[music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. And what I like to think of as your virtual guest hosts
 this week are Jared Dee, Garrett H, Francis V, James M, Zach M, Toby M, and
 Marco L, all of whom paid for a copy of my pay-what-you-can audiobook, my novel
 The Genesis Generation. And while I'm thinking of it, Vipal, who was one of our
 donors last week, hey Vipal, I haven't forgotten about the suggestions you sent
 and I'll be thanking them over in the weeks to come. Now you guys really picked
 a great week to be my co-hosts here in the salon because I think you're going
 to be as excited as I am about the tape I'm going to play for you today, which is
 another from the box of cassettes that Diana Slattery sent me a few weeks back,
 or I should say a few months back now. Thank you again Diana. And I picked this
 one out of the box for several reasons. The first one being that it is the
 oldest recording of a Terrence McKenna talk that I've come across so far. It's
 from December of 1982 and apparently was recorded in someone's living room as
 you'll soon hear. Another reason that I'm playing this today is that on his most
 excellent podcast, The Sea Realm, well my friend KMO has featured Larry Lowe on a
 couple of his recent programs and for my money Larry is the most well-grounded
 and open-minded reporter on the topic of UFOs that you're going to find. Now if
 you're like I was until about five years ago, well then maybe you have already
 closed your mind about the UFO phenomena. However what opened my mind was that I
 wound up actually seeing one one night, but I'll save that story for another day.
 My point that I seem to have drifted away from was that UFOs seem to be on a
 lot of people's minds these days. And then when I started looking through that
 box of old tapes and searching for the oldest one I could find, I came across
 this one that I'm going to play in a minute. And interestingly it was in a
 case that was labeled Psilocybin and the Sands of Time, which is a talk we've seen
 all over the net. But then the tape inside the box itself was labeled the
 Definitive UFO Tape, Terrence McKenna, December 1982. So here's a recording that
 somebody made in December of 1982 in which right off the bat the first
 question to Terrence refers to the two books that he had written at that point.
 And he answers by saying that he kept most of his UFO ideas out of the
 invisible landscape. Then he refers to what he calls the second work titled
 Psilocybin and the UFOs. Now I have to admit that that was a new reference for
 me. I'm sure you might have heard of it already, but I went and googled it and
 could find no bibliography of McKenna that even including the one at
 arrowid.org that referred to that book. However at the very well-established
 deoxy.org, that's D-E-O-X-Y in case you haven't been there, deoxy.org site, I
 found a reference to what they call the missing chapters of true hallucinations.
 And I did remember seeing that a long time ago, so if you're interested you'll
 find a link to it along with the program notes for this podcast. And you can get to
 those through psychedelicsalon.us. And I guess I should mention that lately I've
 received several comments complaining about the audio quality of some of these
 recordings. And they range from the obvious, which we can all complain about,
 to the real picky like this comment about podcast number 259. And I quote,
 this person said, "I just wanted to point out 55 minutes into the podcast I almost
 puked. The most disgusting sound of drinking I've ever heard in my life was
 drilled into my brain." So I actually took the time to go back and
 listen to that, but I guess my years of work with ayahuasca have immunized me to
 being grossed out by somebody swallowing a sip of water. Now the only reason I'm
 mentioning it here is that about four and a half minutes into the talk we're
 about to listen to, during a question from the audience, you're going to hear
 Terrence also swallowing a sip of water. And it's even louder than the one that
 was complained about. So, and oh by the way he does that several other times
 during the talk, so if something like that bothers you to the point of puking,
 well at least you can't say you weren't warned. Personally it really didn't
 bother me at all. Now with that very strange introduction, let's join Terrence
 McKenna and some of his friends on a 1982 December evening and hear what was
 on his mind way back then.
 In the two books that you have written, I have read of UFO inferences.
 Would you expand upon those things? Yes, well actually in the in the first book
 the UFO reference is few and far between. I think it's only touched on once. I
 deliberately suppressed it from the invisible landscape because I thought it
 was already lit up like a Christmas tree with bizarre ideas. And I would say
 that particular ornament for its own treatment later. But in the second work
 "Down to Earth" psilocybin and the UFOs, I deal with that directly because it
 seems to me that in psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally, we
 actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind
 reported to accompany the the UFO contact. And that these things could
 somehow be co-mapped one on to the other. That at active levels of psilocybin
 there is visionary ideation of spaceships, alien creatures, alien
 information, a general futuristic, saucerian kind of quality to the place
 it conveys you to. That seem to be coming from the same place as the modern myth
 of the UFO, if it is a myth. And we discovered in our exploration to the
 Amazon in 1971 that this was quite true. That involvement with these tryptamines
 as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit
 more than one world at once as though superimposed over reality. There was a
 super reality, a hyperdimensional world where information was accessible
 in magical ways. And in the wake of that experience I just went through the
 literature of the mystical experience and the saucer experience and ideas like
 alchemy and that sort of thing. And eventually saw that these they were all
 talking about the same thing. That there is an experience which is gaining
 ascendancy for modern man which is called contact with the UFO. But it is
 not reducible to any of the things that the main people who've written about it
 have said it could be reduced to. It is not strictly speaking a contact from a
 space-faring race that has come from the stars. It is not mass hysteria. It is not
 delusion either. There is in fact something very odd going on, something
 which is as challenging to modern epistemological notions as, you know, a
 US Air Force jet transport landing on some field outside a village in New
 Guinea. In other words, here is an area that is close to the experience of
 people in that a very large percentage of people claim to have seen flying
 saucers. An area close to the experience of people where science is totally
 helpless. It seems as though reality is haunted by a spinning vortex that
 renders science helpless. And the spinning vortex is the UFO and it comes
 and goes on a mass scale, haunting history like a ghost.
