In The Valley Of Novelty

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

Salon.

Well, as promised, here is the next installment of the Terence McKenna workshop held in the

summer of 1998.

There's really an interesting cut in this segment where Terence explains how he got

involved in the rave scene and what he thought about the scene and the youth culture in general

at that point in time.

You'll also hear a short version of his theory about psychedelic mushrooms and the possibility

that they may actually be ETs that we're looking for.

And he ends with a message that the mushroom gave him about a simple, sure-fire way to save

the planet from an ecological disaster.

I'm sure you'll be interested in hearing that one.

Now, if you were with us for our last podcast from the Psychedelic Salon, you might remember,

at least depending on your current state of short-term memory function, of course.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.

Our last podcast, we left Terence saying he'd just said about all he had to say about schizophrenia.

Well, but it turns out there was another question on that topic, so we'll pick up the conversation

with Terence right there.

Yeah, be kind.

The question about schizophrenia, I agree with you that a big part of it is just that

our culture should be more tolerant of people that are crazy.

If there was a place for them, then maybe less of them would be warehoused off, like people

in less developed countries.

Schizophrenics tend to do much better in those cultures.

But my question is the fact that a lot of them really are suffering, and they really are suffering

with the voices in their heads, and many of them do commit suicide because they're suffering

so much with those voices, and some of them do see the hospital as a place, a safe place for them.

How do you balance those two?

Yeah, well, I think the paranoid kind of schizophrenia is different from this process, schizophrenia,

and from having seen people in that state, it's clearly a very uncomfortable state.

These people are not happy, they don't like being where they are, it doesn't seem like a very functional state.

I think what we're dealing with is probably a group of pathologies that may or may not have common origins.

These may be completely different screw-ups, chemical or genetic screw-ups of one sort or another,

certainly the catatonic schizophrenic and the process schizophrenic present completely differently.

The catatonic doesn't move, has nothing to say, can't care for their own body functions.

The process schizophrenic wants to reorganize the company and call the president and talk, you know,

invest and invent and travel and speak and heal and cure and they're just all over the map.

It's a whole different style.

So, you know, in the classification of fungi, they have this classification called fungi obscurante,

and it just means everything we haven't classified.

And I think probably schizophrenia will be seen to be a group of unrelated phenomena,

requiring different kinds of intervention and different kinds of therapy.

You know, when the psychedelics were first coming on, everybody had the idea,

ah, these things are what was called psychotomimetics.

In other words, they imitate psychosis.

And so then people said, well, it must be that people produce,

that schizophrenics are overproducing DMT or they're producing LSD-like compounds in their blood.

And people went tearing off in search of the schizogen.

Well, the schizogen was never found.

Schizophrenics have slightly depleted levels of DMT than the ordinary population,

not dramatically depleted.

Analog as a real marker for schizophrenia has been found.

So it's more complicated than that.

And once you go back through the literature and compare with more attention to detail,

the differences are clear.

The paranoid schizophrenic hears visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare.

Hallucinogenic trips inevitably tend to be more positive than what schizophrenics are.

You have only encounters with zany, punning, self-transforming elf machines.

Compare that to these gray-faced proctologists who come in the middle of the night and look up your ass

and take you off and, you know, abuse you and surgically snip and tuck.

I mean, this is appalling stuff, the stuff of nightmare.

If there was a drug that did that, none of us would get near it, I dare say.

The evolution.

Because I was thinking that, or it just sounds really close to what you were talking about,

especially the neurogenetic level where you can tune into the actual DNA

and get sort of a readout of the evolutionary process and pattern.

Yeah, I like the model. I'm not sure of the mechanism.

On the other hand, one of the most mysterious issues in neurophysiology is the issue of memory.

In other words, where is it?

We know that in the course of your lifetime, every molecule in your body will be swapped out five times.

Well, then how can a 70-year-old woman remember the smell of her grandmother's dress when she used to climb up into her lap?

You know, we know that people can undergo horrific acts of cancer of the brain and this sort of thing,

and that their memory is, in some cases, virtually unscathed.

This has been, in fact, the greatest embarrassment of materialist science in the past 50 years, or one of them,

is they have made zilch on understanding memory.

And, you know, it's right smack in the center of everything we want to do.

It's a communication technology, it's a nanotechnology, it's a molecular genetic technology for information and storage retrieval

that works with images, music, sound, and we don't have a clue as to how it works.

We tend to believe that nature is fairly conservative

and that once you develop a mechanism that's good for a certain function,

you will find it iterated in other areas where that function is called upon.

The DNA, in a way, if you understand how it works, it's like a chemical learning system.

It templates the environment and it responds to environmental selection by building proteins of a certain type.

In a way, it's a chemical engine for responding to the environment.

Well, then, if you look at the nervous system, it's an electrochemical.

It's a combinatory system.

Information moves in the body down the nerve fibers at a pretty good clue, moving creatures.

Well, because every time it gets to a...

It stops being electricity and it turns into a complex chemical reaction to bridge the gap.

And so in the course of this electro to chemical to electro to chemical transmission of the signal,

it slows down to a few hundred miles an hour.

And that determines our speed as organisms.

Downstream, this may all be sped up.

Memory seems to work almost instantaneously.

But no mechanism is visible.

I mean, if you really want to look at a human function that's present in all of us and easily studied

and may hint principles in physics or miraculous new orders of nature,

human memory would be a real place to be.

Is today what you hope to get at, have hope to get out of your involvement with the rave scene?

And just what role do you think youth culture will have in the next 12, 13 years as we approach a possible singularity?

Well, I didn't intend to get involved in rave really.

I mean, I was interested in it.

When I went to England in 1990, I had a pretty academic schedule of lecturing.

But a lot of ravers came and the zippies were just getting organized around the club called Megatrip.

And I met Colin Shaman of the Shaman.

And then we talked about me doing something with Meta to South Africa.

Powerful and creative.

You know, people talk about the 1960s and what a great thing it was.

Well, I was there.

I'm zero.

And it lasted from about 1966 until early 1968.

And 1968 was called the Year of Rage or the Days of Rage.

That was all.

It was like a 27.

I don't understand the youth bashing tendency of this culture.

It seems to me one of the most chuckle-headed things that we're involved in is youth bashing.

That it's so somewhat like a little old they-reeliers and ponies on the machines in the morning.

And to run the payroll software.

So it's a very uneasy with rave culture.

I don't know.

I keep trying to back out of it.

It's different.

It's strange to go on stage.

But I have been with Santa Cruz.

And if you're in San Francisco, New Year's Eve will be at the Veterans Administration doing glossolalia and handling boa constrictors with light shows.

If only this had come when I was 20.

It's, I feel like Billy Pilgrim living my life.

And I'm poor enough.

Pump and Jack Flash.

It's a gas, gas, gas.

For sure it's a shamanic role.

But I'm sure, I mean, it would be beside and let a 22-year-old do it.

Let Spooky do it.

About the proctologists who come in the night, what do you think about the extraterrestrials?

You would never ask.

First of all, before I weighed in, visor down, razors flashing, let me say that I have at times proposed various,

because it seemed to me back in the mid-70s to take seriously the idea that there was an extraterrestrial penetration of the terrestrial ecology,

that the mushroom would be it.

The mushroom is alien enough in its life cycle, alien enough to survive the conditions of outer space.

And when complexed with a mammalian nervous system, it seems to want to download these messages from far away, shall we say.

So that's my idea of how an alien would be.

That the first problem you would have with a real alien would be to recognize.

It's going to be alien, for crying out loud.

This thing evolved on some other planet under a completely different chemical and regime of pressure and chemistry.

And, I mean, if you can't understand your next-door neighbor, what do you think it's going to be like to stare into the face,

if it has a face, of somebody from Zinebogonubi?

So the mushroom seemed alien enough, and it's also very low-key.

It looks as that.

Well, so then we're left with this residuum of testimony that something weird is going on.

I think this is like an intelligence test built into reality.

It presents itself as a mystery.

The people who pass the intelligence test in the middle of the night, they have collusion is,

whatever this is, it is not what it claims to be.

It is not what it appears to be.

They're very puzzled, and they say, well, but what?

Well, this now, we sort of get down to the nut of the masses peeling away from me and horror.

And I think we're very naive about how it works.

And let's see how I can give examples of this or start into it.

First of all, the media that we are embedded in are designed to amplify anomalies.

In other words, here's a story.

Man goes to work, does moderately good job.

No newspaper on earth would run this as a headline.

Why?

Because it's not news.

It's ordinary.

On the other hand, Volkswagen-sized chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts farm field.

This is news.

And if it passes the first gateway, which is the local news reporting apparatus, passes it on to the media and UPI and like that,

then it makes its way out into the electromagnetic medium.

Well, in the electromagnetic medium, the laws of perspective are weirdly distorted.

The further away you are from something, the more real it looks.

The closer you get to it, the less substantial it becomes in the world of media.

So, for example, let's say that the New York Times on a certain day reports that in a Massachusetts field,

a large chunk of ice has fallen.

And so you look at that and then you think to yourself,

well, let's see what Dilbert's up to.

Of course, with the New York Times, you will not be satisfied in your quest,

because there is no Dilbert, because the great grey maiden doesn't stoop to comics.

But suppose you're reading a civilized newspaper.

Well, then you just go and read Dilbert.

But a newspaper like that is designed to be read by five million, six million people per day.

Well, sure as hell, someone will open the paper to page 42,

chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts field,

and they will notice that the county in which this field is located contains their mother's maiden name initials.

And by that, and the dream they had the night before of something wet falling from the sky,

they realize that God has sent them a message.

And they call work, jump in the car, and head for Amherst or wherever the action is.

Well, meanwhile, the rest of us go on about our business, with one exception.

Editors of newspapers where the story has been put out are now getting feedback.

And people, so the editor calls up the cub reporter.

He says, we're really getting a lot of interest on that ice fall in Massachusetts deal.

I want you to drive up there and get the story, interview everybody, find out what's going on.

Is there a religious angle? Is there a this? Is there a that? What did people see?

So this guy thinks, you know, I have to find honest work.

But until then, I have to drive up to Massachusetts and find out what's going on.

The person for whom God was speaking to them and the reporter

encounter each other at the edge of what is now a drying mud hole.

And then he says, and who are you?

He says, well, funny you should ask.

I'm Dr. Raymond Hammarubi Bird, expert in telluric energies, ley lines, radius-thesic energy,

genies, afrites, and ancestor spirits.

And I can tell you what's going on here.

It confirms a theory that I published in my book.

You know, turning the world upside down in ten different ways.

I self-published my book, and you're off at this point.

And so, you know, to make a long story short,

and you maybe can't always follow this advice, but it's very good advice.

The irrational or the extraordinary.

It is legitimate to carefully examine the messenger.

The need to understand what is going on is to examine the messenger.

People don't do this.

They examine the testimony of the messenger.

So they say, now stand exactly where you were standing when the saucer first appeared.

Aha!

And so it was twenty degrees above the horizon, and it moves so we can calculate.

It must have been moving at this speed.

This is not the right question to be asking this person.

The right question to be asking is, have you ever seen a ghost?

What's your position on the resurrection?

How do you feel about homeopathy?

What's your position on major earth changes in the short-term projection of things?

And if you do this, you will begin to discover an epistemological naivete, I maintain,

that the illusion that you and this person are living in the same Idaho begins to break down.

They have categories and presuppositions and expectations that you can't follow along with.

And so the illusion of communication is necessary for there to be the mirage of an event.

It's essentially a way of putting it.

So these things are like informational viruses.

It's because of how we as organisms handle information.

For example, here's a counter way to approach.

Suppose you want to know how much electricity is running through a wire.

The way to do this is to measure 100 times, add these numbers together, divide by 100, and you will have the average amount of energy flowing through the wire.

Now suppose your 100 numbers fluctuate between 3 volts and 3.5 volts, except that measurement 72 tells you that 11,000 volts are running through this wire.

Well, what do you do with that reading if you're a good scientist?

You say, well, that's crazy.

That can't be right.

There's something wrong with that one.

Get that puppy out of there.

In other words, you reject the anomalous.

Instead of pouncing on it and triumphantly raising it on high for all to adore, you simply eliminate it.

The media works exactly the opposite.

It seizes on the, you know, every night a million people go out and look into the night sky.

They see zilch, the stars, the moon.

One person goes out, they see a triangular spaceship 800 feet across with red running lights broadcasting, you know, the second chapter of Mark.

