Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Well as promised here is the next installment of the Terrence
 McKenna workshop held in the summer of 1998. There's really an interesting cut
 in this segment where Terrence explains how he got involved in the rave scene
 and what he thought about the scene and the youth culture in general at that
 point in time. You'll also hear a short version of his theory about psychedelic
 mushrooms and the possibility that they may actually be ETs that we're looking
 for. And he ends with a message that the mushroom gave him about a simple surefire
 way to save the planet from an ecological disaster. I'm sure you'll be
 interested in hearing that one. Now if you were with us for our last podcast
 from the psychedelic salon you might remember, at least depending on your
 current state of short-term memory function of course, what was I talking
 about? Oh yeah, our last podcast we left Terrence saying he just said about all
 he had to say about schizophrenia. Well but it turns out there was another
 question on that topic so we'll pick up the conversation with Terrence right
 there. Yeah, be kind. The question about schizophrenia, I agree with you that a
 big part of it is just that our culture should be more tolerant of people that
 are crazy. If there was a place for them then maybe less of them would have to be
 warehoused off like people in less developed countries. They tend to do,
 schizophrenics tend to do much better in those cultures. But my question is the
 fact that a lot of them really are suffering and they really are suffering
 with the voices in their heads and many of them do commit suicide because
 they're suffering so much with those voices and some of them do see the
 hospital as a place, a safe place for them and what, how do you balance
 those? Yeah well I think the paranoid kind of schizophrenia is different from
 this process schizophrenia and from having seen people in that state it's
 clearly a very uncomfortable state. These people are not happy, they don't like
 being where they are, it doesn't seem like a very functional state. I think
 what we're dealing with is probably a group of pathologies that may or may not
 have common origins. These may be completely different screw-ups, chemical
 or genetic screw-ups of one sort or another.
 Certainly the catatonic schizophrenic and the process schizophrenic present
 completely differently. The catatonic doesn't move, has nothing to say, can't
 care for their own body functions. The process schizophrenic wants to reorganize
 the company and call the president and talk, you know, invest and invent and
 travel and speak and heal and cure and they're just all over the map. It's a
 it's a whole different style. So you know in the in the classification of fungi
 they have this classification called fungi obscurante and it just means
 everything we haven't classified and I think probably schizophrenia will be
 seen to be a group of unrelated phenomena requiring different kinds of
 intervention and different kinds of therapy. You know when the
 psychedelics were first coming on everybody had the idea, aha, these things
 are what was called psychotomimetics. In other words they imitate psychosis and
 so then people said well it must be that people produce DM, that schizophrenics
 are over producing DMT or they're producing LSD like compounds in their
 blood and people went tearing off in search of the schizogen, it was called
 in the literature. Well the schizogen was never found. Schizophrenics have
 slightly depleted levels of DMT than the ordinary population, not dramatically
 depleted. No other chemical analog as a real marker for schizophrenia has
 been found so it's more complicated than that and once you go back through the
 literature and compare with more attention to detail the differences are
 clear. The paranoid schizophrenic hears voices, visual hallucinations are
 actually pretty rare. Hallucinogenic trips inevitably tend to be more
 positive than what schizophrenics are reporting. You know you have only to
 contrast my encounters with zany, punning, self-transforming elf machines,
 compare that to these gray-faced proctologists who come in the middle of
 the night and look up your ass and take you off and you know abuse you and
 surgically snip and tuck and I mean this is appalling stuff, the stuff of
 nightmare. If there was a drug that did that none of us would get near it I
 dare say after one exposure. Yeah. Eight circuit model of evolution because I was
 thinking that it just sounds really close to what you were talking about is
 especially the neurogenetic level where you can tune into the actual DNA and get
 a sort of a readout of the evolutionary process and pattern. So yeah I like the
 model I'm not sure of the mechanism. On the other hand one of the most mysterious
 issues in neurophysiology is the issue of memory. In other words where is it? We
 know that in the course of your lifetime every molecule in your body will be
 swapped out five times. Well then how can a 70 year old woman remember the smell
 of her grandmother's dress when she used to climb up into her lap? You know we
 know that people can undergo horrific accidents, brain damage and cancer of the
 brain and this sort of thing and that their memory is in some cases virtually
 unscathed. This has been in fact the greatest embarrassment of materialist
 science in the past 50 years or one of them is they have made zilch progress on
 understanding memory and you know it's right smack in the center of everything
 we want to do. It's a communication technology, it's a nanotechnology, it's a
 molecular genetic technology for information and storage retrieval that
 works with images, music, sound and we don't have a clue as to how it works.
