Exploring The Abyss

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic

Salon.

Sharing the Salon with me today are several people who either made donations directly

to the Salon or who bought a copy of my audio book, The Genesis Generation, and who I think

of as our virtual host today.

And those generous people are Brock T, who actually bought a book and made a significant

donation to the Salon, Gary B, Robert T, Cord M, Revlin J, C Jones, and Michael M, long

time friend, and another long time listener and regular donor, Mark C.

Also I'd like to thank Xe Velvet who has given me some help in reducing the size of the podcast

files here.

As you may have noticed, beginning in podcast 261 I started using a little higher encoding

rate because I was tired of the audio sounding so tinny and ghosting a bit, but since my technique

with audio is actually just one of hit and miss, trial and error, and I seem to come in on

the error side a little more than I'd like.

Anyway, I've gone back after I've got this help from Xe Velvet and recompiled the podcast

from 261 up to the present, and they now have significantly reduced file sizes with little

noticeable degradation in the sound quality.

At least to my own tinnitus haunted ears, that is.

So thanks again for your time, Xe Velvet, and to our fellow Saloners on low bandwidth connections,

I give you my sincere apologies for those big files, and I'll do my best to keep that from

happening again.

And also, George, Jason, and Laura, hey, please don't think that I've forgotten about you.

I'll definitely get back to you eventually, but once again, I've overcommitted on several

projects that I'm involved in, and I'm having difficulty setting enough time aside right

now to work on the podcast, but hopefully I'll be able to remedy that very soon.

Now, for today's program, which is from this cassette tape that has been sitting on my desk

for over a month now, I guess, I finally just couldn't wait any longer to hear it, and as

you've no doubt already guessed, it's another talk by Terrence McKenna.

Now, this tape is also another one from the box of tapes that Diana Slattery sent to me

sometime last year, and the last tape that I pulled out of that box is the one I played

in Podcast 261, which at the time was the earliest recording of a Terrence McKenna lecture that

I'd come across so far.

But as I was putting that tape away after doing the podcast, another tape slipped out of the

box onto the floor, and that's the one I'm going to play for you right now.

And if the label on the tape is to be believed, the talk that we're about to hear is even a

little older than the previous McKenna talk that I played.

And so, thank you again, Diana, for sending these tapes for me to share with all of our

friends here in the cyberdelic space.

Now, the handwriting on the tape says, New and Old Maps of Hyperspace, McKenna, November 1982,

First Lecture, which I take to mean that this was perhaps the first lecture in a weekend

workshop series of some kind he was giving at the time.

Now, a few weeks ago, Bruce Dahmer asked Diana about the source of these tapes, but since

many of them were given to her a long time ago, she no longer can recall exactly who it

was that gave each and every one to her, so we don't really know where this tape came from.

I do know that there are some McKenna tapes floating around the net that mention maps of

hyperspace or something like that, and they might be from this same lecture series that

he was giving at the time, I guess.

But as you'll hear in a few minutes, you'll see why I decided to change the title a little

bit for today's podcast.

In any event, let's now give a listen to this November 1982 recording of Terence McKenna,

in which he still felt the need to introduce himself and explain his qualifications to the

audience, which I actually find quite charming.

So, let's now join Terence and friends one day, back in November of 1982, and listen to

how they saw the world situation back then.

The big issue these days, and nothing to do with his talk, is this idea of self-reflection

and of things that are self-referential things and the paradoxes that can come out of that.

And I find Terence McKenna a kind of self-referential person.

He's spoken to us at least once, twice I think, right.

And each time, I have experienced an almost hallucinogenic experience in listening to him talk.

And I'm looking forward very much tonight to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens,

and UFOs.

New and old maps of hyperspace.

Take off.

Well, thank you very much.

I'm very glad to be here.

Special thanks to Ruth and Arthur and the Institute for asking me back for a third time.

Perhaps the third time is the charm we'll see here.

My name is Terence McKenna, and my training is basically in shamanism and botany and ethnography.

And my interest is in hallucinogenic drugs, especially plant hallucinogens,

as they're used in a shamanic context.

And what impels me to speak to a room full of people like this is the belief that the major

important point regarding hallucinogens has been largely overlooked, even though we're

now 15 or 20 or 30, depending on how you count it, years into the psychedelic age.

The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience.

And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific

methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.

So what I'm going to address this evening is essentially my own experience with hallucinogens

and how I extrapolate it into the world based on its own being and other people's psychedelic

experiences that I have interacted with.

Before I get into that, I want to clarify something about shamanism.

There are two schools about the basis of shamanism, shamanistic experience.

One is the older school exemplified by Marcia Liad, who holds that all narcotic shamanism is decadent.

He prefers drumming, dancing, self-mutilation, even ordeal poisons, all precede the efficacy of hallucinogens.

He believes they are resorted to when the tradition is vitiated and people are grasping at straws.

I take this to be simply a cultural bias of the school of anthropology that he exemplified

and the time in which his work was done.

Now, Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack and takes the position that non-narcotic shamanism

is decadent because it is on its way to becoming ritual.

In other words, drumming, fasting, flagellation, all these things work to a degree and sometimes.

And they are not dependable in the same way that hallucinogens are.

And this has created, this plays on Western people's biases in favor of the idea that you have to work hard to get somewhere

and if you don't work hard, it isn't useful.

My own experience in looking at non-narcotic shamanism, essentially non-narcotic shamanism in Indonesia and in Nepal,

was that Wasson's intuition was very correct.

There is a grasping after.

And I see that grasping after, blending into the evolution of all higher religions.

In other words, experientially, there is only one religion and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

But it is very difficult to maintain in an agrarian context.

Hunting and gathering societies, which have much less structured social hierarchies,

seem to be able to function with the hallucinogenic experience embedded in them.

As soon as you rise even to the level of primitive agriculturalists,

it becomes much more important to be able to get up in the morning and go to work

than it does to have these ecstatic experiences

because the plants have to be tended, the fields tilled, and so on.

I formed these opinions about non-narcotic shamanism early in my career of looking at this phenomenon.

I didn't contact narcotic shamanism until I went to the Amazon Basin initially in 1971.

And although I was familiar with the hallucinogenic state from growing up basically in the counterculture in Berkeley,

but what I found in South America after sifting through these various experiences

is that the family of drugs constellated around tryptophan,

specifically DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and psilocybin,

which is chemically very similar to DMT,

that these compounds had a relationship to reality far different from all the other hallucinogens,

the scopolamine, hyalcyamine, tropane family that you get in detoura and that kind of thing,

or LSD, which laboratory LSD does not occur in nature,

but isomers of it occur in nature,

although to be taken at hallucinogenic doses,

they must be taken at hundreds of times the amount.

So that's basically the scientific, medical, anthropological basis of what I'm saying,

a career spent in Asia and more recently in the Amazon looking at this phenomenon.

And I want to take my conclusions tonight and contrast them with the modern predicament

and try to make a model using the hallucinogenic experience,

a model that makes some of the anxieties of being human,

and especially some of the anxieties of being human in the 20th century context,

more palatable.

And to do that, I want to evoke a number of abysses,

a number of empty places that our minds tend normally to shy away from.

