[Music] Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. And yes, you are correct in thinking that it's now been two weeks since I've posted a podcast. And the reason you ask? Well, I guess it can be summed up by a single word. Sloth. I was just goofing off more or less and I hope you had a little time this summer to do the same. But while I was goofing off, some of our fellow salonners went out of their way to provide some funding here to help keep these podcasts winging your way. So a huge thank you goes out to Zach M, Eric S, Brian K, Andy W, Jeffrey S, and Jason H. And Jason, along with a very generous donation, sent a note that read in part, "Been meaning to donate for a while, so nice to have such a wealth of McKenna talks and others readily available. He along with Robert Anton Wilson leave me in awe with their insights as well as chuckling with their great humor. Thanks again, Jason." And a huge thank you to you, Jason, as well as to Zach, Eric, Brian, Andy, and Jeffrey. And I also want to thank fellow salonners like Jason who have encouraged me to keep posting Terrence McKenna talks. But you should know that there are others who seem to have had enough of the Bard for a while and I promise to take their wishes into account too. So just as soon as I play today's talk, that is, which is the last in the series that I began two weeks ago. And now for this final session of this workshop today, we're going to hear Terrence McKenna, waxing eloquent, about topics that range from Marshall McLuhan to the I Ching in a workshop that was recorded sometime in 1984. "I'm curious to know how you see the role of the I Ching in all of this." "Ha ha ha. Such a question so late in the game." "Well, the I Ching, you asked about stillness concepts. The I Ching is a very old system of something that was created out of a combination of Taoist yogic techniques and mathematical curiosity. What was happening, I think, was that in states of deep meditation, modalities were observed. You know, it says in the Siddhara Pundarika Sutra that when the Buddha attained enlightenment through the night, he watched the causal uprising and downflowing. And this is what you see in these deep states of the - it's called stilling the heart meditations. You see the passage of modalities of some kind, their elements. And the Chinese noted that there were 60 - seemed to be 64 of them, or you only needed 64 terms to describe them. And they sensed that it was something about time, but they had their linguistical and categorical imperatives were such that they didn't see it the way we would. They assumed these things to be like archetypes. What I suggested was that they were actually varieties of time. And actually there was a 16th century Chinese philosopher who pulled this all together out of the ancient sources and said, you know, the hexagrams are descriptive of time. They're hierarchically structured at many levels so that on one level hexagrams are influencing a situation and passing away at a rate of many a second, and on another level at a rate of many a minute, and on another level at a rate of many an hour, and on another rate at - on another level at a rate of a few per century. And it is the the interpenetration of these modalities on various levels that finally issues into what we call the here-and-now situation. And it's too complicated to go into here, but there is a way of looking at the sequence and structuring it that allows you then to draw maps of novelties and aggression into time, to create a completely non-scientific theory of time that is nevertheless not a cult, meaning has no hidden elements, and is completely mathematical and predictable and self-consistent. This was more my question, in that you're talking about information structures being generated in new ways through computers and the effect of the aging of our culture as it enters our culture and restructuring our perception of time. And if there's a conflict, because you know the computer structure is a logically generated internally consistent structure, and the yi cheng is an illogical but also internally consistent structure. Well, like DNA, these very large systems with very large numbers of elements can have irrational inputs and still have everything end up in the right place. At the end, I mean, if you read Pregocian's work where you discover that global rules govern situations which, when analyzed very locally, appear highly chaotic. And this is what the yi cheng is saying. I mean, here we have a world which appears highly chaotic, but which, when analyzed at higher levels, turns out to be describable by very rigorous methods. So the converse is true, too, that what seems to be very orderly structure in a computer network is on a higher level actually chaotic. That's right. This problem of order and constraint is a very difficult one. For instance, a sociologist can tell you that in the next 12 months, I don't know what the number would be, but let's say 30 people are going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, now, does that... so then someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. Because they're despondent, they've lost their job, they just don't want to live any longer. Are they free? How free are they if at the end of the year we look at the record and say, "Yes, it certainly is true. 30 people jumped off the bridge just like you said they would." So apparently there was almost no freedom in the total system. It came in right on the dot, yet every one of the people who jumped off the bridge felt they were making a completely independent choice, exercising free will. Were they free? Which goes back to what we were talking