Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. Now if you've been here with us in the salon for the last four podcasts, you know that we've been playing cuts from a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998. The workshop, I guess you could say it consisted of four sections, because there was one on Friday night, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday. And also Terrence and Ralph Abraham held a dialogue about the World Wide Web and the Millennium on Saturday night. By the way, that interesting encounter is posted in podcast 19 and 20 in case you missed it. And I guess I should also mention that if you're getting our podcasts through our RSS feed to iTunes or some other aggregator, we only leave about the most recent 15 podcasts on the list. So if you want to get back once, you can get a complete listing of all the psychedelic salon podcasts, just go to Matrix Masters, www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts. Or you can go to our other site, our audio site, palenquenorte.org and click on the podcast link. Now, let's get back to Terrence and we'll begin with a cut that has his, among other things, has his rap about the archaic revival. Well, I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival where the idea there is that we are discomforted. Psychedelicization has made us uncomfortable with our humanness because these various technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times. And that in a sense what psychedelics do is they hit your reset button. They address the animal body. They address a deeper level than cultural conditioning. And so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings that civilization has repressed or transmuted in you. And the whole premise of that book was that the 20th century, in many of its cultural manifestations from cubism to da-da, abstract expressionism, jazz, sexual permissiveness, hallucinogenic drugs, youth culture, a whole bunch of things were all impulses toward the primitive, toward a return to a primal state of social organization. And that really this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century. The 19th century saw the triumph of hierarchical order, gentlemanly values, class structure, all that constipated European stuff. And then the 20th century is experienced as chaos. Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them. Freud announces that we are not just Christian ladies and gentlemen, but right beneath the surface the incest drive, cannibalistic drives, extremely violent primitive impulses are there. Jazz introduces syncopation into music. Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper dancing. I don't know, you can figure it all out for yourself. The point is the whole of the 20th century is a turning back toward these values that had been repressed for millennia, not only by Christianity, but by the Greek scientific philosophy, the fanatic alphabet, urbanism, agriculture itself. There was a very long period in the human adventure when all of those things lay in our future and we were far happier, I think, then, judging by our lack of need to make egoistic statements by building vast religious monuments or enslaving each other or setting down codes of laws, so forth and so on. And of course we'll never be like that again, but there is an impulse in modern society to recapture those values and psychedelics are hugely effective at doing this. I mean, all this talk of shamanism and Native Americanism and getting in touch with your body and honoring gender shifts and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude, a less categorical and constipated and print-defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles and social polity. Well, it's always interesting to me to do these around-in-a-circle things. First of all, it seems to me, I mean, maybe this is self-congratulatory, but it seems to me that people are extraordinarily serious and together. I have a real nose for nuttiness and I didn't so much as twitch this evening. And this is a large group, so don't loosen your chains too much, but congratulations for impressing me anyway as very sane. This is an area where I think sanity counts. There's no points gained for being fanatical or maniacal. This isn't an area where you have to push the process. The process can push you harder and faster than you may wish. So once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas pedal and the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted. Those issues are somehow now overcome. It becomes a very different game now, a much subtler game. The doorway stands open and all it requires is courage, which is not to say it doesn't require a lot. It does require a lot, but what it is is courage. Very few people go to the ashram for their daily meditation with their knees knocking in terror over what is about to sweep over them. They are pretty confident that they've got it confined and nailed down. It isn't so with this. I've done it many times. There are many people here who've done it many times. The survivors are not confident. It doesn't build hubris in you. It doesn't promote bravado because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size if you presume it, or if you presume you understand it, or if you presume to use it. So sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up. I wouldn't get near that. My goal is to see more, to understand more. And what I do on a trip is damn near absolutely nothing. I have two or three J's rolled in front of me. If I can get through them in the course of the evening, all goals have been met. To see, to understand, to remember. It's an incredible statement about our humanness. It's a double-edged statement about our humanness, that within us, under the