[00:00:00 - 00:00:17] [Music] [00:00:17 - 00:00:22] Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the [00:00:22 - 00:00:28] psychedelic salon. And to begin with I'd like to thank Guy, Benjamin, Steve, Timothy, [00:00:28 - 00:00:33] and Rebuland for buying a copy of the Genesis Generation, my pay-what-you-can [00:00:33 - 00:00:38] novel in audiobook format. Your donations are very much appreciated. [00:00:38 - 00:00:43] And speaking of appreciation, I think that we should all spend a moment or two [00:00:43 - 00:00:48] sending our love and good vibes out to the legendary alchemist who we simply [00:00:48 - 00:00:54] knew as Owsley. As you already know, Owsley died in an automobile crash in [00:00:54 - 00:00:58] Queensland, Australia a little over a week ago. And if you aren't familiar with [00:00:58 - 00:01:03] Owsley's work, it might be worth your time to Google him. His full name was [00:01:03 - 00:01:09] Augustus Owsley Stanley III, and I think it's safe to say that what we call the [00:01:09 - 00:01:14] '60s wouldn't have been nearly as interesting without him as it was thanks to [00:01:14 - 00:01:19] the millions of doses of LSD that he and his assistants produced in order to help [00:01:19 - 00:01:24] us crack the cosmic egg of the status quo thinking that prevailed when that era [00:01:24 - 00:01:29] began. So happy trails, Owsley, and I hope you come back soon. [00:01:29 - 00:01:34] Now, speaking of coming back, today at long last we are going to hear yet another [00:01:34 - 00:01:39] talk by the one and only Terrence McKenna. What I'm going to play for you right [00:01:39 - 00:01:44] now is an interview of his that I found in the big box of tapes that Diana [00:01:44 - 00:01:49] Slattery sent to me. And hey, thank you ever so much, Diana. I really appreciate [00:01:49 - 00:01:54] it. Unfortunately, the ink on the label somehow became wet and got smeared on [00:01:54 - 00:01:59] this tape, and so I don't have any information to give you as to the date or [00:01:59 - 00:02:04] place of this interview. But I think that you'll find that once again, even though [00:02:04 - 00:02:09] he may touch on themes we've heard from him before, that the material somehow [00:02:09 - 00:02:14] seems very fresh. There's talk of extraterrestrials and ways that they may [00:02:14 - 00:02:19] be trying to communicate with us, talk of shamanism and philosophy, and all of [00:02:19 - 00:02:24] which I think can be summed up in his statement when he says, "There is an angel [00:02:24 - 00:02:29] within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis [00:02:29 - 00:02:35] is all about." So in order to help us get today's historical crisis in a little [00:02:35 - 00:02:40] better perspective, let's now join the good bard, Terence McKenna. [00:02:40 - 00:02:50] Well, do you think we're in a state of transition? Are we moving from one [00:02:50 - 00:02:55] culture to another? Oh, I think we're definitely in a state of transition. [00:02:55 - 00:03:02] This is the chaos at the end of history. However, it's probably nothing to be [00:03:02 - 00:03:08] alarmed about. I imagine it's simply the normal situation that prevails when a [00:03:08 - 00:03:14] species is preparing to depart for the stars. You think we're preparing to [00:03:14 - 00:03:19] depart for the stars? Well, on the scale of a hundred or a thousand years, I think [00:03:19 - 00:03:26] it's an unavoidable conclusion, and that span of time in geological terms is [00:03:26 - 00:03:32] hardly the wink of an eye. In fact, all of human history from that perspective [00:03:32 - 00:03:40] appears as a preparation for human transcendence of the planetary existence. [00:03:40 - 00:03:45] Do we want to get away from the planet? Well, I think you have to take the view [00:03:45 - 00:03:53] that certainly the planet is the cradle of mankind, but inevitably one cannot [00:03:53 - 00:04:00] remain in the cradle forever. The human imagination, in conjunction with [00:04:00 - 00:04:08] technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed [00:04:08 - 00:04:15] on the surface of the planet with safety. The human imagination has gained such an [00:04:15 - 00:04:21] immense power that the only environment that is friendly to it is actually the [00:04:21 - 00:04:29] vacuum of deep space. It is there that we can erect the architectonic dreams that [00:04:29 - 00:04:35] drive us to produce a Los Angeles or a Tokyo and do it on a scale and in such a [00:04:35 - 00:04:42] way that it will be fulfilling rather than degrading. So yes, I think we cannot [00:04:42 - 00:04:48] move forward in understanding without accepting as a consequence of that that [00:04:48 - 00:04:54] we have to leave the planet, that we are no longer the bipedal monkeys we once [00:04:54 - 00:05:01] were. We have become almost a new force in nature, a thing of language and [00:05:01 - 00:05:09] cybernetics and an amalgam of computers and human brains and societal [00:05:09 - 00:05:16] structures that has such an enormous forward momentum that the only place [00:05:16 - 00:05:22] where it can express itself without destroying itself is, as James Joyce says, [00:05:22 - 00:05:28] "up in the end." So long, long ago in the faraway galaxy, Star Wars style may be in [00:05:28 - 00:05:34] our future? Well, as opposed to our past? It's in our present, I think. Our future [00:05:34 - 00:05:40] is probably almost unimaginable because I think the transformation that leaving [00:05:40 - 00:05:47] the planet will bring will also involve a transformation of our consciousness. We [00:05:47 - 00:05:56] are not going as 1950s style human beings. We are going to have to transform our [00:05:56 - 00:06:03] minds before we are going to be able to leave the planet with any amount of grace. [00:06:03 - 00:06:09] This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of [00:06:09 - 00:06:15] the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed [00:06:15 - 00:06:22] by the laws of normal causality so that there really is a prophetic dimension, a [00:06:22 - 00:06:29] glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these [00:06:29 - 00:06:38] compounds. And no cultural shift of this magnitude can be unambiguous. I mean the [00:06:38 - 00:06:45] idea that as a species we would leave the earth behind us must be as rending an [00:06:45 - 00:06:51] idea as that a child would leave its childhood home. Obviously, it's a turning [00:06:51 - 00:06:59] away from something that once left behind can never be recaptured. However, this is [00:06:59 - 00:07:06] the nature of going forward into being, a series of self-transforming, a sense of [00:07:06 - 00:07:13] level. And we now simply happen to be at that moment of ascent to a new level that [00:07:13 - 00:07:19] is linked to leaving the planetary surface physically and to reconnecting [00:07:19 - 00:07:25] with the contents of the unconscious collectivity of our minds. These two [00:07:25 - 00:07:30] things will be done simultaneously. This is what the last half of the 20th [00:07:30 - 00:07:37] century it seems to me is all about. Well by and large, psychedelics have really [00:07:37 - 00:07:42] not been accepted into the mainstream. Do you see a change in that? Well, not [00:07:42 - 00:07:49] particularly. They hold a certain fascination for a persistent majority, and [00:07:49 - 00:07:55] in that way they do their catalytic work upon society, which is to introduce new [00:07:55 - 00:08:04] ideas and to release a certain kind of creative energy into society. I certainly [00:08:04 - 00:08:11] would not like to see a return to the psychedelic hysterias of the 1960s. I [00:08:11 - 00:08:16] think it's fine that these things are now the subject of interest of a much [00:08:16 - 00:08:22] smaller group of people, but perhaps a group of people with a greater [00:08:22 - 00:08:30] commitment and a better idea of exactly what these things are. And it's really [00:08:30 - 00:08:35] the same people, it's just a smaller group of them, and they have accumulated [00:08:35 - 00:08:41] experience over the past 20 years. However, I certainly don't think all [00:08:41 - 00:08:46] psychedelic frontiers are conquered. One of the things that I write about and [00:08:46 - 00:08:55] speak about are the phenomena that many people confirm with the psilocybin [00:08:55 - 00:09:01] family of hallucinogens that no one has included in the standard model of [00:09:01 - 00:09:07] psychedelic drugs, and by that I refer to the logos-like phenomenon of an [00:09:07 - 00:09:14] interiorized voice that seems to be almost a superhuman agency, a kind of [00:09:14 - 00:09:20] genus loci. And I've been writing recently about alien intelligence, which [00:09:20 - 00:09:27] is what I call this, where you have contact with an entity so beyond the [00:09:27 - 00:09:33] normal structure of the ego that if it is not an extraterrestrial, it might as [00:09:33 - 00:09:43] well be, because its bizarreness and its distance from ordinary expectations [00:09:43 - 00:09:49] about what can go on is so great that if flying saucers arrived here tomorrow [00:09:49 - 00:09:56] from the Pleiades, it would make this mystery no less compelling. It amuses me [00:09:56 - 00:10:01] that the scientific community has taken over the search for extraterrestrial [00:10:01 - 00:10:08] intelligence and defined it as they care to define it and have erected radio [00:10:08 - 00:10:12] telescopes to search the galaxy for these signals, and the world's largest [00:10:12 - 00:10:18] radio telescope is at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, and within the shadow of that [00:10:18 - 00:10:25] installation, mushrooms grow in the fields and the cows munch quietly in the [00:10:25 - 00:10:33] sunshine, and it's this marvelous inner penetration of the near and the far away, [00:10:33 - 00:10:38] because I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the [00:10:38 - 00:10:45] psychic dimension, and there the problem is not the absence of contact, but the [00:10:45 - 00:10:51] volume of contact that must be sifted through, because the fact of the matter [00:10:51 - 00:10:58] is, shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods [00:10:58 - 00:11:05] and demons since the Paleolithic and probably before. That doesn't mean that [00:11:05 - 00:11:12] we can rule out this approach to communication. It seems to me far more [00:11:12 - 00:11:18] likely that an advanced civilization would communicate interdimensionally and [00:11:18 - 00:11:24] telepathically. The amounts of time available for an intelligent species to [00:11:24 - 00:11:32] evolve these kinds of communication are vast, so I think that it's very [00:11:32 - 00:11:39] interesting then that the tryptamines psilocybin and DMT at the 15 milligram [00:11:39 - 00:11:46] level very reliably trigger what could only be described as contact-like [00:11:46 - 00:11:53] phenomena, and not only the interiorized voice in the head, but also the classical [00:11:53 - 00:11:59] flying saucer motifs of the whirling disk, the lens-shaped object, the alien [00:11:59 - 00:12:06] approach. This seems to be something hardwired into the human psyche, and I [00:12:06 - 00:12:15] would like to find out why. I think it's a very odd fact of human psychology, and I [00:12:15 - 00:12:20] don't buy any of the current theories ranging from that nothing at all is [00:12:20 - 00:12:26] happening to that this is in fact another species with a world around another star [00:12:26 - 00:12:30] that is getting in touch with us. I think it's something so bizarre that it [00:12:30 - 00:12:36] actually masquerades as an extraterrestrial so as not to alarm us by [00:12:36 - 00:12:41] the true implications of what it is. Well, your statement implies that it's [00:12:41 - 00:12:46] something external to ourselves, and I wonder about that. Well, this dualism of [00:12:46 - 00:12:52] the interior and the exterior may have to be overcome. It obviously transcends [00:12:52 - 00:13:00] the individual, but I suspect it is something like an overmind of the species, [00:13:00 - 00:13:05] that actually the highest form of human organization is not realized in the [00:13:05 - 00:13:11] democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever [00:13:11 - 00:13:17] penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at [00:13:17 - 00:13:22] the tiller of history. It is no government, no religious group, but [00:13:22 - 00:13:30] actually what we call the human unconscious. But it is not unconscious, [00:13:30 - 00:13:36] and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory. It is an [00:13:36 - 00:13:44] organized intellect of some sort, and human history is its signature on the [00:13:44 - 00:13:50] primates, and it is so different from the primates. It is like a creature of pure [00:13:50 - 00:13:56] information. It is made of language. It releases ideas into the flowing stream [00:13:56 - 00:14:01] of history to boost the primates toward higher and higher levels of self [00:14:01 - 00:14:07] reflection of it, and we have now reached the point where the masks are beginning [00:14:07 - 00:14:15] to fall away, and we are discovering that there is an angel within the monkey [00:14:15 - 00:14:21] struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about. [00:14:21 - 00:14:27] And I am, for no reasons in particular, very optimistic. I mean, I see it as [00:14:27 - 00:14:37] a necessary chaos that will lead to a new and more attractive order. [00:14:37 - 00:14:44] Terrence, you were talking about extraordinary realities, and it occurs to [00:14:44 - 00:14:50] me that there is an enormous amount of prejudice against the psychedelics and [00:14:50 - 00:14:58] the use of hallucinogenic substances, and it is almost as if there is an inordinate [00:14:58 - 00:15:07] fear to open up the door to the closet that these substances reveal. What about [00:15:07 - 00:15:11] that prejudice? What do you think is, how is that going to be resolved? What is [00:15:11 - 00:15:13] the resolution of that? [00:15:13 - 00:15:19] Well, I think it is more complicated than a prejudice. It is a prejudice born [00:15:19 - 00:15:28] of respect, because most people sense that these compounds probably actually do [00:15:28 - 00:15:33] what their adherents claim they do. It is possible to see the whole human growth [00:15:33 - 00:15:40] movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to [00:15:40 - 00:15:47] put yourself on the line the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. [00:15:47 - 00:15:53] And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it is the sheer [00:15:53 - 00:16:00] power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you [00:16:00 - 00:16:06] hate them, and that is because they dissolve worldviews, and if you like the [00:16:06 - 00:16:11] experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from [00:16:11 - 00:16:17] under you, if you think that is a thrill, you will probably love psychedelics. On [00:16:17 - 00:16:21] the other hand, for some people that is the most horrible thing they can possibly [00:16:21 - 00:16:27] imagine. They navigate reality through various forms of faith, and I think that [00:16:27 - 00:16:35] the psychedelics, the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very, very [00:16:35 - 00:16:44] deeply. I spent time in India and I would always go to the local sadhus of great [00:16:44 - 00:16:50] reputation, and I met many people who possessed what I call wise old man [00:16:50 - 00:16:58] wisdom. But wise old man wisdom is a kind of Tao of how to live. It has nothing to [00:16:58 - 00:17:05] say about these dimensions that the psychedelics reveal, and for that you have [00:17:05 - 00:17:11] to go to places where hallucinogenic shamanism is practiced, specifically the [00:17:11 - 00:17:17] Amazon Basin. And there you discover that beyond simply the wisdom of how to live [00:17:17 - 00:17:24] in ordinary reality, there is a gnosis of how to navigate in extraordinary reality. [00:17:24 - 00:17:31] And this reality is so extraordinary that we cannot approach what these [00:17:31 - 00:17:36] people are doing with any degree of smugness, because the frank fact of the [00:17:36 - 00:17:41] matter is we have no viable theory of what mind is either. The beliefs of a [00:17:41 - 00:17:48] Wittoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal [00:17:48 - 00:17:57] chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right. So it's the [00:17:57 - 00:18:01] power of these things, the fact that here is something we have not assimilated. We [00:18:01 - 00:18:05] have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean, the heart of the [00:18:05 - 00:18:11] atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that [00:18:11 - 00:18:17] here is where all the contradictions flow together. And the same prejudice [00:18:17 - 00:18:21] against psychoanalysis that characterized the 20s and 30s when it [00:18:21 - 00:18:30] was thought to be superfluous or some kind of fad attends the psychedelics now. [00:18:30 - 00:18:36] It's because it touches a very sensitive nerve. It touches the issue of the nature [00:18:36 - 00:18:43] of man, and people are uncomfortable with this, or some people are uncomfortable [00:18:43 - 00:18:50] with this. What is the value of exploring the extraordinary realities? Well, I guess [00:18:50 - 00:18:55] it's the same value that attends the exploration of ordinary realities. [00:18:55 - 00:19:02] There's an alchemical