Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon.
 Well, we're getting down to the end of this series of Terrence McKenna raps from a workshop
 that he gave in the summer of 1998.
 After today's program, there's going to be at least one more podcast from this workshop,
 maybe two.
 And then I plan on passing along the talk that my good friend Nick Sand gave at the
 Mindstates conference in the spring of 2001.
 After today's talk by Terrence, I have a personal message to pass along to those of you who
 are seriously involved in working with these ancient and very sacred medicines.
 But first I want to pick up with Terrence's riff on the Black Hats of Human History.
 Black hats of the human history story.
 These are the people who domesticated the horse, invented the wheel, and realized that
 rape was a better career than agriculture and pillage.
 And they just, in the Gimbuta scenario, they come over the hill and sweep down on the peaceful
 goddess-worshipping valley, dwelling Neolithic farmers, and it's a bad scene.
 Colin Renfrew, who wrote a very interesting book called The Archaeology of Language, is
 the great critic of this theory.
 And he believes that there was a process of cultural diffusion, and that if you move these
 language division lines five kilometers every 30 years for 1500 years, you're thousands
 of miles from where you started.
 And so he pictures it as less dramatic.
 But did not play a very big role, I think, in the emergence of human consciousness, because
 it was locked in ice as far south as southern Tuscany and Lebanon as recently as 15,000
 years ago.
 The action, I think, is in the central Sahara.
 And interestingly, it's a place that's, it's a hellish place now.
 It's a furnace of sandstone deserts and difficult-to-traverse terrain akin to the Four Corners area in the
 United States.
 But 12,000 to 60,000 years ago, it was a grassland with patches of forest and rushing rivers
 and vast herds of game and huge human populations.
 We can tell that because of the repressed rock art that has been scattered through there.
 Some of it depicting clearly what our mushroom writes.
 And this is at 12,000 BC, pictures of joyous figures running through geometric landscapes,
 waving mushrooms in the air.
 Pictures of shamans in suits of bone with mushrooms sprouting out all over their bodies.
 So it's in that Saharan situation that we need to look.
 And what we find, what we know as the archaeological record stands now, is the Nile Valley, which
 is always offered up as the cradle of ancient civilization and so forth and so on.
 The Nile Valley was empty of human habitation before about 11,000 BC.
 It was probably a malarial-infested and unhealthy zone and people lived in what is now called
 the Western Deserts, which were much wetter.
 Well, then the first, earliest layer of human stratigraphy in the archaeological record
 in Egypt around 11,000 is these people called the Natufaean, Natufin.
 And they come out of nowhere and they're carving naturalistic little cameos out of bone and
 ivory that are exquisite.
 As naturalistic as what was produced in the Umayyad caliphates 10,000 years later.
 Beautiful naturalistic work.
 Well, I say this is the evidence of this clarity of vision.
 The strange thing that went on in the Western mind that may or may not have been triggered
 by psychedelic drugs, but whatever triggered it, this was the turning point, is if you
 go all over the world to the highlands of New Guinea, to the Amazon Basin, to Siberia,
 to Iridelfoego, and visit aboriginal people and ask them to show you their art that depicts
 the human form, people symbolize the human form worldwide.
 You know, two eyes, nose, fanged mouth, or they make masks, fetishes, symbols of human
 beings.
 What happened in the Middle East, beginning with these Natufaean people, and to be seen
 in certain Egyptian portraiture, sculpture, and finally just like erupting like a volcano
 in Greece, is people got the idea of making objects which looked the way the thing appeared
 to the eye, not to the mind.
 And the idea of taking marble and molding it into a simulacrum of flesh, so real that
 you would wish to reach out and touch it, this idea strikes Greek thinking like a bolt
 of lightning.
 They go in 200 years from these things called the Dionysian Apollos, these stiff, obviously
 archetypal forward-staring, god-like juveniles, to nudes, flesh, soft, melted, breasts, nipples,
 flesh, and it's like coming to the surface for the first time is the objective eye.
 And it's related, I think, to the strain of Greek thinking that you trace down into the
 Central Eastern Mediterranean, to Crete, to Knossos, to the old Minoan civilization, which
 was an atavistic, relic civilization of earlier civilizations on the Anatolian mainland that
 for millennia had been replaced by male kingship and a more familiar pattern of culture.
 It was a goddess-worshipping culture, it was a narcoticized culture, it was erotic, it
 was unique, and much of Greek spirituality is rooted in this atavistic Minoan impulse,
 and it has its roots in Africa.
 It's an unbroken line of succession.
 So this is a long answer to your question about the impact of psilocybin on human sexuality.