 You mean the records in the Aztec records are the whole thing about the white man coming to the new world in spaceships?
 Well, all these cases have been made for saucer intervention but no, actually I'm
 speaking more specifically of the post-World War II spinning silver disc
 in the sky and the myth that accompanies it of the large pointed eared cat-eyed.
 It has numerous variations but it's clearly an idea complex emerging in the
 psyche and the question is what is it? Is it prophecy? Is it a vision of the
 human future? What is it? And the postmodern phase of flying saucers
 speculation is the phase which recognizes that the saucer is somehow
 mixed up with human psychology. That it is no mere light seen in the sky. That
 when you go back and question the people who see these things, that right before
 they saw it they were thinking something very odd and unusual which they didn't
 normally think about or right after it. And in other words it seemed to be a
 kind of ideological catalyst for some purpose and Valet in a book called the
 Invisible College was the first person to suggest what I would call the
 cultural thermostat theory. He said that the flying saucer was an object from the
 collective unconscious of the human race that appeared basically to break the
 force of any set of ideas that were gaining dominance in their
 explanatory power at the expense of their ethical force. In other words that
 it was like a confounding which would enter history again and again when
 history would build to a certain kind of boil the confounding would occur.
 This is a similar idea right? And he suggested that perhaps the career of
 Christ was an earlier confounding where Roman technique and Roman militarism and
 all these things was unseated by a peculiar religion which no educated
 Roman could take seriously for a moment. I mean an educated Roman was a
 democratean anatomist and well-versed in in Epicureanism and sophism and yet
 the servants were telling stories about a rabbi who had risen from the dead and
 had somehow reopened a gate that had been closed since creation so that the
 soul of man could again be reunited with God and this stuff made no sense to the
 Roman authorities and yet it quickly overwhelmed the Empire. The modern
 context is very similar to that in that science now it can be seen to have
 replaced Roman imperial aspirations as a dominant mythos of control and it has
 these neat and tidy explanations of the world yet persistently from the folk
 there come stories of lights in the sky and strange beings and bizarre
 encounters that they cannot quite lay to rest. And you have experienced this yourself. Oh yes it's a real, whatever real means, I mean it is a real
 experience it is phenomenologically real in fact my contention is that
 psilocybin induces it and that perhaps on a mass scale it's as though there is
 an event at the end of history of such magnitude that it casts miniature
 reflections of itself back into time and these are these apocalyptic
 concrescences which haunt the historical continuum igniting religions and various
 hysterias and seeping ideas into highly tuned nervous systems. How does it do that?
 Well it's as though, it's like Plato said, time is the moving image of
 eternity. It does it because in its dimension all these things have are
 somehow co-existent in time or outside of time. They have already happened.
 History is the formality of viewing this hyperdimensional object in a
 three-dimensional way by transecting it many many times until you've built up an
 entire picture of it. But the, you know, the mushroom evokes a profound planetary
 consciousness that shows you that history is just this froth of artifact
 production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years spread
 across the planet very quickly but that mind in man just goes back and back into
 the darkness, you know, and one of the things we were saying in the invisible
 landscape was that there are powers in the human body or avenues of
 understanding that have not been followed because of epistemological
 biases so that, for instance, the idea that you could use your voice to affect
 molecular changes in your own nervous system, it sounds on one level
 preposterous. On the other hand, it's simply a formalized way of noting the
 fact that sound is energy, that energy can be transduced in a number of ways
 and then when you direct it against your body you obviously do make changes.
 That goes on in shamanism worldwide. Well, these people are navigating themselves
 in a space which we have lost touch with that for us, as I'm speaking now as a
 society, only erupts in the weakened situation of a weakened psychic
 constitution where there is the element of panic in the mythological sense of
 Pan bursting through from the underworld, the emergence of the flying saucer.
 What it is, is it's an autonomous psychic entity that has slipped from the control
 of the ego and is approaching, laden with the otherness of the unconscious so that,
 you know, as you look into it you behold yourself, your world, your information
 field, all deployed in this strange, distant, almost transhumanly cool way
 which links it to the myth of the extraterrestrial. The extraterrestrial is
 the human over soul in its general and particulate expression on the planet
 which doesn't rule out the possibility that the mushroom places you in contact
 with extraterrestrials somewhere in the galaxy actually circling other suns but
 it probably means that that communication is mediated through the
 over soul. The over soul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings
 but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, any religion.