First to invoke them and then to integrate them

through the idea of what is conventionally called the UFO or the UFO experience.

These abysses are basically four embedded in a fifth.

The four are the biological abyss that is represented by death and dying

that is the central crisis of every individual existence.

And almost as a reflection of that crisis on a higher plane,

the historical abyss represented by the end of history and the apocalypse

and possibly the millennium, but in any case,

the end of history that Western religion, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, or whatever,

has appointed to our world and made basic to Western man's view of things,

and which now, because of the existence of nuclear weapons and this kind of thing,

poses a terminal threat to the culture.

So, two abysses, the biological and the historical,

the latter being symbolized in the apocalyptic crisis.

A third abyss could be called the psychological,

and this is represented by dreams, most in general experience,

and by hallucinogens.

It is this casting off from the moorings of the ego,

making the night-sea journey into the other,

and being at the mercy of, call it the collective unconscious,

the overmind of the species, what have you.

The fourth abyss, which is one whose emergence is unique in our time,

is the actual physical abyss which surrounds this planet

for light years in all directions.

Because suddenly now, because of our level of technology

and scientific mapping,

we realize that it is there,

and we realize that it is a source of our cosmic loneliness,

and we realize that it presents an immense challenge

of the sort we like to accept as a Western culture,

challenges of energy, engineering, and distance.

So these are the four abysses,

the abyss of space,

the abyss of death,

the abyss of the psychedelic experience,

and the abyss of dying.

And these four general categories

have to be seen embedded

in a somewhat subtler kind of abyss,

which is the abyss of the unspeakable.

In other words, that language,

which is the primary tool of cognition of the species,

casts nets against these other gulfs

and comes away with different kinds of maps.

But you cannot put much trust in these maps

unless you've carried out a thorough analysis of language.

And once you've done that,

for sure you will not put much trust in any of these maps

because the thinness of the web on which it all is hung

will be readily apparent.

Okay.

It's my assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites

is to try to unify them,

to create a coincidencia positorum

as was done in alchemy,

to not force the system to closure,

but to try and leave the system open enough

so that the differences can resonate

and become complementary rather than antithetical.

So I would like to unify here not two dualisms,

but these four oppose these pairs.

You could think of them as the quadripartite elements

of a kind of mandala.

The means to unifying that mandala

is integration of the psychedelic experience.

Specifically, I'm going to make the assumption,

specifically the psilocybin or tryptamine experience.

And what it appears to be

is something which is much more assimilable

to the science fiction metaphor of a parallel universe

than it is to the Freudian metaphor

of the repression of desire

or even the Jungian metaphor

of a collective species-wide memory and experience bank.

It is much more, I think,

of the character of a parallel continuum.

And in order to erect the intellectual edifice

of the past thousand years,

this possibility has had to be ignored,

much in the way that you would apply Occam's razor

to a situation and just say,

well, we will not admit the more complex phenomenon

because we should form a theory

that is true to the simplest phenomena first

and then build out from it.

And this has worked in a demonic kind of way

in the sense that we have taken command

of the atomic world,

which is a very simple world

compared, for instance,

to the variables that you meet in sociology or biology.

But at the cost of formulating theories

about how the world is put together

that nowhere come tangential to experience.

So we have a bizarre situation

where our best models of reality

that are kept for us by the priesthood of science

are like exhibits in a museum

because they cannot be mapped on

to the simple fact of individual experience.

Shamanism, on the other hand,

is this worldwide, since Paleolithic times,

tradition which says that

you must make your own experience

the centerpiece of any model of the world

that you build.

No amount of readings from meters,

whether they're metering cyclotrons

or any other kind of instrument,

are going to satisfy you.

Once you understand that,

then what the task becomes

is one of making sense

of these metaphors, so-called,

or myths, so-called,

that are the pre-Western, pre-print,

pre-literate mappings of the world.

An example of how this problem

distorts other problems

is the problem of extraterrestrial contact,

which is...

The way science presents

the problem of extraterrestrial contact

is that we are alone

and that to assuage our cosmic loneliness,

we should build ever larger radio telescopes

and million-channel signal analyzers

and sift the radio noise

coming from the stars

and eventually, if a signal is found,

an immense philosophical turning point

will have occurred

and we will then place ourselves

in the context of the cosmos.

This is actually a red herring kind of argument

because outside of the highly technical

Western societies that have evolved

in the last 300 years,

people have been talking to the other

since man began.

Angels, demons, fairies, sprites, elves,

all of this is as phenomenologically

a part of human experience

as, we'll say, birds of paradise,

which I'm sure none of you have ever had anything to do with,

but believe inflexibly that such creatures exist

because it is allowed by the experts that they exist.

What psilocybin focuses as a problem

that these other hallucinogens do not

is it allows a dialogue with the other

that is full of give and take.

In other words, there are entities

in the hallucinogenic world

that psilocybin and DMT

and a few other not well-known

or widely distributed plant hallucinogens induce.

I think it was William Blake who said

the truth cannot be told

so as to be understood without being believed.

And this is the kind of information

that is coming through the psilocybin experience.

It is information which you have to believe it.

You have to believe it

because it has this ring of authenticity.

It is the logos.

It is the word somehow.

And what is being said

is that our alienation

and this word is interesting, alienation.

Our alienation from ourselves

has caused us to set up a number of straw men

that are keeping us from building

actually a mature model

of how the universe really works.

The content of the dialogue with the other

is a content that indicates

that man's horizons are infinitely bright,

that death is in fact,

well, as Thomas Vaughan put it,

the body is the placenta of the soul.

And this fact has not yet been assimilated

because it runs counter to Western reductionist,

but this idea that the body is placenta to the soul

is not an object of faith or a dogma.

It's a program for activity.

The activity that it implies should be undertaken

is a familiarization with the soul.

And the soul has been banned from Western thinking about the self

for nigh on 400 years,

at least in leading circles.

But I take this concept very seriously.

And I think, if any of you are familiar with the literature of alchemy,

alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct,

a wholeness, a thing which has many properties,

which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter,

which can do anything.

This is the last gasp of the soul

before it's submerged completely.

In other words, it became trapped

in an association with phonic matter

in the last historical epoch

before it disappeared completely from Western consciousness.

Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin,

allow a searchlight to be thrown

on these deeper levels of the psyche,

as Jung correctly stated.

But it is not a museum of archetypes

or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume.

It is a frontier of wholeness

into which any person so motivated

and so courageous as to wish to do it

can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

In other words, it is a dimension of vertical gain

that is real and is present in all of our lives

and that we do not acknowledge except as an anomaly

because we have been told that it's an anomaly.

We have been told that these perceptions

have to be devalued.

The result of this is to so distort

the psychic life of the species

in the present historical context

that we have this UFO disease

which is essentially a rupture

into three-dimensional space

of this archetype of wholeness

and it haunts time like a ghost

and it haunts human experience in the 20th century

because it is a symbol of alienation

and the word alien has in fact come to be applied

to this thing.

It is alien.

It comes from the stars.

It is totally non-human.

It has great potential for mankind

but it can barely be Englished at all.

And actually, what it is

is the self

in the form in which it is most accessible

to the ego

given the ego's programming

with all the scientific garbage

about the density of life in the universe

the distance to the stars

the probability of chemical evolution

occurring here and there and yonder.