 I tend to believe that nature is fairly conservative and that once you develop a
 mechanism that's good for a certain function you will find it iterated in
 other areas where that function is called upon. So notice that the DNA in a
 way if you understand how it works it's like a chemical learning system. It
 templates the environment and it responds to environmental selection by
 building proteins of a certain type. In a way it's a chemical engine for
 responding to the environment. Well then if you look at the nervous system it's
 an electrochemical system. It's a combinatory system where information
 moves in the body down the nerve fibers at a pretty good clip. But why then are
 we such slow-moving creatures? Well because every time it gets to a synaptic
 cleft it stops being electricity and it turns into a complex chemical reaction
 to bridge the gap to go down the next wire to the next gap and so in this in
 the course of this electro to chemical to electro to chemical transmission of
 the signal it slows down to a few hundred miles an hour and that's that
 determines our speed as organisms. Downstream this may all be sped up.
 Memory seems to work almost instantaneously but no mechanism is
 visible. I mean if you really want to look at a human function that's present
 in all of us and easily studied and may hint at undiscovered principles in
 physics or miraculous new orders of nature human memory would be a real
 place to begin. I wondered what your involvement is today what you hope to
 get at have hope to get out of your involvement with the rave scene and just
 what role do you think youth culture will have in the next 12-13 years as we
 approach a possible singularity? Well I didn't intend to get involved in rave
 really I mean I was interested in it I when I went to England in 1990 I had a
 pretty academic schedule of lecturing but a lot of ravers came and the zippies
 were just getting organized around the club called Megatripolis in Charing
 Cross and I met Colin Shaman of the Shaman and then we talked about me doing
 something with them and and he taped our conversation and then I thought it was
 like a job interview but then when it was all over he said that would do fine
 that that was what they would use on the record and that became and then so that
 CD was called Boss Drum and just by chance it went double platinum in
 England which means hard to believe but every 15th person in the British Isles
 bought this album and so it was a mega hit and suddenly I was an icon to a
 whole bunch of people who had never heard of me before and then I worked
 with Zivuya which was another English band tribal a spiral tribe which was an
 English band I met a Austrian couple in Frankfurt who are Station Rose which was
 a German doof band and last year I went to South Africa and and Australia and
 ended up doing raves there it's a kind of a weird thing for a person my age to
 you know be the world's oldest raver but the rave scene needs to be more
 psychedelic you know it it it breaks down it breaks toward amphetamine it
 breaks toward heroin breaks toward alcohol you have to keep constantly
 reminding it plus the the youth culture is incredibly powerful and creative you
 know people talk about the 1960s and what a great thing it was well I was
 there I was at ground zero and it lasted from about 1966 until 19 early 1968 and
 1968 was called the the year of rage or the days of rage that was all street
 fighting and rocking out bank windows and burning police cars the summer of
 love which was 1967 it was like a two-year thing 66 67 the current youth
 culture has been going in the same direction strong since 1986 there are
 people who will tell you if you were not in London in the summer of 88 you missed
 it and you know and yet there are kids who obviously don't feel they missed it
 because they were children in 1988 so it's an incredibly vital culture it's
 worldwide it's high it was born in the bowels of Thatcherite Britain and it's
 very cynical about bourgeois social values and getting a job and fitting in
 and all that and it speaks German Afrikaan or you know Japanese French
 English with equal fluency and it's not rock and roll you know the ultimate
 heresy against the 60s musical fascists it's it's not rock and roll it's doof if
 it's anything it comes out of hip-hop it's syncopated and and ambient and
 experimental and I you know I I really don't understand the youth bashing
 tendency of this culture it seems to me one of the most chuckle-headed things
 that we're involved in is youth bashing because it all rides on the back of
 youth they're the ones who are going to be asked to live in and perfect the
 future that all this technology and integration and bioengineering and so
 forth and so on it's going to bring to fruition and the great thing about the
 youth culture and there are many great things about it but one is that it's so
 suspicious of bourgeois values and that it's so friendly to the Internet you