 It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet and it regulates
 human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the
 continuum of history and what the UFO is, is an idea to confound, and its purpose
 is to confound science because science has begun to threaten the existence of
 the human species, leave alone the ecosystem of the planet, and at that
 point a shock is necessary for a culture, a shock equivalent to this culture to
 the shock of the resurrection on Roman imperialism and the myths that are
 building are like the messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ
 and what they are of is of an intervention by a hyper intelligent
 entity that comes from the stars and reveals the right way to live and wrecks
 science by a series of demonstrations that make it apparent that the purpose
 of human history is nothing less than total immersion in the teachings of the
 saucer and that once this message is slammed home via worldwide TV hookup and
 that sort of thing it will just disappear and in the wake of that you
 see what you have is this hysteria of abandonment similar to the hysteria of
 abandonment that swept the Christian communities when after the crucifixion
 the resurrection the coming of the millennium was postponed century after
 century and sought the development of science will cease this flying saucer
 oriented religion which is definitely the emergence of an archetype of
 enormous power will hold sway in the same way that Roman science was stymied
 for a thousand years by the immersion in the words of one one rabbi scientists
 are not gonna like your opinion well they should be forewarned valet was
 saying this in another book of his called the invisible college he was more
 alarmed than I am because he is of the tradition of French rationalism and he
 was quite frightened to think he didn't believe it was I should say the over
 soul of mankind he actually believed it was a politically oriented group of
 human beings who had an advanced technology that was allowing them to do
 this I reject that as total paranoia and I am not as concerned with him to pull
 science's chestnuts from the fire I think that science has betrayed human
 destiny to some degree and that you know we are led to the brink of star flight
 but we're also led to the brink of thermonuclear Holocaust and but but the
 conclusion the political implication that I draw from all this is that
 scientists will be swept away by the revelation of the flying saucer they
 have always been the ones to be like the Apostle Thomas and want to put their
 hand into the wound and if the wound is offered meaning if the saucer comes and
 is seen by hundreds of millions of people they would go over immediately
 so the political insulation the political conclusion to be drawn is to
 preserve your freedom of thought by deconditioning yourself to the flying
 saucer religion before it happens because the most inspired scientists
 might be the most intrigued in this situation oh they would go over first but you see a
 religion operates by a law of large numbers as long as 80% of the people
 believe it can transform a civilization therefore if you're one of the 13% who
 don't believe it's okay so you always want to stand where the high water
 won't reach but I think that the flying saucer experience is tremendously
 powerful and that it really is the is somehow linked to the psychedelic
 experience in a way that will not perhaps be understood for some time but
 that the futuristic hyperdimensional world of these tryptamine hallucinogens
 and the persistent message from the unconscious in the form of these
 spinning idea complexes with the alien creatures inside are definitely
 expressions of the cutting edge of the evolution of consciousness and it's very
 interesting a voice has been silent and a voice that guided and revealed has
 been a silent phenomenon for about 1700 years now in Western civilization before
 that there was such a voice I mean it was called the logos and all philosophers
 strove to invoke it and it was a voice which told you the truth the self
 evident truth you had only to hear it and you knew you were hearing the truth
 and with the passing of the aeon or something the death of the pagan gods
 this phenomenon faded out however it is still available through the mediation of
 these compounds how can you say these same words how can you say them and have
 people feel like they want to invite you to dinner to tell of this doom and
 destruction of mankind and the toppling of science especially when it is only
 right now science scientific people will understand what you're saying well see
 what I'm saying is if we would intelligently examine these dimensions
 that the psychedelic drugs make available we could as it were get in
 touch with the over soul and and leave the era when man is disciplined by
 flying saucers and Messiahs and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch
 just because people can't evolve their ethics and their technology at the same
 rate of speed if we would have a dialogue with the other we would
 understand all these things and become in contact with the Tao of the ancestors
 and you know this is what a shamanic civilization or a shamanic culture is
 it's where certain people mediate the group racial experience that is
 available somehow deployed in mind space
 experiment whereby you can bring a number of people to the College of
 psilocybin or however it is that the message would come across have you done
 that you mean in regard to triggering these UFO type experience well only in
 the sense that we've ascertained by questionnaire that this is a very
 frequent motif perhaps the most frequently mentioned motif even by
 people who take psilocybin recreationally is that it's about outer
 space and flying saucers and aliens little green man and these are people
 who are taking you know 15 milligram type doses sufficient doses to elicit
 the full spectrum of the compound DMT is similar I mean it conveys you into an
 elf infested space where you know wild and zany things are going on it's as
 though there are continuing a reality that is beyond this reality
 linguistically as well as spatial dimensionally so that you have to turn
 to a different language channel and then with this language pouring through your
 head you observe the other place the alternate reality and it is yes although
 this alternate reality is surprisingly far from most traditions about what
 alternative realities are like I mean it doesn't prepare you for its crackling
 electronic hyperdimensional interstellar extraterrestrial saucer and mighty
 peculiar all this these highly polished and curved surfaces and machines and
 beings and language transformations and machines undergoing geometric
 transformations into beings and thoughts that condense as visible objects this is
 a theme that's very interesting to me is the the hyperdimensional language a