Well, what are we told the next morning that this was seen and this disrupted the night sky over Phoenix or Alamogordo or someplace like that?

Always someplace you aren't, by the way.

People say, well, but is it all like that?

Is it all so much like that?

I think it pretty much is.

is uh people don't like i mean i've told stories here about strange events and but i've said

the real weirdness does not have to be treated with respect or as though it were fragile true

weirdness is true weirdness you can kick the tires honk the horn drive it around the block phony

weirdness is incredibly fragile and they don't want you to get near and you can only see it if

you stand here and please don't touch and the speaker is veiled and the voice is distorted because

the cia might kill him if they knew who he was a million reasons why it's just not totally

straightforward you know all resting on the preposterous notion that we couldn't stand

knowing the truth and therefore these things must be shielded from us well if we're so fragile why

weren't we shielded from the knowledge of the president's blow job i mean that shook up more

people than the knowledge that extraterrestrials are trading human fetal tissue for advanced technology

it's it seems to me that as psychedelic people we should be more immune to these rumors of miracles

signs and wonders than the rest of the population because we have a benchmark to measure it against and

the cultification of discourse and the the rising tolerance for raps which don't make sense is a really

weird aspect of the end of the millennium discussion that we're trying to have i mean somebody

on no evidence at all can can introduce the most preposterous and outlandish hypotheses into a

conversation and it has to be treated with the same respect that the the pronouncements of quantum

physics or or or evolutionary theory are retreat are treated um and then people say well how do you

not throw out the baby with the bath water well it's tricky i think we all need to get our razors

clarified and also a little less politesse would be all right i don't know what it's like here i

said all these things i'm saying to you now to rupert recently and he said well you're just

you know sinking in malibu-itis he said in an average english pub if somebody started raving about this

stuff there would be half a dozen people on their feet instantly just smearing it out of existence

well new upstate new york is halfway between london and malibu so maybe you're leavened with reason and

and temperance but there certainly is a lot of loose-headed metaphor building out there in the

intellectual marketplace we almost need a new vocabulary of fluff you know i mean there are different

kinds of fluff for instance there's what i call deep fluff which is fluff with a history so that would

be for example alchemy which is something dear to my heart alchemy is fluff with depth because it's

four thousand years old and even though it's never made good on its uh promises or agenda it just keeps

popping up in various places it's generated a rich literature it's deep fluff the kind of fluff that

freaks me out is where you get one person who never read uh the old testament never read plato

doesn't understand mathematics music history art literature religion economics or philosophy but

they have all the answers because when they were in the desert you know the archangel malingi appeared

to them and downloaded the entire shtick from a to z in 11 simple lessons which you they will share with you for a

significant portion of your income uh this kind of thing you should automatically you know the mushrooms

said to me once apropos of all this and i've tried to live by it it said from one human being to seek

enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach to seek enlightenment from another and

you know for me that puts in perspective all this malarkey about lineages and secret orders and

having to sweep up around the ashram for 15 years before they cut you any juice and all all of that stuff

if you know a truth which you cannot understand is of no use to you so don't tell yourself that the fact

that you don't understand quantum physics is okay because these guys at mit have it under control

until you understand it it's utterly useless to you so uh uh people live by hearsay and people delightedly

spread rumors of the miraculous people say whoa did you see that thing on tv the other night where they

had that air force colonel who claimed that he was there at roswell when there's a buzz a buzz and

really well to repeat this kind of stuff is the equivalent of taking home a newspaper with a headline

that says alien mom nine gives birth to dead christ uh this is not something people of intellectual

integrity involve themselves with isn't that a downer and it's especially a downer when i get more

specific than i have been here because of course it really becomes cogent when you tear into somebody by

example and the reigning cult of niceness precludes that i do too much of that because my own ox might be

gored but uh i do urge you to first your your money and attention with extreme miserliness when people

start telling you they have the answers there are no answers is to live without answers you know culture

is a kind of corks on you if you're smart till you're about 35 or 40 or 50 it takes longer for some

people but if you live long enough and you're paying attention you will eventually notice that culture

is a con it just wants to pick your pocket and get your vote and make a fool out of you and around age

35 45 55 people just say screw this i'm not going or they become defenders of it because they they somehow

see into a wisdom that it contains that i have not perceived i think really you know part of there

is an idea around that sometime in your mid-20s you mature and that then you are a fully mature human being

this is obviously not true you're still the maturation process goes on into the 30s and 40s

and if you live that long what you should end up being is an independent idiot an independent person

free of ideology free of fetishism consumer fetishism free of pathological attachments to other people

free of codependent relationships i mean these are all kind of things which people in their 20s are just

beginning to encounter as possibilities and and if you don't grow past these things then you become these

people who watch daytime tv and roam the malls and vacation in artificial paradises and you know a lot of

lottery attention to lotteries and publishers clearing house millions that are soon to arrive and

just a squirrely lifestyle hardly above the level of a laboratory rat

and and if consciousness expansion means anything it means thinking your way out of these cultural

cul-de-sacs and dilemmas you know don't buy anything uh because the very very rarely is what you are being

sold what it represents to be nor worth what it's being uh what's being asked do something about our

planet quickly well in terms of suggestions uh and we have 10 minutes left so i'll be able to get out

of here with how this usually provokes uh in in terms of suggestions when i have said to them i once said to

the mushroom how can we save the world somebody had challenged me in a group like this they said why

don't you ask it how we can save the world which i had never been being sort of it had never occurred

to me to be so blunt myself with it i said how can we save the world and without a moment's hesitation it

said each person should parent only once this is an astonishing idea this is not zero population

growth this is population falling by 50 every 20 years from here on out if if people in the high-tech

industrial democracies would limit themselves to one child almost immediately the destruction of the

earth's ecosystems and resources would halt we preach population control in the third world

but the statistics show that uh to a woman who has a child that child will consume between 800 and a thousand

times more resources in the course of its lifetime bangladesh or some other third this this one person one

child receives there would almost immediately be a visible slackening of the pressure on resources and

population is the is the thing which is driving everything over the edge and is not allowing any time for full reflection about land use implementation of technologies the political directions we want to go in

because everywhere you know no you just hurl money at problems like sanitation detoxification of land education of children

cleaning up of water supplies extension of early primary education and so forth and so on no matter how much money you throw at these problems you see no progress

because it's because it's all dragged down by burgeoning populations so uh and it's interesting i've always felt that the way to solve social problems

that's collective social problems is to find solutions which advance the agendas of individuals in other words some version of enlightened self-interest

and if you think about this one person one child thing what we're saying is uh how would you like to have increased leisure time

increased disposable income

and the sincere gratitude of humanity

and that your your procreative activity

and i would favor social policies that would give people cradle to the grave medical care and cancel their income tax and whatever it took

uh to to uh honor

people who did that because that is

the most significant single political act any one of us

could probably do

uh it's very practical it's a bumper sticker it astonished me when the mushroom said this i thought it was going to be a discord

it said you know one each person should parent only one child in a single sentence it offers probably

the only solution to our long-term

dilemma on this planet can we do it well we don't know it involves changing our habits

the hardest things we have uh to change it involves injecting novelty in an area where habits have ruled

for millennia and tens of millennia are reproductive uh behaviors on the other hand as primates we never

really get rocking and rolling until we're painted into a corner

now china is attempting to do something like this

but of course they stomatic circumstance than our own however if china continues to limit its population

that's the one piece of the puzzle missing from its ability to project its culture onto a global scale

if the rest of us pollute our social systems and drag the development of our economies with burgeoning

populations at the same time that the chinese population is falling and they are bringing their technologies

and infrastructure up to speed then we could find ourselves in a very different socio-political

uh circumstance not far downstream any comment on the on that whole idea it's an interesting idea i'm surprised

that there is no society for it i've never heard it discussed not radical lesbians not libertarians not and i

also thought when it first came up that there must be some hideous political flaw in it that some

radical feminist or somebody would spring forward and point out this appalling contradiction as to why

this couldn't be done or why this was utterly unacceptable and dehumanizing nobody has ever done that either

people have said the only criticism i've had of it is people have said uh that political power is based on

population but i argue that's not true if that were true india would be the second most powerful nation in

the world well what about france what about germany what about england so uh you know we are not in a

breeding race with the brown skinned people of the planet thinking like that is crazy making uh what determines

the viability of a society is the quality of life that it delivers to the greatest of people so i think one

person one child those of you who haven't yet entered the reproductive phase of your life you might

consider people have objected and said well but children need other children this is arguable the nuclear

family is not handed down from mount sinai the nuclear family is a late 19th century invention at the

convenience of industrial capitalism if there is a human model handed down from mount sinai it's the

extended family group the aunts the uncles the cousins all together in a in a long house or a compound well

we haven't lived like that in america since the 1840s uh and uh you know it was no way to live anyway

in 1800 the average american woman the average american woman gave birth 13 times in her life

uh this this this is no population this is not a behavior pattern we want to emulate i i think that

we are sentimental that the concept of the child is some kind of morbid download from 19th century

romanticism and that it's a morbid concept uh the child the child in our society is symbol of innocence

and victim of mayhem uh it would be you know in amazonian societies that i've observed children are small

versions of adults and as quickly as they can handle them they are given responsibilities and roles and they

participate in life birth death sexuality hunting rituals there is no this idea that we screen people from the

facts of life because they are innocent and fragile and it's a complete paradox in our society because

while we're dishing out this rhetoric of innocence we're creating a popular culture so steeped in images

of violence and abuse and rape and so forth that the idea that there are any secrets from anybody is a

pretty hollow rhetoric so we need to re-envision our relationship to children

they are more preended to treat them they are more central to our future than we have tended

to admit and our population policies if they don't swing around to take cognizance of of this

we'll probably derail all our best intents to build a sane and caring world anyway that's the opinion of an

extraterrestrial fungus on a matter of of human population you know i can still remember sitting in

that hot august room and sitting on a thin cushion that didn't do a thing to soften the hardwood floor

after a few hours and i was actually wishing uh terrence would call it a day because my butt was so sore

then he dropped that idea about each person having only one child and that idea caught my imagination

and attention so much that i forgot all about the pain it's really quite an elegant idea don't you think

and uh do you think that terrence take on the brave scene as of 1998 uh fits in today particularly the

point about using more psychedelics and dumping that meth crap you know you gotta watch that stuff it's

the easiest thing there is to get habituated to but i've never seen a good ending for someone who gets

hooked on meth or crack you know stick with the psychedelics use them right and you'll be all right i don't think

you can go wrong and i guess i should maybe say the previous announcement was brought to you by the

partnership of free drugs in america or something like that by the way that was a joke for those of

you who are just maintaining right now and maybe a little paranoid or something by the way uh if you

don't have a copy of boss drum by the shaman you ought to go out and pick up one just to hear terrence's

rap called re-evolution and i play it when i do a solo mushroom trip quite often i i like to sit in

the dark with headphones on and play that track just as the light show has started to come on you know if

you if you've heard that cut you remember the kind of eerie keyboard background intro where terrence

begins saying if the truth can be told so as to be understood it will be believed

i've always enjoyed hearing that particular rap particularly because i think as you just heard

terrence had just come from the club megatropolis and i think it was probably had been his first

rave experience at least according to the story he tells here and how appropriate is that that it's

terrence's first rave at the megatropolis in the uk you know as i'm sure most of you already know the

force behind that club was fraser clark who was uh with us here in the psychedelic salon for our

podcast number 16 where we were treated to fraser's famous epic monkey's trip a short history of the

human species which reminds me by the way that uh fraser just told me that he came across a recording

of a talk he gave at stanford university and i think it was probably must have been during the time he

was leading that zippy pro noia tour across the u.s a few years after terrence was first at the megatropolis

and this talk by the way is called rave culture in the end of the world and if all goes well i

should have a copy in hand and we'll podcast it in the near future right now there are either two or

three more podcasts left at this mckenna workshop and then we're going to hear the talk that nick sand gave at

the mine states 2001 conference at the time he was still under the heavy yoke of the u.s parole system

it's quite a powerful talk by a living legend in the psychedelic community can you say orange sunshine

before we go there's one last thing i'd like to point out and that's a new book by james kent that

hopefully will be published really soon some of you may not recognize james's name but

i'm sure you're already familiar with his work he was the former editor of the classic psychedelic

illuminations magazine of which i still have a few treasured copies in my library and james was also

the publisher of trip magazine sadly i i think that for our community there just weren't enough of us in

the psychedelic community to keep trip magazine alive right now trip and james can be found online at