influence of these plants, we have literally Niagara's of alien beauty. When I go to Manhattan, I go to the Met and the Guggenheim, and I haunt the galleries of Soho. When I take mushrooms, I see more art in twenty minutes of behind the eyelids hallucination in total darkness than the human race seems to have produced in the last thousand years. So on one level, that's an incredible statement about the human capacity to generate and be in the presence of beauty. But the paradox is that so few people know this, that our ordinary styles of being, our ordinary relationships to plants, our main brand religions, almost never carry us into the sense of this potential for beauty. And when I was young, in my early twenties, wandering around India, trying to sort all this out, having taken some psychedelics, but reading yogic texts and Mahayana texts and all this, I discovered in every culture there is what I call "wise old man wisdom" or "wise old woman wisdom." You know, in every culture at evening, you see sitting on porches men smoking pipes, old men. And these guys know something. They know something about life. How to till the soil, how to raise a family, how to shepherd children through their marriages and so forth and so on. But what I did not find in these cultures was any knowledge of this gratuitous grace. This is like a secret of some sort. And it's a true secret in that telling it does not give it away. I know this because I've been trying to tell the secret for twenty-five years to anyone who would listen as you listen tonight. And I don't know how many people hear, at what level people hear me. And there are many problems. First of all, there's the problem of dose. It's a physical problem. You can take a little of a psychedelic substance, or an effective dose, or a lot, or too much, and medically not be in any particular danger. The LD50 of these substances is such. Let's take psilocybin as an example. Psilocybin is effective at 15 milligrams for a 145 pound person. But the LD50, the lethal dose, is something like 110 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. In other words, hundreds of times more than a dose that you would swear you were melting down, you were becoming the earth, you would never live to tell the tale. And actually you're in no medical danger at all. So people have experiences of different dose levels. I've always been interested in what the literature describes as effective doses. What this means is that you're so loaded that a guy standing there with a clipboard looking at you is completely convinced you're totally loaded. All pretense dissolves. At these higher doses, the machinery of phenomenological description begins to come to pieces on you. And in my experience, someone mentioned the difference between mystical experiences and psychedelics, there are enormous similarities and enormous differences. If you study the mystical literature of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, it all triangulates toward unitary states. The bodhi mind, the white light, the ineffable, the unnameable, the radiance. And vocabularies like this, which indicate some kind of homogeneity. Well, in my experience, though, when you push LSD, there is something somewhat like that. LSD is not my idea of the paradigmatic hallucinogen. It's different in many ways. Psilocybin is more the paradigmatic hallucinogen. When you push it, there seems to be not this merging into the radiance, but a revelation of multiplicity, of detail, of complexification within complexification. Everything gives way to everything else. Everything is interconnected to everything else. But the impression is one of an overwhelmingly bewildering perfusion of phenomena. And I've discussed this with lamas and these sorts of people, and they say, "Well, you're just in the realm of samsara. You're in the realm of the multiplicity." Perhaps, but the sense of a hierarchy of judgment doesn't feel right. Somehow this all and everything, this teeming, multiplistic universe that is revealed, seems to carry a message of ecstatic and transcendental import. It's all and everything, in Gurdjieff's phrase. And one of the ideas that I want to explore with you in the course of the weekend is, you know, most discussions of psychedelics orbit around, "What will it be like when I take it?" Well, that's very interesting and, of course, important to the individual. But to me, an equally interesting question is, "What has been the impact of this experience on the evolution of human beings over hundreds of thousands of years?" In other words, what is it that we share with this planet, a kind of co-evolution, not only with another order of being, which it certainly is, but the great confounding fact that I've brought back from my excursions into these places, is that there is an organized intelligence in there, out there, over there, far more alien than the cheerful pro-bono proctologists that haunt the trailer courts of the less fortunate. A truly alien presence, not interested in our gross industrial output or in imparting solitary technology upon us. Then what does it mean that our culture has sealed us off from this information? I mean, our culture claims under the aegis of science to bring us news of quasars, heliocasms of time and space away, news of the activities of the nucleus of the cell, at the heart of the atom, and yet here's a world that begins right behind your eyebrows, that any mention of it either brings talk of mental pathology, or how you've transgressed certain laws of the village. In other words, this culture has reared the edifice of empirical understanding and modern science and existential philosophy. This edifice has all been put in place in complete ignorance and denial of a fact of experience that is approximately as easy