[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space.
 This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 And can you believe it?
 I'm getting this part of the 1984 McKenna workshop out to you just, I guess, about two days after our podcast part one.
 There are a couple reasons for it, including a somewhat timely announcement that I forgot to make two days ago,
 and the fact that I think there's really some interesting material here that I just listened to,
 and I think you might want to hear it right now yourself.
 Also, I want to send a big thank you out to David M., who just now sent in a generous donation to help with the expenses here in the salon.
 So, hey, thank you very much, David. Your help is most appreciated.
 Now, if you can remember where we left off in the last podcast,
 Terrence McKenna was leading a small workshop sometime in 1984 and somewhere in Northern California.
 When we left him, he was just commenting on the need to integrate the scientific research with ayahuasca with the spiritual dimensions of the work.
 But you probably aren't expecting what he's about to come out with right now.
 [Music]
 ...a dialectical process where both the ayahuasca experience and the scientific experience can be integrated.
 Yeah, I don't regard... I'm not one of the noble, savage people.
 I mean, I've spent too much time in the Amazon, and things go on that would curl your hair.
 There are people whose idea of a hilarious joke is to toss a dog in the fire.
 And... but I think there is something to be learned.
 You know, I mean, you can stand off and watch somebody tossing a dog in the fire for their own amusement and say, "What? These people are barbarians."
 On the other hand, we carpet bomb Asian cities from 30,000 feet in the air.
 In the name of policy, we don't even call it fun. We're so alienated from what we're doing.
 So, you know, what's to make of it?
 Good point.
 There are a couple of things which interest me, and they follow very nicely on this.
 One is that I would like to hear you talk very briefly, perhaps, about the highlights of what you've called the invisible landscape.
 What are some of the things that stand out in that?
 The other is that I get the impression that you have a very distinct idea of where we... of the direction in which we can evolve.
 And I wonder if you would say something about that direction, and perhaps those two topics converge.
 Sort of converge.
 Well, without trying to solve the problem once and forever,
 let's just say man has a very strong Gnostic bent.
 And, you know, Gnosticism, dualism, the idea that you don't belong where you are, that you belong somewhere else,
 that this is not your world, that you're a stranger in it, is symptomatic in modern parlance of what's called alienation.
 You're supposed to like where you are, you're supposed to see yourself as part of the seamless fabric of being, and that sort of thing.
 However, the people who take that position, that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis,
 don't realize that the cultural momentum of the last 500 years has made the Gnostic myth a reality.
 In other words, we have become a menace, not only to ourselves, but to the planet.
 And the only way that both parties can save themselves is by a separation.
 And this, on one level, is the greatest crisis that biology has faced since animals left the ocean for the land.
 On another level, it appears inevitable in the present social context that we are going to go to space.
 But we are, the birth pains of doing this are very destructive.
 For instance, and I'm sure you've heard me say this, that civilization is a 10,000 year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves.
 History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes 10,000 to 15,000 years, a moment of biological and geological time.
 But in that 10,000 to 15,000 year period, if you happen to be unlucky enough to be born somewhere in there, it's going to look like it's all up for grabs.
 We are creatures of information and the imagination, the monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed.
 We don't look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.
 We are, humanness may not even be a monkey quality.
 It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys, but that is taking, that has an inner life of its own.
 In other words, we, since the early 1950s, have had a notion of the structure of DNA and this sort of thing.
 Well, it's perfectly obvious that within a century of the discovery of DNA, any species which makes that discovery takes possession of its own form.
 And we are going to do that in the next 50 years.
 We are going to design the kind of people that we want to be.
 And if we don't want to be people, we will design that out of the picture.
 I think of the picture that the mushroom has of the human species is much more like a coral reef.
 In other words, it sees our artifactory as contiguous with our flesh.
 We make a distinction, but what it sees is an animal which takes in raw material and excretes it in ideological moles.
 That's what we do.
 We turn ideas into facts on all levels.
 And this cannot go on any longer on the surface of the planet with the levels of energy and control that we have brought to bear.
 Because we are now in a position to destroy the whole earth or to sculpt, to turn it into a Disneyland, which is a kind of destroying of the earth.
 So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology.
 We feel it and the planet feels it.
 What must happen is there has to be a cleavage.
 And a birth is a good metaphor because an infant being born can hardly face the experience with anything other than trepidation.