www.tripzine.com

and if you go to that site right now which by the way is the spring of 2006 for you time travelers who

might come across this podcast in the far distant future anyhow right now you'll see a link to james's

new book psychedelic information theory and he's also posted the table of contents and several chapters for

you to read online i think that if you take the time to read a little this book you'll see that it's a

completely new take on the subject in fact james was recently invited to present his new psychedelic

information theory at the recent toward a science of consciousness conference which is a venue for

the real heavy hitters in consciousness research and as i said a minute ago our community wasn't able to

muster up enough subscriptions to keep trip magazine alive but now we've got another chance to make up for

it and if you go to the webpage at trip scene that has the link to the table of contents for his new book

there's also a link right below it to donate to the publishing fund for this groundbreaking book

if you donate five bucks you'll get a full online preview of the chapters as they become available and

the first hundred people who chip in fifty bucks will receive a numbered autographed copy of the limited

first edition i don't know how many of those hundred copies are left in fact i can guarantee that there is

at least uh less than a hundred now because uh i've ordered mine and so if you're interested and so

inclined why don't you give one of our our own your support to help to get this important book published

well i guess i've rambled on long enough for now i appreciate you being with us here today in the

psychedelic salon and i appreciate chateau hayuk for letting us use their music for these podcasts so

thanks again jacques cordell and wells and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space

greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon

well we're getting down to the end of this series of terence mckenna raps from a workshop that he gave

in the summer of 1998 and after today's program there's going to be at least one more podcast from this

workshop maybe two and then i plan on passing along the talk that my good friend nick san gave at the

mind states conference in the spring of 2001 after today's talk by terence i have a personal message

to pass along to those of you who are seriously involved in working with these ancient and

various sacred medicines but first i want to pick up with terence's riff on the black hats of human history

landscapes waving mushrooms shamans in suits of bone with mushrooms sprout situation on human

sexuality that what that was all about or why i was a part of a general theory of human evolution

that noticed the difference literally between so much as you have to learn how to do it it's

it seems many drugs are what i recommend with salvia is work with the five i've gotten a hold

of some five x extraction um incense would that be no that's probably strong smoking well you're

talking about previously then a longer question uh is there any of traces of psilocybin and skeletons

things like logical evidence for early human use of 500 years ago atlantis really existed but it sank

into an ocean it's it's there was an incredibly it's my question about any kind of uh direct

uh physical evidence things are of something else no i'm not i'm not arguing that at all i'm just

asking if somebody has done anything to establish you know um with some kind of measurement that

there's traces of something which is psilocybin skeletons or in the in the in the pottery or

something like that no there was the famous case of the ice man enjoy tremendously and i really thank

you for that um you described the world wide web as being you described the world wide web as being

possibly a um some sort of a device for capturing an alien intelligence and um i was wondering if we

could step back a little bit and just think of it as being sort of a site where uh sort of a homegrown

intelligence might sort of emerge you don't have to really need to imagine an alien intelligence

coming from outside it can sort of emerge from uh the web itself well yeah we touched on that

possibility too i that i think is more likely i the ai i think this is a real issue ralph who pooed it

problem for human beings first of all as someone last night mentioned the famous turing test which is

you call somebody calls you on the phone if you can't tell whether it's a person or a machine

and it is a machine then it is an artificial intelligence uh there are theories of emergent network

properties that hold that when you get enough simple switching devices connected together in a

complicated enough way that there will begin to be self-reflective forms of behavior and of course the net

is it is a vast self-monitoring self-observing self-designing uh thing and um you know we're making

it more and more flexible all the time like in a few months we're going to it's going to be able to call

processing power as needed to any task uh so the people who actually really know about it seem quite

concerned uh hans moravik who wrote a book called mind children the future of human and machine

intelligence he says that it's an inevitable consequence of the net and that we could never

turn back from this and there are a lot of essays on the net called what would ultra intelligence look

like in other words you know what would it be what would the global mind actually have to say or would it

have to say anything and what more importantly what would it do with its fingers on the world resource

extraction apparatus research and development facilities stock markets world price of gold platinum iridium

uh we it's an it's an impossible situation for us because we we have designed something potentially beyond

our can and something that's right smack in the middle of our lives on every level it's like you wanted

transcendence you've been whining about it for five thousand years eat this you know so and then people

say well what's the time scale the answer is we don't know because we like all cultures in all times and

places with new technologies we do not understand what we're doing we do not understand the consequences

of all this busy connecting and putting in place of ever faster hardware and expansion of bandwidth and

satellite satellite i mean we're as conscious as termites are of the real uh raison d'etre of what we do so in a way

perhaps we're already a very hard thing to think about because in all most all versions that can be discussed it sounds

paranoid and it also sounds cranky you know it sounds like you've got to be kidding and but it won't be the

way we think it will be this is the scary thing about it the one thing you may be sure about the ai

is you it won't be what you think it's going to be because the very definition of machine super intelligence

means it's going to think very very very differently from us we're going to find out stuff like are there

universal moral values are there moral values so universally binding that you can appeal to a global

integrated machine intelligence and say what you're doing is not fair and have it say oh excuse me

yeah you're right sorry old chum i think for me the insight i got yet last night which i hadn't had

before is that once the process starts it could be over and very very fast because you said that once

achieves the um self-consciousness of a flatworm from there to you know exceeding our intelligence could

be just a matter of minutes well again we'll find out if there are overarching uh moral dimensions

to the universe if it can go from paramecium to beyond the human stage in hours presumably it could

achieve bodhisattva hood within a matter of further hours and at that point hopefully it would achieve

the paranarvana and all sentient beings would be liberated from the illusion of samsara and we would

realize that this was what it was it was buddha 4.0 i'm sorry to what extent you think change is uh

cyclical um and i thinking more particularly of the archaic revival now um and to what degree it's uh

linear how things don't go back well i think it's cyclical on all levels except the largest level

cycle and that unlike the hindu cosmologies where cycles of time are always potentially nested in

larger cycles of time i think this thing called time is ultimately what engineers call a damped

oscillation that it it finally truly does the context of its being it is always cyclical range cycles and

cycles that operate uh you know in the quantum mechanical give an idea of how i think about it the theory

the way novelty down through these each one gets wilder soon the bottom is plank's constant which is 6.55

times 10 to the minus 23rd seconds technically one jiffy uh it if you if you think that uh you know we

don't go deeper than the jiffy level into time then when you are uh an uh an hour and 35 minutes

from the jiffy epoch the universe still has half of its morphological unfolding ahead of it

this is the mind-boggling thing this is why when people ask the question what will happen at the

singularity i just wave them off because it's like trying to see around eight corners at once in the last

hour and 35 minutes of the this hypothesized universe that i'm talking about it will go through more

change more morphogenetic unfoldment more interconnectivity than it has experienced in the

previous 72 billion years of its existence uh now people say well but that's crazy how could something

like that happen well excuse me wait a moment you know what the straight people are selling

they're selling that the universe

instantly well now i submit to you that this is the limit case for credulity if you believe that

my family owns a bridge over the hudson river that we will sell you very very cheaply the

idea that the universe could spring instantly from nothing for no reason is they're just saying you

know test them with this charlie if they'll buy that what wouldn't they buy for crying out loud and

this is tenant one of science essentially what science is saying is give us one free miracle

one free miracle we can just work with that we can unfold that invest that fold it back expand it

comment on it you know copy it rarify it uh well so then apparently you get one free miracle

when you play this game the how does it all work game well then i'll take my miracle at the end

thank you it seems to me that a miracle is far more likely to arise out of a very complex situation

a situation where you have physics and computers and civilizations and superconductivity and planets

and stars and oceans and gases and plasmas and a miracle you might shake a miracle out of such a rich

and juicy mix but to get a miracle out of nothing this is bizarre everyone hands yes yes

this uh singularity whatever it may be affects your daily life now you're building a house or saving

the planet i mean these things seem to pale into insignificance how does it affect my life just day-to-day

life your belief well when i when i got these ideas in 1971 and 72 and wrote the invisible landscape and all

that i was too hot for public consumption uh i was uh manic and grandiose i hope i wasn't as offensive as

some of the cases that i've experienced myself because i i tried never to lose my sense of humor or

my good taste but i did tend to be time meant nothing to me i mean i would corner people in rooms and

seven hours would go by and i was unrolling this is me i mean you have no idea how toned down and how

my whole career is about not not amping it up too much not raving too much not always appearing urbane

self-mocking ironical uh at home with the idea that i might be wrong

well these are the manners the schizophrenic must learn in order to pass among the normals

without them dropping a number three steel net mesh over you and hitting you with a tranquilizing dart

so uh but you know that was 72 82 92 it was my god

uh you know i'm slowly coming down from those trips and uh question pertains to is novelty theory

permission to sit on your ass and not be involved in political action or building community or not

i mean i don't take myself so seriously that i would cancel my obligation to political action

because of anything novelty theory i think that regardless of what our ideological positions and

speculations might be we should act as if do think that novelty theory implies not that what i or you may

do is particularly important but that the human enterprise is immense ralph has pointed out to me

that any invention or political movement uh religious revelation any great culture shaping thing that

you can think of if you study it carefully it always goes back to one person you know no committee ever had a

revelation uh revelations come uh to individuals so in terms of how i view my own life and everything

it seems to me it's like pure science fiction it seems to me you know i really identify with billy pilgrim

in uh slaughterhouse five something happened back there in the amazon jungle

and it turned my life into literature uh like unleashed zany thing and it's crazy it's a crazy kind of

literature it has a kind of nabakovian irony that is it's to what degree everybody experiences the end of

history and the end of millennium of a millennium that way i mean this is an enormous opportunity for us

that we're just dumb lucky to have had happen because you know the way they do history when they do it

uh the quick way is they look at every 500 years and everybody wasn't fortunate enough to be born on a

or live through a year that's a 500 or millennial year drops through the cracks but we'll all be looked at

zero ad1000 2000 3000 will be the sample i don't know where all this a week long we could have a month

long we could just spin endless tales and it is sitting here talking about it doesn't come close to being

being loaded is so hard to grok when you're really loaded when you're really out in the billows when it's

when you're really and so then the implications just filter down from a great it's as though i've i mean

i've always felt i'm not really religious in any ordinary sense but i've always felt this it's the

psychedelic thing is like a religion with a god that is present you know i was raised catholic they're always

yammering at you about how uh god is present on the altar some bread some wine some mumbo jumbo but i

think the reason the church financed the conquest of mexico the reason it was so furious in its of the

mushroom was because the people called it the flesh of the gods and it demonstrably was and you know i

i kid people about yoga and i've done them probably not enough to really know what i'm talking about

it's not how do i find like the end of spiritual child easy to be a seeker you just see how about you

but for me just as terence observed the sacred use of psychedelic medicines truly did end my spiritual

childhood by the time i began a serious investigation of these magical substances i'd already cleansed

my doors of perception about organized religion and had long since part ways from those rigid paternalistic

paths in fact i got so far off that path that i worked quite hard for several years in a very serious

attempt to become an atheist that path didn't work out uh too well for me because at the time i had access

to large quantities of free psychedelic mushrooms and believe me it's at least i found it pretty

impossible to be an atheist after having ingested six or seven grams of mushrooms of course i probably

don't have to tell you that do i and uh before i get too far off track i want to be sure to remind you

of the story terence just told about chatul hayuk the reason i want to point that out is that the music

you're hearing right now is from the group of the same name and uh jacques the driving force behind

chatul hayuk was very close to terence and hopefully one day we'll get shock here in the psychedelic salon to

tell you his story about a visit he had from mr t a short time after terence died i can tell you this it

gave me chill bumps when i heard it the first time also in the talk you just heard there was mention of a

dialogue that evening before between terence and ralph abraham in case you missed it i did podcast

that evening's discussion in two programs our number 19 in the psychedelic salon series is titled the

worldwide web in the millennium and podcast number 20 is the q a session that followed and now for a

personal message from yours truly if you've been listening to these podcasts for a while you might

notice that i've attempted to keep my personal stories out of the programs the main reason for

this is that i've always thought of myself more as a carnival barker you know all the all the actions in

the tent and my role is to get people's attention and guide them into the tent the other reason is that

these podcasts from the psychedelic salon were originally intended to be a test of podcasting

technology i never really expected these programs to reach such a wide audience so i've been giving

a lot of thought lately about what to do you know pick up the tempo a bit and produce even more programs

or just let it keep being an occasional hobby and these were my thoughts that were in my mind earlier

this week when i joined a few close friends in an ayahuasca session but my intention for the evening