It is, in other words,

something which in order not to alarm us

has disguised itself

as an extraterrestrial being

but is in fact

the collectivity of the human psyche

signaling a profound historical crisis.

I talked about this before.

I talked about the danger

of succumbing to belief in UFOs

because of the damage it did to free will

and that, yes, the UFO is a

it is making war on science

because science has created

such a masculine overbalance

in the intellectual life of the species

that this automatic mechanism

has been triggered.

A history-stopping archetype

is being released

into the skies of this planet

and if we are not careful

it will halt all intellectual inquiry

in the same way

that the Christos archetype

halted intellectual inquiry

in the Hellenistic age.

I don't want to go into this too deeply

but it's clear to me

that Hellenistic science

was destroyed by the Christos archetype

because the Demacritian atomists

and materialists who ran Roman civilization

had no patience whatsoever

with this superstition

that was being circulated

among the servants

about a man who rose from the dead

and all that went with it

but before they knew what had happened

their whole civilization was in ruin

because the archetype had frozen

the forward thrust

of this masculine, dominant

ethically depotentiated

technologically obsessed

slave-built society

and for a thousand years

hydrostatics, mathematics, metallurgy

you name it

that was nothing

only the words of one Galilean radical

could occupy the time

of any intellectual successfully

okay, we have now

two thousand years later

fought our way somewhat clear

of that problem

but the problem it solved

which is the problem of this masculine

overbalance

and this obsessive technological thrust

this dehumanizing thrust

has reached an even more intense peak

and now appears the flying saucer

with the capacity of undoing that

by again destroying science

by simply being a miracle

that's all that is required

to wreck science

is a miracle

visible worldwide

and because scientists say

that that can't happen

consequently if it does happen

new language

i can't say

because science

is a miracle

that they have to be

back to the point

of the fact that

the goal is to be

to be able to

continue to change

whether they can

control or study

or study

are they

that they can

in a way

and they can

they can

all

the food

because

they can

Their house is in real disorder.

So I touched on this before, any of you who heard me.

Tonight I want to talk more about the flying saucer,

not from the point of view of the people who are going to get the whammy

when it appears unbidden, but from the point of view of an insider.

In other words, one can do more than simply say,

oh yes, I understand what this is, the overmind is visibly manifest in the skies of earth

in order to skew history toward an eschatological mode

that will stifle inquiry in order, basically, to preserve the species from extinction.

But a mature humanity could get into a place

where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings

from messiahs and flying saucers

that come along every thousand years or so

to mess up the mess that has been created

and to try and send people off on another tack.

And the way to do this

is to look at the abysses that confront man

as species and individuals and try to unify them.

And I think that psilocybin offers a way out

because it allows a dialogue with the overmind

that is not, you won't read about it in Scientific American or anywhere else.

You will carry it out.

And the carrying out of this dialogue

will essentially eschatologize you as a person

and lift you out of the historical context.

It's like Stephan Dedalus said in Ulysses,

history is the nightmare that I am trying to awake from.

Well, I would turn it around a bit

and say history is what I am trying to go to sleep from

in order to get away from it.

In other words, the dream is eschatological.

The dream is zero time and outside of history.

Escape into the dream.

Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs,

that they are for escapists.

I think the people who make this charge

hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapists.

Escape.

Escape from the planet,

from death,

and from the problem, if possible,

of the unspeakable.

This, so now,

to say a bit about death and dying,

if you leave aside the last 300 years

of historical experience

as it was handled in Europe and America

and examine the phenomenon of death,

the doctrine of the soul

in all its ramifications,

Neoplatonic, Christian,

dynastic, Egyptian, etc.

I am sure you are all familiar

with some or all of these.

What you get is the idea

that there is a light body

or a thing,

an intellect,

that is somehow mixed up in the body

during life

and at death or at dying

is involved in a crisis

in which these two envelopes separate

and one loses its raison d'etre

and falls into dissolution,

metabolism stops,

and the other one goes,

we know not where,

perhaps nowhere,

if you believe it doesn't exist,

but then you have the problem

of trying to explain life,

which, by the way,

though science makes great claims

and has done very well

in systems of nuclear particles

and even simple atomic systems.

The idea that science

can make any statement

about what life is

or where it comes from

is preposterous.

Science has nothing to say

about how you can decide

to close your hand into a fist

and it happens.

This is utterly outside the realm

of scientific explanation

because what we see

in that phenomenon

is mind as a first cause.

In other words,

we see matter.

It's an example of telekinesis.

Matter is caused by mind to move.

So science has,

we need not fear

the sneers of science

in the matter of the fate

or origin of the soul.

There,

and as I say,

my thrust into this

has always been

the psychedelic experience,

but I've been thinking recently

more about dreams

because dreams are

a much more generalized form

of experience

of the hyperdimension

or the mode

in which life

and mind

seem to be embedded

and looking at dreams

and looking at what

people with shamanic traditions

say about dreams,

you come to the realization

that experientially

for those people

it is a parallel continuum.

The shaman accesses it

with hallucinogens

or other things

which I mentioned

but most efficaciously

with hallucinogens

but everybody else

accesses it

through dreams.

Now,

Freud's idea

about dreams

was,

I forget the German term,

but he called

the day residues.

He always felt

that you could trace

the content of the dream

down to a distortion

of something

that happened

during the day

or, you know,

during waking time.

I think that

it's much more useful

to try and make

actually a kind

of geometric model

of consciousness

and to take seriously

the idea

of a parallel continuum

and to say

that the mind

and the body

are embedded

in the dream

and the dream

is a kind,

not a kind of,

but a higher order

spatial dimension

so that

in sleep

you are released

into the real world

of which

the world of waking

is only the surface

and in a very,

in a very literal sense

it's the surface.

It's the surface

in a geometric sense

that there is a plenum

and recent experiments

in quantum physics

tend to back this up.

There is a holographic plenum

of information.

Information,

all information

is everywhere.

Information that is not here

is nowhere

and that information

stands outside

of historical time.

It's like Plato said,

time is the moving image

of eternity.

Eternity,

it does not have

a temporal existence,

even the kind

of temporal existence

where you say

it always existed.

It does not have

temporal duration

of any sort.

It is eternity.

We are not,

we are not primarily

biology

with mind

emerging

as a kind

of iridescence,

a kind

of epiphenomenon

at the higher levels

of organization

of biology.

We are in fact

hyperdimensional objects

of some sort

which cast

a shadow

into matter

and the matter,

the shadow in matter

is the body

and at death

what happens

basically

is that the shadow

withdraws

or the thing

which casts

the shadow

withdraws

and metabolism

ceases

and matter

which had been

organized

into a dissipative

structure

in a very localized

area

sustaining itself

against entropy

by cycling material

in and degrading

it and expelling

it.

That whole phenomenon

ceases

but the

thing which

ordered it

is not affected

by that

and when I make

these declarative

statements

I'm making them

from the point of view

of this shamanic tradition

which touches

all these higher religions.

Everything

basically

except rationalism

holds to some version

of what I'm saying.