to access as orgasm. By different means, but nevertheless not far away. And yet we in the west have navigated for 1500 to 2000 years with this simply and easily repressed rumor. How did we get into this situation? In other words, if there was a primordial era of shamanism and plant symbiosis and mediated relationship with nature through the Gaia of intelligence, how did we fall then into the domain of post-renaissance, post-medieval, post-industrial culture? And then, what is the implication for the future of, in this dark hour of complete over-commitment to technology, economic solutions, rational reductionism, materialism, so forth and so on, in the darkest hour of our commitment to these things, this news arrives from these repressed aboriginal people that we have marginalized and humiliated in the process of building our own version of a global culture? Well, obviously I'm not going to try to answer these questions tonight, but this, to my mind, you know in the 11th century, when Islam swept across Asia Minor, in Isfahan, in Iran, they built these immense mosques with mosaic-vaulted roofs, and one of the great historians of Islam said of the city of Isfahan in the 10th century, he said, "It is half the world." A single city, half the world. In a way, psychedelics are half the world, and yet how few people have ever visited these sites, have ever stared into these particular vistas of beauty. And as was said in going around the circle, the impact of these psychedelics, where they hit us hardest, is in the domain of visionary imagining and the effort to communicate about our visionary imaginings. In other words, where they hit us hardest is in the domain of art and invention and novelty. And we have built a culture that, however hostile it may be to the psychedelic experience, it is incredibly friendly toward novelty, innovation, creativity, cultural evolution, celebration of difference, so forth and so on. So I would like to believe that the long prodigal journey of Western humanity to a well-nigh perfect understanding of the nature of matter and energy and space and time, that that prodigal journey can only be redeemed and made meaningful if the things learned in the shamanic descent into history, which it is a shamanic descent, I mean we have achieved what the alchemists only dreamed of, and we've achieved it, strangely enough, by abandoning their illusions. They were epistemologically naive. You do not discover fusion by endlessly rarifying mercury. You do not disentangle DNA by heating chemical vessels in horse dung. We had to abandon the naivete of alchemy to achieve its goals, which were mastery of space and time, control of human longevity and health and psychological well-being. Well, at the center of the alchemical ideal was the idea of the stone, something part mineral, part mental, part spiritual, something drawn out of nature, but perfected by human artifice and then reflecting back upon man, a perfect world created through magic. This is the faith of the Renaissance magi, Marcello Ficino and Campanella and these people. It's a different idea than the idea of man as a fallen creature, or science's notion of man as a mute witness to a meaningless universe. The magical ideal that these things fertilize and support is the idea that humanity is somehow the co-partner, a full partner, in creation, and that what God has brought into being, the human imagination can perfect. And it's a necessary faith for our time, because the power that we have is so great. If the power that science has given us does not serve a transcendental ideal, then it will serve some kind of fascist ideal, and most people will be reduced to equations and parts of a machine that does not serve the human individual or the human community. Psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination. They raise the ante in the historical poker game. They show that there is more than one way to skin a cat. And we have come to a place of bifurcations, immense choices. The decisions and the processes that are put in place in the next twenty years will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and this planet are made or broken as a cosmic concern. Well, consciousness is the key. What is dragging our boat is an absence of consciousness. You know, we have one foot in angelhood and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape. And the tension between these two on a global scale is excruciating. So if psychedelics, if there is one chance in a thousand that they contribute an increased measure of consciousness to this situation, then they are a precious gift, a resource, an option, a possibility to be explored. I don't advocate these things because I think it's a sure thing or a safe path to the eschaton. I advocate them because they're the only game in town. You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick, then the sermon on the mount would have been the turning of the corner. But we have Buddha, we have Christ, we have these examples of enormously insightful spiritual beings who have delivered their message, and humanity has continued to flop on the seamy side. So it's not about an idea. An idea is not sufficient to transform us. It's about an experience. And this is the only experience I know that in the time given to us, on the scale given to us, we have a hope of actually cutting through the detritus of our historical experience and building a true human community. On days this nice, my parents used to make me go outdoors. I had no excuse anymore for staying in. No, actually I vacillated. And I spent a lot of time on my stomach on the couch reading, and then a lot of time scrambling around in the nearby semi-arid wilderness looking for fossils and later collecting butterflies and then after that building and