didn't include anything about podcasting to tell you the truth i had some other issues big ones i thought

that i was looking for some guidance or answers from lady ayahuasca about however as is often the case she

had other plans for me that night all she really wanted to talk with me about was you actually each and

every one of you out there in cyberdelic space who join us here in the psychedelic salon and uh by the way

there are already tens of thousands of us that come together here each week and maybe we'll have to think

about doing a worldwide psychedelic tune-in to the salon all at the same time someday those fantasies are

for another day today i have a message to pass on to you that comes directly from lady ayahuasca herself

at least that's my take on it yours might be different but that's what makes the world so

interesting in our next podcast by the way you'll hear terrence say the truth doesn't require your

belief to exist but hokum does so here's my warning to you if you've had the honor of receiving the

gratuitous grace of lady ayahuasca well then you're going to probably understand this message as the way i'm

going to try to pass it along and if you've not yet had the opportunity to be under her spell then you

should probably treat this as hokum you know just a product of a overactive mind and uh perhaps it

really is but nonetheless it makes sense to me and you're going to have to be the judge of this yourself

so so here's what happened the energy in our circle was a lot stronger than usual that night and yet our

group was experienced enough and able to hold the energy well within the circle of our friends that

were sitting together in complete darkness as is our tradition and listening to our dear iowascaro sing

some beautiful acaros to the accompaniment of flutes and even our own voices joined in time to time when

the plant so moved us and i was gliding along on that lucid plane that manifests itself you know shortly

after the light show ends i was trying to sort out the issues i'd raised as i focused on my evening's

intention but i wasn't really getting anywhere you know i was just stuck in one of those crazy negative

loops that you get into sometimes you're not careful and so i was trying to get out of that loop when we

entered into one of the several minute long periods of absolute silence that we occasionally punctuate the

evening with and that uh that particular time the silence just hit me like it was a strong wind and

instantly my mind was just crystal clear not a thought in it and i don't know how long i remained like

that but a voice came from my left that broke the silence and said the future ain't what it used to be

and in an instant uh geez my mind began to laugh and as the cosmic giggle expanded it it felt as if it

was just wrapping itself around me and then it suddenly squeezed me and i got it all of a sudden i got it

and i think some of you can relate to those kind of moments now for those of you who are just beginning

to explore the the realm of the psychedelic if that nonsensical insane rap doesn't scare you away with

its total lack of what's commonly called reality then maybe you've come to the right place and for

those of you who have been encouraging me to tell a few of my own tales well maybe now you can see why i

hesitate to be honest i find most trip accounts to to be not very interesting except for the bad trips

you know i like to read them and learn what not to do anyway even i can see how this fits into the

hokum category and i was there so for me this really happened and and my words don't even come close to

describing what took place so i'll dispense with the how i got this message for you and i'll just pass it

along as best i can well the first thing i got was a profound insight to that

quirky little saying the future ain't what it used to be of course if the future remains what it used

to be then we're totally screwed you know our only hope is a species is to change course and that's when

lady ayahuasca began to speak and here's what she said as best as i can remember it the people who are

listening to these podcasts are beginning to understand that the hopi prophecy that says we are the ones we

have been waiting for not only refers to each of you you're also beginning to wake up to the fact that

you've incarnated in this time and place for a very specific reason the reason that we're all probably

still really trying hard to uncover and she went on to say that your instincts are probably a lot more

accurate right now than your reason and by the way she said you should probably start expecting

synchronicities to appear in your lives almost every day she went on to say please tell them that each

and every one of them and it was very clear that it was a specific each and every one of them is vitally

important right now as ralph abraham pointed out you know in normal times we should all go out and have

fun and make piles of money but these are not ordinary times and this is where she got into a discussion of

safety and i won't go into all the details but i was given a review of the lives of four of my very

close friends during the past nine months all of them are dead now two were suicides and the other two had

accidents with our sacred medicines none of them should be dead right now and each one of them was vitally

important now all we have to learn from is their mistakes because that's all they have left to give

this enterprise that we're now so deeply engaged in the point was that these were all highly experienced

psychonauts and all were over 40 years old right now of course our little clan is still in a state of

shock over these deaths but believe me we have all abandoned any casual attitude we had about these

substances because we found out that a casual attitude really will cause casualties so that part of the

message was clear always get as much information about the experience you are about to have as you

can and start at arrowid site that's www.erowid.org arrowid.org i know almost all of the people involved in the

the arrowid project and i can't speak highly enough about them arrowid.org is truly an impeccable website in

my humble opinion now i know that i've talked about safety before and i'll continue to talk about it in

future podcasts but somehow this is a different kind of message i'm trying to deliver right now you know

having been in intheospace most of you know that the most important things you learn there are impossible to

put into words you know they're truly ineffable and it's as much uh... more than just a simple feeling

it's it's a deep grokking if you know what i mean and i'm pretty sure that you do actually

the message uh... really did seem to be directed personally to to you to each and every one of you

and i'm going to stop here because i don't want to keep on going in this uh... airy fairy mode but

to be honest it makes me uncomfortable because i know it sounds like all that new age stuff that i

i can't really stand so let me say this another way forget the experience i had the other night

i'll just say this from me to you and hey maybe i should warn you you ought to take everything i say

with a grain of salt you know you should probably know that i've kissed the blarney stone on more than

one occasion i've been wrong a lot more than i've been right in my life so you've had a fair warning

now about that but this isn't blarney this is from my heart and my personal belief is that yes this is

it really is it we're actually here for the big one and why are we the ones that are so fortunate to

be here at such a pivotal moment in time well maybe it's because we've done this work for so many

lifetimes now that we've earned our ringside seats for the big show that has already begun

you know uh... i think it's hard to deny this if you really spent much time working and thinking

about this issue but the human species is now poised on the rim of a new chaotic attractor and i don't

think it's going to take much to tip this human slinky of consciousness into a new and improved basin

of attraction you know there's been a lot of talk about the hundredth monkey coming along and personally

i don't think it's even going to take that much you know there's a famous metaphor in chaos theory

which uh... is what i believe is currently governing our state of affairs right now on this little planet

so according to this metaphor the uh... flapping of butterflies wings in the amazon rainforest can

actually be the initial event in a cascade of events that eventually causes a hurricane

i believe that the metaphor also works for all of you who are joining us here in the psychedelic salon

i think it would be wonderful if one of you becomes that hundred butterfly you know the one who gives

our species its final little push that begins the next great stage in the evolution of our species

and i really hope it's one of you and together maybe it could be uh... all of us giving up that little push so

now i'll bet you guys who uh... wanted some personal stuff from me are sorry you know don't ask an irishman

to tell a story unless you've got a lot of time on your hands and in my case i hope you all keep in mind

the fact that everything i know uh... right now could very well be wrong you know it's happened to me before

back in the eighties before i first discovered mdma i was an irish catholic republican lawyer

today i'm still irish but uh... no longer do i believe any of that bullshit i believe back then

hardly any of it you know so my track record on uh... having uh... uh... e-line to the truth really

isn't that good so the only really good advice i can uh... give you is to experience these things for

yourself well that's the big difference between religion and a psychedelic experience one requires

a belief and the others literally an experience i don't know about you but i'll take experience over

belief any day well that should be about enough for now i want to thank you for being here again and i

look forward to joining with you uh... to be sure that the future ain't what it used to be

jacques cordell and wells better known as chateau hayuk thanks again for the use of your music and

we're all looking forward to the release of your new cd which i understand is almost ready right now so

thanks again and thanks to you dear terence thank you for being you for now this is lorenzo signing off from

cyberdelic space be well my friends linguistic archip greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and

i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon well we're slowly coming to the end of this series of

terence mckenna wraps and if you're joining us for the first time i guess i should let you know that

this is the ninth input looks like it's going to be a series of ten podcasts of sound bites from a

workshop terence mckenna gave in the summer of 1998 when we left him in the last podcast terence was

waxing eloquent about what happens to a seeker once she or he has found the magical essence of a true

psychedelic experience and as most of you already know once you have ingested a large dose of say

psychedelic mushrooms for the first time well there's simply no turning back after that moment

you know because from that moment on as as my friend tony rich once said when he was keynoting

uh an ayahuasca conference we do know what we know and now for those of you who haven't yet had a

a well-guided and profound psychedelic experience there uh there simply is no way to explain what a

an incredibly pure crystalline god-like experience this is as terence often said you can spend the

rest of your life sweeping out the ashram or following the rules of one of the paternalistic

hierarchical religions that are tearing this world apart or you can simply take the red pill

and experience the truth for yourself as i mentioned i think in the last podcast i was 42 years old before

i mustered up the courage to find out if i'd been lied to and i hope it doesn't take the rest of you

so long to wake up yourselves most of you have otherwise you probably wouldn't even be tuned in here

would you well that's enough from me right now let's uh let's listen to what the bard mckenna has to

say about how a great culture can lose its way it's a great puzzle how cultures lose their way i mean in

the 20th century we have the example of national socialism in germany uh in the course of this

weekend we've talked about how vedic india was based on the total celebration of some kind of psychedelic

and that it was lost 100 percent loss so that you know there are a few pundits in india who claim

they know what soma is but nobody can produce something which performs as advertised greater than indra

greater than brahma shaper of the world soma it's pouring forth from the

soma presses gushing forth to intoxicate the multitudes well what kind of drug is this that

you can have three daily pressings and intoxicate hundreds of people and and it has no reputation

for anything except the highest state of ecstasy and this goes on for 1500 years and then bingo

nobody knows what it is nobody makes it nobody can find it it's just something talked about in

old books how do cultures lose their way it's a hard thing for us to understand with our electronic

obsession with you know preserving everything digging in colonial outhouses and cataloging the

pottery shards and all this we're savers you know many times several times in chinese history there

have been enormous book burnings to basically dial back the cultural clock to zero and started ticking

again the burning of the alexandrian library was an event like that in the west i mean there were over

a million volumes in the alexandrian you know the guy who burned it said that there are two kinds of books

books here those who contradict the curse let it all and that was the second burning of the alexandrian

library it was also burned by a christian barbarian enthusiast called aleric the visigod the same clown

who burned it loose just have uh two brief questions the first one i just wanted um to um to know more

about the uh visual puns of the uh machine like elves and um or elf like machines and uh the second

question is uh i know of someone who recently went to holland and they brought back some tryptophan

and uh i've heard i've read something in the literature about combining uh nmao inhibitor

with tryptophan and uh i just wanted to know if you knew anything about uh the effects of that or

anything like that well i think tryptophan is an amal inhibitor i'm not sure there's a common amino acid

they're thinking of starting toward dmt i think you can start from tryptophan but i think it's easier

to go from an elf machine puns what exactly did you want to know about them just um just uh

if you could kind of elaborate on the three-dimensional four-dimensional like uh what maybe give an example

of i know it's kind of hard to put into words but yeah well kind of transformation of category

where things are made out of things which are impossible i mean as i said how can something be

made out of yesterday consomme and hope it's impossible to conceive and so in the presence of

these puns they they're they break down ordinary reality even more than it's broken down anyway in

the dmt state uh it's it's like you know it's not enough that you're loaded on this psychedelic

mega hallucinogen now they tell you crazy jokes which you get uh in that state it's sort of like the

surrealists use the opening the crack it would be a great choice to do this i'm thinking of who

this was renee magritte where you know foreground and isn't a psychoactive alkaloid that occurs in

and it's used traditionally although we interest in this field at all housewives accountants and so

for us so from that point of view um and many of them have also been scientists or or people with

who are credentialed in some way so to dismiss them as you know people who have had some kind of bias in

that area i don't think i think we'd have to delve into that a little bit more as i'm sure you've thought

about also i i just read an article um that was pretty incredible where i think a former air force

officer came forth and said that he had been responsible for planting uh technology from a

crashed saucer in major corporations you know in this country and that was eventually reverse engineered

and uh a lot of people feel are responsible for the increased technology since world war ii and

including the computer ship and a lot of other uh things that have come about recently and and

certainly revolutionized where we are right now so i just you know wanted to ask you again to uh if

did you hear me right is what you're wondering yeah right i know your previous writings have been

somewhat more more liberal in that regard and well um first of all let me say i saw that had some

encounter with uh like yourself possibly oh well if we by some encounter if what we mean is cosmic giggle

come near i don't think you can get through life without that happening the problem i have is first of

all um this is hard to talk about but maybe worth talking about first of all because of my position as

whatever i am i get to meet all these people off stage so to speak and it's not been a confidence