 know the Internet is owned and managed by the fortune 500 corporations but they
 own and manage it somewhat like a little old lady who owns a gorilla they really
 fear it and they don't understand it and and they have to hire guys with rings in
 their ears and ponytails to turn on the machines in the morning and to run the
 payroll software and the inventory control software and everything so it's
 a very uneasy alliance as far as whether I'll do more with rave culture I don't
 know I keep trying to back out of it it's it's different it's strange to go
 on stage in front of a screaming crowd at 2 a.m. and try to talk philosophy and
 so I've given up trying to talk philosophy and instead I find myself
 behaving more incoherently and crazily than I do in any other fashion and the
 crowd seems to love it but the crowd is predisposed to love it the crowd is not
 terribly discriminating at that point but I have been working with a band
 called lost at last a Maui band transplanted to Santa Cruz and if you're
 in San Francisco New Year's Eve will be at the Veterans Administration doing
 glossolalia and handling boa constrictors with light show and the
 whole razzmatazz if only this had come when I was 20 it's it's I feel like
 Billy Pilgrim or something I'm living my life entirely out of sequence I mean
 what is a 51 year old guy need with the career as a raver it's the shit out of
 me but there you have it you know I'm poor enough I can't just say no there I
 have to negotiate this stuff oh yeah it's a shamanic role for sure I mean
 jumping Jack Flash it's a gas gas gas for sure it's a shamanic role but I'm
 sure I mean it's would be perfectly reasonable to stand aside and let a 22
 year old do it let spooky do it let somebody else do it yeah with all your
 talk about the proctologist who come in the night what do you think about the
 extraterrestrials I thought you would never ask well first of all before I
 weighed in visor down razors flashing let me say that I have at times proposed
 various extraterrestrial theories because it seemed to me back in the mid
 70s that if you were to take seriously the idea that there was an
 extraterrestrial penetration of the terrestrial ecology that the mushroom
 would be it the mushroom is alien enough in its life cycle alien enough to
 survive the conditions of outer space and when complexed with a mammalian
 nervous system it seems to want to download these messages from far away
 shall we say so that's my idea of how an alien would be that the first problem
 you would have with a real alien would be to recognize it because first of all
 it's gonna be alien for crying out loud this thing involved on some other planet
 under a completely different chemical and regime of pressure and chemistry and
 and I mean if you can't understand your next-door neighbor do you what do you
 think it's going to be like to stare into the face if it has a face of
 somebody from some Nebo canoe be so the mushroom seemed alien enough and it's
 also very low-key it looks high technology I don't expect them to come
 in trillion ton ships of titanium roaring out of the cosmic darkness into
 parking orbit around our planet I seriously doubt if it will happen that
 way if they don't want to be detected they certainly will not be detected
 because you have to assume that the technology will be beyond your wildest
 imaginings the idea that someone is going to come in ships speaking
 languages and with an interest in our gross industrial output or trading with
 us or some crap like that this is what I call failure of scale this is for people
 who don't understand how weird reality is this is for people who've been
 watching too much daytime TV to think it's going to be so humdrum as that well
 so then we're left with this residuum of testimony that something weird is going
 on I think this is like a built an intelligence test built into reality
 life presents itself as a mystery the people who pass the intelligence test
 are not worrying about gray-faced aliens checking them for hemorrhoids in the
 middle of the night they have passed this intelligence test and their
 conclusion is whatever this is it is not what it claims to be it is not what it
 appears to be and then people are very puzzled and they say well but what about
 all these people who have these things happen to them well this now we sort of
 get down to the nut of the matter and and this is where I often feel my
 audience is peeling away from me in horror and disappointment because I
 think we're very naive about what information is and how it works and and
 let's see how I can give examples of this or start into it first of all the
 media that we are embedded in are designed to amplify anomalies in other
 words here's a here's a story man goes to work does moderately good job no
 newspaper on earth would run this as a headline why because it's not news it's
 ordinary on the other hand Volkswagen sized chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts
 farm field this is news and it if it passes the first gateway which is the
 local news reporting apparatus passes it on to the AP and UPI and like that then
 it makes its way out into the electromagnetic medium well in the
 electromagnetic medium the laws of perspective are weirdly distorted the
 further away you are from something the more real it looks the closer you get to
 it the less substantial it becomes in the world of media so for example let's
 say that the New York Times on a certain day reports that in a Massachusetts
 field a large chunk of ice has fallen and so you look at that and then you
 think to yourself well let's see what Dilbert's up to of course with the New
 York Times you can feel you will not be satisfied in your quest because there is
 no Dilbert because the great grey maiden doesn't stoop to comics but suppose
 you're reading a civilized newspaper well then you just go and read Dilbert
 but a newspaper like that is designed to be read by five million six million
 people per day well sure as hell someone will open the paper to page 42 chunk of
 ice falls in Massachusetts field and they will notice that the county in
 which this field is located contains their mother's maiden name initials and
 by that and the dream they had the night before of something wet falling in the
 from the sky they realize that God has sent them a message and they call work
 and cancel and jump in the car and head for Amherst or wherever the action is
 well meanwhile the rest of us go on about our business with one exception
 editors of newspapers where the story has been put out are now getting feedback
 and people so the editor calls up the cub reporter he says we're really
 getting a lot of interest on that ice fall in Massachusetts deal I want you to
 drive up there and get the story interview everybody find out what's
 going on is there a religious angle is there a this is there that what did
 people see so this guy thinks you know I have to find honest work but until then
 I have to drive up to Massachusetts and find out what's going on the person for
 whom God was speaking to them and the reporter encounter each other at the
 edge of what is now a drying mud hole and then he says and who are you says
 well funny you should ask I'm dr. Raymond have a ruby bird expert and
 telluric energies ley lines radios these ik energy genies a free and ancestor
 spirits and I can tell you what's going on here this confirms a theory that I
 published in my book you know turning the world upside down in ten different
 ways I self-published my book but and you're off at this point and so you know
 to make a long story short and you maybe can't always follow this advice but it's
 very good advice nevertheless what do you follow it or not when confronted
 with the irrational or the extraordinary or the miraculous it is legitimate to
 carefully examine the messenger the key to understanding what is going on is to
 examine the messenger people don't do this they examine the the testimony of
 the messenger so they say now stand exactly where you were standing when the
 saucer first appeared aha and so it was 20 degrees above the horizon and it
 moves so we can calculate it must have been moving at this me this is not the
 right question to be asking this person the right question to be asking is have
 you ever seen a ghost what's your position on the resurrection how do you
 feel about homeopathy what's your position on major earth changes in the
 short-term projection of things and if you do this you will begin to discover
 an epistemological naivete I maintain that that the illusion that you and this
 person are living in the same Idaho begins to break down they have
 categories and presuppositions and expectations that you can't follow along
 with and so the illusion of communication is necessary for there to
 be the mirage of an event is essentially a way of putting it so these things are
 like informational viruses it's because of how we as organisms handle
 information for example here's a counter way to approach a problem in nature
 suppose you want to know how much electricity is running through a wire
 the way to do this is to measure 100 times add these numbers together divide
 by 100 and you will have the average amount of energy flowing through the
 wire now suppose your 100 numbers fluctuate between three volts and three
 and a half volts except that measurement 72 tells you that 11,000 volts are
 running through this wire well what do you do with that reading if you're a
 good scientist will you throw it out you say well that that's crazy that can't be
 right there's something wrong with that one get that puppy out of there in other
 words you reject the anomalous instead of pouncing on it and triumphantly
 raising it on high for all to adore you simply eliminate it the media works
 exactly the opposite it seizes on the you know every night a million people go
 out and look into the night sky they see zilch the stars the moon one person goes
