
 Planky Norte lecture series at Burning Man and the fourth leader of that
 workshop happens to be one of my heroes although we've never met and I'll bet
 many of our fellow saloners also hold him in high regard the person I'm
 talking about is David Presti the neurologist from UC Berkeley whose
 downloadable lectures have been talked about here in the psychedelic salon and
 in several of the programs over on the cannabis podcast network at dope bean
 dot co dot UK the version of his course that I got through iTunes is titled psych
 119 fall 2006 drugs and behavior but the poster for this event says that the
 title of his course now is brain mind and behavior but if you go to the iTunes
 store and search on Presti PR ESTI you will find his course under the iTunes you
 heading where it's still titled drugs and behavior there are 29 lectures in
 this series and they are so packed with at least for me new and interesting
 information in each week's lecture that I've put them on a DVD so I can be sure
 they're still available for me to revisit once in a while and if you've
 been with us here in the salon for a long time you already know about those
 famous lectures but if you're new to the salon you might want to check them out
 for yourself but I'm getting off track here the main thing I want to once
 again stress is the fact that if you're really serious about meeting people like
 yourself then eventually you're going to have to attend a few of these workshops
 gatherings conferences festivals and whatever it isn't easy I know that even
 if you can afford to take some vacation time and travel to one of these
 workshops it still isn't easy to do for some reason I know that I was living
 alone and thinking about going to one of these events for over five years before
 I finally did and that was in July of 1998 just ten years ago and believe me
 it changed my life there is where I first met Terrence McKenna who suggested
 I come to his in Theo Botany conference in Mexico the following January I did
 and within six months I quit my job moved to California and began doing
 whatever it is that I've been doing here until till now and we're having this
 little chat along with tens of thousands of other close friends of ours here in
 the psychedelic salon you never know what awaits you once you finally step
 out of your self-imposed box and no I don't get a commission if you attend
 this upcoming workshop that's not why I'm promoting it and it isn't because
 three of the workshop leaders are friends of mine either but I'm really
 passionate about all of us doing a better job at finding the others as
 Terrence so directed before I go I want to read part of an email I received from
 JJ he says hey Lorenzo my name is JJ and recently listened to a podcast in which
 you said that Burning Man was out of the picture for you I'm sorry to hear that
 now I've never been to Burning Man but it seems like you had a lot to do with
 setting up the plylogues so I was wondering what will happen to the
 Burning Man lectures have you ever considered moving them I gave this little
 thought if there were psychedelic talks given at a music festival like Bonnaroo
 or Lollapalooza you could get your message to the people who are on the
 fence so to speak regarding the responsible use of these medicines
 people who take these substances at music festivals seem to be on the right
 path but sort of stumbling towards spirituality empowerment and
 responsibility some are on the wrong path altogether and stumbling toward
 burnout there's a lot of energy but it is hedonistic and unfocused by giving
 lectures at the festivals the thousands of people who attend these events may
 find the same reassuring sense of community that the podcasts provide my
 fellow slaughters and I well that's a great idea JJ yeah I know that Daniel
 Pinchbeck Eric Davis and Bruce Dahmer among others have all spoken at some of
 these other festivals but I'd never given any thought to taking the plank a
 Norte lectures to one and to tell the truth it's it's a lot more work than I
 have time for until I finish this book that I've been working on for several
 years but if any of you event organizers out there would like me to help you
 connect with some of the past blanket Norte speakers I'd be glad to help and
 if there are any talks held at some of these events that anyone thinks might
 fit here in the salon I'd love to hear them and if you do record them be sure
 to get permission from both the speaker and event organizer before letting me
 know about them just so I know I could use them if I hear one last thing I want
 to mention from JJ's email is the tagline at the end which reads you can
 never solve a problem with the same state of consciousness that started the
 problem well said and a little note to posh who just joined what I'm sorry to
 report is the now defunct blanket Norte mailing list sorry everybody but I'm no
 longer able to spend time on the two mailing lists that I once maintained
 these these podcasts are now my only form of mailing list I guess anyway posh
 asked if I thought the Kabbalah was psychedelic well I've never studied the
 Kabbalah myself but several of my friends tell me that in their opinions
 yes it does contain a lot of psychedelic thinking and maybe somebody will start a
 thread on that topic on our blog or on the psychedelic salon forum over at the
 grow report calm I think that might evolve into a really interesting thread
 and one last thing I want to mention before I close with my usual rap about
 the creative commons license I've used for these podcasts for a long time the
 lawyer in me was saying that these podcasts are protected under the
 creative commons license what I really should have been saying of course is
 that these podcasts are available for your use under this license basically
 what that means is that you don't have to ask permission to use sections or or
 even all of any of these podcasts in your own work as long as it isn't for
 commercial purposes over the last few years I've been sent links to dozens of
 places where parts of these programs are being used and I'm overjoyed each time
 that happens recently one of our fellow salonners Murr I believe his name is
 posted a very brief comment on our notes from the psychedelic salon blog and it
 had a link to his podcast which is named are you ready for this it's called brain
 douche now I can't say I'm in love with the name of his podcast but as a former
 marketing guy I have to admit that it's a perfect name and that it's going to be
 almost impossible to forget once you hear it anyway brain douche number nine
 titled birthright is to me a perfect example of artistic ways that sound
 bites from these podcasts can be used he's taken a short Terrence McKenna