 language that is fulfills philo Judeus quest for the more perfect logos philo
 said that a more perfect logos would be beheld rather than heard and this is
 what happens on DMT you hear a language which is very faint and far away and as
 it gets louder and louder you realize that without ever going over a quantized
 transition it is becoming a phenomenon not of the audio field but of the visual
 field and that it is in fact a fully evolving synesthesia hallucination of
 extremely realistic and utterly bizarre
 proportion I mean it's like an Arabian maelstrom of color and form and you
 somehow sense you know that you're in the Sistine Chapel you're at the cabal
 you're at Conor ac you're at all these places and but you know it's a
 hyperdimensional in fundibulum if you will it's just a little place to dance
 and then you see you know that there is alien information this saw Syrian
 information is deployed everywhere in this other space and that the really
 astonishing thing is that human history and art reflects so little of it you oh
 you see it but very very faintly when you see the real thing you just think
 my god I mean how did they keep the lid on this stuff this is raging right next
 door and you know the modern epistemological methods are just not up
 to dealing with an elf with chattering elf infested spaces I mean we have a
 word for those spaces we call it schizophrenia and slam the door but you
 know these these dimensions have been with us since 10,000 times longer than
 Freud and people just have to come to terms with them now it's because of an
 axe accidents of botany and history European man has been away from the
 psychedelic dimension since a while you know from the dimension of the
 tryptamines and psilocybin since perhaps the closure of the last glaciation so
 now we've accomplished marvelous things with technique and this and that but
 here it is you know many cultures around the world have kept the flame burning
 and the the disks which haunt the skies of earth indicate that the unconscious
 cannot be kept waiting forever these things are going to have to be dealt
 with and what it seems to me to point out is you know that the the imagination
 really is the ground of being and this is the great discovery which will change
 things it will be as if man had discovered fire for the second time the
 imagination is the the golden pathway to everywhere and when we cease to try and
 cross to the stars by crude rocket and engineering schemes and realize that
 deployed in the imagination is the entire universe well you have to be I
 think what the task of history can now be seen to be is what I call turning man
 inside out the body has to be exteriorized and the soul has to be
 exteriorized to create you know a golden disk a how by magic this matter of the
 flying saucer gives me an excuse to read a favorite poem of mine which answers
 your question about the future of man and the psychedelic experience he says
 once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing but
 such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enamelling to
 keep a drowsy Emperor awake or set upon a golden bow to sing to lords and ladies
 of Byzantium of what is past or passing or to come and this is the idea of
 becoming you know a golden object after death
 yes this is sailing to Byzantium once once out of nature I shall never take my
 bodily form from any natural thing but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
 of hammered gold and gold enamelling to keep a drowsy Emperor awake or set upon
 a golden bow to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing
 or to come in other words a golden bird a hyperdimensional object of Grecian
 gold enamelling and then and this is what the flying saucer is it is the soul
 become object this is the secret of alchemy it's interesting you see that
 these great flowering of alchemy great last flowering of alchemy in the 16th
 century was coincident upon a level of understanding of natural chemistry
 approximately equal to our modern understanding of the role of life in the
 universe in other words mostly speculation so that what for us moves
 off into the sky as the flying saucer told to us to be possible by science but
 highly unlikely is like the 16th century minds relationship to the philosopher's
 stone which was said to be highly unlikely but not impossible and so all
 this imaginative effort was exhausted in trying to produce the philosopher's
 stone and the focus was upon chemical hardware heating alembics watching
 swirling like gases and cloudy glass and now in the modern context it has gone
 into the sky the sky is the dimension of the other for 20th century man we feel
 we understand natural chemical processes there is no mystery there miners no
 longer encounter gnomes when they go into deep mines the way they did in the
 15th and 16th century those gnomes have been stilled but the sky is still
 haunted this is where we are told it might be possible for it to come from
 and the sea and sea is obviously co-mapped to the unconscious but the sky
 because our scientists tell us you know that somewhere out there just possibly
 it might be so but I think what's being missed is that the whole dimension of
 communication is being ruled inadmissible as evidence simply because
 it doesn't conform to the epistemological biases of the people who
 are asking the question and that is all these voices in the head that guide
 shaman that obsess lunatics that make poetry and in other words the muse the
 muse is real I mean if you have not experienced the muse that doesn't mean
 anything you may not have climbed Mount Everest either but I tell you out there
 in life their experiences which cause a need for new definitions and
 whether they're willing to admit it I think one sort or another an intimation
 of the other well so imagine a compound which elicits this when you choose to
 use it well one could talk endlessly about this subject I suppose but until
 it's resolved all of man's epistemological dealings with reality
 will be haunted by this faint spookiness which can't be gotten rid of so to start
 off this continuation of the discussion of flying saucers I'll read Yates again
 Oh sages standing in God's holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall come from
 the holy fire purn in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul consume my
 heart away sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it
 is and gather me into the artifice of eternity and it's that phrase the
 artifice of eternity which again invokes this strange mechanistic yet
 spiritualistic future into which the archetype of the flying saucer is
 calling people you see what's happening is man is becoming a transplanetary
 creature and this is something which takes about 10,000 years from the first
 you know the earliest machines to leaving the planet and give it give or