saying that one should read the oldest books, climb the [00:19:02 - 00:19:10] highest mountains, and visit the broadest deserts. I think that being imposes some [00:19:10 - 00:19:18] kind of obligation to find out what's going on, and since all primary [00:19:18 - 00:19:24] information about what is going on comes through the senses, any drug or any [00:19:24 - 00:19:30] compound which alters that sensory input has to be looked at very carefully. I've [00:19:30 - 00:19:36] often made the point that chemically speaking you can have a molecule which [00:19:36 - 00:19:42] is completely inactive as a psychedelic, and you move a single atom on one of its [00:19:42 - 00:19:48] rings, and suddenly it's a powerful psychedelic. Well, now it seems to me this [00:19:48 - 00:19:55] is a perfect proof of the inner penetration of matter and mind. The [00:19:55 - 00:20:00] movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position [00:20:00 - 00:20:07] changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and [00:20:07 - 00:20:15] matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together. This means that in [00:20:15 - 00:20:22] a sense the term extraordinary reality is not correct if it implies a division of [00:20:22 - 00:20:26] category from ordinary reality. It is simply there is more and more and more [00:20:26 - 00:20:33] of reality, and some of it is inside our heads, and some of it is deployed out [00:20:33 - 00:20:40] through three-dimensional Newtonian space. Most of us I think just simply [00:20:40 - 00:20:46] accept the everyday reality as the only one, and you're talking about [00:20:46 - 00:20:54] journeys into the nether regions of which far beyond most people's conception [00:20:54 - 00:21:01] or even wanting to conceive of such a reality. Well, I think there's a shamanic [00:21:01 - 00:21:08] temperament which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense [00:21:08 - 00:21:13] of gnosis, in other words knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to [00:21:13 - 00:21:19] Scientific American and it validates what you believe, but immediately [00:21:19 - 00:21:25] cosmology is constructed out of immediate experience that are found always to be [00:21:25 - 00:21:31] applicable. You see I don't believe that the world is made out of quarks or [00:21:31 - 00:21:37] electromagnetic waves or stars or planets or any of these things. I believe [00:21:37 - 00:21:43] the world is made out of language and that this is the primary fact that has [00:21:43 - 00:21:49] been overlooked. The construction of a flying saucer is not so much a [00:21:49 - 00:21:58] dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge, and people find it very hard [00:21:58 - 00:22:03] to imagine exactly what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that the [00:22:03 - 00:22:16] leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being. We in [00:22:16 - 00:22:21] the West have had it the wrong way around for over a millennia, but once [00:22:21 - 00:22:28] this is clearly understood with what we have learned in our little excursion [00:22:28 - 00:22:34] through three-dimensional space and matter, we will create a new vision of [00:22:34 - 00:22:40] humanity that will be a fusion of the East and the West. The world being made [00:22:40 - 00:22:44] of language, and I think of these extraordinary realities which are totally [00:22:44 - 00:22:50] beyond any language that we use in any ordinary sense. Yes, well they are beyond [00:22:50 - 00:22:57] ordinary language. I always think of Philo Judeus writing on the logos. He [00:22:57 - 00:23:02] posed to himself the question, "What would be a more perfect logos?" and then he [00:23:02 - 00:23:09] answered saying, "It would be a logos which is not heard but beheld," and he [00:23:09 - 00:23:14] imagined a form of communication where the ears would not be the primary [00:23:14 - 00:23:19] receptors but the eyes would be a language where meaning was not [00:23:19 - 00:23:24] constructed through a dictionary of little mouth noises but actually [00:23:24 - 00:23:29] three-dimensional objects were generated with a kind of hyper language so that [00:23:29 - 00:23:35] there was perfect understanding between people, and this may sound bizarre in [00:23:35 - 00:23:41] ordinary reality but these forms of synesthesia and synesthesia glossolalia [00:23:41 - 00:23:47] are commonplace in psychedelic states. Terence, could you identify Philo for us [00:23:47 - 00:23:52] and tell us who he was? He was an Alexandrian Jew of the second century [00:23:52 - 00:23:58] who made it his business to travel around the Hellenic world and discussed [00:23:58 - 00:24:04] all the major cults and religious and cosmogonic theories of his day, so he's a [00:24:04 - 00:24:10] major source of Hellenistic data for us. How would you relate to Socrates' view of [00:24:10 - 00:24:19] the world? Well, I think that it's hard not to be a Platonist but it's something [00:24:19 - 00:24:25] perhaps we should struggle against or at least struggle to modify. I think of [00:24:25 - 00:24:30] myself as sort of a white-headian Platonist. Certainly the central Platonic [00:24:30 - 00:24:38] idea which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand [00:24:38 - 00:24:44] outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience [00:24:44 - 00:24:52] and Plato's formulation of time as the moving image of eternity is another one [00:24:52 - 00:24:58] of these aphorisms that the psychedelic state confirms and certainly [00:24:58 - 00:25:05] Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic [00:25:05 - 00:25:10] philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarified [00:25:10 - 00:25:18] states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology which is the [00:25:18 - 