building experience i noticed you you had a tendency in your question to lead with credentials

an air force colonel a navy officer a nasa ex-nasa scientist and when i hear the phrase ex-nasa

scientist i reach for my revolver i think what we have to first of all nice people do not understand

how mendacious scheming lying and bizarre pathological people are they can't imagine it that's

essentially what being a nice person means is evil is a mystery to you uh i think that uh a lot of people

are making a lot of money spreading anxiety anxiety is uh and the earth change people one by one we tick past

the edgar casey prophecies that don't come true one by one you know now every piece of physical evidence

from the first 30 years of the ufo phenomenon has now been shown to be fake all none of those photographs

stand up under modern uh computer logical deconstruction and so what i i my method

for because i'm interested for because i'm interested in the weird the miraculous the bizarre the unearthly the

other but my method has been to to or the thing and then not believe hard questions and everybody else

goes and believes doesn't require your belief to exist requires a relationship between the consumer of the

the hokum and i've spent time i've argued with bud hopkins i've had lunch with whitley streber i've

argued vociferously with john mack and these people are uh thinkers you would not invest send them to

investigate a bus accident uh i'm sorry that this is true i didn't know this uh i assumed as

most people do but the word expert has meaning it has no meaning it's just a piece it's public relations

flackery you're a ufo expert if you say you're a ufo and when you go into the uh so my method has been

as i said to kick the tires and make it real the other thing is and people don't like this but to examine

the messenger you know you you mentioned in your question these people are normal

run-of-the-mill type people accountants lawyers so forth and so on in fact when you look at these

populations closely they're weird uh for example let's the abduction population a paper was written uh

showing that uh the abduction population tends to cluster in middle-aged white women uh of the middle

class who who uh do not who stay home what is that of people who watch more daytime tv than any of the rest

of us if if our average tv consumption is five and a half hours a day this population is pulling up the

slack for those of us who don't watch and is watching 15 hours a day this is an area where you know you

see the newspapers being vended at the grocery store virgin mom nine gives birth to alien christ

are we all clear that this is a joke all of us including the remedial readers and the people who just

got off the boat from somalia last week and everybody are we all looking at it through the eyes of a harvard

intellectual with a b.a in english literature uh i'm not sure so this is what i call the balkanization

of epistemology uh and part of it has to do with us all not nobody apparently this was left out of our

curriculum uh what's called rules of evidence you know if you're a lawyer you learn what are called

the rules of evidence what does a given set of fact what do a given set of facts actually mean

and in this ufo game people uh first of all they repeat things never with citation they say did you

see that article the other night or that thing on channel six a few weeks ago about this thing that

happened in argentina where this and it's never accompanied by citation so it's a multi-networked

game of telephone where these rumors move out and are endlessly adumbrated and and changed around

and uh all for the purpose of filling in people's blank spaces and i the the i don't like the the see

i think there are two phenomena i'm not saying there aren't strange lights in the sky that we may not know

what they are and that they could be anything subject b is the ufo community as a social phenomena

it's a paranoid community these myths that are being propagated are always myths of disempowerment

it's that they came to babylon and gave us an alphabet because we couldn't think it up ourselves

it's that they're giving us fiber optic technology and computer chips because we couldn't think it up

ourselves it's always about poor humanity receiving the large yes of the space brothers and all we have to

do is trade them human fetal tissue and some other stuff and they'll be happy it's uh it's a backward

fantasy that the media has drummed up into uh uh a hysteria if you really care speaks to you

then you must go and investigate it you cannot understand it by consuming it from the media uh because

all these people that you hear about jacques valet and bud hopkins and john mack the gods of this do you

think they would stand out if they were sitting here in this room do you think if we had them in front of

us that these would be towering geniuses or men of deeper insight than you and i get real you know it's

just it's just the new age book circuit it's just marketing and people making careers not that they're

insincere but they're limited as you and i are limited by our our understanding and our and our past

history uh i i was invited a few years ago to speak at a big ufo conclave in la and i had never been to

one and i thought as i'll bet most of you think who have a moderate interest in this but if you go to one of

these things what you will find is a whole bunch of sincere people who have had strange experiences

and who are trying to figure it out together not that is not what you find what you find is booths

the urantia book the raelians billy myer the palladians the roswell incident and these people operate side by

side having coffee holding smokers for each other and so forth and so on with no sense of co of cognitive

dissonance whatsoever you know they it doesn't ever strike them that if the raelians are right then how

can commander rama be right and if he's right how can billy myer and the police this doesn't come up

as an issue and you realize these people are having a lot of fun and but they are not this is a support

group for some kind of fallout from a religious hysteria this is not about the study of strange

lights seen in the sky at night and if you try to talk about that people will just look at you like

you know who let you in uh you know it's now all about channelings and prophecies and the rise of atlantis

and the beam from the center of the galactic uh whoop-dee-doo and the photon belt and the coming of

malchut sedek if matreya will get out of the way and on and on and on and i find the only defense

against this is the conjuring rod of irony and reason uh you know if it if it seems absurd it probably is

absurd now i'm not saying that the world isn't strange i'm actually saying that the world is

stranger than these cheerful ufo enthusiasts can even begin to imagine the stars are so

diffuse in space and time the evolutionary time spans available to life so vast that the idea that

the alien intelligence will you know communicate through sparkling-eyed blue-eyed middle-aged women

with bowl haircuts and moo-moos is mind-boggling to me and uh so it's just a matter of and you know how

do you tell and i have this argument with ralph all the time and rupert because they're both softer than i

am and i'm getting more hard-boiled in my old age because i see how a lot of people take all this stuff

much too seriously and can't even really think straight i read an interesting essay in a few months

ago in a in a book about all this by douglas stillings and he said when you encounter somebody with

a strange belief the question to we have been asking the wrong question the question we've been asking

is why do you believe this wrong question the question we should be asking is why do you believe that you

believe this because the interesting thing is these people don't act differently than you and me somebody

can claim they were an abductee and they did this and they did that they don't act the way i would act

if i were abducted if i were abducted i would come apart at the seams do you realize the implications of

being abducted by an alien spacecraft i don't think i would be satisfied to just tell my story to john

mack and become case number 232 and then sit back and let him handle the public relations fall out of it

these people do not behave as though their story was true they behave as though it's a story and so

somehow what we're dealing with here is clashes of epistemic values the carlos castaneda phenomenon

was a good example half the people who want to talk about castaneda want to talk about is it true or

not or was this guy some kind of a charlatan the other half says what kind of a question is that you

don't even understand the issue it doesn't matter whether without taking sides on that issue notice

that these two groups don't have much to negotiate because for them the very notion of truth has taken

on a different meaning one is saying the truth of myth is truth and the other is saying the truth of myth is

this is a bullshit concept we want to know if this is the truth or not um about psychotherapeutic use

of psychedelics and the lack thereof in this country and in other countries do you foresee an increase of that

with um

you

of the nation-state and the rise of the World Wide Web as you've sort of laid it out?

The rise in psychedelic therapy?

Well, because from what I understood of what you were saying, one of the main reasons why that's been, you know,

marginalized and pushed under and scheduled to the degree that it's been scheduled is because the nation-state,

it doesn't serve the nation-state to have psychedelic activity going on on a large scale.

And so if, you know, nation-states, you know, in the next 15 to 20 years go on the decline and are marginalized in their power and scope,

and, you know, either, you know, corporations or global community take over, do you foresee a rise in psychedelic use in the medical system?

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, we talked about the world corporate entity that's emerging,

that the world is being replaced by from 200 nations to 1,000 corporations.

The values are very different. Corporations are not particularly interested in suppressing dissent in quite the same way that nations are,

because corporations don't argue their existence from a philosophical position.

The other thing is, corporations hate unregulated markets. And so I can imagine, I mean, drugs are a commodity,

an enormous money-making engine. And it would be better for everyone, cynics, users, purists, manufacturers, physicians, governments,

if drugs were simply an ordinary commodity. And if abuse of drugs was treated like any other mental aberration,

simply you would be dumped into the mental health and criminalized and humiliated.

Management and the legal system to treat it this way. Essentially, the situation now, the reason drugs are so severely repressed

when it's such a money-losing proposition to do that is because the nation state is carrying out a vestigital obligation to Central European Calvinism.

I mean, the reason drugs are illegal is because they're evil. Well, they may be evil.

Corporations, you have things that have to be manufactured. I've been dealing with the uprising in Chiapas, you know.

Somebody has to make the stuff. There is a point where there are uprisings and where it is shut down, where there is great violence that occurs. We don't hear about it.

You mean violence at the behest of corporatism. Indeed.

Yes, but it's nothing like erasing the cities of Europe by aerial bombing or something like that. I agree. There's a low level of...

It may be low level. It seems fairly high level where, you know, a company will go in and say, you know, Guatemala is becoming a socialist. Let's go to the law firm. We'll hire the lawyers.

They'll get in touch with the political people and we'll go down there and, you know, assassinate whoever so that United Fruit can continue. That's just, you know, an easy example.

Well, if assassination is a tool of corporate statecraft, I've always sort of leaned toward assassination. Have you ever noticed how few innocent people get ground up in assassinations?

I mean, if someone had assassinated Saddam Hussein, those hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers who were buried alive in the pits in the desert might have lived to tell the tale to their grandchildren.

But governments are horrified by assassination. Oh, Lord, no, you would never do that.

The entire fabric of diplomatic understandings established since the Congress of Vienna would come unglued.

It's far better to conscript a million eighteen-year-olds and send them off to try to kill the leader of international diplomacy.

You know, capitalism is so triumphant now that its salvation will probably have to be self-generated.

In other words, it's not going to come from slave uprisings or a papal insignical.

It's simply that capitalism is going to have to grow smarter, and they're trying to do this.

And once they smarten beyond a certain point, they will carry out what is essentially a Marxist analysis of their own situation

and realize we can't keep doing this because the open system of exploitable natural resources that we are assuming doesn't exist anymore.

And we can't lift everybody to the level of the American middle class without cutting down every tree and digging every vein of metal.

What was that for a wild ride? I only noted the major topics that Terence touched on in those brief 50 minutes or so.

And what I wrote down was how a great culture can lose its way, self-transforming machine elves,

the secret chief in the story of psychedelic psychotherapy, UFOs in the UFO community as a social phenomena,

the balkanization of epistemology, psychedelics in the age of the world corporate state, nanotechnology, time machines in the singularity.

And when you realize that he's not using notes, that this is all coming right off the top of his head,

well to me it's even more amazing, and his use of the language I think is exceptional.

But that was Terence.

By the way, have you been thinking about synchronicity since I mentioned it last week?

Well, here's one that happened just a few minutes ago.

I'd just finished editing the talk that you just heard and was thinking about how far out Terence could get,

talking about time travel and stuff like that, but from a rational, scientific, and yet very psychedelically philosophical point of view.

And right then I decided to check my email before I recorded this segment, and as I was waiting for it to download,

the thought popped into my head that I'd really give most anything right now to be able to hear a fireside chat

between Terence and the man I consider to be really right out there on the far edge of consciousness research.

That's my good friend Zoe Seven.

And you probably know the rest of the story by now, don't you?

Yep, the last message to come in was from Zoe.

Don't you love it when things like that happen?

When a little synchronicity like that happens to me, I explore it a bit to see if there's a message somewhere in there for me.

So I read Zoe's email with that in mind and noticed that one of the things he mentioned was a website that I suspect most of you have probably already heard about.

It's David J. Brown's site, Mavericks of the Mind, and you can find it at www.mavericksofthemind.com.

It's an interesting site that has interviews of many of the early luminaries of the psychedelic movement.

And in the interview with Terence, I found the following McKennaism.

He said,

We're moving towards something very much like eternal dreaming, going into the imagination and staying there,

and that would be like a lucid dream that knew no end, but what had a tight, simple solution.

The psychedelics, the near-death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries,

all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we've been living in this dimension.

I like that, don't you?

So thank you, Zoe Seven, for leading me to that.

And by the way, if you haven't read Zoe's first book, Into the Void, you might want to do that soon.

I think it's probably already close to becoming a classic.

In fact, if you go to our palenkenorte.org site, and that's the corner of matrixmasters.com where these podcasts originate.

So if you go to palenkenorte.org, and navigate to the 2003 original Burning Man lecture series,

and click on the title of our first palenkenorte lecture, you'll see some pictures of John Henna giving that talk,

and there in the foreground is a copy of Into the Void that you can see in several of the shots.