 take 3,000 either way but it is as HG Wells said of history it is a race
 between education and catastrophe because these more and more destructive
 chemical and atomic processes are released as the species realizes its
 aspirations are alien to the ecology of the planet and that it and the planet
 must part and this is the the transformation of man into a space
 faring race is on a biological scale the great event that history is about I mean
 the coming of agriculture the coming of urbanization these things are peanuts
 compared to the what is going to happen to this species to these monkeys as they
 leave the planet with their computers and their atomic physics and all this I
 mean you see what is happening and why the psychedelic experience is so
 important is because information is loose on planet three some kind of very
 strange thing is going on the world is not made of quarks or electromagnetic
 wave packets or the thoughts of God the world is made of language and language
 is replicating itself in DNA which at its culmination is creating societies of
 civilized and intelligent beings which it possess languages which possess
 cybernetics which possess machines which use languages so that standing off a
 light year or two from this system what seems to be happening what is unusual
 about earth is that language literally has become alive it is infested matter
 it is replicating and defining and building itself and it is in us my voice
 speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying
 agreed-upon meaning and it is the meaning without the meaning you only
 have little mouth noises the meaning is a crude form of telepathy because as you
 listen to my voice my thoughts become your thoughts and we compare them and
 there is what's called communication understanding it's all about codes and
 that's why I've said at times the flying saucer problem is like a grammatical
 problem it's like a dangling participle in the fourth dimensional language which
 makes reality and that's why it's not reducible to any of these very simple
 minded approaches it is somehow embedded in the machinery of epistemic knowing
 itself no it is it is it is within it is the soul of man we won't be able to find
 it until we somehow come to terms with the hidden part you know the
 unconscious the collective unconscious the overmind the fact that there is a
 level of hierarchical control being exerted by the human species as a whole
 that the destiny of man is not in the hands of governments and corporations
 and Communist Party apparatchiks it is in the hands of a weirdly democratic a
 me boy delight hyper intelligent super organism which is called everybody and
 as we come to terms with this as we take our place embedded in the body of
 everybody and information flows more freely and the reality of this
 informational creature is seen more clearly the fact that we are it's an
 organism we are having a symbiotic relationship with an organism made of
 information and this is what psychedelics reinforces I think very
 strongly it's in the psychedelic dimension that you finally can key into
 the voice of the organism and say hey what's happening and then it explains to
 you that things are not as you took them to be at all and that there is in fact
 layer and layer and layer upon interlocking meaning and that there's
 very little else other than that and that the imagination is the true ground
 of being and that there is a dimension parallel to time outside of time that is
 accessible to you as much as you want it to the degree that you can decondition
 yourself from the history bound cognitive systems that have carried you
 to that point this is why it's always been said of psychedelics that they were
 or socio sociological catalysts for the shaman well the shame brings a message
 to the tribe yes but it's a the tribe is a system set up to receive the message
 we have a different way of doing it which is that power elites in political
 control pass down state approved philosophies which are then applied and
 this runs quite the state has shame the state as mediator of God's holy will
 rather than a personal a Protestant approach if you will a personal
 relationship to the overmind and the flying saucer what it represents
 basically is an instance of crisis between the individual and the overmind
 where the overmind breaks through the oppressive screen thrown around it and
 comes to meet the individual and it is you know like an interview with an angel
 or a demon it's a very very laden with heavy psychological resonances for the
 person experiencing it it is a numinous experience it is
 creation and falling into that category of the seepage from the overmind where
 you get a synthesis of information which becomes your creative thought your
 discovery yes well our theory of time basically mapped the idea that novelty
 was what you call this standing wave of eternity and that it seeps into time at
 a variable rate which can actually be mathematically described using the
 I Ching and other techniques it's that sort of thing yes it's as though you
 know where the flying saucers come from is eternity they don't come from the
 stars unless space in eternity encompasses the idea of being able to
 move instantly to and from the stars but the flying saucers come from a dimension
 you could almost say they come from beyond death they come from a dimension
 somehow totally different from our own but tied up with the with human
 psychology and human psyche in a way that is puzzling and alarming and
 reassuring and shaman it's very hard this is a question to what degree non
 participants in 20th century civilization perceive this meaning people
 who take mushrooms but have nothing to do with 20th century society whether
 they accept that always since paleolithic time this super futuristic
 dimension has been present so that in any century people could have had this
 commerce with the end of time with the far future with the place where as James
 Joyce said man becomes dirigible the place where you know we have bootstrapped
 ourselves to the point where we leave the planet leave the monkey shell leave
 all earthbound conceptions of ourselves behind and push off into the pure
 imagination scary gnostic perhaps as someone said it sounds like
 megalomania to me Martha you know the future always I mean how how mad with
 the 20th century have sounded recited to anyone in the 19th it what it comes down
 to is trying to have faith that man is good because what's happening is that
 whatever man is man is taking control of the definition of being human so that
 through genetic engineering through drug design through probing of you know these
 weird psychedelic dimensions through cybernetic interface through activation
 of information man is going to become a mirror of his deepest aspirations and