 piece and not just put it to music but he's also used some very interesting
 audio techniques to emphasize the underlying theme that Terrence is
 presenting as we have all discovered on our own when listening to one of
 Terrence's talks there is so much information packed into them that they
 have to be listened to several times before we can fully grok all that he's
 saying well the way Murr has styled this little McKenna piece goes a long way
 toward remedying that situation but rather than you listening to me talk
 about it I'm gonna play it for you as soon as I sign off and let you hear for
 yourself what I'm talking about and Murr I apologize for not clearing this with
 you via email before posting this podcast but recently someone hijacked my
 email address and now I'm getting thousands and thousands of notices of
 undeliverable mail every time I open my email client so I'm gonna have to give
 up on email for a little while until this spammer moves on to some other
 target and so I hope you don't mind my playing your short podcast number nine I
 haven't had a chance to listen to any of your other podcasts but as you go
 forward I hope you do some more shows like number nine as you can tell I like
 your work so once again I will close my portion of today's podcast by saying
 that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelics lawn are available for
 your use under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial share alike
 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click the Creative
 Commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon webpage at psychedelic
 salon org and that's where you'll also find the program notes for this podcast
 and for now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyber deluxe space be well my
 friends
 welcome to brain douche tonight I'm trying a couple of new things first of
 all first of all I'm going to try and sound like a podcast so God help me and
 second of all I'm just sitting in my living room talking into my computer not
 up in the studio right now this is just an experiment to see if this will work
 for recording little intros and things like this so I can try and get stuff out
 a little more frequently for you we'll see how this works
 tonight I have a piece for you called the birthright it's based on a series of
 short lectures done by the barter and mechanic they were all posted at the
 psychedelic salon podcast a couple of months ago there's a show number 120 I'll
 put the link in the show notes obviously and it's a really excellent podcast you
 should really go listen to it I can't do it justice but it's outsider
 philosophy it's psychedelic thinking it's all kinds of good stuff if you're
 at all interested in philosophy or liminal art or anything like that drugs
 obviously go check them out they're excellent anyway Lorenzo the host of the
 podcast posted show 120 which is just a series of short things called it notes
 to himself just little things that he never got around to doing anything else
 with and one of these talks really really inspired me and I wasn't quite
 sure what to do with it but I just sat down and started playing with it and I
 ended up with the following piece now the background music is a song Babaji by
 the band and/or artist Star Garden magnitudes calm they've got all kinds of
 interesting other music that you should also go listen to now sit back relax put
 your feet up it's kind of trippy enjoy if you want to get in contact with me
 you can email me at podcast at brain douche net or you can leave comments on
 the website I like feedback everybody likes feedback love to hear from you and
 hear what you think all right I hope you enjoy there are thousands of altered
 states you know we know them orgasm indigestion to cappuccinos where tequila
 takes you so endless altered state
 and I'm not really interested in them more or less than any of you are I mean
 they're part of life what I'm interested in as an experimentalist as a connoisseur
 of nature is this family of compounds called the indole hallucinogens
 indole
 they're objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind
 hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be
 some people say you know that I'm a fetishist about this that who cares or
 that there are other things besides hallucination yes I know maybe and of
 course but the reason I'm so fascinated by hallucinations is because to my mind
 when you're hallucinating you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not
 generating this material
 it's not funny ideas for me this is the revelation it's not racing thoughts
 it's not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday
 right that kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting our own mind
 they cause hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could
 not be imagined and if it previously could not be imagined then there is no
 grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself
 for me this is the revelation for God's sake you ought to know what's in your
 mind
 well then if something comes forward and you say that's not mine
 then you have a kind of perfect proof that this is coming from somewhere else
 to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined and
 then the question becomes and the question where
 where
 somebody who didn't like these substances would say oh well it's just
 neurological chaos
 I know what a neurological chaos would look like it would look like bright
 lights moving patterns colored this something that it would not be ruins
 landscapes machines paintings works of art building plans weapons bits of
 manufactured technological detritus these things are too coherent they're
 objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind and for me this was the
 revelation
 the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humaneness as
 having sex or having a child or having responsibilities or having hopes and
 dreams
 [Music]
 get it straight this is about an experience not my experience your
 experience it's about an experience which you have like getting laid or like
 going to Africa you must do the experience otherwise it's just whistling
 past the graveyard and we're not talking about something like being born again or
 meeting the flying saucers or something like that where good works and prayer
 are the method
 [Music]
 nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn't work for them on
 one or two tries this is an art it's an art it's something you coax into
 existence you have to learn to make love you have to learn to speak English
 anything worth doing is an art that is acquired this is part of our birthright
 [Music]
 perhaps the most important part of our birthright
 [Music]
 [Music]
 [Music]


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