 The weightless state, the effortless nurturing, the complete immersion in a support system.
 All that is ending in earthquakes and spasms and pain and anguish, which looks, it must look like a death process.
 And yet it's a life process.
 It is necessary for the mother and the child that this cleavage take place.
 And this is now happening on a mass cultural level for us.
 We, to be who we want to be, we have to leave the planet.
 As Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, "Up in the end, prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings."
 Then couldn't you say that all of the higher forms are in all of the lower forms simultaneously?
 Yes, what's the word for that? Implicit.
 They are implicit in the lower forms. That's right.
 But, I don't know, it's a great challenge to us to fulfill the things that we can imagine we are capable of.
 Our imagination is really the sail of the soul.
 And the question is, you know, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?
 Well, what is the imagination or what is its relationship to the unconscious of which you've spoken?
 Well, its relationship to the unconscious, I suppose it is the unconscious made conscious.
 In other words, all the mythologies, I think it's Mercilio in Dreams and Mysteries,
 he talks about the evolution of human flight and says, he talks first about shamanic flight
 and then the notion of the dirigible and the right flyer and the spaceship.
 And he says these ontologically self-transforming images of flight say far more about the nature of the human soul than they do about technology.
 This is again this idea of James Joyce's that man would become dirigible.
 I haven't mentioned the flying saucer here this morning, but this is one of the things that I think is very interesting.
 I think flying saucers have been the province of very dubious intellectual cadres for probably long enough
 and that it really should be looked at as a totality symbol which haunts human history
 in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead thought that the color dove gray haunted human history.
 In other words, it's a thing always present.
 It is the symbol of the ontological transformation of the human species
 and it always takes upon itself the accoutrements of the current cultural myth
 so that it can be seen as the intercession of the immaculate conception or the descent of an angel
 or the current myth is that there are probably advanced civilizations somewhere in the universe
 and so that this is what it is.
 It's really nothing so trivial, you know.
 It is the alchemical object. It is the blind spot in the consciousness of the race
 and it has to be the blind spot because it is a mystery.
 All appetition for the future is an appetition for this modality of super freedom
 that comes from transcending the limitations of dimension.
 That's why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology
 because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us.
 We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tendencies
 does not give a true picture of the future.
 That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty
 and that we have never yet created a method for integrating that uncertainty and planning for it.
 Novelty is the thing that continually overturns all efforts to project toward a given end state.
 So is it correct to say then that our evolution will be or can be seen as a reclaiming more of the landscape of the unconscious?
 Yes, absolutely. That's what it is. That is our world.
 Our world is in our minds, you know.
 The kingdom of God is within you. That's the wrath.
 But the point is then, you know, to get a lease nailed down somewhere in the world of the imagination so that you can be part of it.
 Yes, the planet is simply a precursor of what we will project outward when we have the ability to do so.
 And this is coming soon.
 How can we... how would you propose to accelerate the evolution of language?
 I think that we have to make a very reasoned case to the establishment that the...
 that the psychedelic drugs have to be looked at in a non-hysterical manner by experts.
 We don't know who the experts are. They may not be pharmacologists.
 They may turn out to be linguists or they may turn out to be jugglers.
 But we have to recognize that what we're talking about when we're talking about the advancement of human evolution is the evolution of the human mind.
 And these drugs and do... you know, before the argument was whether it should be called a hallucinogen or a psychedelic or an entheogen
 or... they were just called consciousness expanding drugs.
 And that really, as a phenomenological description, is more useful than these other things.
 They expand consciousness.
 Well, therefore, we should be really bearing down on them because the problem is we don't have enough consciousness.
 And we don't know how to direct it and sculpt it and orient it toward our own salvation.
 So we can't just take our mental states as given, as somehow sacrosanct, and therefore not to be tampered with.
 We have to actually begin to engineer them.
 And Arthur Kessler has made this point. This is not big news.
 But there's some resistance to it.
 Again, I think a recursion of dualism in a more dangerous form, the dualism of the natural and the unnatural, yoga is natural, drugs are unnatural, all these dichotomies.
 I mean, who can argue with the notion that dualism is the root of all evil?
 How could it be otherwise?
 A question relating to this is that there's something -- we have all this choice, we have all this power, and yet we are also prone to a great many powerful mistakes.
 And there's the element of that which happens spontaneously through us.
 And this is part of that dichotomy, too. Where do we leave off engineering and let that which is beyond us do it through us?