00:25:23] cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves [00:25:23 - 00:25:29] with psychedelics. What I think most of us don't understand or don't really [00:25:29 - 00:25:34] know is the fact that Greek culture and the Eleusinian mysteries incorporated [00:25:34 - 00:25:40] the use of something that very akin to psychedelics. Yes. Essentially Western [00:25:40 - 00:25:47] civilization is based on the culture that had at its core root an experience [00:25:47 - 00:25:52] and a ritual that used as I say something akin to psychedelics. Yes well [00:25:52 - 00:25:58] for over 2,000 years everyone who was anyone in the ancient world made the [00:25:58 - 00:26:03] pilgrimage to Eleusis and had this experience which Gordon Wasson and Karl [00:26:03 - 00:26:11] Ruck have argued very convincingly was a hallucinogenic intoxication on Urgot but [00:26:11 - 00:26:17] of course as soon as the church solidified its power it closed these [00:26:17 - 00:26:25] Platonic academies and moved against pagan so-called pagan knowledge and [00:26:25 - 00:26:30] heretical knowledge and not only the Platonists but all the Gnostic sects all [00:26:30 - 00:26:38] of these people all of these viewpoints were repressed. I like to think that the [00:26:38 - 00:26:46] end of that repression came in a very odd way when in 1953 I guess it was [00:26:46 - 00:26:53] Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina in the village of Watla de Jimenez in the [00:26:53 - 00:27:00] Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It was as if [00:27:00 - 00:27:07] Eros who had been martyred in the old world was then found sleeping in the [00:27:07 - 00:27:13] mountains of Mexico and resurrected and the experience of the mushroom is very [00:27:13 - 00:27:21] much the experience of a genus loci a god on the Grecian model not the god who [00:27:21 - 00:27:30] hung the stars in heaven but a local god a pre-christian bacchanalian nature [00:27:30 - 00:27:37] power that is is very alien and yet resonates with our expectations of what [00:27:37 - 00:27:41] that experience would be like. Interesting that the mushroom also is a [00:27:41 - 00:27:46] symbol in our culture of death and destruction being the symbol of the [00:27:46 - 00:27:53] nuclear explosion. Yes well my brother has made the point asking you know what [00:27:53 - 00:27:59] mushroom is it that grows at the end of history is that the mushroom of [00:27:59 - 00:28:05] Fermet and Oppenheimer and Teller or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman [00:28:05 - 00:28:13] and Humphrey Osmond. So no I think the latter is safer. Well it may not only be [00:28:13 - 00:28:21] safer it may open the way to escape from the former. It's like a pun in physics [00:28:21 - 00:28:25] that the force of liberation and the force of destruction could take the same [00:28:25 - 00:28:31] form it's what alchemists call a coincidencia positorum. It is an amazing [00:28:31 - 00:28:38] synchronicity it seems that also I was interested in talking with Andy [00:28:38 - 00:28:44] Weil some time ago about the fact that their new genus of mushrooms appearing [00:28:44 - 00:28:50] that have psilocybin in them they've never been seen before never been [00:28:50 - 00:28:54] tracked before and it's almost as if they're appearing now. Well it's amazing [00:28:54 - 00:28:59] how many have been discovered since people have bent their attention to it [00:28:59 - 00:29:04] there have been still Simon mushrooms reported from England, France, localities [00:29:04 - 00:29:10] where so far as we know there is no cultural history of usage at all or [00:29:10 - 00:29:17] however it's interesting that cultural usage seems to disappear very early in [00:29:17 - 00:29:23] human history. Halocenogens are hardly even welcome in agricultural societies. I [00:29:23 - 00:29:29] think it was Weston LaBar made the point that once you learn how to grow [00:29:29 - 00:29:36] plants your God shifts from the ecstatic God of the halocenogens to the corn God [00:29:36 - 00:29:45] or the food God and it no longer is about divining the hunt and weather [00:29:45 - 00:29:50] through the ecstatic use of halocenogens it's about being able to get up every [00:29:50 - 00:29:58] morning and go to work and hoe the crop so you mentioned earlier the prejudice [00:29:58 - 00:30:03] against halocenogens I think it reaches back to the beginning of agriculture [00:30:03 - 00:30:10] this competition among plant gods which exemplified lifestyles that must have [00:30:10 - 00:30:16] seemed very very alien to each other. Is psilocybin illegal? Oh yes it's a [00:30:16 - 00:30:25] schedule one drug without any public debate it was placed on the list at the [00:30:25 - 00:30:31] same time that LSD was and yet the issue was always couched in terms of LSD being [00:30:31 - 00:30:35] made illegal but actually at that point in time a whole bunch of things were [00:30:35 - 00:30:40] made illegal and there was never any public debate all psychedelics were [00:30:40 - 00:30:47] viewed as the same drug and LSD was used as the model actually these drugs [00:30:47 - 00:30:52] there's a spectrum of psychedelic effects and certain drugs trigger some of [00:30:52 - 00:30:58] them and certain ones others but yes psilocybin is illegal. Are the mushrooms [00:30:58 - 00:31:05] illegal? The mushrooms also are illegal as they contain psilocybin. I recall Andy [00:31:05 - 00:31:08] Wiles saying that he walked along the downtown Seattle residential street [00:31:08 - 00:31:15] picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of presidential homes. Oh yes. [00:31:15 - 00:31:22] In English law took the view that it was preposterous to try and outlaw a [00:31:22 - 00:31:28] naturally occurring plant and they took the position that only the chemical was [00:31:28 - 00:31:34] illegal which I think is a very very