Maybe we're starting to reach so many of you now because of some extra mojo we got from Zoe way back there in the beginning, huh?

Anyway, after you read Into the Void, you'll probably want to read his next book, which has just been published.

And in a few weeks, we'll be able to get a copy shipped from here in the U.S.

Until now, the books were only shipping from Argentina, and the shipping cost is too high for most of us, yours truly included.

So, Zoe has fixed that, and soon Back from the Void will also be available in the U.S. with a very reasonable shipping price.

And Zoe's main website, by the way, is www.zoe7.com, Zoe7.com.

And before long, he'll have a couple of new sites operating as well.

I'll be sure to let you know when they come online.

So, I guess I should say stay tuned if that's a thing you can say in a podcast, huh?

One other little announcement I'd like to make is that Dr. Grobe would like to get the word out that he still needs seven more volunteers for his psilocybin study at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.

Now, before you get too excited, I need to tell you that the selection criteria is so strict for this study that you definitely don't want to qualify.

You see, the participant population is restricted to stage four cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety.

And since stage four means terminal, less than a year to live, it seems to me that you'd have to be a little anxious.

And you can get the details about this study at www.canceranxietystudy.org.

So, if you know of anyone who might meet the criteria, it would be nice of you to pass that URL along to them.

Well, the next podcast will bring this series of Terence McKenna Talks to a close.

And following that, we'll hear the talk that Nick Sand gave at the Mind States Conference in 2001, shortly after his release from prison.

Those of you who experienced the 60s might know of Nick, maybe not by name, but by the name of his most famous product, Orange Sunshine.

Well, I guess that about does it for today. I really do appreciate you joining us all here in the Psychedelic Salon.

And I want to thank you for all the kind emails you've sent.

If I ever get caught up again after this move I'm in the middle of right now, I might even be able to answer some of you.

If you don't hear back from me right away, it isn't because I don't care. I do read everything that comes in.

So, thanks again to all of you for being here.

And thanks again to Chateau Hayek for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.

For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

Be well, my friends.

Dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Have you ever had one of those times when all of your tech just seems to conspire against you?

And the sad part is that Mercury isn't even retrograde?

Well, that's what's been happening around the old Psychedelic Salon lately.

My plan was to get a better microphone and start producing more frequent programs.

But, as the fates would have it, a cascade of little changes to my system has resulted in a Niagara of problems.

And the main one is that I can't get any microphones to work properly on my PC right now.

So, after several days of frustration, I decided to use my trusty SanDisk MP3 recorder to finish this program

and get this podcast on its way to you before we all forget where we last left the good bard.

And so, it is that we've finally reached the end of this long series of Terence McKenna recordings.

I hadn't planned on doing so many of them in a row, but I hadn't heard these tapes in a long time,

and once I got started, I couldn't stop listening.

And from some of the comments you've sent, I hear it's the same with many of you.

You know, I keep telling myself that some night I'm going to self-medicate a bit

and listen to all ten of these McKenna rhapsodies in a row,

but I'm afraid that maybe my head would explode if I did.

So, let's get on with it.

Here's the tenth and final installment of a workshop Terence McKenna conducted in the summer of 1998.

Yeah, machine is a very general term.

I mean, the machine might be a mantra, a drug, a physical position.

I mean, this is the kind of stuff we were playing with at La Charrera,

but I'm now afraid of it because I know that it's real.

You have to believe you're going to fail to attempt to build a time machine

because no one in their right mind, if they thought it was going to work,

would in fact climb into the gleaming saddle and slam the lever forward.

You have to believe that you're going to fail or you wouldn't do that.

I had a particular psychedelic journey where I was going into the wormholes

and I was realizing, wow, if people really are serious about doing this, this is the way,

because I was actually feeling like I was able to go wherever I wanted.

But at that moment I refrained because, wow, this is real.

I can actually traverse through the timeless singularities or the timeless wormholes

and pop out at any point in space-time because it's all interconnected at that one point.

The name of the game is to bring back real information.

I mean, that's how you will convince the rest of us to do it and to believe you.

And I think it can be done. I think probably shamanism is about this.

But one of the things we talked about a little bit here, but maybe not enough,

is this bell, non-local information space that seems to lurk beneath the surface of ordinary reality.

For 50 years in quantum physics this was denied as so counterintuitive

and leading to such bizarre conclusions and possibilities that it must be.

impossible and now they've done experiments that pretty much show this is real this is real and

what it means is all the mystics of history were right you can journey from any place in the

universe to any other place instantly you can extract information that lies on the other side

of the cosmos instantly it's all done in the imagination the imagination is this sense

which you have that is your non-local perceptor your local perceptors are your eyes your ears

the surface of your body so far the non-local perceptor is the imagination and it's giving

you a continuous holographic readout of the bell non-local dimension and then and it's like a it's

like a cheat on your being trapped in in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of newtonian space and

time you are trapped in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of newtonian space and time but you have this

little tiny peephole this doorway into the entire cosmos all the races that ever were there all the

catastrophes and civilizations and philosophies and messiahs and so forth and so on and but you have

to like tune it 99.99999 percent of this bell information is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind

because it's on a scale too large or too small or it involves premises or environments or

presuppositions so bizarre that we can't grok them but the remaining 0.00001 percent of this data is

absolutely fascinating these works of art ruins planets herophanies strange music strange art strange ideas

endlessly to be explored and then to be brought back as much as can be it to the human camp and examine i mean we are hunters and gatherers in hyperspace as much as we are in in 3d and what we're roving and scanning for in those informational spaces is things which delight us or make life more comfortable or inform our relationship to each other or our

environment the future lies in the imagination you know the imagination is going to get louder and louder and louder and louder william blake saw this we talk about virtual realities designer drugs downloading ourselves into circuitry travel through time disincarnate bodies cloned identities gender shifting point of view shifting

shifting all of these things this is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics the rules of physics say you know you are a body you are on a planet you have weight you have momentum you have specific gravity you must behave like this and like this and like this and mind says no i want to be pure unleashed

i want to move from planet to move from planet with the twink of an eye i want to know everything see everything be everything feel everything and then by that means somehow i will make my way back to my higher and hidden source and who knows you know maybe this always awaited us beyond the grave and what we're doing in some sense is drawing death

the most profound of all boundaries and death itself becomes thin becomes transparent i mean i it's very easy to imagine technologies such that human identity will be scrambled beyond imagining you know if you can download yourself into certain make copies of yourself

and then you can have multiple identities and then you can have multiple identities uh in one of greg egan stories people have this thing inside them that is implanted when you're two years old that's called

it was it starts out being called the dual and it ends up being called the jewel and what it is is it's a thing which simply maps and studies your nervous being for the first twenty three years of your life well then when you're twenty three you go through this ceremony where the body is vaporized

is vaporized and the dual copy of your youthful self lives on uh this is within reach uh hans moravik has had the idea that you could take uh you could nano engineer bacteria such that they you could nano technologically engineer a leprosy bacteria because leprosy moves along the nerves from the point of

infection bacteria bacteria bacteria bacteria that would lay down on every nerve and so you would undergo these operations where you would slowly be changed into a thing of gold and silicon glass and arsenic but there would be no moment of transition no loss of consciousness no speed bump no transition of identity it's just over time you would become something completely eternal and machine like

you know that poem by william butler yates sailing to byzantium where he says once out of nature i would be a thing of gold and golden words and ladies of byzantium to sing of what was and what will be once out of nature what he means is when i am dead i will be a thing of gold and gold enameling there's the image of the flying saucer

coming out of the collective unconscious we want to become the stone we want to become somehow a living thing that is nevertheless has the character of machinery and objectification it's a very complex image in the human mind you know with christ at one end of the spectrum

and then all these adambrations and resonances the philosopher's stone the grail the gift magical object the talking stick the the jeweled self-revealing basketballs of the dmt state you know in the fifty-third fragment of her it makes no sense until you smoke dmt and then you find yourself in the presence of the

the aeon the archon of the world age it's a child at play with colored balls in some kind of a of a virtual reality yeah

ends up one of them is if you could talk a little bit about the tone that you and dennis used to intercalate uh

to me molecules in dna how you decided to use it that particular tone if it's occurred again in your life what it

may mean to you um as well as uh just a brief comment on uh gender ratios in your workshops whether there's more men than women usually you've talked a little bit about that before i've heard you say that men may be more drawn toward the psychedelic experience because of

uh some lack of uh intuitive knowledge about uh yeah well i don't know why exactly it is it certainly seems true that men

have a deeper relationship to drugs than women i think that's generally true even hard drugs don't seem uh as interested in drugs or drugs maybe those

uh as a deeper women are constantly burying the dead caring for the sing with miscarriages uh they may be more rock bottom realists

well you know the guys are harping a hundred thousand uh stuff like that i think you know the average i quoted the statistic in a different context but that in eighteen hundred the average american woman gave birth thirteen times

uh giving birth especially poop-dee-doo in traditional societies not psychedelic simply because they have enough the gender

into the internet and guru male female mathematical abilities seem to differ although i think that's changing i think the latest data is that women are pulling even medical graduates some places i don't know men are

are are maybe more boundary defined than women like women seem and again you make these statements you don't know whether you're making a biological

statement or a cultural statement but women seem more tolerant of bisexual and homosexual behavior they're sort of comfortable with all that

with all that where men male male sexual encounters are always defined to some degree by uh competitive shadow of competition uh

now what was the other part of your your question oh about the tone about the tone well this is a very specific question but in the story that's told in the invisible landscape

dennis seemed as he went around the bend to have insights into these like shamanic techniques that were real techniques

and that he could not only tell you what they were he could tell you how they worked and one of the things he insisted upon was that you could use your voice

voice to transduce energy into your own body and other people's bodies which this is no news

acoustical signals are a good way to transduce energy across space

but that you could actually use it almost like a

laser or something like that and that you could interfere with the normal chemistry of these drug molecules

enter into bonding situations that they would normally not

you do this by making them super conductive

you make them super conductive by

we tend to think still

so he said and that then

they would bond activity

a talk at the world future society

in chicago

and it was entitled beyond alternative medicine

and in that talk i talk

you know i bring up the internet

and i talk about the shift

from the industrial paradigm

to the information age and all that

kind of stuff

and i i was

presenting that and i was going down the list of the industrial things

massification

you know to customization

quantity

to quality

hard resources

to soft resources

and as i was looking at the list of the industrial age

and the information age

the thing that came off was

like masculinity

moving to femininity

and i said to myself

you could almost look at these columns

in front of this group

as testosterone loaded

and estrogen loaded

what in the hell is a man supposed to do

with testosterone

in the information age

so i throw that out at you

you know

how do we fit in

as you know

hunters and gatherers

in the information age

well the internet

is a large

and multi-level

forest environment

with all kinds of

a place

for the stealthy

and the swift

i think it's a place

steely-eyed

is rewarded

we're probably

this whole gender thing

it's locked into the

on the brink of

sending gender

but

having a different

relationship to it

as we have a different

relationship to our bodies

and

in the future

it will be thoughts

absurd

for people to think of themselves

as

heterosexual

homosexual

exclusive

this

Freud shows

these are almost

counter elements

i think

you know

hyperspace is going to

give a lot of

because it's at the center

of our biological

nature

is going to be one of the

most interesting things

about how we

manage

cyberspace

you know

the things that are usually

put against cyberspace

is that

small tv cameras

to

conference with people

at a distance

and go into these

reflectors

you'll log into a place

where there are

eleven guys

the

four

seem to be

masturbating

but not in a particularly

exhibitionistic

way

sort of half-heartedly

and

lackadaisically

and then other people

you can see them

they're staring at screens

and you're wondering

am i

do i look like that

am i staring at a screen

are they watching the people

masturbating

what is the relationship

between these people

is this an invited situation

is it a

situation of voyeurism

or is it a situation of

domestic carelessness

where this guy

forgot to turn off his

software

and you realize

these are the frantic

questions of someone

enraged by the breakdown

of public space

you say

i don't understand

what's happening here

are we

are we in a private space

are we in a public space

can people see us

what do they think

what's happening

it doesn't make any sense

you just have to

go with the flow

i don't know what those

people are doing

yeah

do most people who take

dmt have the same

encounter with the

machine like elves

and so how similar are they

and then also i'm wondering

what your

relationship is with law

enforcement

well the first question

everybody's different

and everybody takes the dose

differently and gets a different

amount and brings different

baggage

having said all that

i think

if the dose

the

the stronger

the higher the dose

the more everybody's experience

people get

fifty to seventy milligrams

in a big hit

they will go

to the realm

of the self transforming

machine elves

as described

by yours truly

they may not describe it

as i do

i've turned a number of people

on to dmt

i've listened to a lot of stories

and slowly

the

image that has emerged for me

if you want to think of the dmt place as an archetype

it's the archetype of the complex archetype

it's a rupture of plane

of the bizarre

and the transmundane

which shatters bourgeois packaged in several ways

first of all it's a great place for children

clowns

animals

bright music

cotton candy

the hurdy-gurdy

and the calliope

great place for children

but also

the circus traditionally packaged and marketed eros

i think my earliest intimation of sexuality and eros

was when i was a creature so small that i was wrapped in a blanket and handed from shoulder to shoulder

and i was taken to a circus

and i saw that the woman in the nearly naked woman in the little spangled costume hanging by her teeth up in the top of the tent spinning around and around working without nets

but i imprinted this thing very strongly and i got the feeling of the fear of death

the beauty of youth

flat you know the whole

so that's part of dmt

dmt is always characterized by clowns you know

they arrive in a tiny automobile exploding and chugging fifteen of them get out huge noses

huge shoes they're poking each other in the eye they're dropping anvils they're flinging irons around

But then just off the center ring, it gets weird.