So then

the psychedelic

the dream

state

and the psychedelic

state

acquire

great import

because

there is then

a task

to life

and the task

to life

is to

become familiar

with this

thing

which is

causing

being

and to

be familiar

with it

at the moment

of passing.

In other words

the metaphor

is used

by several

traditions

of a vehicle

an after death

vehicle

an astral body

something like that

and shamanism

and

certain yogas

Taoist yoga

claim very clearly

that the purpose

is to familiarize

yourself

with this

after death

body

in life

and then

the act

of dying

will not

create

confusion

in the psyche

you will

recognize

what is happening

you will

know what to do

and you will

make the clean

break

and

there does

seem to be

the possibility

of a

problem

in dying

in other words

what I'm telling

you is not

that you're

condemned

to eternal life

I'm saying

it's a possibility

that you can

muff it

through ignorance

in other words

at the moment

of death

there is

a kind

of a

separation

it's like

birth

the metaphor

is trivial

but perfect

it is

there is a

possibility

of

damage

of

incorrect

activity

again

William Blake

who said

that

as you start

into the

spiral

there is

the possibility

of falling

from the

golden track

into

eternal

death

but it is

only a

crisis

of a

moment

it's a

crisis

of

passage

and the

whole

purpose

of shamanism

and of

life

correctly

lived

is

to

strengthen

the soul

and to

strengthen

the relationship

to the soul

so that

this

passage

can be

cleanly

made

okay

this

is

not

anything

earth

shaking

or

it's

well known

it's

a

traditional

position

actually

but now

I want

to

assimilate

one more

abyss

into this

model

one

less

familiar

to us

as

rationalists

but well

familiar

to us

just one

level

deeper

in the

psyche

as

Christians

and

westerners

and that

is

this

idea

that the

world

will

end

that there

will be

a

final

time

that there

is not

only

the

crisis

of the

death

of the

individual

there is

the crisis

of the

death

of the

species

what

this

seems

to be

about

is

that

from the

time

that there

is an

awareness

of the

existence

of the

soul

we'll

say

circa

50,000

BP

until

the

moment

but

it

is

the

entire

span

of

history

times

five

in that

period

everything

hangs

in the

balance

because

it is

a mad

rush

from

monkeydom

to

starship

hood

and

in

the

leap

across

those

25,000

years

energies

are

released

religions

are

shot

off

like

sparks

philosophies

evolve

and die

science

arises

magic

arises

all

of

these

things

which

control

power

with

greater

and

lesser

degrees

of

ethical

constancy

appear

there

is

the

possibility

as

in the

metaphor

of

dying

there

is

the

possibility

of

mucking

it

no

doubt

that

we

are

now

in

the

final

seconds

of

that

crisis

a

crisis

which

involves

the

end

of

history

the

departure

from

the

planet

the

triumph

over

death

and

the

release

of

the

individual

from

matter

we

are

in

fact

closing

distance

with

the

most

profound

event

a

planetary

ecology

can

encounter

which

is

the

freeing

of

life

from

the

dark

chrysalis

of

matter

the

old

metaphor

of

psyche

as

the

butterfly

is

a

species

wide

metaphor

we

must

undergo

a

metamorphosis

in order

to

survive

the

momentum

of

the

historical

forces

already

in

motion

well

if

you

know

anything

about

evolutionary

biology

you

know

that

man

is

considered

to

be

an

unevolving

species

in

the

biological

evolution

of

man

ceased

and

evolution

became

a

cultural

phenomenon

tools

languages

and

philosophies

began

to

evolve

but

the

human

somotype

began

to

remain

the

same

and

so

we

are

very

much

like

people

a

long

time

ago

but

technology

is

the

real

skin

of

a

technological

shell

we

take

in

matter

that

is

has

a

low

degree

of

organization

we

put it

through

mental

filters

and

we

extrude

lindisfarne

gospels

space

shuttles

all of

these

things

this is

what

we

do

we're

like

coral

animals

embedded

in

a

saucer

or

the

soul

exteriorized

in

three

dimensional

space

it's

as

James

Joyce

said

it's

the

problem

of

how

man

may

be

dirigible

right

and

how

man

may

be

dirigible

is

basically

by

turning

himself

inside

out

in

other

words

the

body

must

become

an

interiorized

hologrammatic

object

embedded

in

a

state

hyperdimensional

matrix

which is

eternal

so that

man

wanders

through

Elysium

in his

body

this is

a kind

of

Islamic

paradise

that I'm

putting out

here

wanders

through

Elysium

in his

body

experiencing

all the

pleasures

of the

flesh

but not

realizing

that he

is a

holographic

projection

of a

solid

state

matrix

that is

micro

miniaturized

super

conducting

and

nowhere

to be

found

it is

part

of

the

plenum

and

we

all

history

is about

producing

prototypes

of this

situation

with

greater

and greater

closure

toward the

ideal

so that

airplanes

automobiles

condominiums

space

shuttles

space

colonies

star

ships

of the

hardware

speed of

light

spin

dizzy

drive

type

all of

these

are

as

Mircea

Liad

says

self

transforming

images

of flight

that speak

volumes

about man's

aspiration

to self

transcendence

so that

we are

our wish

our salvation

and our only hope

basically

is to

end the

historical

crisis

by becoming

the alien

by

ending

alienation

by recognizing

the alien

as the

self

in fact

recognizing

the alien

as

an

overmind

which holds

all the

physical laws

of the

planet

intact

in the

same way

that you

hold an

idea

intact

in your

mind

in other

words

givens

which are

thought to

be

so

written

adamantine

are actually

merely

the moods

of the

god

if you

will

which we

happen to

be

and the

whole

thing

about

human

history

is

recovering

this

piece

of

lost

information

so that

man may

be

dirigible

or

again

to quote

Finnegan's

Wake

Moycane

is the

red light

district

of Dublin

here

in

Moycane

we

flop

on the

seamy

side

but up

in the

end

prospector

you

sprout

all

your

worth

and you

woof

your

wings

so if

you want

to be

phoenixed

come and

be

parked

it's that

simple

you see

but it

takes courage

to be

parked

when the

grim

reaper

draws near

a blessing

in disguise

Joyce

calls

so

to me

what

psychedelics

point out

and where

I think

society

will go

once they

are

integrated

to the

point

where

large

groups

of people

can

plan

research

programs

without

fear

of being

persecuted

for it

is

it

models

the

after

death

state

it

may

do

more

than

model

it

may

essentially

reveal

the

nature

of it

that

our

mind

what we

each

call

our

mind

can

be

the

modalities

of

appearance

and

understanding

can be

shifted

so

that

we

and

then

problems

like

the

existence

of

extraterrestrials

and that

kind of

thing

become

trivial

because

the

one

mind

that

I'm

talking

about

contains

all

experiences

of the

other

there

is

not

the

Newtonian

universe

deployed

throughout

the

parsecs

and

kiliocosms

of

physical

space

and

the

interior

mental

universe

they

are

the

same

thing

we

perceive

them

as

unresolvable

dualisms

because

of

what

is

called

or

what

I

call

a

code

the

quality

of

the

code

meaning

the

language

we

use

to

discuss

this

problem

has

these

built

in

dualisms

this

is

a

problem

of

language

all

codes

have

code

qualities

except

the

logos

the

logos

is

perfect

and

therefore

it

partakes

of

no

quality

other

than

itself

but

so

long

as you