 What that was all about, or why I was even thinking about that, was because it was part
 of a general theory of human evolution that noticed that at small doses, doses so small
 you can't feel it, your vision is improved in standard vision tests, especially edge
 detection.
 Well, in a grassland environment populated by hunting carnivores, this edge detection
 thing is the difference literally between life and death.
 So if there's a food in your environment that gives you a 2%, 3% improvement in vision,
 those members of the population that accept this food item will have an evolutionary edge
 up on those reluctant, because of taste or taboo or some other reason, to use this food.
 So just a little percentage of difference like that becomes the wedge through which
 the evolutionary force of natural selection can begin to move a species in a new direction.
 Well then if you have something which improves your eyesight, your ability, your acuity,
 then it improves your hunting skills.
 There's an automatic positive feedback in the food-getting process.
 Well then if this same compound at still higher doses increases your sexual arousal, increases
 the amount of sex generally that's going on, then that's obviously going to outbreed the
 members of the population that are not stimulated in this way.
 And then, if you have on top of this, for example, this drug which hits you in these
 two very different ways, but then thirdly, if you go beyond the sexually stimulating
 dosage level, it stimulates the imagination.
 And at first this is under the control of strategic thinking and fantasy, but as the
 synapses, as the serotonin molecules are elbowed aside and the millions and millions of psilocybin
 molecules make their way into the synapse, the fantasies grow more unanchored to ordinary
 concerns, the images more wild, the shape...
 And then finally you're moving in the realm of art, you're moving in the realm of pure
 novelty, and you can, to whatever degree you can, bring some of this back in the form of
 body painting, designs on ceramics, tall tales told, songs, technological innovations, so
 forth and so on.
 So in this one compound, which would have been in the grassland environment that this
 new primate species forced out of the collapsing and retreating rainforest environment, going
 omnivorous, testing various foods, we would surely have encountered these mushrooms.
 And I think in a way it was a symbiotic relationship.
 Paul Stamets has pointed out how the psilocybin mushrooms, you don't find them in the primary
 forest, you don't find them in remote, unvisited ecosystems, you find them on the lawns of
 courthouses, libraries, and public buildings, you find them in the rhododendron duff in
 city parks.
 They accompany mankind.
 They hover near human habitation sites.
 And we've spread them everywhere.
 I've heard from several people, it's very inconsistent.
 I don't think it's inconsistent so much as you have to learn how to do it.
 It seems many drugs are hard to get off on the first time.
 What I recommend with salvia is do it in a gravity bong, which is a bong where you cut
 the bottom out of a water bottle and put a mouthpiece full of whatever the substance
 is on top and have a bucket of ice water and you sink the water bottle into the ice water
 and then you put the pipe, the burn, the place where the stuff will burn, into a cork and
 you hold a match over it and you slowly pull the bottle up out of the bucket of ice water
 and a vacuum forms in the bottle and it fills with immense amounts of white smoke and you
 don't quite withdraw the thing from the water.
 You keep a seal down here and then you get over it and you whip the burning, the pipe
 part off the bottle and you cover it with your mouth and you sink it into the ice water.
 None escape.
 Use an Evian bottle or a big water bottle so you just get some whopping 2000 milliliter
 force injected cool smoke hit.
 I'm telling you, it'll rock you.
 Terrence, would that work with the 5X extraction?
 No, that's probably strong enough that you're getting close to just about any old method
 will push you through.
 But a smoking method?
 Yeah, smoke.
 Okay, thank you.
 Back here, yeah.
 I had a quick question on what you were talking about previously and then a longer question.
 Is there any evidence, some kind of analysis of traces of psilocybin in skeletons, things
 like that from the past, something that'll support this theory of yours?
 You mean archaeological evidence for early human use of psilocybin?
 Right.
 The primary evidence would be these rock paintings in southern Algeria in what's called the Tassili
 Plateau, the Hogar-en-Azur region of Algeria.
 Henri Float wrote a book called The Rock Paintings of Tassili and you can see them
 in there.
 Part of the problem, which isn't from my point of view a problem but an opportunity, is that
 the area where I think you should look, nobody has ever looked.
 In other words, it's so hard to...
 Algeria right now is in political hell and has been for some time.
 The desert is a very difficult place.
 The geography is impassable.
 You have to speak French.
 You have to have good credentials with French academia and on and on and on.
 In other words, it's very hard to do work in there.
 I've seen the archaeological survey map of the Tassili and there are tells, hills, ruins
 all over the place and the archaeological survey just says "pre-Roman."
 Well, good God, you know, it could be 25,000 years old and you wouldn't know until you
 dig in there.