 out they see a triangular spaceship 800 feet across with red running lights
 broadcasting you know the second chapter of mark well what are we told the next
 morning that this was seen and this disrupted the night sky over Phoenix or
 Alamogordo or someplace like that always someplace you aren't by the way so
 people say well but is it all like that is it all so much like that I think it
 pretty much is people don't like I mean I've told stories here about strange
 events and I thought I've said the real weirdness does not have to be treated
 with respect or for as though it were fragile true weirdness is true weirdness
 you can kick the tires honk the horn drive it around the block phony weirdness
 is incredibly fragile and they don't want you to get near and you can only
 see it if you stand here and please don't touch and the speaker is veiled
 and the voice is distorted because the CIA might kill him if they knew who he
 was a million reasons why it's just not totally straightforward you know all
 resting on the preposterous notion that we couldn't stand knowing the truth and
 therefore these things must be shielded from us well if we're so fragile why
 weren't we shielded from the knowledge of the president's blowjob I mean that
 shook up more people than the knowledge that extraterrestrials are trading human
 fetal tissue for advanced technology it's it seems to me that as psychedelic
 people we should be more immune to these rumors of miracles signs and wonders
 than the rest of the population because we have a benchmark to measure it
 against and the cultification of discourse and the the the rising
 tolerance for raps which don't make sense is a really weird aspect of the
 end of the millennium discussion that we're trying to have I mean somebody on
 no evidence at all can can introduce the most preposterous and outlandish
 hypotheses into a conversation and it has to be treated with the same respect
 that the the pronouncements of quantum physics or or evolutionary theory are
 retreat are treated and then people say well how do you not throw out the baby
 with the bathwater well it's tricky I think we all need to get our razors
 clarified and also a little less politesse would be alright I don't know
 what what it's like here I get said all these things I'm saying to you now to
 Rupert recently and he said well you're just you know sinking and Malibu I'd
 this he said in an average English pub if somebody started raving about this
 stuff there would be half a dozen people on their feet instantly just smearing it
 out of existence well new upstate New York is halfway between London and
 Malibu so maybe you're leavened with reason and and temperance but there
 certainly is a lot of loose-headed metaphor building out there in the
 intellectual marketplace we almost need a new vocabulary of fluff you know I
 mean there are different kinds of fluff for instance there's what I call deep
 fluff which is fluff with a history so that would be for example alchemy which
 is something dear to my heart alchemy is fluff with depth because it's
 4,000 years old and even though it's never made good on its promises or
 agenda it just keeps popping up in various places it's generated a rich
 literature it's deep fluff the kind of fluff that freaks me out is where you
 get one person who never read the Old Testament never read Plato doesn't
 understand mathematics music history art literature religion economics or
 philosophy but they have all the answers because when they were in the desert you
 know the archangel maligny appeared to them and downloaded the entire stick
 from A to Z in 11 simple lessons which you they will share with you for a
 significant portion of your income this kind of thing you should automatically
 you know the mushroom said to me once apropos of all this and I've tried to
 live by it it said from one human being to seek enlightenment from another is
 like a grain of sand on the beach to seek enlightenment from another and you
 know for me that puts in perspective all this malarkey about lineages and secret
 orders and having to sweep up around the ashram for 15 years before they cut you
 any juice and all all of that stuff if you know a truth which you cannot
 understand is of no use to you so don't tell yourself that the fact that you
 don't understand quantum physics is okay because these guys at MIT have it under
 control until you understand it it's utterly useless to you so people live by
 hearsay and rumor and people delightedly spread rumors of the miraculous people
 say well did you see that thing on TV the other night where they had that Air
 Force colonel who claimed that he was there at Roswell when there's a buzz a
 buzz and well to repeat this kind of stuff is the equivalent of taking home a
 newspaper with a headline that says alien mom 9 gives birth to dead Christ
 this is not something people of intellectual integrity involve