deal

so

long

as

you

map

with

something

other

than

the

logos

there

will

be

code

qualities

and

the

dualism

built

in

to

our

language

makes

the

death

of the

species

the

death

of the

individual

these

seem

to be

opposed

things

likewise

the

problems

biology

and by

extrapolation

exobiology

pose

by examining

the

physical

universe

versus

the

angel

and

demon

haunted

world

that

death

psychology

is

reporting

on

is

again

set

up

as

a

dichotomy

all

that

is

needed

to

go

beyond

an

academic

understanding

of what

I've been

saying

is

to

have

the

experience

of

the

tryptamine

molecule

has

this

unique

property

of

releasing

the

structured

self

into

the

over

self

and

each

person

who has

that

experience

undergoes

a mini

apocalypse

a mini

entry

and mapping

into

hyperspace

for

society

to

change

in

this

direction

nothing

is

necessary

except

for

this

experience

to

become

an

object

of

general

concern

now

what

I'm

not

saying

everybody

should

rush

out

and

take

mushrooms

in

case

you

thought

that's

what

I

was

saying

but

I

am

saying

that

these

fields

of

information

which

I

don't

know

if

you're

like

me

but

my

experience

of

these

things

is

basically

literary

I

read

Plotinus

I

read

Heraclitus

I

read

all

this

stuff

and

I

try

to

integrate

it

intellectually

but

it

is

a

plane

of

experience

that

is

directly

accessible

and

the

role

that

each

of

us

plays

in

relationship

to

transformation

that

this

hints

of

in

other

words

in

this

theory

there

is

a

kind

of

teleological

bias

there

is

a

belief

that

there

is

a

hyper

object

called

the

over

mind

or

god

or

what

have

you

that

casts

shadow

into

time

and

history

is

the

experiencing

of

this

shadow

and

as

you

draw

closer

and

closer

to

the

source

of

the

shadow

the

paradoxes

intensify

the

rate

of

change

intensifies

the

because

what

is

happening

is

that

this

hyper

object

is

beginning

to

ingress

into

three

dimensional

space

one

way

of

the

dream

and

the

waking

world

and

the

world

of

the

dream

begin

to

become

one

so

that

the

school

of

flying

saucer

criticism

which

has

said

flying

saucers

are

hallucinations

was

in a

certain

sense

correct

in

that

the

laws

which

operate

in

the

dream

the

laws

which

operate

in

hyperspace

can

at

times

operate

in

three

dimensional

space

when

the

barrier

between

the

two

modes

becomes

weak

and

then

you

have

these

curious

experiences

sometimes

called

psychotic

breaks

sometimes

called

whatever

but

which

always

have

a

tremendous

impact

on the

person

they're

happening

to

because

there

seems

to be

an

exterior

component

that

hysterous

claim

that

this

is

a

psychological

phenomenon

because

these

are

changes

in the

world

what

Jung

calls

synchronicity

and

made a

certain

model

of

but

what it

really is

is that

an

alternative

physics

is beginning

to impinge

on

reality

and it

is the

physics of

light

essentially

light

is composed

of photons

photons

have no

anti-particle

this

means

that

there

is

no

dualism

in the

world

of

light

and

if

you

try

to

imagine

the

experience

from the

point of

view

of a

thing

made

of

light

you

realize

I'm

sure

you're

all

familiar

with

the

conventions

of

relativity

which

say

that

time

slows

down

as

you

approach

the

speed

of

light

but

what

is

never

said

about

that

is

that

if

you

move

at

the

speed

of

light

there

is

no

time

whatsoever

there

is

an

experience

of

time

zero

so

if

you

imagine

for a

moment

yourself

to be

made

of

light

or

in

possession

of

a

vehicle

which

can

move

at

the

speed

of

light

there

you

can

traverse

from

any

point

but

the

amount

of

time

that

has

passed

in

the

relativistic

universe

is

whatever

it

is

four

and

a

half

years

but

if

you

move

at

very

great

distances

if

you

cross

250,000

light

years

across

to

Andromeda

you

still

have

an

experience

of

time

zero

the

only

experience

of

time

that

you

have

is

a

subjective

time

that

is

created

by

your

own

mentation

but

in

relationship

there

is

no

time

whatsoever

you

exist

in

eternity

you

have

become

eternal

now

of

course

the

universe

is

aging

at a

staggering

rate

all

around

you

in

this

situation

but

you

perceive

it

as

a

fact

of

the

universe

the

way

we

perceive

Newtonian

physics

as

a

fact

of

this

universe

so

you

time

as

the

moving

image

of

eternity

you

are

then

away

from

the

moving

image

you

exist

in

this

static

mode

I

believe

that

this

is

what

technology

pushes

toward

and

that

there

is

no

opposition

between

you

know

ecological

balance

and

the

people

who

want

to

leave

the

planet

and

the

hyper

technologists

and the

hyper

naturalists

all

of

historical

entity

which is

becoming

eminent

is

the

human

soul

and

it

is

the

monkey

body

has

served

to

carry

to

this

moment

of

release

and

it

will

always

serve

as

a

focus

of

self

image

but

it

will

exist

in

a

world

made

by

the

suffices

the

rising

out

of

the

gnostic

universe

of

iron

that

traps

the

light

all

these

metaphors

this

is

what

it

means

it

means

release

into

the

human

imagination

very

shortly

a

as

it

were

a dry

run

for this

phenomenon

will

take

place

in

the

form

of

space

exploration

and space

colonies

because

there

the

coral

reef

like

man

that

has

extruded

technology

all over

the

surface

of

the

earth

will

be

freed

at

last

from

the

constraints

of

anything

but

his

own

imagination

and

the

limitations

of

materials

so

that

for

instance

the

earliest

space

colonies

of

course

there

will

be

an

effort

to

duplicate

the

ecosystem

of

Hawaii

and

this

and

that

you

know

these

like

exercises

in

ecological

understanding

to prove

you know

what

this is

under

control

we will be

released into the realm of art

which is what we have always striven for

we will make our world

all of our world

and the world we came from will be maintained as a garden

but what Iliad indicated as these endless metaphors of self-transforming flight

will be realized momentarily as the technology of the space colony

what is lining up right behind that of course is the fact that the transition from earth

to space is a staggeringly tight genetic filter

a much tighter filter than any previous frontier ever has been even the the filter

the genetic demographic filter represented by the new world it's said that you know

the vitality of america is because only the dreamers and the pioneers and the schemers

made the trip across

this will be even more true of the transition to space and the technological conquest of space

will set the stage then for the interiorization of that metaphor and the conquest of inner space

and the collapse of the state vectors associated with this technology deployed in newtonian space

and then man will have become more than dirigible

I think a break here

A couple more things, and then there seem to be a lot of questions, so I'll throw it open for questions.

But before I do that, I mentioned this book, The Invisible Landscape, that my brother and I wrote,

and I'll say just a bit about it because it relates to what's been said.

I spoke in general terms about the technology which would interiorize the body, exteriorize the soul,

spoke of it as a long-term technological goal, meaning visible within the next hundred or so years,

following on to space travel, that sort of thing.