about, about truth drugs and things like that. Are we creating that through our beliefs, which is the same sort of thing we're doing when we predict statistically? Perhaps, or it may be something else. It may have something to do with how probability works. It's not clear that probability is a good way of describing nature. The only time we get randomness is when you examine the output of a random number generator. There is no other process in nature that can be relied upon to produce random numbers, yet we use the notion of randomness. Our entire physics is probabilistic and statistical. With the notion of randomness, a very unexamined philosophically notion, centered right in the middle of things. And it may be a kind of fudging. What we think is an explanation, that things are probabilistic, is actually a statement of complete ignorance, that we don't know how things work, so we say they're probabilistic. But if the other extreme is that, well, there's a pattern or there's a norm, but nothing really fits the norm. And so you always have to describe it by approximation. And so that's where the probability of getting close to this approximation, you know, is a useful tool because everything is a dynamic state, and so you can't define it in terms of, except on a moment-by-moment basis, and it's by a static model. And so you need the probability to describe the transition from one to the other. But it's created all kinds of consequences that were not expected, like the notion of the citizen, and the way democracy is, and the way power is apportioned, because we have these probabilistic and statistical notions about human beings. Politically, we atomize ourselves. We say, you know, we live in the fiction that all citizens are equal, which is an absolute pumpy car. It's simply that how else can we have the kind of social system we have and have it function? So the tools, you have to be aware of the tool, of what the tool does to you as well as here. McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered vis-a-vis the psychedelic phenomena, the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definitions, and the drugs have done that to a great extent. And so as the exchange, I used it for seven years and it stopped because I found that it was... I started to live two weeks... well, I was living for a long time, two weeks or two months in the future. And not... I didn't mean right here because I was sort of pre-structuring what was happening. Although this abolition of the future is a controversial thing, for instance, I try to produce maps of the future with Li Ching on my computer, and people say, "You want to destroy the future? You want to take the surprise out of being?" Well, that seems to me rather silly. I mean, if you tell me you're going to South America and I give you a National Geographic map of South America, have I destroyed the trip for you? Now there's no point in going. You know where every capital city is, where the rivers run, how the mountains lay. It's I just ruined it for you, you know? I don't think so. Because what we are interested in is the details. Maps don't make it unnecessary to go to the places they portray. There's a deeper fear, though, in your friend's comments. Isn't it, I mean, the fear that somehow the rational conceptualization will somehow interfere with the intuitive flow of things? I mean, that's what I think. I didn't pick up the map thing. People don't want to feel that freedom has been compromised, you know? But my theory of time is not a predictive theory of events. I've just quantified one quality, which I call novelty, following Alfred North Whitehead, and talk about how history is the career of novelty ingressing into time. And sometimes novelty comes fast, and sometimes it comes slow. Consequently, its ingression rate can be portrayed as a line graph. And in some periods, there's very little novelty. There is disorganization and compromise of connection. And then in other periods of history, we'll say Periclean Athens or Mugodeli or the 20th century or the Nara period in Japan, there is great cohesiveness, but then there is this ebb and flow of something which physics will not be found to describe. In other words, I like to make the analogy that science describes what is possible. What is possible. And what we need is a theory that tells us out of what is possible, what is it that will undergo the formality of actually occurring. We have no theory of what it is, out of possible sets of things, why certain things will undergo the formality of occurring. And this is what we need. But like I said, science as the way of looking at the world, we've decided that that is what will come about. But science only describes the most trivial kinds. Oh, whether or not it's the most worthy and worthwhile way of performing our reality. Well, it's a good first try because it's the simplest case. What science tells you is, what science is interested in is those situations where if the initial conditions are reestablished exactly, the process will occur exactly as it occurred every other time. If the initial conditions are the same, the end state will be the same. But in all experience, this isn't true. I mean, if I say that I'm falling in love and you once fell in love, it doesn't mean that the way your love affair ended is how mine will end. And so there is no guidance for understanding by extrapolation of past cases. And this is where we need help because this is where we feel and bleed, is in the realm of these processes where initial conditions are no guarantee of final end state. But I wonder if we had that ability to predict that, then if we wouldn't avoid feeling and avoid suffering