 You mean the thing which is leading?
 Yes.
 Well, we need to open a more coherent dialogue with the thing which is leading.
 Again, the reason I'm somewhat immune to political anxiety and that sort of thing is because I really do believe there is a control system that is larger than any human institution.
 I don't believe that the evolution of faith on this planet is in the hands of the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, the Jews, Wall Street.
 It isn't -- no one is in charge.
 What is in charge is the most intelligent life form on the planet, which happens to be transhuman, not human.
 We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious.
 What we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive.
 It's not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing.
 It is more like an intellect key.
 It guides. It opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices.
 I think it was in Mysterium Conjunctionis that Jung said the unconscious has a thousand ways of terminating a life that has become meaningless, a chilling notion.
 And what he meant was, you'll step off a curb and be hit by a bus because you didn't look.
 But the real analysis is that a decision had been made at a higher control level to just fling you away.
 Well, how much more disturbing it is to think that that could be possible on a global level.
 So we have to open a dialogue and no longer -- you know, all these words, intuition, artistic vision, trans, means like poetry.
 These are all ways of trying to have a dialogue with the control mechanism.
 And the psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, I think lay that open.
 We need to have professional facilitators of dialogue.
 We need to understand who is speaking.
 We only now have possibilities, you know, that the voice that speaks on psilocybin is now extraterrestrial, you know, with its own history, its own evolutionary standards, etc.
 That it is what Jung would call an autonomous portion of the psyche that has slipped beyond the ego's control, meaning that you're crazy,
 or at least that you are experiencing a form of consciousness not validated by this society.
 I want to stick something in there.
 I agree with your analysis, but I don't share the same faith that we will inevitably make it as a species,
 because what I see happening in the collective conscious unconsciousness, or that unconscious becoming conscious,
 is a struggle over whether to live or to die.
 And although I believe and hope certainly it decides, or we decide for life, I don't see that as inevitable.
 Well, this is the question, is God mad?
 You know, are we living in a universe run by a mad God where the choice for death could be made as easily as the choice for life?
 This is what the Gnostics of the Hellenistic era fear.
 This is quite what I'm saying, though, really, because I think that, yeah, a subordinate consciousness is made up of all of us,
 so our individual decisions and consciousness, I don't think, are irrelevant to the totality.
 Well, is it built up of, is it a bottom-up thing or a top-down thing?
 I think it's a both.
 I don't see how in this level of talking about it can really separate out all the elements.
 I mean, if you talk about cells in your body, yeah, they don't go off into the life of their own, it's all coordinated,
 but it isn't coordinated by one thing in the body, the whole body coordinates itself,
 and each cell is part of that coordination, but you need to say the same thing.
 Yes, that's right, yes, I see what you're saying.
 Where can we find a local ayahuasca?
 These are not the ones.
 Well, I'll tell you, a few years ago we bought ten acres in Hawaii
 and moved as many of these Peruvian drug plants as we could get in there,
 so that was four or five years ago.
 Now those plants are grown and hopefully the next time we go back to Hawaii,
 we'll be able to produce ayahuasca.
 We're calling it Hawaii-ahuasca.
 Other than that, I don't know what to tell you.
 These things, the botanists don't think in terms of live plants, they always make voucher specimens.
 We were in 1982 or 1, whenever it was, we were really the first expedition
 looking at Amazonian psychobotany that really put emphasis on live plants,
 and we got out hundreds of them, you know,
 but then growing them, they can only be grown in greenhouses or in a subtropical environment,
 but eventually we're hoping that researchers who want to grow the plants
 can buy stock from a place like that and not have the expense of having to send an expedition to the Amazon.
 I was trying to get a hard-hitter to build a shamanic institute in Ecuador,
 because it was just an interesting idea that we were passing back and forth.
 Well, when we originally conceived this idea of a psychobotanical farm,
 we bought land near Florencia in the state of Cacatá in Colombia,
 and then it became politically unfriendly to foreign scientists,
 and so we stayed away for years, and then I just read last week,
 13 tons of cocaine was busted in Colombia, and it was all in Cacatá,
 so I assume it'll be years before it's cooled down enough to do it there,
 and I like the idea of doing it in Hawaii.
 The Amazon is so difficult an environment to carry out even minimal field studies in
 that it's very hard to do much other than interview the informants,
 collect the vouchers, collect the drugs, and get out,
 because after two or three weeks, you're really beginning to show the strain.