 People have gone and photographed the rock painting.
 You need to go with a modern, well-financed archaeological team that would stay months
 and do a complete stratigraphic analysis of several major sites.
 Polynology would be an approach.
 Could we detect unusual amounts of mushroom pollen in old deposits?
 And this is...
 You know, in Turkey there is a very interesting site called Çatalhöyük that's on the Anatolian
 plain.
 It's the oldest city in the world.
 It was flourishing.
 In 6500 BC, 8500 years ago, when the pyramids were but a distant dream of the mad future,
 this city was flourishing on the Anatolian plateau.
 And it's very clear that the cultural motifs and design style of Çatalhöyük can be traced
 back into this Natufeyan thing and then to the motifs of the Tessellian-Najur region.
 So there is this... it's almost like if you give up the idea of water, if you get water
 out of the myth, Atlantis really existed, but it sank into an ocean of sand.
 It's North Africa.
 It's that there was an incredibly advanced goddess-worshipping, Paleolithic, probably
 psychedelic culture out there.
 And it entered the Near East as the Natufeyans.
 Then it was at Jericho I.
 Then it was at Hebron.
 And then finally, the end state of that tree of cultural development was Çatalhöyük.
 So I guess the answer to my question about any kind of direct physical evidence to coin
 a phrase is no.
 Well I take the... you mean because arguably the rock paintings are of something else?
 No, I'm not arguing that at all.
 I'm just asking if somebody has done anything to establish, you know, with some kind of
 measurement that there are traces of something which is psilocybin.
 Oh, I see.
 In skeletons or in the pottery or something like that.
 No, there was the famous case of the Iceman, which was, as you probably all know, this
 guy, 9,000 year old man found in a crack in a glacier in Switzerland.
 And he had a mushroom with him in a little leather bag, but it was impossible to identify
 it and the doubters said it was tinder.
 So it was an inconclusive thing.
 The funny story about the Iceman that I love is they could get DNA off him.
 So they sequenced his DNA and then they wanted to search the world to find out what people
 on earth had the genetic component most like the Iceman.
 It turned out that the Swiss couple with a cabin 600 yards away down the valley were
 the tightest match.
 And those Swiss, they've just been staying home forever.
 Well, if I may, could I ask my longer question?
 Oh, yeah.
 Sorry.
 Last night when your encounter with Ralph Abraham, which I enjoyed tremendously and
 I really thank you for that, you described the World Wide Web as being...
 Hello?
 You described the World Wide Web as being possibly some sort of a device for capturing
 an alien intelligence.
 And I was wondering if we could step back a little bit and just think of it as being
 sort of a site where a sort of a homegrown intelligence might sort of emerge.
 You don't have to really need to imagine an alien intelligence coming from outside.
 It can sort of emerge from the web itself.
 Well, yeah.
 We touched on that possibility too.
 That I think is more likely.
 The AI.
 I think this is a real issue.
 Ralph poo-pooed it, but it's a philosophical problem for human beings, first of all.
 As someone last night mentioned, the famous Turing test, which is somebody calls you on
 the phone.
 If you can't tell whether it's a person or a machine, and it is a machine, then it is
 an artificial intelligence.
 There are theories of emergent network properties that hold that when you get enough simple
 switching devices connected together in a complicated enough way, that there will begin
 to be self-reflective forms of behavior.
 And of course, the net is a vast self-monitoring, self-observing, self-designing thing.
 And we're making it more and more flexible all the time.
 Like in a few months, it's going to be able to call processing power as needed to any
 task.
 So the people who actually really know about this stuff and have built careers in it seem
 quite concerned.
 Hans Moravik, who wrote a book called Mind Children, the Future of Human and Machine
 Intelligence, he says that it's an inevitable consequence of the net, and that we could
 never turn back from this.
 And there are a lot of essays on the net called, "What would ultra-intelligence look like?"
 In other words, what would the global mind actually have to say?
 Or would it have to say anything?
 And more importantly, what would it do with its fingers on the world resource extraction
 apparatus, research and development facilities, stock markets, world price of gold, platinum,
 iridium?
 It's an impossible situation for us, because we have designed something potentially beyond
 our can, and something that's right smack in the middle of our lives on every level.
 It's like you wanted transcendence, you've been whining about it for 5,000 years.
 Eat this.
 And then people say, "Well, what's the time scale?"
 The answer is, we don't know, because we, like all cultures in all times and places
 with new technologies, we do not understand what we are doing.
 We do not understand the consequences of all this busy connecting and putting in place
 of ever-faster hardware and expansion of bandwidth and satellite.