wise position but I noticed that Canada [00:31:34 - 00:31:40] recently chose the American interpretation over the British one. [00:31:40 - 00:31:45] Interesting. Turns out going back to the Andy Wiles story that the reason that [00:31:45 - 00:31:50] these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locales in the northwest was [00:31:50 - 00:32:00] that their spores were contained in a mail order company's mushroom growing [00:32:00 - 00:32:06] product that they sent out mail order and so. Yes this is an interesting [00:32:06 - 00:32:11] phenomenon you see the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do [00:32:11 - 00:32:17] not contain psilocybin they only contain the message in the DNA of the mushroom [00:32:17 - 00:32:23] for the production of psilocybin so it's a kind of bizarre catch-22 the mushroom [00:32:23 - 00:32:30] spores can move anywhere legally can be bought and sold but they are the sine [00:32:30 - 00:32:35] qua non for the production of mushrooms of course. The kind of knowledge and [00:32:35 - 00:32:39] kind of information you're putting forward is is not generally available [00:32:39 - 00:32:43] it's not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the [00:32:43 - 00:32:52] typical academic anthropology curriculum and yet it seems to be a knowledge that [00:32:52 - 00:32:58] is ever expanding but somehow it's it's outside of the cultural institutional [00:32:58 - 00:33:06] entities in some way. Number one why do you think that's the case of course [00:33:06 - 00:33:09] there's a logical answer to that one but what do you see is the future of this [00:33:09 - 00:33:13] kind of information this kind of knowledge? Well I think in a sense it [00:33:13 - 00:33:19] signals the rebirth of the institution of shamanism in the context of modern [00:33:19 - 00:33:25] society and anthropologists have always made the point about shaman that they [00:33:25 - 00:33:30] were very important social catalysts in their group but they were always [00:33:30 - 00:33:35] peripheral to it peripheral to the political power and actually usually [00:33:35 - 00:33:41] physically peripheral living at some distance from the village and I think [00:33:41 - 00:33:47] the electronic shaman the people who pursue these the exploration of these [00:33:47 - 00:33:56] spaces exist to return to tell the rest of us about it that we are now coming [00:33:56 - 00:34:03] into a period of racial maturity as a species where we can no longer have [00:34:03 - 00:34:12] forbidden areas of the human mind or cultural machinery we have taken upon [00:34:12 - 00:34:17] ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what [00:34:17 - 00:34:26] we are we cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we [00:34:26 - 00:34:32] inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition we need to truly explore the [00:34:32 - 00:34:38] problem of consciousness because as man gains power he is becoming the defining [00:34:38 - 00:34:47] fact on the planet in the near space area so the question that looms is is man [00:34:47 - 00:34:55] good and then if he is what is it he's good for and the shaman will point the [00:34:55 - 00:35:03] way because what they are are visionaries poets cultural architects [00:35:03 - 00:35:08] forecasters all these roles which we understand in more conventional terms [00:35:08 - 00:35:16] rolled into one and raised to the nth power they are cultural models for the [00:35:16 - 00:35:20] rest of us this has always been true that the shaman has access to a [00:35:20 - 00:35:26] superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition and by being able to do that [00:35:26 - 00:35:33] he affirms the trans the potential for transcendence in all people he is an [00:35:33 - 00:35:38] exemplar if you will and I see the attention that's being given to these [00:35:38 - 00:35:45] things signaling a sense on the part of the society that we need to return to [00:35:45 - 00:35:50] these models this is why for instance in the Star Wars phenomenon Skywalker Luke [00:35:50 - 00:35:56] Skywalker Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of [00:35:56 - 00:36:02] the tongue gusick which is where Siberian shamanism comes from so these [00:36:02 - 00:36:07] heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes [00:36:07 - 00:36:13] they control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy [00:36:13 - 00:36:18] together and this is true as a matter of fact and as we explore how true it is [00:36:18 - 00:36:25] the limitations of our previous worldview will be exposed for all to see [00:36:25 - 00:36:32] I think it was JBS Haldane who said the world may not only be stranger than we [00:36:32 - 00:36:39] suppose it may be stranger than we can suppose I think of the care of the [00:36:39 - 00:36:48] excuse me the character Yoda right is a shamanic type character very much so the [00:36:48 - 00:36:55] as we talk about shamans and shamanism again that brings up cross-cultural [00:36:55 - 00:37:01] currents and do you see this the shaman taking on a new certainly you don't see [00:37:01 - 00:37:06] Indian shamans walking into the metropolitan areas do you see the [00:37:06 - 00:37:12] shaman taking on a new form well I I believe along with Gordon [00:37:12 - 00:37:17] Watson and others but in distinction to Marsili odd who is a major writer on [00:37:17 - 00:37:25] shamanism that it is hallucinogenic shamanism that is primary and that where [00:37:25 - 00:37:32] shamanic techniques are used to the exclusion of hallucinogenic drug [00:37:32 - 00:37:39] ingestion the shamanism tends to be vitiated it is more like a ritual [00:37:39 - 00:37:48] enactment of what real shamanism is so that the shamanism that is coming to be [00:37:48 - 00:37:54] is coming to be within people in our culture the people who feel