But what The Invisible Landscape is about is an effort to short-circuit that chronology

and to actually, in a certain sense, force the issue.

It's the story, or rather it's the intellectual underpinnings of the story of an expedition to the Amazon

by my brother and myself and several other people in 1971 in which my brother formulated an idea

that involved using harming and harmaline.

These are compounds which occur in banisteriopsis capi, which is the woody vine that is the basis for ayahuasca.

And ayahuasca is one of these planned hallucinogens that releases you into this dimension I'm discussing.

An effort to use harming in conjunction with the human voice in what we call the experiment at La Chorera,

which was basically, you can take it as very loose science or very tight magic,

but it was an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of these harming molecules

metabolizing in vivo in the body in such a way that they would bind preferentially into certain molecular structures.

Our candidate at the time was DNA.

I think Frank Barr has convinced me that there's as great a likelihood that it involves binding into melanin bodies

is as likely a possibility as that it involves DNA,

but it involves binding into a molecular site where information is stored

so that this information is then broadcast in essentially in the mind in such a way

that you begin to get a readout on the structure of the soul.

In other words, this was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the cat, if you will,

to hang a superconducting telemetric psychedelic device on the overmind

so that there would be a continuous readout of information from this dimension.

And the success or failure of this, you may judge by reading the book

because the first half of the book describes the experiment,

the theoretical underpinning of the experiment.

The second half of the book describes the theory of the structure of time

that derived from the bizarre mental states that followed upon the experiment.

I don't claim that we succeeded.

I just claim that our theory of what happened is better than any theory

any of our critics have been able to bring forward.

But whether we succeeded or not, that kind of thinking points the way.

In other words, when I say, when I speak of the technology of building the starship,

I imagine it will be done with voltages far below the voltage of a common flashlight battery.

This is, after all, where the voltage is, where the most interesting phenomenon go on in nature.

Thought is that kind of phenomenon.

Metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.

So I think that an aquarium science or a science that places the psychedelic experience

at the center of its program of investigation should move toward a practical realization of this goal.

The goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the over-self

so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the over-self

so that the anxiety of being cast into matter,

of apparently facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of death,

of apparently facing a tremendous species crisis in the form of the apocalypse,

the crisis of limitation in physical space by being planet-bound,

all of these things can be obviated by cultivating the soul, basically,

by practicing shamanism using these tryptamine drugs that I've described.

And my plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may be listening to my voice

is to look again at psilocybin, to not lump it with the other psychedelics,

to realize that it is a phenomenon unto itself and it has an enormous potential for transforming mankind,

not simply transforming the people who take it,

but it is like an art movement or a mathematical understanding or a scientific breakthrough.

It holds the possibility of transforming the entire society

simply by virtue of the information that is coming through.

This is a source of Gnosis and the voice of Gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.

I like to think that when these Franciscans and Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the 16th century,

they immediately set about stamping this thing out.

The Indians called it Tiananakotl, the flesh of the gods.

Well, the Catholic Church has a monopoly on theophagia

and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on.

Now, 300, 400, whatever it is, years after that initial contact,

I think that Eros, which retreated from Greece and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity,

retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, essentially,

and then was finally pushed into seclusion there,

it now re-emerges in Western consciousness.

And our institutions, our epistemology, all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued

that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities,

we can release this thing once again.

I mean, the logos can be unleashed once again.

And the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus,

that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people.

And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.

And this is the promise that is held out.

And I realize that it may seem to some a nightmare vision,

but it is all historical changes of immense magnitude have had that quality

because they propel people into a completely new world.

Are there any questions?

Yes.

I agree with you that this is a strongly held position.

I always in my explorations have recourse to my own experience.

And I've not had good luck with any of these other techniques.

I spent time in India, practiced yoga, scoured the various rishis, roshis,

geishas and gurus that Asia had to offer.

And I believe they must be talking about something.

But in my experience, it is so pale and so far removed from the actual closure

with the intense tryptamine ecstasy that I don't really know what to make of it.

And I am willing to believe these things are possible.

I just must be a very grounded person.

Well, maybe it's a shortcut.

Well, Tantra, for instance, claims to be that's what Tantra means, is the shortcut path.

And certainly they might be on the right track.

Sexuality, orgasm, these things do have tryptamine-esque qualities to them.

But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens,

is information, immense amounts of information.

In my experience, a hallucinogen like LSD, the hallucinations seem largely to be somehow related

to the structure of the optic nerve, or they are essentially trivial.

They are geometric patterns, shifting lights, this and that, but unless synergized by another drug.

The classic psychedelic experience that started it all with Huxley and those people

was, I believe, 200 micrograms of LSD and 30 milligrams of mescaline.

And I would believe that that would deliver a visionary experience rather than an experience of hallucinations.

And the difference is, what psilocybin shows you is not colored lights and moving grids.

It shows you places, jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic form of incredible complexity.

Just click, click, click.

There is no possibility that this could be construed as noise of any sort.

It is, in fact, the most highly ordered visual information that you ever experience.

Much more highly ordered than the visual experience I'm having at this moment of this room.

But information in the form of a flood of data, that isn't gnosis.

I mean, could you spell out what you mean?

You certainly must mean something more important than the volume of data.

No, no.

I think I talked about this last time, that Philo-Judeus talks about what he calls a more perfect logos.

He says a more perfect logos would be beheld rather than heard.

In other words, the formulation you get in the Gospel of John, in principio ad verbum ad verbum car factum est.

In the beginning was the word, yes, it was the word in the beginning, but this is a strange kind of word.

It is a word which is visually beheld.

And the language in which the gnosis communicates is a language of visual forms such that there is no ambiguity about meaning

because there is no recourse to a dictionary of agreed upon signification.

It is purely beheld.

This is why it's very hard, one of the main problems of psychedelic drugs is to bring back information

because it is hard to English it.

And the reason it's hard to English it is because it's like trying to make a three-dimensional rendering of a fourth-dimensional object.

Only through the medium of sight can the true modality of this logos be perceived.

That's why it's so interesting, and I should have maybe talked more about it,

that psilocybin and ayahuasca, which is this aboriginal drug which uses tryptamine to make it run,

is there's a telepathic component, which is there is a shared state of mind

because the unfolding hallucination is shared in complete silence.

And, you know, it's very hard to prove this to a scientist,

but if four people are having this experience, you know,

one person can, like, monologue it and then cease the monologue and another person will take it up.

Everyone is seeing the same thing.

And this, it is the quality of being visual information, to answer your question, Arthur,

that seems to make this logos believable in the way that I quoted William Blake

when he said the truth cannot be told.

That is very powerful.

And you do believe it.

You do believe it.

But I was going to say that you said you have a seeing,

and we say QED after the demonstration in geometry,

but the Hindus say, behold.

Now, the seeing involved there, I wouldn't think of as visual,

but it does get the word seeing, the name seeing.

You somehow, your whole, what I was, I wouldn't say mind, your being resonates.

I like to use the term recognize.

You see that, let's say, this is the same thing as the other thing.

And I don't know whether it's seeing, but it,

seeing is a good word, but it isn't, I wouldn't call it visual.

No, well, it isn't exactly visual.