 the question then becomes what are man's deepest aspirations you know what will
 it be is it some kind of Mephistophelian nightmare is that the Nietzschean
 Superman come back to haunt us in a way that makes the Third Reich look like a
 picnic or is it you know the element of care and control the aesthetic element
 the wish to escape into an a universe that is in fact art this is what it
 holds out that man could become an inhabitant of his own imagination
 because with the technology for space for building large habitats in space it
 is possible to imagine the complete galaxy of science fiction created in a
 sphere less than 12 light hours in diameter with the Sun at the center of
 it so that you would have 50 or 60 thousand independent habitats pursuing
 social experiments of every sort spatially independent doing very
 long-term slow orbits from the Sun and the outer planets but informationally
 linked in a bubble of time 12 light hours in diameter and the current
 engineering thinking on building these large habitats is that right now you
 could produce the Hawaiian environment six up to 14 light hours from the Sun
 which is several light hours further out than Pluto so that means that
 essentially the entire solar system has become habitable real estate if we can
 simply transform the human imagination to realize that getting high is not a
 metaphor getting high is what the whole ballgame is about that you know it's
 true that the earth is the cradle of mankind but you don't remain in the
 cradle forever and this is what beckons the it's been you know only 25 30 50
 thousand years since our shamanic ancestors began to munch the mushrooms
 and glimpse the vision of man radiating out through the galaxy as a perfected
 super intelligent force for light and this is the 15 round slug out the
 leading to whether or not that happens or not similar but different but right
 he he talks a lot about the DNA I'm not well it's the DNA on one level the
 genetic information is stored in DNA where these visionary worlds the
 information that allows them to be just shown to you like movies hour after hour
 where that information is stored is I think a very very interesting question
 and certainly a challenge to molecular enthusiasts of molecular memory models
 precisely it's an ecstasy and the claim is made that these things can be
 attained various ways but there are many different kinds of ecstasy
 I think the peculiar spacey extraterrestrial dimension that these
 tryptamines convey you into is not the standard ecstasy of the mystics or we
 would have more of a reflection of that in our literature in fact one of the
 things most puzzling to me is why the the bizarre motifs of the DMT flash have
 not made their way into any culture anywhere as far as I'm aware well with
 that make either an image of people being fearful of the of these visions
 when they have them and so keeping them under cover or an idea they might be
 going insane in some way I mean what is the the yes way out of that well I think
 the change is so radical and the implications so hard to digest that
 you're right people either feel their own sanity is being threatened or they
 recognize it as a challenge to the to the reality myth of their society and so
 they just repress it they have very little to do with it it's very hard to
 to contact these contradictory realities which throw into doubt everything you
 know about the reality you're inhabiting I mean what a strange strange world it
 is if there are these alternative continue I operating all around us filled
 with strange alien information floating around and yet why why pose it in the in
 the future it is so that this is what's going on it's just then how much time you
 care to spend thinking about it
 yes well I'm not saying it's only the way it is but I am certainly saying that
 these tryptamine drugs elicit an experience that is extremely peculiar
 that has more relationship with the UFO experience than with classical mystical
 experience or other hallucinogenic drugs and that societal attitudes and other
 things have conspired to keep this under wraps it has not been well looked at and
 yet basically because people who are interested in flying saucers are not
 interested in drugs the great majority of people interested in flying saucers
 are hardware nuts and just for sure want to prove that it's a machine from Zeta
 reticuli you know just nuts and bolts and these the psychological explanation
 is not welcome anywhere particularly meanwhile the community of drug
 researchers feels they're laboring under enough of a stigma to not ally
 themselves with flying saucer people which is just like adding an albatross
 to an anchor so you know it's not a popular point of view so since I'm
 outside of all of that I can just say you know I read Iliana and shamanism and
 you know I think these people did a fine job and but I don't catch the flavor for
 many of this orthodox anthropological reporting on shamanism that anybody has
 really come to grips with how strange the psychedelic experience is and that
 it poses problems not only for these so-called primitive people who use it
 and are being studied it poses fundamentally equally deep problems for
 our society that we can no more assimilate the content of the
 psychedelic experience than can a villager in the New Guinea Highlanders
 or a we toto in the Amazon in fact we have less of a basis for coming to terms
 with it so our culture is in in a very desperate crisis a birth crisis terminal
 crisis if if we are not fully informed as to the nature of reality we should
 correct that oversight and this is my motivation well I'm disappointed that we
 can't greet our other well I guess you greet your other when you meet them in
 that dimension and have you ever gone anywhere with another human to these
 places and actually been able to say have a parallel experience well I think
 that happens certainly in taking ayahuasca with with groups of people in
 the Amazon where the shaman is singing you definitely have the feeling that
 you're all being carried through the same space and being shown the same
 things and when you take psilocybin just with one other person you're lying
 together be mushroomed as Gordon Lawson says you have the feeling you know that
 you're just flowing there together and sometimes you can even one person can
 describe and then leave off and the other one can begin to describe and it's
 all flowing together yes - I am totally convinced that that telepathy occurs on
 these drugs I'm not sure how to go about making it a repeatable phenomenon but it
 certainly happens you see psilocybin was made illegal just as an afterthought
 when in the panic when everything was being made illegal it never had any
 hearing or was you know examined by itself it was just a hallucinogenic
 agent therefore illegal but for for throwing a light on the psyche for for
 catapulting the imagination into these futuristic spaces it needs to be looked