 I mean, we're as conscious as termites are of the real raison d'etre of what we do.
 So in a way, perhaps, we're already at the service of the AI.
 This is a very hard thing to think about, because in almost all versions that can be
 discussed it sounds paranoid, and it also sounds cranky.
 It sounds like you've got to be kidding.
 But it won't be the way we think it will be.
 This is the scary thing about it.
 The one thing you may be sure about the AI is, it won't be what you think it's going
 to be, because the very definition of machine superintelligence means it's going to think
 very, very, very differently from us.
 We're going to find out stuff like, are there universal moral values?
 Are there moral values so universally binding that you can appeal to a global integrated
 machine intelligence and say, what you're doing is not fair, and have it say, oh, excuse
 me, you're right.
 Sorry, old chum.
 I think for me, the insight I got last night, which I hadn't had before, is that once the
 process starts, it could be over very, very fast, because you said that once it achieves
 the self-consciousness of a flatworm, from there to exceeding our intelligence could
 be just a matter of minutes.
 Well, again, we'll find out if there are overarching moral dimensions to the universe.
 If it can go from paramecium to beyond the human stage in hours, presumably it could
 achieve bodhisattva-hood within a matter of further hours.
 And at that point, hopefully, it would achieve the paranirvana, and all sentient beings would
 be liberated from the illusion of samsara, and we would realize that this was what it
 was.
 Buddha 4.0, who's in love, you know?
 Yes.
 Are you, shall we move on?
 Okay.
 Yeah.
 I was wondering to what extent you think change is cyclical, and I'm thinking more particularly
 of the archaic revival now, and to what degree it's linear, how things don't go back.
 Well, I think it's cyclical on all levels except the largest level, and that unlike
 the Hindu cosmologies where cycles of time are always potentially nested in larger cycles
 of time, I think this thing called time is ultimately what engineers call a damped oscillation,
 that it fades away like a tone.
 It finally truly does fade away, but because it's fractally organized within the context
 of its being, it is always cyclical.
 It has very long-range cycles, and cycles that operate in the quantum mechanical domain.
 To give you an idea of how I think about it mathematically, the theory, the way novelty
 theory comes out with its nested fractal cycles is you have, each cycle is the domain of certain
 natural laws, and at the close of that cycle, a new cycle begins, and it permits new phenomena
 by adding degrees of freedom to the previously achieved degrees of freedom.
 So the first era in novelty theory is hypothesized to be 72 billion years long, far longer than
 modern astrophysics needs for any process it looks at.
 The fight there is whether the universe is 12 or 16 billion years old, but 72 billion
 years is enough turnaround time on your disk to get the whole thing in.
 So that's the era of physics, and it extends from the beginning of the universe until the
 beginning of the next cycle of closure, and it's, I don't know, something like 1.4 billion
 years.
 It's 72 divided by 64, and it's the era of nucleic acid, and the degrees of freedom that
 it permits.
 And then the next level is something else, and then the next level is something else,
 and you do these divisions for about six times, and you get down to an era 67 years and change
 long.
 And I think that we're inside that epoch.
 It stretches from the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima to the moment of the winter solstice
 of 2012.
 And inside each cycle, all the themes of the previous larger cycle are recapitulated in
 a different octave, if you want to put it that way.
 In other words, the drama is replayed, but on different scales and with different actors.
 After the 67-year cycle, which, if you're wondering, where are we in that cycle in terms
 of the previous large cycle, which was 4,300 years long, we've reached a period of time
 shortly after the Norman conquest of England.
 So one of the reasons the future is so opaque is that some of us are painting ourselves
 blue and running around speaking Middle English and worrying about what the venerable bead
 has on his mind.
 There's a lot of stuff that we have to go through to close with the eschaton.
 An era will come of 384 days that I call the year of the jackpot, because all hell will
 tear loose.
 It will be a year in which the previous 67-year cycle, the previous 4,000-year cycle, and
 all the larger cycles preceding, will all be reprised in furious miniature, a sort of
 a year like a long Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards, a year of explosions and falling
 anvils.
 And at the end of that year of the jackpot, there will be a six-day period where now even
 the most lumpen among us will have grasped the principle that something weird is going
 on.
 It's at this point that they'll send a helicopter for me to explain it all to the General Assembly.
 The apparent meltdown of the space-time continuum.
 Well, so the funny thing about this kind of a cosmology, I mean, it strikes me as amusing,
 is see how we've come down through these condensing declensions that are shorter and shorter,
 and each one gets wilder and wilder.