comfortable [00:37:54 - 00:38:00] with psychedelic drugs and who by going into those spaces and then returning [00:38:00 - 00:38:07] with works of art or poetic accounts or scientific ideas are actually changing [00:38:07 - 00:38:12] the face of the culture I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension [00:38:12 - 00:38:21] of inspiration and dream I think history has always progressed by the bubbling up [00:38:21 - 00:38:26] of ideas from these nether dimensions into the minds of receptive men and [00:38:26 - 00:38:33] women it is simply that now with the hallucinogens we actually have a tool to [00:38:33 - 00:38:39] push the button we are no longer dependent upon whatever factors it is [00:38:39 - 00:38:45] that previously controlled the ingression of novelty into human history [00:38:45 - 00:38:53] we have taken that function to ourselves and this will accelerate and and [00:38:53 - 00:38:58] intensify the cultural crisis but I think in the end it will lead that much [00:38:58 - 00:39:08] sooner to its resolution so as we continue to move towards the further [00:39:08 - 00:39:15] exploration of these spaces we can expect that social change as a result [00:39:15 - 00:39:22] personal change tremendous social change I see in fact what is happening is a [00:39:22 - 00:39:29] tendency to what I call turn the body inside out we are through our media and [00:39:29 - 00:39:33] our cybernetics we are actually approaching the point where [00:39:33 - 00:39:41] consciousness can be experienced this in a state of disconnection from the body [00:39:41 - 00:39:48] we have changed we are no longer as I said bipedal monkeys we are instead a [00:39:48 - 00:39:54] kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic [00:39:54 - 00:40:01] technological components we have become a force which takes unorganized raw [00:40:01 - 00:40:09] material and excretes technical objects we have transcended the normal [00:40:09 - 00:40:14] definitions of man we are like an enormous collective organism with our [00:40:14 - 00:40:20] databanks and our forecasting agencies and our computer networks and the many [00:40:20 - 00:40:26] levels at which we are connected into the universe our self image is changing [00:40:26 - 00:40:32] the monkey is all but being left behind and shortly will be left behind the [00:40:32 - 00:40:38] flying saucer again I take to be an image of the future state of humanity it [00:40:38 - 00:40:46] is a kind of millenarian transformation of man where the soul is exteriorized as [00:40:46 - 00:40:55] the apotheosis of technology and it is that eschatological event which is [00:40:55 - 00:41:00] casting enormous shadows backward through time over the historical [00:41:00 - 00:41:07] landscape that is the siren at the end of time calling all mankind across the [00:41:07 - 00:41:12] last ten millennia toward it calling us out of the trees and into history and [00:41:12 - 00:41:19] through this series of multi-leveled cultural transitions to the point where [00:41:19 - 00:41:24] the thing within the monkeys the creature of pure language and pure [00:41:24 - 00:41:33] imagination whose aspirations are entirely Titanic in terms of self [00:41:33 - 00:41:39] transformation that thing is emerging and it will emerge as man leaves the [00:41:39 - 00:41:44] planet and it's not something quantized and clearly defined it is in fact what [00:41:44 - 00:41:50] the next 50 or so years will be about but at the end of it the species will be [00:41:50 - 00:41:58] off-planet and transformed and fully wired from the depths to the heights are [00:41:58 - 00:42:02] we just talking about another version of the Christian death resurrection [00:42:02 - 00:42:07] ascension into heaven except that it is coming into history what is happening is [00:42:07 - 00:42:17] that the the paradise promised the soul is actually going to enter into history [00:42:17 - 00:42:23] because technological man took the apocalyptic aspirations of Christianity [00:42:23 - 00:42:28] so seriously that we are going to make it happen it has become the guiding [00:42:28 - 00:42:34] image of what we want to be and I'm reminded of the poem by Yates it's [00:42:34 - 00:42:39] sailing to Byzantium where he speaks of how after death he would like to be an [00:42:39 - 00:42:46] enameled golden object to singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium and it's [00:42:46 - 00:42:52] the image of man transformed into eternal circuitry and released into a [00:42:52 - 00:43:00] hyperspace of information where you are a thing of circuitry but you appear to be [00:43:00 - 00:43:08] walking along an unspoiled beach in paradise it is that we are going to find [00:43:08 - 00:43:12] the power to realize our deepest cultural aspirations this is why we must [00:43:12 - 00:43:17] find out what our deepest cultural aspirations are again another way of [00:43:17 - 00:43:23] phrasing the question is man good we've got the idea that these spaces that [00:43:23 - 00:43:28] we've been talking about that you've been eliminating our spaces that can be [00:43:28 - 00:43:35] achieved without the use of psychedelics well again I scoured India and my humble [00:43:35 - 00:43:44] personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely I have always approached to [00:43:44 - 00:43:50] people of spiritual accomplishment with the question what can you show me [00:43:50 - 00:43:57] because as I said earlier this wise old man wisdom is one thing but only the the [00:43:57 - 00:44:05] hallucinogen using shaman of the Amazon seem to be able to go beyond that there [00:44:05 - 00:44:13] may be techniques for doing this but the efficacy and the dependability of the [00:44:13 - 00:44:18] hallucinogen seems to me to make them the obvious choice it would only be a [00:44:18 - 00:44:24] series of cultural