launching rockets. Freud notwithstanding. And it was lots of fun, but there was certainly lots of fun inside books. So last night was sort of a first pass at all of this. And there were questions left unanswered and threads untied. And now you've had a certain amount of time to absorb all that. Before I launch into some rap of my own, is there anything anybody wants to carry forward? Yeah. I realized last night that I didn't mention, but I have an interest in the I Ching and I don't think anyone else has really mentioned it either. But your work and others trying to tie that to other systems of order, DNA, calendars and stuff is also difficult to understand. Yeah, well several people last night mentioned novelty theory, but you're right, the I Ching itself wasn't mentioned, which we could do and I have done five day workshops on nothing but the I Ching, especially its mathematical deconstruction. So we'll talk about all of this probably this morning if I feel like it. Novelty, order in nature, since we're talking around it and through it I might as well just do it. What does it have to do with psychedelics and all that? Well, the bridge of connections, there are many, but for purposes of discussion, these psychedelic experiences, in my opinion, when correctly managed, end up giving you a big idea. That's a really successful psychedelic experience, it's not where you simply have observed this bewildering other dimension and try to come to terms with it and then come out and then live in the light of it because it's made the universe so much bigger. But following like a shamanic model of a journey to obtain a gift or to recover a lost jewel or this is the shamanic motif, it's always one of loss and recovery, these flights into this realm of the logos, the real stamp of authenticity on them comes when you bring back a new idea, something brand new. That proves that you're not just talking to yourself. And so I knew this and aspired to a new idea, whatever that might be, but I had no notion of what it was. And my problem as an intellectual throughout my entire life has been it's hard for me to go to depth with anything. I study Roman history for a year, I study German for a year, I study the Maya for a year, but I never could get that professional mania that leads you into becoming a real academic in a specialized sense. So this download for a big idea, somehow these psychedelic experiences set you up for it. They're not the only way, but they're the only way where you have some managerial control. The other methods all seem to be driven from the unconscious. For instance, if you read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, you discover there that these huge rational idea systems were downloaded in very shady and shaky mystical ways. The classic example that I always give, because it's so much fun basically, is that Rene Descartes' invention of scientific materialism was at the behest of an angel. An angel appeared to him in a dream. He records it in his diary and the angel says, "The conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number." He awakens the founder of French empiricism, materialism, and derivatively this whole branch of modern science at the behest of an angel. In this occult drive to understand nature, this is the amazing thing that the Greeks unleashed, this idea that we can not only mythologize the world, but that there is another way of looking at it. We can understand it. They started out simply, what is air, what is fire, what is earth? After 2,500 years of this, we've pretty much figured out what the standard moves are. The history of Chinese philosophy and the history of Western philosophy are the same schools by different names. You get atomic materialists, you get spiritualists, you get what's called occasionalism, you get all the possible adumbrations of a mind's position in relationship to being in the search for these ideas. Well, my idea, which came to me, I don't say I channeled it because I find that vocabulary infantile and obnoxious. But on the other hand, I don't take credit for it in the way that I don't feel elevated by my genius for having done this. It was definitely unfolded for me at a conversational speed by an intelligence for which I was little more than the secretary. And the idea is this, and I'll start with the outlines and then move into the details. First of all, that two facts about nature have been overlooked by science, and that these facts are so overwhelmingly obvious once you begin to talk about them, that ordinary people like you and I, by talking about them, can actually satisfy ourselves that these two aspects of nature, these two related aspects of nature, have been overlooked or not properly weighted in philosophical discourse. And here's what they are. The first one is, as you go back in time from the present moment, the universe becomes a simpler place. This is a huge generalization, and it's true. And let's state it now a slightly different way. Let's imagine we're at the moment of the Big Bang, or the moment when the universe flashed into existence 15 billion or however many billion years ago. It was a very simple thing. In the first nanoseconds of its existence, it was some kind of integrated plenum. It was smaller than the diameter of a proton. All particularity was coextensive in this tiny area. And then it began to expand. But for many milliseconds, it was a pure electron plasma. There was only a certain kind of physics, only the physics of pure electrons. The universe had to cool over minutes and millennia for atomic systems to form, so that electrons could actually go into orbit around the atomic core and not be overcome by the greater dissipative power of high thermal radiation. So until the universe cooled below a certain point, atomic