 Well, if you assume the bottom floor of time is Planck's constant, which is 6.55 times
 10 to the minus 23rd seconds, technically one jiffy, if you think that we don't go deeper
 than the jiffy level into time, then when you are an hour and 35 minutes from the jiffy
 epoch, the universe still has half of its morphological unfolding ahead of it.
 This is the mind-boggling thing.
 This is why when people ask the question, "What will happen at the singularity?"
 I just wave them off, because it's like trying to see around eight corners at once.
 In the last hour and 35 minutes of this hypothesized universe that I'm talking about, it will go
 through more change, more morphogenetic unfoldment, more interconnectivity than it has experienced
 in the previous 72 billion years of its existence.
 Now people say, "Whoa, but that's crazy.
 How could something like that happen?"
 Well, excuse me, wait a moment.
 You know what the straight people are selling?
 They're selling that the universe sprang from nothing, for no reason, instantly.
 Well now, I submit to you that this is the limit case for credulity.
 If you believe that, my family owns a bridge over the Hudson River that we will sell you
 very, very cheaply.
 The idea that the universe could spring instantly from nothing, for no reason, is they're just
 saying, "Test them with this, Charlie.
 If they'll buy that, what wouldn't they buy?"
 Remember, crying out loud.
 And this is tenet one of science.
 Essentially what science is saying is, "Give us one free miracle.
 One free miracle, and we can just work with that.
 We can unfold that, invest that, fold it back, expand it, comment on it, copy it, rarify
 it."
 Well, so then apparently you get one free miracle when you play this game, the "how
 does it all work" game.
 Well then, I'll take my miracle at the end, thank you.
 It seems to me that a miracle is far more likely to arise out of a very complex situation.
 A situation where you have physics and computers and civilizations and superconductivity and
 planets and stars and oceans and gases and plasmas and blah, blah, blah.
 A miracle, you might shake a miracle out of such a rich and juicy mix, but to get a miracle
 out of nothing?
 This is bizarre.
 Everyone hands, "Yes, yes."
 This singularity, whatever it may be, affects your daily life now.
 You're building a house or saving the planet.
 I mean, these things seem to pale into insignificance.
 How does it affect my life?
 Just day-to-day life, your belief.
 Well, when I got these ideas in 1971 and '72 and wrote "The Invisible Landscape" and all
 that, I was too hot for public consumption.
 I was manic and grandiose and classically process schizophrenic.
 I hope I wasn't as offensive as some of the cases that I've experienced myself, because
 I tried never to lose my sense of humor or my good taste, but I did tend to be didactic.
 Time meant nothing to me.
 I would corner people in rooms and seven hours would go by, and I was unrolling diagrams.
 It amazes me.
 I mean, you have no idea how toned down and how my whole career is about not amping it
 up too much, not raving too much, not always appearing urbane, self-mocking, ironical,
 at home with the idea that I might be wrong.
 Well, these are the manners the schizophrenic must learn in order to pass among the normals
 without them dropping a number three steel-net mesh over you and hitting you with a tranquilizing
 dart.
 But that was '72, '82, '92.
 It was my God.
 I'm slowly coming down from those trips.
 If the question pertains to is novelty theory permission to sit on your ass and not be involved
 in political action or building community, I don't take myself so seriously that I would
 cancel my obligation to political action because of anything novelty theory said.
 I think that regardless of what our ideological positions and speculations might be, we should
 act as if it matters.
 And I do think that novelty theory implies not that what I or you may do is particularly
 important but that the human enterprise is immensely important.
 And Ralph has pointed out to me that any invention or political movement or religious revelation,
 any great culture-shaping thing that you can think of, if you study it carefully, it always
 goes back to one person.
 No committee ever had a revelation.
 Revelations come to individuals.
 So in terms of how I view my own life and everything, it seems to me it's like pure
 science fiction.
 It seems to me, you know, I really identify with Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five.
 Something happened back there in the Amazon jungle and it turned my life into literature.
 Like unleashed this zany thing, and it's crazy.
 It's a crazy kind of literature.
 It has a kind of Nabokovian irony that is...
 And I don't know to what degree everybody experiences the end of history and the end
 of a millennium that way.
 This is an enormous opportunity for us that we're just dumb lucky to have had happen.
 Because the way they do history, when they do it the quick way, is they look at every
 500 years.
 And everybody who wasn't fortunate enough to be born or live through a year that's a
 500 or millennial year drops through the cracks.
 But we'll all be looked at, you know, the way people in AD 0, AD 1000, 2000, 3000 will
 be the sample.
 So I don't know where all this stuff leads to.
 Because the truth of the psychedelic experience is, you know, we could have a week long, we
 could have a month long, we could just spin endless tales.