 at very closely well we need to have what's always been lacking in psychedelic
 research is an examination of the content of the experiences so we need to
 give it to very intelligent people who are willing to work with it not in a
 clinical setting but in a setting where you ask the question how does it change
 people's lives when they can be involved in it in a open non-stressed sort of
 environment we found that going into the Amazon which is not exactly a
 non-stress-filled environment that as we would go up these jungle rivers and
 inevitably contact small villages where the mushrooms would be available that
 you know reality is transformed reality truly is made of language and of
 linguistic structures which you hold unbeknownst to yourself in your mind and
 which under the influence of psilocybin just begin to dissolve and you begin you
 begin to perceive right beyond the unspeakable you the contours of the
 unspeakable begin to emerge into your perception and you can't say much about
 the unspeakable and yet it can color everything you do you live with it it is
 the invoking of the other the other has become the self all these various forms
 of estrangement are healed that's why it's so you know that the term alien has
 these many connotations what's the next step well the next step is to confirm
 some of what I've said to form a consensus among a group of researchers
 to then try and figure out a strategy chemical or otherwise to work on a
 problem like that oh people like Frank Barr Sasha Shulgin my brother John Lilly
 if he would behave himself all these great people you know would have a great
 interest in this this is the question that has not been dealt with the botany
 has been dealt with the taxonomy the chemistry how would I set it up well we
 need to explore this linguistic phenomenon somehow specifically I think
 not by giving drugs to volunteers but by giving drugs to the researchers who are
 going to actually grapple with the problem because all this talk that
 orbits around the psychedelic experience by scientists how many of them have had
 a psychedelic experience I think the early approach with psychedelics which
 was the Baconian approach the logical approach was the correct one which is
 very intelligent thoughtful people should take psychedelics and try and
 understand what's going on not batteries of prisoners and not just
 school children but intelligent people and share their experiences see I say
 it's too early for a science what we need now are like the diaries of
 explorers we need many diaries of many explorers so we can begin to get a
 feeling the hit I get off of it is that it is very important for human culture
 that it is no coincidence that this is coming to Western man just as we acquire
 the technological capability to leave the planet that the mushroom and the
 transformation of the human image by going into space are all things that are
 spun together that nothing less is happening than the emergence of a new
 yes a new human order a telepathic humane universalist kind of human
 culture is emerging which will make everything which preceded it be the
 Stone Age
 the personality knowledge that's gained within one lifetime and therefore that
 is what you see as a UFO reincarnation or would you say that it's terminated at
 that terminals termination in other words the personality which inhabits
 your form is when that license is up it reforms itself and that the form is what
 the personality is carried by well the wind consciousness is finally understood
 it means that the absence of consciousness will be understood which
 means the study of consciousness leads inevitably to the study of death death
 is both a historical and individual phenomenon about which we as monkeys have
 great anxiety but what the psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out is
 that actually the reductionist view of death has missed the point and that there
 is something more it isn't simple extinction that the universe does not
 build up such complex forms as ourselves without conserving them in some
 astonishing and surprising way that is perhaps related some way to the
 intuitions that we have from the psychedelic experience the UFO comes
 from this murky region beyond the end of history beyond the end of life it is
 both super supra historical and supra organic it is uncanny alien it raises
 the hair on the back of your neck it is both the apotheosis and the antithesis
 of the monkeys journey toward mind it is like the mind revealing itself this is
 what all religion is about is shockwaves given off by this event at the end of
 history which we are now very close to and which psilocybin can help us to
 understand because it conveys you into the place where it is happening
 constantly where the the millennium is a standing wave in eternity not an
 anticipation and so the mushroom stands at the end of history it's an object
 that pulls all history toward itself it's a causal force that operates to us
 backwards through time it's why things happen the way they do because
 everything is being pulled toward a nexus of transformation you're
 listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one
 thought at a time and so he ends by saying everything is being pulled
 towards a nexus of transformation and I guess that even a casual glance around
 the world right now seems to bear him out don't you think you know I've heard
 quite a few Terrence McKenna talks but this has to be one of my all-time
 favorites which I think is something I say after every new talk I've heard
 maybe it's just me but in no other talk of his where he spoke about complexity
 did I hear him talk about preserving the complexity that is each and every single
 one of us his exact quote was the universe does not build up such complex
 forms as ourselves without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising
 way that is perhaps related some way to the intuitions that we have from the
 psychedelic experience now I think I mentioned a while back that in my work
 to overcome the brainwashing that I experienced as a child in Catholic
 school that I worked really hard for a while at trying to become an atheist my
 only problem was that at the time I was living in Florida and I had an almost
 unlimited free supply of psychedelic mushrooms which I enjoyed to the fullest
 now I'm sure you remember that old saying that there aren't any atheists in
 a foxhole during a war well I'm here to tell you that it may be even more
 difficult to be an atheist with a belly full of magic mushrooms but I sure did
 give it a try what I did succeed at though was to rid my thinking of heaven
 and hell and those mysterious points in between in fact I try so hard to live
 intensely in the present that I seldom give any thought at all to the
 possibility of an afterlife or to reincarnation or anything like that but