You know, the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle,

the hermaphrodite, the harlequin,

it's all this strange stuff.

And then every child worth their salt

wants to run off with the circus.

The circus represents such a countervailing force

to middle-class respectability and small-town rules and so forth.

You want to run off with the circus.

I remember when I was a kid,

the town I grew up in every 4th of July

was the big festival of the town,

and a carnival would come.

And our parents would tell us,

you can't stay out after 9 o'clock at night

while the carnival is in town.

Well, why not?

Well, you just can't.

These carny people are different.

They're, you know, a little darker shade than most of us.

Some of them might use drugs.

Some of them may, God forbid, have once been divorced.

In the 50s, things were pretty screwed down.

And then when the circus would leave town,

of course, reality would seamlessly close over it,

where it had been,

and the city park would once again be a place for...

The archetype is, I think, the ruling thing of DMT.

It's made me a fan of Fellini's.

His wonderful circuses are very DMT-like

and have everything I'm talking about,

the erotic, the humorous, the menace,

the shadows, and the light.

As far as my relationship to law enforcement is concerned,

I'm happy to say I don't have any.

It disappoints people,

especially conspiracy theorists.

Of course, they can assume I'm lying,

but nobody has ever bothered me.

Years ago, I was a hashish smuggler,

and then they did bother me.

They indicted me when I was in India,

and I had a whole opera as youth

to come back and work all that out,

but that was all settled by the mid-70s.

Do I not have a relationship to law enforcement?

In other words, why don't they watch me,

bother me, tell me to shut up?

I mean, it's sort of disappointing to people to hear,

I think,

because I love it when people come up

and congratulate me on my courage

and say, you know,

we're so happy that you're doing what you do.

It must take enormous courage.

No, I think if it took enormous courage,

I probably wouldn't be doing it.

I just have made an assessment

of how things work,

and my assessment seems to be right,

and here's how they work.

Eggheads don't count in America.

It doesn't matter shit what we say here.

What drugs are about in America

is money, point of view.

You can bet your booties

that if in the next year

I cleared a million dollars

in untaxed money dealing drugs,

I would have trouble.

You would have trouble, too,

probably,

unless you're already in the mafia

or something,

and you've got it wired.

They hate not getting their cut.

Psychedelics generally

have not been big money makers.

They're not addicting.

So they've always been a side issue

for criminal syndicalism.

The criminal syndicates

that have marketed drugs,

psychedelic drugs,

with the possible exception of cannabis,

have just basically done it

for humanitarian reasons.

You know,

there's lots more money to be made

in heroin and cocaine

and MDMA

and all these things

than in true psychedelics.

Usually,

the only time you meet

idealistic criminals

is when you meet

psychedelic chemists

and the people

who distribute their wares.

Because if you're good enough

to make LSD,

you're certainly not a good idea

to make money with.

I think that people should,

are entirely too,

by creating a kid,

if you wanted information

about drugs,

it was like

the most forbidden thing.

Log on to lycineum.com

or to enormous,

ongoing discussions.

30 posts a day

to the salvia list.

30 posts a day

to the ayahuasca list.

You can't possibly

churn through

all this stuff,

let alone

the vast amounts

of material

that have been archived

and articles.

The first workshop

I saw you at

was about

five years ago

and I had done

quite a bit

of psilocybin

and LSD

but never DMT

and I heard you

talking about

coming into contact

with the alien

and the visual language

and I guess

I was quite skeptical

because it just seemed

like it was

a lot of romanticism

and then I had my experience

and it was all there.

These jeweled basketballs,

the carnival-like quality

so it kind of was

the evidence for me

that it was more than

just a vague memory

of a trip,

that it was really

something outside of

our own consciousness

that we weren't creating it

and experiencing

some variation

on our past.

Yeah, I mean

something, you know

we talk about DMT

and all this

remember

it's just

three tokes away

and it only lasts

ten minutes

so

your major problem

I suppose

is accessing it.

Well,

why are you sitting here

for crying out loud?

In other words

if you worked

at accessing it

24 hours a day

how the hell

long would it take

before you accessed it?

I know,

I'm sure

there are people

in this room

who could help you

so if you didn't

meet them this weekend

well then

you wandered

in the wilderness

what were you doing?

Sitting by the brook

browsing in the bookstore

you blew it.

It's

to be sought

and

what?