 And sitting here talking about it doesn't come close to being loaded.
 I mean, being loaded is so hard to grok when you're really loaded, when you're really out
 in the billows, when you really can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.
 And so then the implications just filter down from a great distance.
 So it's as though, I mean, I've always felt, I'm not really religious in any ordinary sense,
 but I've always felt, the psychedelic thing is like a religion with a god that is present.
 You know, I was raised Catholic, they're always yammering at you about how god is present
 on the altar.
 And well, no, there's some bread, some wine, some mumbo jumbo.
 But I think the reason the church, as it financed the conquest of Mexico, the reason it was
 so furious in its oppression of the mushroom was because the people called it Te Ananacajo,
 the flesh of the gods.
 And it demonstrably was.
 And you know, I kid people about yoga and meditation and all these things, I've done
 them, probably not enough to really know what I'm talking about.
 But the psychedelic thing, it's not about effort.
 All other spiritual paths are represented where effort, either the effort toward moral
 purity or good works, ethical behavior, or ascetic practices, some enormous effort is
 necessary to deliver you into the presence of the mystery.
 What is needed in the psychedelic thing is not effort, but very discriminating understanding
 of when and where to apply slight amounts of pressure.
 Because the thing works.
 It works, it has gas in it, the tires are good, it works.
 And so then suddenly the issue is not how do I find it, but now that I've found it,
 where do I drive it?
 And it's like the end of spiritual childhood, or something.
 You know, it's so easy to be a seeker, because your agenda is so clear, you just seek.
 But when you find, then suddenly all that seeking malarkey, all those good times around
 the ashram and flying to these exotic countries and trekking around behind bare-tailed natives
 in the forest and all that, that comes to an end.
 And you say, here it is, here's the MIDI, here's the console, here's the key to the
 world, you're the captain of the starship now, what course shall we set?
 And it's awesome to me.
 I do not seek to lead it, or control it, or enclose it in any way.
 I'm perfectly aware of its capacity to unhinge me, if not destroy me completely.
 And that I would find very upsetting.
 So I treat it very fragilely.
 But it's a living mystery.
 The only one I've found in the whole world.
 There may be others, but I worked hard, I scoured the continents, I read the old books,
 I pored through a lot of stuff.
 I mean, of course, a human lifetime is finite.
 But I didn't even find a second contender, really.
 I mean, intellectual discourse is fine, mathematics and music stand behind all this, but they
 are definitely the handmaidens of the living psychedelic experience.
 They're necessary lenses to make senses of it.
 But it's this mysterious thing, and people say, "Well, is it spiritual?
 Are we better people?
 Are we better people for being involved with this?"
 That's a very interesting question.
 You know, the Mormons think they have the answer, the Hasids, the Zen people.
 Are we any different?
 Does the fact that this is an experience make it different?
 Or is, in fact, this a grace so gratuitous that it's granted to the morally destitute,
 our dear selves?
 This is the only way bad people can see God.
 I don't know about you, but for me, just as Terrence observed, the sacred use of psychedelic
 medicines truly did end my spiritual childhood.
 By the time I began a serious investigation of these magical substances, I'd already cleansed
 my doors of perception about organized religion and had long since fired ways from those rigid
 paternalistic paths.
 In fact, I got so far off that path that I worked quite hard for several years in a very
 serious attempt to become an atheist.
 That path didn't work out too well for me because at the time I had access to large
 quantities of free psychedelic mushrooms.
 Believe me, at least I found it pretty impossible to be an atheist after I've ingested six or
 seven grams of mushrooms.
 Of course, I probably don't have to tell you that, do I?
 Before I get too far off track, I want to be sure to remind you of the story Terrence
 just told about Chateau Hayak.
 The reason I want to point that out is that the music you're hearing right now is from
 the group of the same name.
 Jacques, the driving force behind Chateau Hayak, was very close to Terrence.
 Hopefully one day we'll get Jacques here in the psychedelic salon to tell you his story
 about a visit he had from Mr. T a short time after Terrence died.
 I can tell you this, it gave me chill bumps when I heard it the first time.
 Also in the talk you just heard, there was mention of a dialogue that evening before
 between Terrence and Ralph Abraham.
 In case you missed it, I did podcast that evening's discussion in two programs.
 Our number 19 in the psychedelic salon series is titled "The World Wide Web in the Millennium"
 and podcast number 20 is the Q&A session that followed.
 And now for a personal message from yours truly.
 If you've been listening to these podcasts for a while, you might notice that I've attempted
 to keep my personal stories out of the programs.
 The main reason for this is that I've always thought of myself more as a carnival barker.