 I mean, it's hard to sleep in hammocks, so you go into a kind of never-asleep, never-awake,
 and the strange diet, the intestinal problems, insect toxins.
 People are not always 100% cooperative and honest.
 Numerous problems, and since we were not ethnographers or anthropologists per se,
 our real focus was on the plants and the drugs,
 so hopefully in Hawaii, a more commodious and low-key atmosphere can be created
 for experimenting with these things.
 This relates to your question, which is,
 how can a group of people create an experimental context for doing these drugs
 with an eye toward making some kind of progress or getting something out of it?
 And it's a real challenge.
 We were amazed when we went to Peru and began taking ayahuasca.
 We had never taken drugs with groups of 30 people, you know.
 You're taking them alone or one or two people,
 or occasionally with 100,000 other people at a rock concert,
 but the notion of 30 or 40, it's very intense,
 and without a tradition, it will be even more demanding,
 but it's important to do.
 The problem in psychedelic research is the reluctance to have human subjects in the picture.
 You know, as soon as that begins happening,
 the institutions and the government and people's wish to make careers
 rather than to actually do original work,
 a whole bunch of factors come into play that make it very, very frustrating,
 that the LD50 in rats, the absolute structural determinations,
 the botany, the chemistry, the linguistic studies,
 you can only go so far with this stuff.
 The real thing is, what does it do?
 I think that's partly because in the sciences of human experience,
 is it considered a valid subject of study, and so that's what it's called.
 You know, so people don't ask those questions because, well,
 it's more quantitative and you can't--
 That's right.
 Well, why don't you get the vote and get the mental health grant to do it?
 Well, I think this is Dennis' notion.
 What he wants to do really, and I think he has Frank Barr interested
 and some other people, is return one more time at least to the Amazon
 and study them taking it, and actually take blood samples and study diet
 and get a full biomedical study of what's going on,
 and that should be sufficient data then that you could get a grant
 for human experimentation in this country.
 All this remains to be done.
 The work is just beginning to be done on psychedelics.
 Essentially, the botany is now well in hand.
 There are only botanical details now,
 but the chemistry, the pharmacology, the neurophysiology, the psychology,
 these are just wide-open areas.
 I'd like to take the opportunity to thank you for doing what you're doing today.
 I can't remember since sitting like this in India
 being so enlivened by what's going on today.
 Oh, thank you very much.
 I'd like to hear from some of you who have been so silent.
 People who are either appalled that we're this deep into this.
 Let me preface the question.
 From my own meditative experience,
 I feel like I'm just beginning to get to a point
 where I can feel how energy and stillness are both necessary.
 In the existential phenomenological sense, they co-constitute one another.
 They cannot be one without the other.
 And by energy, I mean all its forms too, including mind.
 For me, it was good to hear another way of saying
 that the idea of mindfulness or chitta in the yoga philosophy
 is a reality that someone else too is comforting.
 Including the intellectual stuff, all that form.
 In your experience with these cultures, these different cultures,
 I hear a lot about the energy side, the form, etc.
 Is there any stillness work?
 Is stillness sacred?
 Is there a meditative "tradition" in this culture?
 Oh yeah, for sure.
 Yes, it doesn't call itself that.
 It calls itself trance.
 But trance is not a state of unconsciousness.
 It's in fact a state of full alertness.
 But you can't move.
 And you don't experience this as paralysis because you don't care to move.
 But yes, I think that there must be stillness for these things to manifest.
 One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs
 is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality.
 People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them, they will work.
 And this is not true at all,
 especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you're attempting to conjure.
 So that a drug will potentiate you for a vision state.
 But a number of other things have to be present.
 Energy and stillness being, I think, the two most important ones.
 And then a third factor, which is the invocation.
 You must invoke it in some way.
 And it's hard to explain what that is.
 It's sort of like, you know, the difference between being alone and with someone.
 Though you are alone taking the drug, you have to assume the I-Thou tension.
 And then you will discover the Thou on the other end of the equation.
 And so the stilling will allow this.
 It's almost sensory deprivation is what's required.
 Not in the formal sense of a tank or anything like that.
 But you must sit still in darkness.
 And you must look at your closed eyelids with the expectation of seeing something.
 And then you will.