in the moment and avoid a certain dimension of life. You mean we would fear to be victims? Well, of our own desire to escape unpleasant feelings. But I say, what is going to happen? And without staying with the uncertainty, I don't think it's going to happen. Well, presumably if you have a theory which will tell you how a situation will evolve, then you steer it the way you want it. You know, it isn't rote. It isn't like a ball rolling downhill. Then of course you have to take your steering it consciously into account with the prediction of itself. Well, there's no escaping the input, the fact that there is a hand on the tiller. The uncertainty principle has to be expanded to include everything. And to actually, the notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion. See, the problem with Western thinking and science especially is that it's a historical phenomenon. The oldest scientists were people like Thales and these people, two thousand years in the past. This means that the most epistemologically fundamental assumptions of science are the least examined for flaws in their sophistication in the light of experience. The fact that we rely on an intellectual method two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding anything interesting. That's why people like Ralph Abraham with his theory of dynamics and Ilya Prigozhin with his non-equilibrium thermodynamics and Manfred Eigen with his autocatalytic hypercycles. These are interesting new approaches because they don't predict end states from initial conditions. They only predict broad target areas where processes can be expected to come to rest. I think a great deal of anxiety would leave human society if we had this grip on the future. It's, you can make a biological argument that what life does, leaving aside what it is, what it does is it conquers dimensionality. The earliest life forms were, had no impression of the world except that portion of the world which physically impinged upon them. In other words, they had a tactile sense and then very slowly light-sensitive melanin chemistries were entrapped and light-sensitive cells arose so that light and darkness could be distinguished and then following upon that motility so that a third dimension was claimed, the dimension of space and then as higher animals evolved with binocular vision and the ability to walk into the space perceived, three dimensions were gained. Intelligence, the unique human property of being able to command past experience as though it were present through memory is like extending this dimension-conquering faculty to time and I think that the psychedelic drugs show that that's the way the evolutionary arrow is pointing in man. Again, Merciliard's statement about how the images of flight spoke volumes about the internal aspirations of the human psyche. We want to conquer dimensions, life wants to conquer dimensions and first it conquers the tactile, then the immediate two-dimensional space, then the immediate three-dimensional space, and finally through memory the dimension of time is added in and then theories of the sort that the I Ching represents and that my own ideas represent, whether or not they're true, if they represent an effort to do for the future what the faculty called memory does for the past. Well, if they work at all, then in some sense they're true, and that means something. And as you're talking I'm realizing that what I was saying underneath it is that I have used the I Ching and the Tarot for a long time and what I realize now I was dissatisfied with is that they are, to a certain extent, alien philosophic systems to me and that as I stopped using them what's happened is that I start to dream more and more what's going to be happening, you know, one step, two steps, whatever down the road. And that's much more congenial to me and the problem really isn't do you look ahead in time but in what way do you look ahead in that if you do it through your own dreams then you have a philosophy inherent in those systems which is utterly congenial to your own way of feeling. Yes, well, sometimes you're trying to understand your own life and sometimes you're trying to create a general theory of being and these things will issue into different sorts of stances. Uh-huh. Would you say that intuition or the imaginal mind is to the future what memory is to the past? Essentially, yes. I mean, I believe that eschatological objects, if you want to put it that way, cast shadows backwards over the landscape of history and that we are drawn towards these things. They are what C.H. Waddington called creodes. They are narrow, canalized pathways of development that it would take an enormous amount of energy to lift you out of that channel and drop you somewhere else. It isn't impossible but it's highly improbable. This is why religion cannot be dismissed because religion is like the mass intuition about fate and the religious ontology for the human species is generally eschatological. Not always, not in Buddhism or, well, there are exceptions, but it generally is eschatological in that we are seen to be in the grip of a backward-flowing casuistry, that there is something pulling us forward, the telos, so unwelcome in science. Science insists on operating without teleology and so its explanatory power is in proportion to that. But the sense of the telos is very great and I think that it's physically there, that what is really happening is that there are forward-moving, meaning from the past to the present, causal chains and there are causal chains which operate the other way, from the future into the past. The present is the interference pattern caused by the backward and