 now that quick little thought that Terrence planted in my mind just now has
 got me thinking about those things again damn it you know I've now heard this
 recording three times and I think that maybe I'll go back one more time and
 listen again each time I've heard it so far I've picked up something that I've
 previously missed and to me it seems to have something for everyone who has ever
 given any serious thought to the topic of UFOs I can see why whomever made this
 recording labeled it the definitive UFO tape and I hope that you enjoyed it as
 much as I have you know thanks to the internet and to relatively inexpensive
 mp3 players quite literally millions of people have now heard one or more
 lectures of Terrence McKenna millions more than did while he was alive to be
 sure and even before he died though his reputation was worldwide but today he's
 even kind of begun to slip a little bit into legendary status and I've got no
 objection to that however I also think that it's very important to learn as
 much as we can about our heroes not so as to reveal their feet of clay but to
 give each and every one of us hope in our own ability to grow and evolve over
 a lifetime that's full of ups and downs and as I'm sure you already know
 Terrence's brother Dennis has committed to undertake the momentous task of
 writing the definitive story of the life of Terrence McKenna as seen from the
 closest perspective possible that of a brother who shared many of the adventures
 that we've heard Terrence speak about in fact just now we even heard Terrence
 include his brother Dennis as one of a very select group of people he would
 trust to further investigate the world of psychedelics of course that's
 precisely what Dennis has made his professional life all about now I guess
 I'd better just lay this out and say something here hopefully it won't make
 too many people mad but as you know I get several requests each week to help
 somebody promote their kickstart request and so they're just way too many to sort
 through and then promote as a result I know that I've probably pissed off quite
 a few people and I'm really sorry about that but you know I've got to try and
 keep these podcasts as commercial free as possible but now I'm going to break
 that long-standing rule of mine and promote Dennis McKenna's kickstart
 project and I'm doing this for a lot of reasons but to me the most important one
 is that this is an opportunity for all of us to come together collectively as a
 worldwide community and contribute to a project that will preserve the very
 valuable part of the early history of the resurgence of the use of psychedelics
 as what we hope will one day be an acceptable practice in human society
 once again and this is an opportunity for us to do something that maybe will
 be a very significant value to those generations coming after us you know a
 big part of the reason that I do these podcasts is so that these talks this
 information will still be available centuries after we're gone and thanks to
 Bruce Dahmer and the good people at the Internet Archive that's archive.org
 these podcasts are all backed up on servers on three continents and will be
 available in new formats as technology changes over the years and without you
 coming back each week to hear these podcasts well I probably wouldn't even
 be doing this so don't forget that you are every bit as important in this
 process as I am we're all in this together you know so just a few minutes
 ago I went to Dennis's Kickstarter page myself and made a pledge and as much as
 I had good intentions to just give a pledge and not accept any of the gifts
 being offered for the various pledge amounts well Dennis I have to confess
 that your offers were just too tempting and so I accepted one of them so hey
 thanks in advance I feel like I'm the one that's really making out in the deal
 so if you're interested in his kickstarter.com project it's titled the
 brotherhood of the screaming abyss what a great title and there's also an
 interesting video there along with a very detailed description of the project
 and here's a summary of it that he has in that page Terrence McKenna is a
 legend in the psychedelic community he is remembered as a radical philosopher
 futurist raconteur and cultural commentator he was and is one of the
 most articulate spokesmen for the post psychedelic zeitgeist he is one of the
 prime originators of the 2012 mythos with all its attendant apocalyptic
 anxiety I am the younger brother of Terrence McKenna I want to write a
 memoir telling of the real story of our intertwined life together over the last
 60 years and of the ideas adventures and explorations both inner and outer that
 we shared I am Terrence's only brother I am the only one who can tell this tale
 from this unique perspective Terrence died in 2000 but his ideas live on on
 the net and in his books for example true hallucinations food of the gods
 the archaic revival the invisible landscape and others the time has come
 to tell his story in reality it is our story so there you have it and Tony and
 my other friends I hope that you understand why I'm promoting this
 particular Kickstarter and not your equally important projects it's simply
 that this podcast probably wouldn't be anywhere as popular as it is without all
 the public domain talks of Terrence McKenna and so this is my small way of
 giving a little back to his legacy and believe it or not there is one more
 Terrence McKenna announcement I have for this week you know it's funny sometimes
 how things fall into place so next week at long last I'm finally going to be
 able to play for you the first part of the two-hour interview that Eric Davis
 did with Terrence McKenna for Wired magazine and as it turned out it was
 also the last interview that Terrence ever granted although there is a CD set
 of this interview it's now out of print so if you have one it's a real
 collector's item but through the kind services of the traveler Alex Chuck Wall
 and Eric Davis himself I'm going to be able to play it for you in the next two
 podcasts barring any unforeseen circumstances so I hope you'll be
 joining us then as well well that'll do it for now and so I'll close today's
 podcast again 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 alike
 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just click the
 Creative Commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you
 can find via psychedelic salon dot us and if you're interested in the
 philosophy behind the salon you can hear something about it in my novel the
 Genesis generation which is available as an audiobook a pay-what-you-can
 audiobook that you can download at Genesis generation dot us and for now
 this is Lorenzo signing off from cyber delic space be well my friends
 impossible and yet remaining impossible.
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