 Within the culture of spoken discipline about mental stillness and the importance of that,
 or talking about the drugs or plants in terms that that would be a positive thing, or...
 I'm just curious, is there any metaphor for that?
 I think that the context is isolation.
 That's what they would say about this.
 They would say, "Well, we go into isolation. We put ourselves away.
 We put ourselves into a tree or a cult hut or something like that and do not move around a lot."
 I think it could be compared with a completely different culture and...
 Well, this question, though, of the role of hallucinogens in Taoist practice is not well understood.
 As you know, James Ware's book, the number, the attention given to fungi is out of all proportion.
 I mean, their pharmacopoeia was largely fungal.
 There are no known psilocybin mushrooms from China reported.
 However, this is a place for somebody to make a quick reputation, I bet.
 If you chose carefully where you went to look, I'll bet you would find it,
 because we know Staphylocubensis is in Thailand, Laos,
 and there is no reason at all that it shouldn't be in southern China.
 And it was in southern China that the Taoist pharmacopoeia was evolved and elaborated.
 It's in the art.
 He wrote a couple of papers. I have a copy.
 Strickman.
 Strickman, yes.
 Oh, yes.
 Yes, he's doing very interesting work in all of this.
 It is in German, of course.
 I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been.
 You know, Karl Ruck and Wasson wrote a very convincing book to show that the Elisinian mysteries were an ergot, a cult of ergot, intoxication.
 I thought that sounded totally crazy before I read the book.
 I thought that it was going to be some flung-together case that would convince nobody.
 Actually, I can't believe that it's anything else.
 Having read the book, the evidence is overwhelming.
 Well, elusis was the central wellspring of mystery for the Western mind for 2,000 years.
 Everybody who was anybody went to elusis and had the experience.
 And there were times when the mystery was profaned to the point that writers can speak of wealthy Athenians who had the mystery in their house, were able to offer it to their guests after dinner.
 Well, what kind of mystery is this?
 And John Allegro wrote a much less convincing book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, trying to say that Christianity itself was a mushroom cult.
 In fact, going much further than that, saying that Christ himself was in fact no person at all, but a code, a system of coded epigrams for a mushroom.
 His case is harder to judge because it depends on a knowledge of Aramaic philology.
 But my brother has suggested to me and in fact has set an outline for a book.
 He believes that consciousness itself arose in the higher primates in a feedback relationship with hallucinogenic plants.
 In other words, he would go much further than Wasson, who's saying religion was caused by a relay.
 He's saying thought itself was caused by monkeys relating to these plants.
 And we know from laboratory experiments that if you set monkeys in a situation where they can smoke DMT by just walking up to a pipette and taking a hit, that 20% of the monkeys will refuse food and water in preference to that.
 We'd rather be stoned.
 And so having this predilection, apparently it's simply the shift is what they like.
 They like the thrill, the shift of modality from down to up and up to down.
 But you stretch that out over 100,000 years and the next thing you know you have the integral calculus and the 384 byte chip and all the rest of it.
 So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys.
 And that you don't have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together.
 This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture.
 In Columbia once I saw a graffiti, and I'm my Spanish, I can't get it right.
 But what it was, there was a picture of a mushroom and it said, "Without this you are not yourself."
 So this is, you know, Arthur Kessler, I think it was in "The Ghost in the Machine," said very clearly that he felt there was no hope for the human species without chemical intervention.
 That we cannot be the sharp fanged monkey and the possessor of atomic weapons.
 And that we are going to have to chemically intervene to mute the monkey proclivities.
 And it may be true that the depth of their influence upon us, our thought systems, language, I hold the peculiar opinion that language preceded meaning by millennia.
 That long before people could communicate, they discovered how interesting the small mouth noises were.
 And made them for each other as a form of entertainment which then bifurcated into chanting and singing.
 But it was very late in this experimenting with small mouth noises that someone got the idea that you could assign a meaning to a certain mouth noise.
 And everybody would agree that that's what that noise meant and then you could discuss things.
 So, you know, we are creatures of language and thought and probably because these drugs, these plants first kicked that over in us.
 I'd like to go back to the drugs and consciousness idea.
 I'm going to stop right there for a minute.
 I like the development of it.
 Are you... I mean, there are several ways that a person could take that notion really and several different directions that you could go with it.
 On the one hand, you could be suggesting that the experience itself of a hallucinatory state is such a different experience from normal waking consciousness that it demands thought to come to terms with it.