systems, as it were, couldn't crystallize out. And then they did. And at that moment, a whole new set of phenomena in nature emerged, in David Bohm's phrase, emergent phenomena. There had been only a universe of pure electrons. Suddenly there was a universe of hydrogen and helium atoms, much more complex organisms, if you wish. So then the whole story of the universe is a story of progressive complexification accompanied by this phenomenon of cooling. And the universe of hydrogen and helium atoms, under the influence of gravity, these things were aggregated into huge masses where pressure rose at the center of these masses from the weight of the stuff above. And at a certain point, the curve of pressure passed through a point where a new phenomenon, hidden in the structure of being that previously not by any phenomenon proclaimed, emerged. A new phenomenon, fusion. The stars began to burn. And this process of nuclear burning, this nuclear chemistry, created heavier elements. Instead of a universe of hydrogen and helium, suddenly you have a universe which contains sulfur and iron. And for us, for our story, carbon. And at that point, it's like the rest was inevitable. The rest is just filling in the blanks, drawing the dots. I mean, it takes 14 billion years. But with carbon present in the universe, this force, which I identify and call novelty, could begin the long march forward toward this teleological ideal, this purpose, which it beckons at the end of time. What makes this idea radical, one of the things which makes it radical, is that it doesn't simply assume that history and becoming is the unfolding of causal necessity. It assumes instead that there's some kind of an attractor, that events are not just bubbling forward probabilistically and randomly, but that they're actually caught in some kind of field that is pulling everything toward a conclusion. And this, so I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be. The basic perception is the universe has grown more complex as we approach the present. Now this is a huge law, if true, because it's a statement about physical matter. It's a statement about organic organization. It's a statement about culture and society. It's a statement about your own psychology. Things complexify through time. But science has never said this. It's not even, I mean, the theory of evolution says biological systems grow more adaptive through time. But there's been a real phobia against any teleological implication from that. But this is a general rule which I submit to you, you by investigating the nature of things on your own can completely satisfy yourself that this is true. Well, when you start thinking that way, that it begins to look like nature on all scales is some kind of an engine which produces complexity and then conserves it and uses it as a platform to proceed deeper into complexity. It's a kind of anti-thermodynamic flow. It's a dissipative, it's what's called autopolysis by one school. So this tendency has been completely overlooked by science. In fact, science's most secure statement is Maxwell's second law of thermodynamics, which says all systems tend to disorder over time. But what it means is closed systems, all closed systems tend to disorder over time. Well, biology is some kind of a loophole in the laws of physics and chemistry because what's happening in biology is complex materials are trapped inside membrane and energy is extracted from these materials. And so a chemical process which would ordinarily ride down into entropy and obey the second law of thermodynamics actually is trapped in a kind of basin of attraction far from equilibrium. And people, you know, physical chemists look at this and say, well, but it's ephemeral. It just happens on the surface of the earth and it's very fragile and death is everywhere. It's a fluke, basically, is what they're saying. Well, but this is just their professional bias because you can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil record 4.83 billion years deep. The stars that you see when you look out at the Milky Way at night, the average star is 500, last 500 million years. So we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable, slow-burning type of star. But in fact, life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars themselves by five times. So you can't discount biology. Biology is clearly a player on a cosmic scale in this universal game of capturing energy and resisting entropy. So novelty theory says that this general law that nature conserves complexity reaches its culmination or its most interesting intersection of discursiveness in ourselves. That we then look different to ourselves by this theory because we are the most novel phenomenon around. So suddenly, what positivist materialism teaches about man's place in nature is that we're lucky to be here. It's a cosmic accident. We purpose is conferred. It's this totally existential, you're on your own, make it up, don't make it up, who cares, it doesn't matter anyway, kind of modernism. If in fact nature, we have identified nature's purpose as to create and conserve complexity, then suddenly we become, we are returned for the first time since the 16th century to the center of the cosmic stage of a universal drama of salvation and redemption. Isn't that weird? I think so. Yeah. Thinking about making that shift to considering human experience is kind of central to our understanding of the planet. And then seeing some of the environmental movements like Earth First that places a large emphasis on diet and ecosystems and other animals and the environment. And I think that's a really interesting way to look at it. I mean, I think it's a really interesting way to look at it. 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