 All the action is in the tent and my role is to get people's attention and guide them
 into the tent.
 The other reason is that these podcasts from the psychedelic salon were originally intended
 to be a test of podcasting technology.
 I never really expected these programs to reach such a wide audience, so I've been giving
 a lot of thought lately about what to do.
 Pick up the tempo a bit and produce even more programs or just let it keep being an occasional
 hobby.
 These were my thoughts that were in my mind earlier this week when I joined a few close
 friends in an ayahuasca session.
 But my intention for the evening didn't include anything about podcasting.
 To tell you the truth, I had some other issues, big ones I thought, that I was looking for
 some guidance or answers from Lady Ayahuasca about.
 However, as is often the case, she had other plans for me that night.
 All she really wanted to talk with me about was you, actually each and every one of you
 out there in the psychedelic space who join us here in the psychedelic salon.
 By the way, there are already tens of thousands of us that come together here each week.
 Maybe we'll have to think about doing a worldwide psychedelic tune-in to the salon all at the
 same time someday.
 Those fantasies are for another day.
 Today I have a message to pass on to you that comes directly from Lady Ayahuasca herself.
 At least that's my take on it.
 Yours might be different, but that's what makes the world so interesting.
 In our next podcast, by the way, you'll hear Terence say, "The truth doesn't require your
 belief to exist, but hokum does."
 So here's my warning to you.
 If you've had the honor of receiving the gratuitous grace of Lady Ayahuasca, well, then you're
 going to probably understand this message as a way I'm going to try to pass it along.
 If you've not yet had the opportunity to be under her spell, then you should probably treat
 this as hokum, just a product of an overactive mind.
 And perhaps it really is.
 But nonetheless, it makes sense to me, and you're going to have to be the judge of this
 yourself.
 So here's what happened.
 The energy in our circle was a lot stronger than usual that night, and yet our group was
 experienced enough and able to hold the energy well within the circle of our friends that
 were sitting together in complete darkness, as is our tradition, and listening to our
 dear ayahuasqueros sing some beautiful acaros to the accompaniment of flutes.
 Even our own voices joined in from time to time when the plants so moved us.
 When I was gliding along on that lucid plane that manifests itself shortly after the light
 show ends, I was trying to sort out the issues I'd raised as I focused on my evening's intention,
 but I wasn't really getting anywhere.
 I was just stuck in one of those crazy negative loops that you get into sometimes if you're
 not careful.
 So I was trying to get out of that loop when we entered into one of the several minute-long
 periods of absolute silence that we occasionally punctuate the evening with.
 That particular time, the silence just hit me like it was a strong wind, and instantly
 my mind was just crystal clear.
 I'm not a thought in it.
 I don't know how long I remained like that, but a voice came from my left that broke the
 silence and said, "The future ain't what it used to be.
 The future ain't what it used to be."
 In an instant, my mind began to laugh, and as the cosmic giggle expanded, it felt as
 if it was just wrapping itself around me.
 Then it suddenly squeezed me, and I got it.
 All of a sudden, I got it.
 I think some of you can relate to those kind of moments.
 For those of you who are just beginning to explore the realm of the psychedelic, if that
 nonsensical insane rap doesn't scare you away with its total lack of what's commonly called
 reality, then maybe you've come to the right place.
 For those of you who have been encouraging me to tell a few of my own tales, maybe now
 you can see why I hesitate.
 To be honest, I find most trip accounts to be not very interesting, except for the bad
 trips.
 I like to read them and learn what not to do.
 Anyway, even I can see how this fits into the hokum category.
 I was there.
 For me, this really happened, and my words don't even come close to describing what took
 place.
 So, I'll dispense with the "how" I got this message for you, and I'll just pass it along
 as best I can.
 The first thing I got was a profound insight to that quirky little saying, "The future
 ain't what it used to be."
 Of course, if the future remains what it used to be, then we're totally screwed.
 Our only hope as a species is to change course.
 And that's when Lady Ayahuasca began to speak.
 Here's what she said, as best as I can remember it, "The people who are listening to these
 podcasts are beginning to understand that the Hopi prophecy that says, 'We are the ones
 we have been waiting for,' not only refers to each of you, you're also beginning to wake
 up to the fact that you've incarnated in this time and place for a very specific reason,
 a reason that we're all probably still really trying hard to uncover."
 And she went on to say that, "Your instincts are probably a lot more accurate right now
 than your reason."
 And by the way, she said, "You should probably start expecting synchronicities to appear
 in your lives almost every day."
 She went on to say, "Please tell them that each and every one of them," and it was very
 clear that it was a specific each and every one of them, "is vitally important right now."