 I don't think that's a very tenable line because the dream state itself would have similar experiences.
 We know that chimpanzees and lower primates are dreaming so that doesn't seem to be too far.
 The other way would be to say it's the actual communication with more developed intelligence that is inducing thought in our species.
 The way we're doing it now with chimpanzees and teaching them sign language and they're starting to develop humor and things like that.
 If you want to go that way too, then you have to then get to how did that being itself develop consciousness and start to...
 It's an interesting line but I don't think it would stop there.
 Well, the way I think of it is a third possibility, a kind of a geometric model, which is just to say here you have a grid called experience of the world and then we have waking.
 So that's a dot on the grid. Then we have dreaming. That's another dot on the grid.
 But you can't construct a three-dimensional reality till you have a third dot.
 And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing.
 It's providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor so that it isn't really...
 And you really notice this with acid. It isn't the taking of LSD that is so important. It's the talking about it.
 But having, in other words, the reference point. Remember when we were all freaks and all we talked about was how in the light of acid everything was thus and so and thus and so and thus and so.
 And it took about five years longer for some of us to assimilate that.
 So we no longer had to run around saying how everything was in the light of LSD.
 We had integrated that point on the grid. And I think that's what it is.
 We tap into worlds of experience and each world of experience taps, stretches our metaphors, is a boot in the tail for further evolution of language.
 And that's all the evolution we have now. I said this earlier but it's a point worth making again.
 It isn't culture that's changing and carrying everything with it. It's language that's changing and it carries culture with it.
 Culture lags far behind. But the evolution of language is the evolution of reality.
 And this is a cliché but the challenge of the cliché is to make it operational so that like God when you utter a word it becomes so.
 What do you reflect on in terms of the origins of the use of hallucinogens and that whole scheme of sort of the negative, literally the...
 You're talking a great deal about the sort of evolutionary potentials and I'm curious about the example...
 Negative potentials.
 Yeah, negative potentials and how we deal with those and foresee them.
 Well, the only answer I can give is probably not a very good one.
 The forces of... Let me put it a different way. The government gets to everything first.
 And they have been at the problem, you ask, for 20 years with an amazing little success.
 I worked for the Department of Interior for a while. I can tell you why.
 Well, there are many reasons why. But it doesn't seem very pervertable.
 They were very excited at first, you know. But then... And I think what they got into, although perhaps you can say more about this because you probably follow the literature.
 They like to give psychedelic drugs to people and then hypnotize them and then get them to do terrible things which they wouldn't remember later.
 And claims were made that this was possible or being done. But it certainly didn't seem to come into wide application.
 They also looked at, during the Vietnam War, they built artillery shells which would deliver aerosol DMT.
 They envisioned dropping one of these aerosol DMT bombs on a Vietnamese town.
 Everyone falling into this intense hallucinogenic state and they could just roll right in.
 But like plans in the 1960s, radicals, there was the fantasy of poisoning water supplies with LSD.
 Well, it just turns out that there are chemical factors and buffering problems and it just is not very easy to do these things.
 I suppose maybe I'm too sanguine about it and irrationally so because when I asked this question of the mushroom entity, the perversion of this,
 I was told that it was good in such a platonic sense that you could only approach it if you were good.
 So that it was like ethical mercury, the grasping hand would find that it flowed right through it and there was nothing left.
 But I may be God's fool, you know. That may be an excuse. Certainly we know the Nazis used scopolamine as a truth serum.
 Although now when you look at the data on scopolamine, it's not very impressive.
 People don't, they lie as much as they tell the truth. So it's a little puzzling as to why.
 But definitely...
 It's a language. It's called the truth serum.
 That's right.
 It's a belief thing.
 That's right.
 Also I have to agree with what James calls the cognitive imperative that things happen because we believe that things happen.
 That's right.
 And so a lot of the use of all these things may depend a great deal on what people believe to happen.
 And also technology is the production, you could think of it as the residue of the workings of the imagination.
 And the imagination is under the control of the super ego or the overmind.
 So that I think technology has a weird way of always escaping the intentions of those who are working with it.
 A perfect example would be the chip which makes possible the personal computer.
 That thing was developed under contract to the Air Force by I think Sperry Rand.
 And when it was finally finished, it didn't work right.
 It was far too slow.
 They wanted it for guidance systems of missiles and this kind of thing.
 So this thing is a thousand times too slow.