flow, the forward and backward-flowing casuistries inherent in time. Where they meet, they form an interference pattern, a standing wave, if you will, which is what a hologram is and it's that which is experienced as the now and it is half of the past and half of the future. One of the interesting things I've noticed about the future... I want to stop there because I disagree. And I think that the interference pattern requires an operation of consciousness that I know, I noticed while I'm doing therapy with someone, that it's the reinterpretation of the past that changes causal lines in the past. It's not simply something laid down in the past, it comes to the future, into the present, but it's an interpretation of what the past was that makes it real. But in that sense, the past is a part of the present. It was Proust who said, "The past can never be understood until it is remembered." And it's that idea. And it's remembered each way in a different way. It's restructured each time that you remember it. Yes, nothing is fixed. This is for sure. And in some ways it seems to me, working with my clients, that it isn't the past they're really talking about, but they're symbolizing certain aspects of their perception of present reality in terms of certain memories, in terms of a certain way of seeing the past. Well, the past is constantly changing. I mean, one could study the changing past. Did you know that the Renaissance was invented in the 1850s? It didn't exist before a German historian decided that's what had happened. And now we live in the light of the Renaissance, you know? It's just we don't question. Nobody was running around Florence talking about how great it is that we're living in the Renaissance now, you know? History is fiction. History is fiction. Or Stephan Dedalus said, "History is the nightmare I am trying to awaken from." I was wondering, in terms of Telos, the psychotropics, the attacks on the plants, could they be analogous to an antelope that is drawing us to the future? Yes, I think so. I mean, I'm basically on this issue fairly platonic. I mean, I think that, you know, Plato said, "Time is the moving image of eternity." And that, I think, is probably true, that eternity is all time. And it somehow exists in a higher dimensional matrix than what we experience so that we can only section that dimension to create the three- or four-dimensional world that we live in. But that there is this platonic completeness, at least in essence, whatever that means. And that sort of carries me back to my time maps. They don't say what will happen. They only say that certain levels of novelty and its lack will be fulfilled at certain points in time by some set of events. You see the difference? So you can't have an absolute determinism. If you have an absolute determinism, you preclude the possibility of thought meaning anything. It just means I'm saying what I'm saying because I have to say it. You're thinking what you're thinking because you must think it. So an absolute determinism is hopeless and indefensible and destroys the intellectual enterprise entirely. So we have to have a free future. But how free, you know, looking at the case of the Golden Gate Bridge and the number of people who will jump off it. And certain things are very bound. The time of sunrise tomorrow morning, you wouldn't feel great trepidation about making a prophecy about that. But nevertheless, forces could be invoked which would make it rise earlier or later. But it is very much embedded in the matrix of inertia. But everything interesting is not, is much more up for grabs. Yeah. What psychedelics do, and I begin this as a kind of summation, is they enrich experience, which sounds trivial, except that experience is all that we have. One of the things, if my career or whatever it is could be said to be about one thing, it's the notion that your understanding depends upon yourself. In other words, no myth of the tribe will satisfy these myths like science and religion and politics. They do not satisfy. When I talk about this, I usually mention the notion of the flying saucer. People who believe in flying saucers as alien spacecraft nevertheless so undervalue their own identity that they believe that contact will come to the Secretary General of the United Nations. He will assemble Time Newsweek and the reporters from The Economist. They will get together with Carl Sagan and whoever, and they will all explain it to all of us, and then we will understand what's going on. This is a sold-out point of view. You have accepted their definition of you as a citizen. The real fact of the matter is an anarchy of the imagination where each one of us is our own Magellan. We are not living in the age when all frontiers have disappeared, when all things have been tamed and made mundane. We are living in the most exciting era that has ever been because we are about to turn to the real terra incognito, which is the terra incognito in our minds, and it is for us to do. And this is why the drugs are so controversial because they free you from the myth of the tribe, and that single fact, the fact that they decondition you, they don't decondition you at the chemical level, like make you forget everything you believe so you have to start over. They decondition you at the ideological level, so you just look around at the society you're in and its contradictions and preposterous assumptions are perfectly visible to you, and that frees you then to create a new world through self-experience, not by taking Heidegger's word for it or somebody else's word for it, but creating it through your own experience, and this is what we should all be involved in, and this would carry us to psychological balance. It's trying to make sense of our intuitions in the light of the enormous pressure to accept prepackaged ideologies that makes neurotics of us all, and the only way out of that is to step back from it and to say, "I will only believe what I know. I will be like someone from Missouri, you know? Show me and I'll believe it." This is why I always, my favorite person in the New Testament is Thomas, the doubter, because if you will recall, Christ returned to... The apostles were gathered in the upper room, and Christ came to them, I think, on the 40th day, but Thomas was not there. So then later, and then Christ went away, and so then Thomas came and they said, "The Master was with us," and he said, "You know, you guys have been smoking too many of those little brown cigarettes. The Master has gone from the plane. Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it." So then a few days later, Thomas was with them, and Christ came again, and he said to him, "Thomas, put your hand into the wound that you might believe." And he did, and he believed. Okay, so what conclusion do we draw from this story? The conclusion is that of all of the people, of all of the disciples, the only person in all of human history recorded to have actually touched the incorporeal body of the risen Christ was Thomas the Doubter, and he was allowed that. He was vouchsafed that unique blessing because he doubted. And that's, yes, he insisted on experiencing it himself, and so he touched the incorporeal body, the white stone at the end of time, and this is what we are trying to do because, you know, if you can get your hand on the doorknob, you can turn it and walk through, and the Secretary General of the United Nations need not be at your elbow. Nobody need be at your elbow. And this is what shamans know. They have touched the doorknob, turned it, and walked through, and they are out of time and out of history, and their immense personal presence, or at least the immense personal presence that I have experienced among the ones who are genuine is because they have taken responsibility for their model of the world and have modeled the world based entirely on their own experience. Yes? One question. I mean, I was never exposed to any drugs, never tried any drugs, no, anything, and the way you're talking feels to me like this is the only way to be aware, to become aware of our own being, our own... To me, the experience came to me with the near-death experience, which without any drugs, without anything, my life changed after this because I became aware of a different dimension that I never was aware before, but it was without drugs, without anything. So how do you explain this? No, I don't think drugs are the only way. I think that they are the most effective way when you're talking about transforming an entire society or a planet. But there is, you know, many shamans are not drug users. We've here spoken, because we spoke mostly of Amazonian shamanism, as though the use of hallucinogens and shamanism are always co-present, not necessarily true. I have often people say, "You mean you don't believe in yoga, you don't believe in..." Well, I think that these ways may be efficacious, but I think we are caught in a culture crisis where there is real immediacy to the notion that we have to get on with it. But yes, near-death experiences... How do you compare the two experiences? Because to me, I became very aware of new dimensions, and my own truth came, I didn't have to learn that. Nobody teaches me my own truth. And the world looked at me like it was supposed to be, and never changed since then. But I'd like to know how could you compare the two experiences? Is there any way? Well, I guess you can compare them in their results, you can't compare them in their content. That's the thing. Yes. Some people think you can compare them in their chemistry. That's true. So I think that there might be more similarities than occur when you first consider the point. I'd like to get back to one of your concluding statements on how the use of the psychedelics will decondition a society for its mythology. Now that doesn't seem to have happened with the Amazonians, it really seems to have reinforced their mythology. It was based on those experiences. Yes, that's right. Well, we have no record. We find them using this drug. We have no notion of what ideological transformations may have brought them to that point. There are tribes in the Amazon, right next door to the people we're talking about, who don't use drugs. And so we can't know what upheavals of ideology they have been through. When there is a tradition which supports the notion of the deconditioned individual, then you get the institution of shamanism. We don't have any comparable institution so that there, if you are of a shamanic temperament, you will be selected out and put in that position. But we do, but we don't give a credence within a totally united sort of context. We have sports, for example. There's ample evidence for athletes entering into all sorts of shamanic experiences and experiencing sinning and everything else and not knowing what in the world is going on with them. You know, and that just happens. I mean, marathon runners and droves have these kinds of experiences. Distance swimmers, anyone who gets into hyperventilating, tremendous physical activity, I mean, we do have that in our culture. It's a warrior type ethic as opposed to more of a healing one, but it does exist. It's also a question of how much you can decondition yourself in the absence of any other example. In other words, if you're part of a nomadic Amazonian tribe, there is no model, there is