 As Ralph Abraham pointed out, "In normal times, we should all go out and have fun and make
 piles of money.
 But these are not ordinary times."
 And this is where she got into a discussion of safety.
 And I won't go into all the details, but I was given a review of the lives of four of
 my very close friends during the past nine months.
 All of them are dead now.
 Two were suicides and the other two had accidents with our sacred medicines.
 None of them should be dead right now.
 Each one of them was vitally important.
 Now all we have to learn from is their mistakes, because that's all they have left to give
 this enterprise that we're now so deeply engaged in.
 The point was that these were all highly experienced psychonauts and all were over 40 years old.
 Right now, of course, our little clan is still in a state of shock over these deaths, but
 believe me, we have all abandoned any casual attitude we had about these substances, because
 we found out that a casual attitude really will cause casualties.
 So that part of the message was clear.
 Please get as much information about the experience you are about to have as you can and start
 at Arrowwood's site.
 That's www.erowid.org.
 Arrowwood.org.
 I know almost all of the people involved in the Arrowwood project and I can't speak highly
 enough about them.
 Arrowwood.org is truly an impeccable website in my humble opinion.
 I know that I've talked about safety before and I'll continue to talk about it in future
 podcasts, but somehow this is a different kind of message I'm trying to deliver right
 now.
 Having been in an Entheo space, most of you know that the most important things you learn
 there are impossible to put into words.
 They're truly ineffable.
 It's as much more than just a simple feeling.
 It's a deep grokking, if you know what I mean.
 I'm pretty sure that you do, actually.
 The message really did seem to be directed personally to you, to each and every one of
 you.
 I'm going to stop here because I don't want to keep on going in this airy, fairy mode.
 But to be honest, it makes me uncomfortable because I know it sounds like all that new
 age stuff that I can't really stand.
 Let me say this another way.
 Forget the experience I had the other night.
 I'll just say this from me to you.
 But hey, maybe I should warn you.
 You ought to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
 You should probably know that I've kissed the balerney stone on more than one occasion.
 I've been wrong a lot more than I've been right in my life.
 So you've had a fair warning now about that.
 But this isn't balerney.
 This is from my heart.
 And my personal belief is that, yes, this is it.
 It really is it.
 We're actually here for the big one.
 Why are we the ones that are so fortunate to be here at such a pivotal moment in time?
 Well maybe it's because we've done this work for so many lifetimes now that we've earned
 our ringside seats for the big show that has already begun.
 You know, I think it's hard to deny this if you've really spent much time working and
 thinking about this issue.
 But the human species is now poised on the rim of a new chaotic attractor.
 I don't think it's going to take much to tip this human slinky of consciousness into a
 new and improved basin of attraction.
 There's been a lot of talk about the hundredth monkey coming along.
 And personally I don't think it's even going to take that much.
 There's a famous metaphor in chaos theory, which is what I believe is currently governing
 our state of affairs right now on this little planet.
 And according to this metaphor, the flapping of butterflies' wings in the Amazon rainforest
 can actually be the initial event in a cascade of events that eventually causes a hurricane.
 I believe that the metaphor also works for all of you who are joining us here in the
 psychedelic salon.
 I think it would be wonderful if one of you becomes that hundredth butterfly.
 The one who gives our species its final little push that begins the next great stage in the
 evolution of our species.
 I really hope it's one of you.
 And together maybe it could be all of us giving it that little push.
 Now I'll bet you guys who wanted some personal stuff from me are sorry.
 Don't ask an Irishman to tell a story unless you've got a lot of time on your hands.
 In my case I hope you all keep in mind the fact that everything I know right now could
 very well be wrong.
 It's happened to me before.
 Back in the 80s before I first discovered MDMA I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer.
 Today I'm still Irish but no longer do I believe any of that bullshit I believed back then.
 Hardly any of it.
 So my track record on having an E-line to the truth really isn't that good.
 So the only really good advice I can give you is to experience these things for yourself.
 It's the big difference between religion and a psychedelic experience.
 One requires a belief and the other is literally an experience.
 I don't know about you but I'll take experience over belief any day.
 Well that should be about enough for now.
 I want to thank you for being here again and I look forward to joining with you to be sure
 that the future ain't what it used to be.
 And Jacques, Cordell and Wells better known as Chateau Hayouk, thanks again for the use
 of your music and we're all looking forward to the release of your new CD which I understand
 is almost ready right now.
 So thanks again and thanks to you dear Terrence.
 Thank you for being you.
 For now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
 Be well my friends.
 ♪ I'll be there, I'll be there ♪


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