conventions that would cause one to want to engineer [00:44:24 - 00:44:31] around that it is the obvious path to transcendence people must face the fact [00:44:31 - 00:44:36] that at one level we are chemical machines that doesn't mean we are that [00:44:36 - 00:44:41] at every level but it does mean that that is a level where we can intervene [00:44:41 - 00:44:48] to change the pictures that are coming in and going out at higher levels you're [00:44:48 - 00:44:51] not suggesting that people should do this by themselves [00:44:51 - 00:44:57] it take hallucinogens well I don't know about take it by themselves probably not [00:44:57 - 00:45:05] although I always do and I seem to prefer it what I am suggesting is they [00:45:05 - 00:45:10] take it in a situation of minimum sensory input lying down in darkness with [00:45:10 - 00:45:18] eyes closed cannot be surpassed and people want music they want to walk [00:45:18 - 00:45:22] around in nature they want all these things but nature and music are [00:45:22 - 00:45:26] beautiful in their own right they are the adumbrations of the psychedelic [00:45:26 - 00:45:31] experience that we deal with an ordinary reality in confrontation with the [00:45:31 - 00:45:36] psychedelic experience these things are hardly more than impediments the very [00:45:36 - 00:45:41] interesting things are happening in the utter blackness behind your eyelids [00:45:41 - 00:45:49] lying still in darkness and that is where the mystery comes from and goes to [00:45:49 - 00:45:54] my question had to do with with or without a guide oh I don't think people [00:45:54 - 00:46:00] should do it without a guide unless they feel very confident from experience that [00:46:00 - 00:46:05] they don't need to guide so I like to have these ideas get out I think it's [00:46:05 - 00:46:10] important that we discuss all this in a way that is only now becoming possible [00:46:10 - 00:46:18] because of how it was in the 1960s now we need to shed all that and look back [00:46:18 - 00:46:24] and look forward and try to make a mature judgment for our culture based on [00:46:24 - 00:46:33] the facts of the matter you're listening to the psychedelic salon where people [00:46:33 - 00:46:40] are changing their lives one thought at a time as Terrence said just now in [00:46:40 - 00:46:45] closing it's up to you and me to make a mature judgment based upon the facts of [00:46:45 - 00:46:50] the matter and as we all know the so-called facts that the government's [00:46:50 - 00:46:54] around the world are putting out about cannabis and our psychedelic medicines [00:46:54 - 00:47:00] well they're almost all completely wrong and anyone who has ever had a few tokes [00:47:00 - 00:47:04] of grass knows full well that this is not a dangerous drug without any [00:47:04 - 00:47:08] medicinal value yet that's what the screw heads in Washington and other [00:47:08 - 00:47:14] world capitals are saying however as Aldous Huxley once said facts don't [00:47:14 - 00:47:20] cease to exist just because they are ignored also I'd like to be sure to point [00:47:20 - 00:47:24] out that early on in this talk when Terrence said the human imagination in [00:47:24 - 00:47:29] conjunction with technology has become a force so potent that it really can no [00:47:29 - 00:47:34] longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety now I suspect he [00:47:34 - 00:47:39] was talking about things such as nuclear power and at the present moment of course [00:47:39 - 00:47:43] we can see how dangerous this technology can be when it's combined with a profit [00:47:43 - 00:47:47] motive where cost-cutting measures are more important to corporations than is [00:47:47 - 00:47:52] the safety of our people but my guess is that by the time of Terrence's death in [00:47:52 - 00:47:58] 2000 he probably would have revised that statement to reflect his then newly [00:47:58 - 00:48:04] growing fascination with virtual reality and cyberspace thanks to what he was [00:48:04 - 00:48:08] learning from Bruce Damer and other cybernetic pioneers and so in my next [00:48:08 - 00:48:12] podcast I'll be playing part of an interview that Matt Anderson did with [00:48:12 - 00:48:17] Bruce Damer for his fall winter documentary series in it Bruce expands [00:48:17 - 00:48:22] on his thoughts about what he sees as the coming of a great crescendo so in [00:48:22 - 00:48:26] the weeks ahead we'll be spending some time with Bruce and then I'll probably [00:48:26 - 00:48:31] dip into the Timothy Leary archive for a bit more from the good doctor and then [00:48:31 - 00:48:35] we'll get back to some of these other Terrence tapes that Diane so kindly sent [00:48:35 - 00:48:40] for me to play for you here in the salon and so that'll do it for now and I'll [00:48:40 - 00:48:45] again close by reminding you that this and most of the podcast from the [00:48:45 - 00:48:48] psychedelic salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio [00:48:48 - 00:48:52] projects under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share like [00:48:52 - 00:48:57] 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click the [00:48:57 - 00:49:01] creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you [00:49:01 - 00:49:06] can find via psychedelics salon bus and if you're interested in the philosophy [00:49:06 - 00:49:10] behind the salon well you can hear a little bit about it in my novel the [00:49:10 - 00:49:14] Genesis generation which is available as a pay what you can audiobook that you [00:49:14 - 00:49:20] can download at Genesis generation dot us and for now this is Lorenzo signing [00:49:20 - 00:49:26] off from cyberdellic space be well my friends [00:49:26 - 00:49:28] impossible [00:49:28 - 00:49:31] remaining [00:49:31 - 00:49:33] you [00:49:33 - 00:49:36] (upbeat music) [00:49:36 - 00:49:46] [BLANK_AUDIO]