the social model of the tribe, and the only thing you can decondition yourself into is acceptance of the secret, non-public aspects of the ideology in the men's societies or something like that. Well, and we have pharmacological means for intervening, and we need them because we're at such a terminal state with this problem. It's a personal response to it, but also on a social level, we need to have it happen. That's right. We need to talk about it, and it isn't necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded. It's more about participating in a new language of self-reflection. This is what we need to do. Some of us should take drugs. The people, it's a professional kind of obligation. You know, that's what a shaman is. He's the guy whose professional obligation is to take drugs. But we all have an obligation to create a language that values us and the people around us, and this begins with a language that values the self and our experiences. Experience, this is the central thing above and beyond all else. I wanted to come back to something that you were saying a while ago, and that was the deconditioning of the culture. And I just have a couple of observations, and I'd like to know if you have any reaction to this. It's always been a curious fact to me that during the '60s, as we were beginning to move out into space, we were also taking drugs at a very heavy rate. There was an inner and outer exploration that was going on there simultaneously. Out of that experience, I think we have in some ways reconditioned the society specifically in regards to the psychedelic experience of an ecology movement, and beginning to see things in more whole patterns. And I wonder if you have any comments about any of that. Well, I think all of these things, like the ecology movements, the hippies, the dietary sensitivity, all of this stuff arises out of the awareness of the culture crisis, basically traceable back to the bomb. I think the bomb has had a wonderful effect in focusing people's attention wonderfully on problems that before they just tended to fly off in all directions behind. The thing I might say about space, I don't believe that, you know, we will go to space as we are so that we're going to create, you know, a South Bronx on Mars and to slavery and the moons of Jupiter and this kind of thing. I think space is too much like the imagination, this enfolding velvet darkness that stretches to infinity, that cries out to have artistic objects dropped into it. It's like going into the mind, going into the unconscious. The same thing that we must do here on Earth before we go to space. We must, we cannot afford the unconscious anymore. This is a concept that has to take its place with the high button shoe. We must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the Earth like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it. So there can be no more talk of the unconscious or the freight of the primate body or anything like that. We have to get our act together because nature is very ruthless and we cannot have, you cannot rest on the notion that there's some kind of deus ex machina denouement which is going to make it all right even though we blundered endlessly. So it's basically, strangely enough, a call to responsibility which is always, what is always charged against psychedelic drug use is its flagrant irresponsibility. So it's a pretty, the lines are drawn. Sounds like we've got a pretty big job ahead. I think so. Thank you all very, very much for helping me think about all of this. You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. So what do you think? Is it true that we can't afford the unconscious anymore? I'm not so sure about that myself but I do see how the internet today is providing a great deal of information that was largely unavailable before, at least easily. But framing it in terms of us being entirely conscious does have a nice ring to it even though it may be a bit too intense for me personally to be entirely conscious. But whatever that may actually mean, of course. But the concept may also fit the observation of Dr. Spock in Star Trek when he said, "It sounds good, Captain, but it's not logical." Anyway, I guess I'm going to have to let you decide these things for yourself just as you have had to do with everything else in this life, I might add. And of course, how each of us answers what Terrence just now said is a call to responsibility. Well, that may well determine our destiny. And my guess is that you and I are going to answer that call appropriately whatever that means for each of us. Now I have another, I guess you'd call it a call, that I'd like to pass along. Hopefully it won't be a call into the void. I have a longtime friend who is a researcher and cataloger of music inspired by the painter Paul Klee. And by the way, if you were a geeky engineering student like me, you may be pronouncing his name "Klee," K-L-E-E, just as it's spelled. However, I have it on very good authority that "Klay" is a proper pronunciation. In any event, my friend has compiled an amazing list of musical works inspired by Klee. Significantly more than have been inspired by any other painter, it appears. But when I asked him about how much electronic music has been inspired by Klee, he said that it was a genre he hadn't yet researched. And so, where better to put the word out to a wide range of highly musical and artistic people than right here in the salon. So, if you have created any music or know of any music, and it doesn't have to be only electronic, I should add, but if you know of any music inspired by one of Paul Klee's paintings, I'd love to know about it and pass it along to my