I mean, again, to quote Philo-Judeus on the logos,

he says that the logos goes from a thing heard to a thing seen

without ever crossing through a quantized transition point.

And yet this seems impossible.

It seems a logical impossibility because it is either one or the other.

And yet, when you actually have the experience,

you see, aha, it is as though thought, which is heard,

the thought, which is heard, becomes more and more intense

until finally its intensity is such that with there being no jump or glitch,

you now are beholding it in the three-dimensional visual space

and you command it.

And this is very typical of suicide.

Yes?

I have two questions.

One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue,

I was wondering if you could kind of be more descriptive in that regard.

And the other thing was,

as far as the effects of this type of experience,

especially over, say, a prolonged period of time on the body

and the body as an energy system,

and how do you balance that

or how do you counteract possible negative effects?

Okay, well, I'll take the last part first,

which is about the body.

I'm not an abuser.

It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience.

And I feel, you know, I never have lost my respect for it.

I mean, I really feel dread is one of the emotions that I always feel as I approach it

because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.

I always make the metaphor, you know,

it's like sailing out onto a dark ocean in your little skiff.

And, you know, you may view the moon rising serenely over the calm black water

or something the size of a freight train may roar right through your scene

and leave you clutching at an oar.

And I don't know, astrology is maybe helpful in figuring out when to go and when not to go,

but there needs to be a way to figure out when to go and when not to go.

Now, your question about the dialogue, I mean this very literally.

It speaks to you, you speak to it.

It says things.

I don't know how many of you have read the book that my brother and I wrote

under pseudonyms called Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.

But in the introduction there, there's a rap which is all about

I am old, 50 times older than thought in your species, and I came from the stars.

Well, that's verbatim, you know.

I just was writing it furiously.

And sometimes it's very human.

I mean, my approach to it is Hasidic.

I rave at it.

It raves at me.

We argue about what it's going to cough up and what it isn't.

And I say, well, look, you know, I'm the grower.

You can't hold back on me.

And it says, well, but if I showed you the flying saucer for five minutes,

you would figure out how it works.

And I said, well, you know, come through.

I remember once I asked it, what was it?

It has these many manifestations.

Sometimes it's like Dorothy.

Sometimes it's like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker.

And I asked it one time, what are you doing on Earth?

And it said, well, you know, you're a mushroom.

You live cheap.

It's very, this was a quiet neighborhood till the monkeys got out of control.

I can understand, you know, at least in my own way,

you know, how this idea about an over-consciousness or, you know,

casting a shadow and that our psychedelic experience or dream experience

has to do with getting in touch with that.

But you said that some, I'm not really positive about this.

This is why I need some clarification on, is that in some sense that those brief experiences,

that sometimes something about that our experience was in order to get back there

and that was the reason for us to be.

Let me see.

Well, I think that this object, as a friend of mine said,

history is the shockwave of eschatology.

In other words, we are living in a very unique moment,

10 or 20,000 years long, where this immense transition is happening.

And the object at the end of and beyond history,

which is the human species transformed into this eternal, superconducting,

over-mined spacecraft thing, is casting a shadow back through time.

And all religion, all philosophy, all wars, pogroms, persecutions,

are because people do not get the message right.

And that's because there is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being,

causal determinism,

and the interference pattern that is formed against that

by the backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyper-object

throwing its shadow across the landscape.

So we exist, there is a great deal of noise.

This situation called history is totally unique.

It will only last for a moment.

It began a moment ago.

It will only last for a moment.

But in that moment, there is like this tremendous burst of static

as the monkey goes to godhood,

and there is this crossing of the,

I don't like to call it the casuistry,

but the efficacy of the eschaton,

this final eschatological object,

and the forward flow of entropic circumstance.

Does that get it for you?

Maybe.

Well, I have a little bit of trouble,

you know, thinking kind of like which came first.

Are you saying the chicken or the egg?

Are you saying that this over-consciousness

has something to do with...

Well, I'm certainly saying that life is necessary,

that life is, that we, it is not the idea

that we are, have been skewed onto a siding

called organic existence,

and that our actual place is in eternity.

No, there is something about,

this is a very important part of the cycle.

It is, it is a filter.

Remember, I mentioned that I thought

that there was the possibility of extinction.

There was the possibility of falling into physis forever.

And so in that sense,

the metaphor of the fall is valid.

There is a spiritual obligation.

There is a task to be done.

It isn't, though, simply something as simple-minded

as following a set of somebody else's rules.

It's that the noetic enterprise

is a primary obligation of being

in this circumstance.

And your salvation is linked to it.

Because if you do...

And not everyone has to read alchemical texts

or study superconducting biochemistry

to make the transition.

Most people make it naively

by thinking clearly about the present at hand.

But we and I,

we are intellectuals trapped

in a world of too much information.

Innocence is gone for us.

We cannot expect to cross the Rainbow Bridge

through the act of a good act of contrition.

That won't be sufficient.

We have to understand.

And I recall, you know,

Whitehead said,

understanding is the perception of pattern as such.

Because to fear death

is to not understand what's going on.

And to even see it as a big deal

is to not understand what's going on.

Although I don't claim to have reached

that exalted plane.

But cognitive activity

is the defining fact of humanness.

Language, thought, analysis,

art, poetry, myth-making.

These are the things that point the way

toward the realm of being of the eschaton.

That is what Joyce means

when he says man may become dirigible.

In other words,

man may be released

into a realm of pure engineering.

The imagination is everything.

This was Blake's perception.

This is where we come from.

This is where we're going.

And it is only to be approached

through cognitive activity.

I think.

Can you comment on the importance

of your discussion

of the I Ching in your book?

Well, very briefly.

Because I always have the feeling

this part bores people

more than any other

because it tinges on tiny details.

But briefly,

what the Logos said to me

was that time

is not simply a homogeneous medium

where things occur.

You can think of it

as a fluctuating density

of probability

so that though science

will tell us

what can happen

and what cannot happen,

we have no theory

that explains

why out of everything

that could happen,

certain things undergo

what White had called

the formality

of actually occurring.

And this was what

the Logos sought to explain to me.

Why out of all the myriad things

that could happen,

certain things undergo

the formality of occurring.

And it is because

there is a hierarchical,

a modular hierarchy

of waves

of temporal conditioning

or temporal density

or, in other words,

a given moment,

it is more likely

for a certain event

rated highly improbable.

it is more probable

at some moments

than others.

And taking that simple perception

and being led

by the hand

by the Logos,

we were able

to construe maps

of time

which we run

on a computer

and which give

a map

of the ingression

of what I call novelty,

the ingression

of novelty

into time.

Now, as a general statement,

it's obvious

that novelty

generally

is increasing.

It has been

since the very beginning

of the universe

because first

there was only

the possibility

of nuclear interaction

and then

as temperatures fell

below the bond strength

of the nucleus,

atomic systems

could be formed

and then

as temperature fell

molecular systems

could be formed

then much later

life became possible

and then

as very high

life forms,

complex life forms

evolved,

thought became possible,

culture was invented

then with the invention

of printing

and language

and then printing

and then electronic

information movement

and this kind of thing.