 It's just baloney. It's worthless. Toss it in the wastebasket.
 But somebody said, "But wait a minute. You know what you could do with this?"
 And created an information revolution that must be absolutely appalling to the forces that wish to control.
 I have an Apple II computer and a $350 modem.
 And I can access the Defense Department databases.
 I can access all the complete shelf list of the Library of Congress.
 All chemical abstracts.
 In short, all information in the world I can access from my living room in Sonoma County.
 And so can anyone else who buys $1,000 worth of equipment.
 This was not part of the plan.
 This is in fact a terrifying thing.
 And my God, these computer networks where, as an example, a few years ago someone invented a device.
 This is an anecdote that will give you the idea.
 Someone invented a little device which looked like a ballpoint pen.
 And it was a small cybernetic device that could be programmed with a category.
 Like, let's say, "stamp collector" or "saddle massacre."
 And when you wore this pen, if you got near anyone else who was wearing a similar device,
 and you programmed with the same word, your pen would begin flashing a little light.
 The notion was that these things could be sold to people who hang out in singles bars.
 And would create a dimension neither public nor private.
 A new dimension where people of similar interests could get together completely.
 Isn't that interesting? And this thing had a range of 20 feet.
 So now comes $1,000 worth of cybernetic equipment and the telephone, and it's the same device.
 It doesn't clip into your shirt pocket, but we've extended the range to include the entire planet.
 You can have a search program on it, too.
 Oh, you do. You go into these computer networks,
 and you say, you know, who listed that they were interested in
 mushrooms, psychedelics, psilocybin, consciousness-altering drugs, hallucinogens.
 And then out of 70,000 users on the network, in 4 1/2 seconds,
 it tells you that 12 people listed one or some of those words.
 You immediately type a little letter to each one, shoot it off through the system,
 and you're in contact with those people.
 It makes conspiracy on a level almost impossible to conceive a form of liberation.
 And these kinds of hardwired technologies are simply patriarchal follow-ons
 to the feminizing of consciousness that is happening in drugs.
 In other words, you can almost think of drugs as the software
 and cybernetics as the hardware of what is being done.
 But vast areas are being opened up for human interaction,
 completely unregulated by any kind of institution,
 and these will create new kinds of social realities.
 And the computer has a psychedelic experience.
 Right.
 It is a psychedelic. It's a hardwired psychedelic experience.
 People tend to think of computers as masculine, I guess,
 because the first generation of people who built them were male.
 But what they actually are are the mysterious mama matrix of information.
 It is like the unconscious made conscious.
 The unconscious is ceasing to be unconscious.
 All information is rising into this dimension of accessibility
 so that you need not wonder how many people died of tuberculosis in western Nepal last year.
 You just key into the biomedical index and you find out.
 And this seems to me, you know, the word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined.
 But many things are psychedelic.
 Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids and supports consciousness is psychedelic,
 if we take the word down to its Greek roots.
 So this is very exciting.
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
 where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
 While I realize that there was a wealth of interesting ideas in this talk that I could comment on,
 the geek in me just has to go back to when Terrence was describing an internet experience back in 1984.
 And I know that there are quite a few of our fellow sauners
 who were also hacking their way around the net back then as well.
 With high definition streaming of videos to an iPhone these days, though,
 to hear an old timer talk about the days before the web came around
 are like my stories of walking to school every day in blizzards and uphill both ways, right?
 I actually do still have a very vivid memory of one night that doesn't seem like it was actually over 20 years ago.
 But around 2 o'clock in the morning, I remember waking up my then girlfriend
 to show her what a spectacular thing I'd just accomplished.
 And there on my 15-inch black and white screen was the login screen for Trinity Library in Dublin.
 And then I proceeded to show her that I could access the card catalog
 as words filled the screen one letter at a time over my little 300-baud dial-up modem.
 And like you right now, I suspect that she was less than impressed.
 But if you were there back then when the net was just coming alive,
 you know exactly how exciting those days and late nights were.
 There is one thing I feel the need to comment about, however,
 and that is when Terrence said, "To be who we have to be, we have to leave the planet."
 Now, a few years ago I was on board with the space migration people,
 but I no longer hold any hope that we humans are going to be able to physically populate other planets.
 And I can already hear some of our fellow salonners screaming that I'm wrong,
 but once you spend some time studying the problem,
 it becomes pretty obvious that the requirements for human life support are simply too massive to be practical.