 themselves with isn't that a downer that rap it's so and it's especially a
 downer when I get more specific than I have been here because of course it
 really becomes cogent when you tear into somebody by example and the reigning cult
 of niceness precludes that I do too much of that because my own ox might be gored
 but I do urge you to disperse your your money and attention with extreme
 miserliness when people start telling you they have the answers there are no
 answers at this point part of growing up is to live without answers you know
 culture is a kind of con that works on you if you're smart till you're about 35
 or 40 or 50 it takes longer for some people but if you live long enough and
 you're paying attention you will eventually notice that culture is a con
 it just wants to pick your pocket and get your vote and make a fool out of you
 and around age 35 45 55 people just say screw it
 or they become defenders of it because they somehow see into a wisdom that it
 contains that I have not perceived I think really you know part of there is
 an idea around that sometime in your mid-twenties you mature and that then
 you are a fully mature human being this is obviously not true you're still a
 puppet of culture the maturation process goes on into the 30s and 40s and if you
 live that long what you should end up being is an independent idiot an
 independent person free of ideology free of object fetishism consumer fetishism
 free of pathological attachments to other people free of codependent
 relationships I mean these are all kind of things which people in their 20s are
 just beginning to encounter as possibilities and and if you don't grow
 past these things then you become these people who watch daytime TV and roam the
 malls and vacation in artificial paradises and you know a lot of lottery
 attention to lotteries and publishers clearinghouse millions that are soon to
 arrive and just a squirrely lifestyle hardly above the level of a laboratory
 rat and and if consciousness expansion means anything it means thinking your
 way out of these cultural cul-de-sacs and dilemmas you know don't buy anything
 because the very very rarely is what you are being sold what it represents to be
 nor worth what it's being what's being asked for it yeah something about our
 planet quickly well in terms of suggestions and we have ten minutes left
 so I'll be able to get out of here without the hour of discussion this
 usually provokes in terms of suggestions when I have said to them I once said to
 the mushroom how can we save the world somebody had challenged me in a group
 like this they said why don't you ask it how we can save the world which I had
 never been being sort of an oblique thinker it had never occurred to me to
 be so blunt with it but the next time I found myself with it I said how can we
 save the world and without a moment's hesitation it said each person should
 parent only once this is an astonishing idea this is not zero population growth
 this is population falling by 50% every 20 years from here on out if if if
 people in the high-tech industrial democracies would limit themselves to
 one child almost immediately the destruction of the earth's ecosystems
 and resources would halt we preach population control in the third world
 but the statistics show that to a woman in the first world who has a child that
 child will consume between eight hundred and a thousand times more resources in
 the course of its lifetime than a child born in Bangladesh or some other third
 world place so if if we were to practice this one person one child policy in the
 first world democracies there would almost immediately be a visible
 slackening of the pressure on resources and population is the is the thing which
 is driving everything over the edge and is not allowing any time for full
 reflection about land use implementation of technologies the political directions
 we want to go in because everywhere you know no you just hurl money at problems
 like sanitation detoxification of land education of children cleaning up of
 water supplies extension of early primary education and so forth and so on
 no matter how much money you throw at these problems you see no progress
 because it's all dragged down by burgeoning populations so and it's
 interesting I've always felt that the way to solve social problems collective
 social problems is to find solutions which advance the agendas of individuals
 in other words some version of enlightened self-interest and if you
 think about this one person one child thing what we're saying is how would you
 like to have increased leisure time increased disposable income and the
 sincere gratitude of humanity by volunteering to limit your your
 procreative activity and I would favor social policies that would give people
 cradle to the grave medical care and cancel their income tax and whatever it
 took to honor people who did that because that is the most significant
 single political act any one of us could probably do it's very practical it's a