friend. Maybe the best way to let me know is through a comment on the program notes for this podcast, or you can try sending it to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com, or through my Facebook account. But I should warn you that email and Facebook mail are both kind of hit and miss things for me. Otherwise, I wouldn't have time for anything else. Which brings me to one last thing I'd like to mention today, and that is the perpetual problem we have of how to find the others. For example, here's part of an email that actually did make it through to me the other day. "Lorenzo, I know you are quite busy these days from listening to the salon, but hopefully you can help me. My fiancé and I are planning on moving to Beijing next year, and I'm a little worried that I won't be able to connect with anyone from the tribe. I was wondering if you know of any tribe members who live in Beijing, or just China in general. If so, could you put me in contact with them? It would be very nice to connect with some kindred spirits during our time there. If not, I understand. Peace be with you, my not-yet-met-in-person friend, Brian." And here's another message I received on Facebook. "Hello, Lorenzo. If you're eyeing my profile and wondering why I sent you a friend request, it's because I'm here looking for the others. My fellow Chad and I have been silent salon visitors for years and years. Thank you for all your hard work. We're better people for having your podcasts available to us. Namaste." Well, thank you for your kind words, Brian and Jennifer, and I want you to know that you bring up something that's bothering a lot of us here in the salon. Over on the GrowReport forums, too, and all over the net for that matter. As I look out over this little valley where I'm living right now, there are probably 50,000 people here in this valley, maybe more, maybe 100,000 even. But I'm sure that there are at least 100 or more people who are also trying to find the others. Yet we don't know quite how to go about it. I don't know them. They don't know me. And this isn't true just here in California, as far as the number of people. People who think like you and I do are everywhere. You know, you can't go to any public space in the world without having been within shouting distance of another member of the tribe. Yet we are fearful, and with very good reason, I should add, but we're fearful of making our ideas too public because of the harsh surveillance states that we all live in. Even here in the U.S., we have to be careful about what we say and who we say it to. But at least if we're only exchanging ideas and stories about psychedelic experiences and not exchanging any drugs themselves, we're not breaking a law. At least not yet. And so I'm going to suggest that maybe we should, while we still can, think about getting together more in full public view so the world will know that we're not trying to hide anything. And maybe we could even use public technology like Meetup to schedule regular get-togethers in various cities. I remember when my wife and I were living in the LA area, we regularly attended a monthly Timothy Leary meetup somewhere near Hollywood. And if I remember correctly, at the time there were dozens of Leary meetups all around the country each month. But just now I checked and found that they now only show two groups that come up when searching for Timothy Leary. One of them is in Washington, D.C. with 57 members, and the other is in New York City and has 395 members. And my guess is, is that if you attended one of those two meetups, you might begin finding one or more of the others. However, be sure to keep in mind that just because someone sounds cool, they may not be your best friend after all. No matter what, I would never accept any kind of illegal substance, even as a gift from somebody that you don't already know quite well. That was one of the secrets of Kathleen's long-running salon. No talk about buying, selling, prices, or anything else about exchanging illegal substances was allowed. It's ideas that these salons are about, psychedelic ideas to be sure, but just ideas after all. So how do we get more of us together to share those ideas? Well, even though I'm basically a hermit by temperament, I found when thinking about it, even I would attend a meetup here in the north San Diego county area. And then I got to thinking that if even somebody like me would maybe attend one, that the idea isn't so far out of line after all. But if we are going to do something like this on a large scale to where you knew ahead of time that the meetup was being organized by a fellow saloner, then my opinion is that they should have some non-descript kind of name for the meetup group. Definitely don't use any words that raise flags, words like psychedelic, for example. So if anybody is interested in working on a project like this, and would want to start a discussion in the comments section of this podcast, I'll be sure to pass the ideas along here in the salon and see what we can come up with. You know, in the lockdown societies that we seem to be heading into, maybe it would do us well to begin to make more local contacts. For as you know, locals always survive empires. Well, that's all for now, and so I'll close today's podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Like 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 through psychedelicsalon.org. And that's also where you'll find the program notes for today's podcast. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Transcribed by https://otter.ai {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.30 sec Transcribe: 2902.78 sec Total Time: 2905.72 sec