 But I have another problem with space migration as well.
 You see, when I think of going on a holiday, I dream of a Pacific island,
 not taking a long ride in a metal tube hurling through space.
 And in my wildest dreams, I can't conceive of a planet I could travel to
 that would be more desirable than a trip to New Zealand.
 So, at least for me, any thoughts of leaving the planet will be confined to trips into entheospace,
 psychedelic voyages, if you will, which, by the way,
 can be as harrowing and enchanting and captivating as any physical space adventures could be.
 And I do find it interesting, though, that both Terrence and Timothy Leary
 had dreams and fantasies about space migration.
 Which is why I think that solid down-to-earth minds like those of Bruce Dahmer
 are so important right now, because they fuse the reality of hard-nosed science
 with the flights of poetic fancy of people like Terrence McKenna.
 And in case you weren't able to attend one of Bruce's recent talks in the UK,
 you'll still be able to hear him here in podcast land,
 first of all in September when Shamanic Freedom Radio returns.
 I believe now I'll be playing the October Gallery Talk,
 and later this fall in the Slaan here, I plan on playing Bruce's Buddhafield Festival Talk.
 Also, some of our EU Slaaners will have a chance to catch Bruce live,
 where he will be presenting the opening keynote of the Cognitive Intelligence and Games conference
 in Copenhagen, Denmark on the 18th of August.
 And following that he'll be co-chairing sessions on the Origin of Life and the EvoGrid
 at the Afterlife 12 conference in Odense, Denmark on the 19th through the 23rd of August.
 So if you'd like to meet up with Bruce in Denmark, you can reach him through his website,
 www.damer.com, D-A-M-E-R, or on Facebook and make some arrangements to get together.
 So if you want to debate the possibilities and the hows and whys of human spaceflight,
 you ought to get in touch with Bruce, because he's spent a lot of time working with NASA
 and even some former moonwalking astronauts,
 and they've had a big influence on his thinking about these things.
 And talking about how we see things in this world,
 I want to mention the work of one of our fellow Slaaners, F.X.
 And I hope I'm pronouncing that right. He spells it E-H-P-H-E-X.
 And he has a new CD of his poetry out that's titled "Life, Dreams, and Poetic Beats,"
 which is, I think, just now being released today.
 And F.X. has posted a link to one of the tracks titled "Liberation" to listen to for free,
 and I highly recommend it.
 When you hear this piece, you may think it's the short McKenna rap at the end that caught my attention,
 but that's not really what drew me into the piece.
 You see, F.X., at least I think when he wrote and recorded this poem,
 and maybe right now today, is 33 years old.
 And even though he and I have had completely different lives, different backgrounds,
 I'm struck at how very similar our emotional lives were at age 33.
 I still have some things that I wrote when I was 33, and they sound very much like F.X.'s work.
 My point being that underlying the cultures we're embedded in here,
 there are some very fundamental human values or emotions or states of mind that are really universal.
 There really is no difference between us at our most basic selves, and I find that very encouraging.
 So, if you go to the program notes for this podcast, you'll find a link to "Liberation" by F.X.,
 and I hope you get a chance to check it out.
 Finally, I want to once again mention the new album by Chateau Haulluc,
 whose song "El Alien" is our theme song here in the salon.
 As I mentioned in my last podcast, my dear friend Jacques Oliver is the man behind the Chateau Haulluc music,
 and due to some bad luck, Jacques has to raise some money in a hurry,
 and is trying to do so by selling his new CD titled "Nature Loves Courage."
 That's all one word.
 And just now we heard Terrence McKenna talking about his botanical preserve in Hawaii,
 and his hope for it to be a place where some of these rare and exotic plant species could be grown and propagated.
 And for a while after Terrence died, the garden wasn't tended as well as it should have been,
 but now Jacques is working with Terrence's family to restore it to its pristine state,
 and so he's become a caretaker gardener at Terrence McKenna's old house in Hawaii.
 So, if you can, it would be really cool if you could give Jacques a helping hand,
 and I'm sure you'll enjoy his music as well, and I'll link to all that on the program notes for this podcast as well.
 Well, that's going to do it for today, and so again I'll close by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Salon
 are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License.
 And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
 which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
 At least that'll transfer you to the blog.
 And if you're interested in the philosophy behind the Salon, you can hear about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
 which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from psychedelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
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