 bumper sticker it astonished me when the mushroom said this I thought it was
 going to be a disco it said you know one each person should parent only one child
 in a single sentence it offers probably the only solution to our long-term
 dilemma on this planet can we do it well we don't know it involves changing our
 habits the hardest things we have to change it involves injecting novelty in
 an area where habits have ruled for millennia and tens of millennia are
 reproductive behaviors on the other hand as primates we never really get rocking
 and rolling until we're painted into a corner now China is attempting to do
 something like this but of course they start from a more problematic
 circumstance than our own however if China continues to limit its population
 that's the one piece of the puzzle missing from its ability to project its
 culture onto a global scale if the rest of us pollute our social systems and
 drag the development of our economies with burgeoning populations at the same
 time that the Chinese population is falling and they are bringing their
 technologies and infrastructure up to speed then we could find ourselves in a
 very different socio-political circumstance not far downstream any
 comment on that whole idea it's an interesting idea I'm surprised that
 there is no society for it I've never heard it discussed not radical lesbians
 not libertarians not and I also thought when it first came up that there must be
 some hideous political flaw in it that some radical feminist or somebody would
 spring forward and point out this appalling contradiction as to why this
 couldn't be done or why this was utterly unacceptable and dehumanizing nobody has
 ever done that either people have said the only criticism I've had of it is
 people have said that political power is based on population but I argue that's
 not true if that were true India would be the second most powerful nation in
 the world well what about France what about Germany what about England so you
 know we are not in a breeding race with the brown-skinned people of the planet
 thinking like that is crazy-making what determines the viability of a society is
 the quality of life that it delivers to the greatest number of people so I think
 one person one child those of you who haven't yet entered the reproductive
 phase of your life you might consider people have objected and said well but
 children need other children this is arguable the nuclear family is not
 handed down from Mount Sinai the nuclear family is a late 19th century invention
 at the convenience of industrial capitalism if there is a human model
 handed down from Mount Sinai it's the extended family group the aunts the
 uncles the cousins all together in a in a long house or a compound well we
 haven't lived like that in America since the 1840s and you know it was no way to
 live anyway in 1800 the average American woman the average American woman gave
 birth 13 times in her life this this is no population this is not a behavior
 pattern we want to emulate I think that we are sentimental that the concept of
 the child is some kind of morbid download from 19th century romanticism
 and that it's a morbid concept the child the child in our society is symbol of
 innocence and victim of mayhem it would be you know in Amazonian societies that
 I've observed the children are small versions of adults and as quickly as
 they can handle them they are given responsibilities and roles and they
 participate in life birth death sexuality hunting rituals there is no
 this idea that we screen people from the facts of life because they are innocent
 and fragile and it's a complete paradox in our society because while we're
 dishing out this rhetoric of innocence we're creating a popular culture so
 steeped in images of violence and abuse and rape and so forth that the idea that
 there are any secrets from anybody is pretty hollow rhetoric so we need to
 re-envision our relationship to children they are more precious than we have
 tended to treat them they are more central to our future than we have
 tended to admit and our population policies if they don't swing around to
 take cognizance of this will probably derail all our best intents to build a
 sane and caring world anyway that's the opinion of an extraterrestrial fungus on
 a matter of human population you know I can still remember sitting in that hot
 August room and sitting on a thin cushion that didn't do a thing to
 soften the hardwood floor after a few hours and I was actually wishing
 Terrence would call it a day because my butt was so sore then he dropped that
 idea about each person having only one child and that idea caught my
 imagination and attention so much that I forgot all about the pain it's really
 quite an elegant idea don't you think and do you think that Terrence take on
 the rave scene as of 1998 fits in today particularly the point about using more