What is happening

is there is

an ingression

of novelty

toward what Whitehead

and I took his term

called concrescence

and this is

a tightening gyre

everything is

flowing together

and in fact

the man-made lapis

the alchemical stone

at the end of time

occurs when

everything flows together

when the laws

of physics

are obviated

and the universe

disappears

and what is left

is the tightly

bound plenum

the monad

if you wish

able to express itself

for itself

rather than

able only

to cast a shadow

into Pisces

as its reflection

and I

don't

I speak

I come very close

here to classical

millenarian

and apocalyptic

and thought

my view

of the rate

at which change

is accelerating

and the way

the gyre

is tightening

causes me to think

and the way

it predicts this

that it is not long

it is soon

50 years

25 years

35 years

then this event

will occur

it is the entry

of the species

into hyperspace

but it will

appear to be

the collapse

of the state vector

and the end

of physical laws

and the release

of the mind

into itself

and all these

other images

the starship

the space colony

all that

These are precursors, again, the idea that history is the shockwave of eschatology. As you close distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off become more and more true to the thing itself.

And in the final moment, God stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the mystery. The mystery in all its nakedness then is seen, and nothing else exists. But what this is, decency can safely scarcely hint at.

You're listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

I don't know about you, but I kind of like that part back there where Terence was talking about the body being the placenta of the soul.

And to be honest, in my long battle to rid myself of the stories that had been drilled into my brain in Catholic school, well, I've more or less quit thinking in terms like soul.

But when Terence made that statement a while back, it somehow resonated with the old memories or something, and then it immediately combined with the thought of how old I seem to be getting.

So my first thought after that was, hell, if that's true, I'd better get to work pretty soon or a very rough-edged soul is going to pop out of this body slash placenta.

But when I think about it, my soul, or whatever we want to call it, is probably in its best shape when I'm having a good time doing things like having a few tokes and listening to Terence McKenna.

So if that's what it takes, then I'm not only up to it, I'm all for it.

But, you know, back before that, at least for me, I think that Terence made the clearest statement about death that I've heard from him yet.

You remember what I'm talking about?

It was when he said that there may be a problem about death that the psychedelic experience helps to prepare you for.

And to tell the truth, that's something that I've felt very deeply about for a long time now.

And while only a very few of my experiences were dark, they all could be called explorations in the land after death, I think, something like that.

And I've also found that the transition from the time that you ingest a substance until you've reached the plateau, well, it can often be quite tricky and sometimes even brutal.

But after having gone through a wide range of these experiences, I have to say that I've really lost all fear of dying to at least to the point where I've convinced myself that when my time comes, I'll be able to sail on through that experience quite gently.

Of course, it's much easier for me to say that it doesn't bother me to think about dying because, you know, I've already had a life that's been really filled with fun and adventure.

And while I'm planning on being active for another 25 years or so, I don't have the feeling that, you know, I really have to cling to life rather than just enjoy each day I have.

And I sure wish that I'd had this attitude earlier in life because it's a lot more enjoyable just taking it day to day and not trying to plan for a future that, at least for me, never actually got here the way I planned early on.

And I guess that after I think about it, though, the future that actually did get here for me is several orders of magnitude better than the one I originally planned for myself.

And I hope that holds true for you in your life as well.

Now, was it just me or near the end of this talk, when Terence was going into his rap about how the universe has constantly been increasing its novelty content,

that he began to sound almost like that crackpot preacher who recently and quite wrongly predicted that the end of the world would take place on May 21st?

Here's part of what Terence said at the end of that rap, and I quote,

It's not long, it is soon, 50 years, 25 years, 35 years, then this event will occur.

End quote.

And the event that he was talking about, of course, was his somewhat poetic version of the eschaton.

Now, since this talk was given in 1982, I guess that means his prediction for the eschaton is sometime between 2007 and 2032.

So, I guess 2032 is the next end of the world date that Hollywood will be focusing on once we get to the end of 2012.

However, my wish for you is that you don't latch on to any of these end-time prophecies, no matter what their source.

Unless I miss something, never in the entire history of humanity has a prediction about the end of the world come true.

So, I'm going to go along with the odds in accepting the fact that the only eschaton that I'm ever going to experience is my own personal eschaton.

And, outside of exercising and watching my diet, I don't see a lot more that I can do about that one.

Now, on a little happier note, I'm pleased to report of a recent return from the dead.

And, that is the wonderful news that Zandor and Mrs. Z have got the growreport.com forums back online.

Unfortunately, the company where Zandor was hosting the forums didn't do proper backups,

and so all of the postings from last July until now have been lost.

And, it's really a tragedy because there was a lot of very excellent discussion that took place on the forums in that time.

But, past is past, and now we can get back to those wonderful and very robust, but without flaming, discussions that the growreport.com is so famous for.

Another positive announcement is that if, like me, you enjoy podcasts that aren't all talk, but which also include music and comedy,

there are two that I highly recommend.

One is a relatively new podcast by the host of the weekly Planet London Radio Live and Interactive Sunday Smoking Sessions that you can find online.

And, that's the one and only Scooby Snacks.

He's been podcasting for a few months, and already by his podcast number five, he has reached what I think is a really high level of professionalism.

And, that got me to go back and listen to his latest show more than once, even.

Now, fast forward another hundred podcasts, and we get to my long-time variety podcast favorite, Lefty's Lounge.

And, if you look at Lefty's Listing on iTunes, you'll see only 105 podcasts of today for Lefty's Lounge,

but I've been listening to Lefty even before the lounge, way back when he was doing a show called Story Time with Lefty.

In fact, I think I even called in and told a story or two on that one.

Now, if my memory serves me right, I forgot to congratulate Lefty on his hundredth program with his current Lefty's Lounge show.

But, I'm here to tell you, 101, 102, 103, and onward each keep getting better.

So, a belated congratulations, Lefty, and keep them coming, particularly the comedy, which I think of as intellectual music for the soul.

You know, I just couldn't imagine a world without comedy.

It would be a bleak world without music, to be sure, but who would want to live in a world without laughter?

Not me.

And, Lefty always has a lot of good comedy, which lately has been featuring some more clips from Joe Rogan, who is one of my all-time favorite comedians.

And, I think I've mentioned this before, but Joe also has a podcast that you probably would like.

So, check out Lefty, Joe, and Scooby Snacks' podcast if you want some more really feel-good time each week.

Finally, I want to also point you to my friend KMO's podcast, number 258, which is titled Navigating the Screaming Abyss,

and features an interview that KMO did with Dennis McKenna.

In fact, it was KMO who inspired me to title today's program with that interesting word, abyss, in it.

For, as you know, Dennis McKenna, Terrence's younger brother, is about to begin writing a biography of his brother,

and is nearing the end of a Kickstarter campaign titled, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

And, I just checked Dennis' Kickstarter website and see that in the past week, another 121 people have made pledges for this campaign,

but with only 11 days left before it closes, he's still somewhat shorter the target amount.

So, if you happen to get a little cash as a graduation present or something, you might want to pay a little of it forward,

so that years from now, when Dennis and the rest of the elders of that period are long gone,

their stories will still live on in our collective tribal memory.

Well, that's going to do it for now, and so I'll close today's podcast by reminding you that

this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License.

And, if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.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 a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

And, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.