 psychedelics dumping that meth crap you know you got to watch that stuff it's
 the easiest thing there is to get habituated to but I've never seen a good
 ending for someone who gets hooked on meth or crack you know stick with the
 psychedelics use them right and you'll be alright I don't think you can go
 wrong and I guess I should maybe say the previous announcement was brought to you
 by the Partnership of Free Drugs in America or something like that by the
 way that was a joke for those of you who are just maintaining right now and maybe
 a little paranoid or something by the way if you don't have a copy of boss
 drum by the shaman you oughta go out and pick up one just to hear Terrence's rap
 called re-evolution and I play it when I do a solo mushroom trip quite often I
 like to sit in the dark with headphones on and play that track just as the
 light show is starting to come on you know if you if you've heard that cut you
 remember the kind of eerie keyboard background intro where Terrence begins
 saying if the truth can be told so as to be understood it will be believed I've
 always enjoyed hearing that particular rap particularly because I think as you
 just heard Terrence had just come from the club Megatripolis and I think it
 was probably had been his first rave experience at least according to the
 story he tells here and how appropriate is that that it's Terrence's first rave
 at the Megatripolis in the UK you know as I'm sure most of you already know the
 force behind that club was Fraser Clark who is with us here in the psychedelic
 salon for our podcast number 16 where we were treated to Fraser's famous epic
 monkeys trip a short history of the human species which reminds me by the
 way that Fraser just told me that he came across a recording of a talk he
 gave at Stanford University I think it was probably must have been during the
 time he was leading that zippy pro noia tour across the US a few years after
 Terrence was first at the Megatripolis and this talk by the way is called rave
 culture and the end of the world and if all goes well I should have a copy in
 hand and podcast it in the near future right now they're either two or three
 more podcasts left at this McKenna workshop and then we're gonna hear the
 talk that Nick Sand gave at the mind states 2001 conference at the time he
 was still under the heavy yoke of the US parole system it's quite a powerful talk
 by a living legend in the psychedelic community can you say orange sunshine
 before we go there's one last thing I'd like to point out and that's a new book
 by James Kent that hopefully will be published really soon some of you may
 not recognize James's name but I'm sure you're already familiar with his work he
 was the former editor of the classic psychedelic illuminations magazine of
 which I still have a few treasured copies in my library and James was also
 the publisher of Trip magazine sadly I think that for our community there just
 weren't enough of us in the psychedelic community to keep Trip magazine alive
 right now Trip and James can be found online at www.tripzine.com
 and if you go to that site right now which by the way is the spring of
 2006 for you time travelers who might come across this podcast in the far
 distant future anyhow right now you'll see a link to James's new book
 psychedelic information theory and he's also posted the table of contents and
 several chapters for you to read online I think that if you take the time to
 read a little this book you'll see that it's a completely new take on the
 subject in fact James was recently invited to present his new psychedelic
 information theory at the recent toward a science of consciousness conference
 which is a venue for the real heavy hitters in consciousness research and
 as I said a minute ago our community wasn't able to muster up enough
 subscriptions to keep Trip magazine alive but now we've got another chance
 to make up for it and if you go to the web page at Tripzine that has the link
 to the table of contents for his new book there's also a link right below it
 to donate to the publishing fund for this groundbreaking book if you donate
 five bucks you'll get a full online preview of the chapters as they become
 available and the first hundred people who chip in 50 bucks will receive
 numbered autographed copy of the limited first edition I don't know how
 many of those hundred copies are left in fact I can guarantee that there is least
 less than a hundred now because I've ordered mine and so if you're interested
 and so inclined why don't you give one of our own your support to help to get
 this important book published I guess I've rambled on long enough for now I
 appreciate you being with us here today in the psychedelic salon and I
 appreciate shuttle hi yuk for letting us use their music for these podcasts so
 thanks again Jacques Cordell and Wells and for now this is Lorenzo signing off
 from cyber delic space be well my friends
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