It's an intelligence test

that would give it away

you're supposed

my job

which is telling you

this stuff exists

and I tell it

in such a dramatic way

that you're supposed

to doubt me

and so then

the only way

to prove

that I'm full of it

is to go out

and find this stuff

smoke it

and then come

find me

and tug at my wrist

and say

I smoked it

and

nothing

or whatever

and

one person

in 20

will be able

to do that

but the other 20

will come

you know

with flowers

offerings

incense

and the sound

of yellow brass

because

this is there

and it's a real thing

I mean

if I were to tell you

that you should go

meet the flying saucers

or go find Atlantis

or go find

Bodimine

for that matter

it's a pretty

tall order

where do you begin

but finding DMT

you know

it's matter

it's an object

in this world

you know

if you wanted

a print

by Hieronymus Bosch

you'd know

how to proceed

if you wanted

to buy

the Kolonur diamond

you'd know

how to proceed

if you needed

a Mercedes

you'd know

how to proceed

if you wanted

a first edition

of the poetry

of E.E. Cummings

you'd know

how to proceed

why do you have

so much trouble

figuring this out

just proceed

as you would

in the pursuit

of any other

defined material object

basically put the word out

that money

is no object

and

I'm sure

you'd be amazed

at how the market

responds

I'm wondering

I find my balance

in meditation

and psychedelics

have given me tools

I think

I'm wondering

if you have

any

suggestions

for

preparing ourselves

for this

evolutionary acceleration

you mean

practical

tools

basically

you know

in the short

term

I don't eat

for six hours

I don't call

that fasting

I just call it

emptying my stump

because I get

dizzy

and have

headaches

and I'm not

going to work

anyway

but I don't

eat meat

or stuff

sugar

and stuff

like that

leading into it

I fast

for six hours

and then

I do it

in a

to be interrupted

that would be

the problem

to be solved

in terms of

longer term

preparation

how do you

really

evading

wonder

imagination

and curiosity

curiosity

is really

the psychedelic

impulse

in the absence

of psychedelics

you know

if you like

to look at

things

paintings

ants

bugs

butterflies

flowers

pay attention

and then

the other

thing is

this weekend

that the

the alien

intelligence

is a

cold

you put

into your

head

the more

far

can be

you know

there are

people

say

you give

them DMT

and they

come down

with the

standard

it was

pretty

colorful

saying

somebody's

interested

in

you know

you want

fermented

mare's

milk

usually

you find

out

that by

behaving

in this

way

you end

so dims

the voice

of the

sweet

bard

McKenna

didn't

you love

the part

where he

said

that

the best

way

to prepare

for a

psychedelic

experience

is to

cultivate

wonder

imagination

and curiosity

and isn't

that exactly

what we're

all trying to

do here

in the

psychedelic

salon

at least

I hope

it is

which

reminds me

I wanted

to comment

on something

else

clear

and that

was

when he

said

if you

didn't

make a

connection

this

weekend

you

blew

it

well

I've

got to

take

issue

with

that

at least

the way

it

sounded

when I

heard

Terrence

say

that

just

now

I

thought

of

all

the

times

my

friends

and I

have

met

new

here

in the

psychedelic

salon

we're

exercising

our

first

amendment

rights

of

free

speech

and

talking

freely

about

psychedelic

medicines

but

we're

not

going

to

be

talking

about

where

or

how

to

find

these

sacred

medicines

because

I

truly

believe

that

when

your

mind

and

spirit

are

properly

prepared

and

ready

they'll

magically

manifest

themselves

to you

it

happened

that

way

for me

and I've

seen

it happen

that way

many times

since

so

be

patient

and

take

your

time

to

get

to

know

people

and

more

importantly

let

them

get

to

know

you

I

have

a

personal

rule

of

thumb

that

if

somebody

asks

me

if

I

can

help

them

find

one

of

our

sacred

medicines

and

if

I

it

there

there's

no

room

for

error

right

now

so

be

careful

be

really

careful

out

there

you

know

a few

years

ago

I was

told

that

90%

of

all

drug

bus

come

out

of

traffic

stops

and

the

other

10%

were

from

friends

who

rolled

over

on

them

so

be

warned

don't

drive

with

or

under

the

influence

of

these

substances

and

be

very

careful

about

making

new

friends

particularly

when

you

so

why

do

we

take

these

risks

well

maybe

it's

because

if

we

use

these

sacred

medicines

the

right

way

then

they

do

what

Terrence

said

psychedelics

make

you

aware

of

the

fact

that

life

is

beautiful

without

psychedelics

it's

true

you know

life

is

beautiful

and

for

me

it's

even

more

beautiful

with

all

of

you

being

here

with

us

in

the

psychedelic

salon

and

although

Terrence

didn't

end

this

heard

him

and

several

others

I

think

it

might

be

fitting

right

now

so

in

the

words

of

the

bard

McKenna

keep

the

old

faith

and

stay

high

for

now

this

is

Lorenzo

signing

off

from

cyberdelic

space

be

well

my

friends

greetings

from

cyberdelic

space

I'm

Lorenzo

and

I'm

your

host

here

in

the

psychedelic

salon

you know

I have

to

admit

that

I

had

a

lot

of

fun

putting

today's

program

together

in

one

of

my

never

ending

attempts

to

get

better

organized

I

was

cleaning

out

with

Terrence

McKenna

it

was

as

the

old

timers

would

say

it

was

back

in

the

summer

of

and

it

was

an

interesting

workshop

Terrence

gave

it

at a

place

that

he

called

a

new

age

watering

hole

and

so

I

guess

I

first

session

on

Friday

night

spent

a

couple

hours

going

around

the

circle

and

everybody

told

a little

bit

about

themselves

you

know

I

was

really

blown

away

to see

the

wide

range

of

people

who

had

been

drawn

together

for that

weekend

it

I

left

with

several

friends

that

I

know

I

have

for

the

rest

of

my

life

so

it

was

a

great

weekend

and

Terrence

of course

was

really

at the

top

of his

form

I

think

in

fact

I

about

how

the

internet

figured

into

Terrence's

time wave

theory

and

from

there

well

I

tell you

what

let's

just

listen

to

the

master

the

one

and

only

Terrence

McKenna

original prediction

was that there

would be a deep

plunge into

novelty

in 1996

that it

would be

the deepest

plunge

in the

90s

but that

was

based

on

my

mathematics

before

John

Sheliac

corrected

it

were

factored

in

it

showed

that

there

was

a

deep

plunge

into

novelty

where I

said

it

was

in

but

that

it

wasn't

the

deepest

it

was

the

second

deepest

the

deepest

was

I

believe

in

fall

of

which

was

right

when

the

internet

was

going

public

and the

world wide

web

was

coming

into

being

and

all

that

was

happening

the

plunge

that

I

felt

pretty

good

about

because

right

near

the

place

where

I

predicted

the

maximum

amount

of

novelty

we

got

within

days

of

each

other

the

announcement

of

the

shed

moment

that

the

president

of

the

United

States

felt

the

need

to

address

the

nation

on the

subject

of

extraterrestrial

life

was

a rare

moment

and then

within

eight days

of that

announcement

was the

announcement

of

Dolly

the

human race

passed

from which

there was

no going

back

then

because

basically

if you

can clone

a sheep

you can

clone

a human

being

and

these

technologies

are all

rushing

upon us

I mean

the body

is being

dissolved

as much

by advanced

medical technology

as it is

by

cyberspace

and the

internet

I read

this story

this amazing

story

recently

set

slightly

in the

future

and

this guy

has been

in this

very bad

accident

and

virtually

nothing

has survived

but his

brain

but they

have a

medical

technology

that they

can take

a fragment

of flesh

and

clone

him

and then

with

hormones

rapidly

age

the

infant

so that

in two

years

there will

be a

brand

new

adult

body

for his

brain

to be

transplanted

in

and

these

people

have

this

fantastic

medical

policy

but the

fine

prince

says

that

the

brain

can be

kept

alive

must be

kept

alive

by a

medically

approved

method

but the

insurance

company

reserves

the right

to choose

the

cheapest

method

and

the

cheapest

method

is

implant

into

the

body

wall

of the

co-signatory

of the

insurance

policy

so this

woman

carries

her

husband's

brain

for

two

years

inside

her

body

cavity

while

his

body

is being

grown

to

manhood

for the

transplant

it's a

dilemma

we all

may face

someday

she

yes

yeah

I

wanted to

ask you

about

novelty

and

psychedelics

and the

language

that

changes

through

the use

of them

I remember

reading

Maria

Sabina

saying

that

the

mushrooms

spoke a

different

language

to her

after

people like

Watson

came down

and began

to use

them

they

played

from

Spanish

to

English

from

Catholic

mushrooms

to

I don't

know

Harvard

mushrooms

or something

Harvard

mushrooms

I don't

know

so I

haven't

spoken

with

people

that

have

taken

DNA

I'm

a DMT

sorry

in

the

60s

very much

the people

I've talked

to

they did

said

it was

so

overwhelming

they

could

not

even

understand

the

language

I

haven't

read

about

this

anyway

well

one

place

there

aren't

many

places

you

can

read

about

it

one

place

you

can

read

about

it

is

there's

a book

edited

by

Michael

Harner

called

hallucinogens

and shamanism

Oxford

University

Press

and there's

an essay

in there

by Henry

Munn

called

The Mushrooms

of Language

which is

one of the

most eloquent

and beautiful

essays

ever written

on

psilocybin

it's

so

wonderful

Henry

Munn

then

harder

to get

but equally

interesting

is a

doctoral

study

that a

guy named

Horace

Beach

did

at

CIIS

and it's

called

something like

the perception

of audio

phenomenon

under the

influence

of

psilocybin

and he

interviewed

Bay Area

psilocybin

heads

about their

experiences

with language

and it's

very interesting

this is a

very interesting

area of

discussion

the

on DMT

and on

psilocybin

and they are

closely related

psilocybin

being for

phosphoryloxine

and dimethyltryptamine

the phosphorylated

form

of DMT

though they do

not

degrade

into

one pathway in the body it's a parallel pathway DMT is NN dimethyltryptamine these psychedelics

particularly seem to impact the language forming portion of the brain and this produces truly

bizarre states of mind because it's the language forming part of your brain that is explaining to

you moment to moment what is going on you know now I am eating now I am having sex now I am flashing

on DMT and when that part of the brain gets foobard then you really do have a puzzlement on your hands

because the end the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process on DMT the

these entities these machine like diminutive shape-shifting faceted machine elf type creatures

that come bounding out of the state and they come bounding out of my stereo speakers if I have my

eyes open they are like you know they're elfin embodiments of syntactical intent somehow syntax which is normally

the invisible architecture behind language has moved into the foreground and you can see it I mean

it's doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you it's crawling all over you and and what's happened

is that your categories have been scrambled or something and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible

and in the background and and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you

and the thing makes linguistic objects it sheds syntactical objectification so that it comes toward you

they come toward you they divide they merge they're bounding they're screaming they're squeaking

and they hold out objects which they sing into existence or which they pull out of some other place

and these things are are you know like jewels and lights but also like consomme and old farts and yesterday

and high-speed in other words they are made of non-material made of juxtapositions of qualities

that are impossible in three-dimensional space what they're like is and in fact this is probably what

what they are what they're like is they're like three and four and five-dimensional puns and you know how the pleasure

of a pun lies in the fact that it is it's not that the meaning flickers from a to b it's that it's simultaneously a and b

and b and when the pun is really funny it's an a b c d pun and it's simultaneously all these things

well that quality which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output

in other words a printed pun in the dmt world objects can do this objects can simultaneously manifest

more than one nature at once and for some and like upon the result is always funny it's amusing you cannot help but be

delighted by this thing doing this thing well so these syntactical animals or these linguistic elves are pulling this stuff

out and gesturing with it pushing it in your face saying look at this look at this and you are fascinated you know

pulled into it because each one is you know what how can this be happening it's it's not we're not in the world anymore

we're not in the word no artist however gifted could make one of these objects because they have qualities

extremely difficult to language qualities that no object in this world has and and so you're trying to wrap your mind

and say my god you know what is it because in spite of the fact that it's just a little thing you can tell by

looking at it that its implications are earth-shaking in other words that if I could suddenly pull one of these things

out of hyperspace and we would all look at it we would all realize that that was the ball game right there that

somehow this proved it was it did it ended it started it made it clear how can this be well I don't know you had to be

there sort of and then what lies be and then you what lies behind this or as you try to analyze the situation

you realize that these objects that these things are making are made by utterances that sound is how this trick is done

and meanwhile these things are saying or beaming at you the general vibe is strangely enough do not

give way to astonishment do not abandon yourself to wonder get a grip try to get a grip and notice what we're doing

pay attention this is the mantra pay attention pay attention somebody once asked me you know is it

dangerous and the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment but but death by astonishment is entirely

possible I'm not kidding I mean you are so fucking astonished that you you never felt your astonishment

astonishment circuits get a workout like that before I mean what is astonishment in this world it's like oh

this is a different form of astonishment this is

you know so

and and then the whole notion that's being pushed here is

is do this thing do this activity do as we do and you can sort of feel your intentionality or your inner something or

other reorganizing and there's this like heat it's quite akin to heartburn I won't metaphysicize

it but heat in your stomach and it just

moves up and then your mouth flies open and

you do you this stuff comes out which is a very highly

articulated syntactically controlled

non-english non-european

language behavior of some sort not

strictly speaking though I call it glossolalia

it's strictly speaking is not glossolalia glossolalia has been carefully

studied and it's a trance like

state on the

floors of these Pentecostal churches

in Guatemala

they measured pools of saliva

16 inches across

from people

who were in

ecstatic glossolalia this

is much more conscious

much more controlled it's almost like

a kind of spontaneous singing

but your mind steps aside

and this linguistic stuff

comes out and

you can see it

that's the amazing thing

it is not to be heard

even though it is carried

as an acoustical signal

its meaning resides

in what happens to it

when the acoustical signal is processed

by the visual cortex

that's the important thing

it is a new kind of language

it's a visible

three-dimensional language

it's not something

it's not something I ever heard about

or any mystical tradition

I ever heard about anticipated

but it's

it's as though

the process or the project

of language

which according to academic linguists

began no more than 50,000 years ago

the process of

doing language

in us

is not yet finished

and this thing we do with small

mouth noises

and each of us consulting

our own learned dictionary

and quickly decoding

each other's intent

this is a stumble bum

cobbled together

half-assed way to do

language

and what

we're on the brink of

or what these psychedelic states

seem to hold out

is a much more seamless

kind of fusion of minds

by generating topological manifolds

that we look at

rather than

that we

you know

localize into

designated

meaning

I didn't mention ayahuasca

this rap

but ayahuasca being the

along with the mushrooms

a natural

and shamanically

used for many millennia

doorway into these places

and what you find in

ayahuasca groups in the

upriver tribal situation

is people

the whole way the

ayahuasca taking

is set up

is to facilitate singing

the shamans get loaded

then they sing

then they go outside

and take a leak

and smoke

and talk

and in those intervals

you hear people say

things like

you know

I liked the

the violet

and yellow

part

but I thought

the olive drab

with the silver spattering

was way over the top

and you think

you know

what kind of a

kind of a critique

of a song is that

well it's the critique

of a song that is designed

to be looked at

nobody talks about

the sound

everybody talks about

the visual impression

left

by

the sound

and the

it was these

groups

these ayahuasca taking

groups that

when the German

ethnographers

got into the Amazon

in the early part

of the 20th century

they called

this chemical

telepathine

they recognized

you know

that

and the reputation

of ayahuasca is

group states of mind

well if you're naive

then you think

you're going to hear

everybody thinking

no

you're going to see

everyone

thinking

you know

you're going to see

what people mean

and

it's not that surprising

when you think of it

because obviously

the world arrives

at the surface

of our skin

as a seamless

body of

electromagnetic

and acoustical

and pheromonal

data

it's just that our eyes

our nostrils

our ears

our skin

we break up

this incoming flow

of data

and I

now we're close to

McLuhan country

here

I think what this hints

at

is that print

skewed

our

perceptual

our

perceptual

our perceptual apparatus

or our

style

of

parsing

perceptual data

toward

the acoustic space

so that for us

thought became a voice

you know

and very early in the Western tradition

this is so

Jehovah is a voice

in the Old Testament

the Logos

is a voice

in Hellenistic

philosophy

we're

the people

of the voice

you know

there's a passage

in

Philo

Judea

where he

talks about

the etymology

of the word

Israel

and he says

Israel

means

he who sees

God

he who sees

God

and then he says

he's

poses the question to himself

what is the more perfect

Logos

and then he says

the more perfect

Logos

is that Logos

which goes

from being

heard

to being

seen

without

ever passing

over

a

moment

of

noticeable

transition

well I've actually

seen

this happen

in psychedelic

states

where

you will be lying

in silent darkness

you hear

distant music

and

as

the music

gets closer

it's like a band

with

lights

and drums

coming over a hill

as the music

gets louder

it seems to

physically approach

and

a confusion

of light

turns into

you know

oom-pa-pa

brass band

dancing elves

cavorting

harlequins

and

less easily

described

denizens

of the imagination

and then it all

goes

thumping

and marching past

and disappears

but

it's a perfect example

of light

and sound

arriving together

in the hallucinogenic

space

the fact

that

we've talked here

or mentioned

that we have

DMT

in our

pineal glands

in our brains

what we haven't said

is we also have

compounds in that same

organ

very much like

what's in ayahuasca

occurring in the human

pineal gland

is a compound called

adenoroglomerotropine

but when you

give it its physical

chemical

nomenclature

it turns out

it's 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmelan

6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmelan

it's a very near relative

of harmine

and harmeline

so

I'm

you know

it doesn't

strain me to believe

that

perhaps in looking

at this phenomenon

we have

actually put our

finger on the place

the cutting edge

of the evolution of consciousness

right now

at the biochemical level

what's happening is

there is a

a shifting

or an acceleration

of the concentration

of harmine like

alkaloids and DMT

in the human pineal

and it's affecting

our probability

to process language

and it's pushing

and exacerbating

a bias

toward visual understanding

and I see this then

also reinforced

and accelerated

by the evolution of media

media

you know

in the last 150 years

we go from

photography

to color photography

to moving

colored photography

with sound

with stereophonic sound

and you know

pointing toward virtual reality

with more and more money

and more money

to be made

at each

step of the way

and clearly

with the

amounts of money

now it's

we're outspending

defense

for entertainment

we will produce

simulacrums

of imaginary worlds

and you know

engineering bench tests

will be to make it

as much like Hawaii

as possible

or as much like

Tibet

as possible

but what people will

really want to do

with these things

is make worlds

as strange

as we can stand

that are

in these virtual places

so whether it comes

through a natural evolution

of the human nervous system

or the evolution

of an advanced interface

with prostheses

that create virtual realities

I think the transformation

of how we do language

is part of this acceleration

into singularity

yeah

I believe you made a reference

in one of your books

to Julian James' book

The Origin of Consciousness

and the breakdown of bicameral mind

and the way we evolved

and God was like

a auditory hallucination

before I guess

our consciousness

really developed

and we were thinking

human beings

yeah Julian James

it didn't win him

too many friends

but he wrote a big book

and had this theory

that this thing

which we call

the ego

is so recent

in human beings

that it actually

didn't exist

at the time of Homer

and he goes into Homer

and he shows

that the God

always breaks through

in situations

of crisis

and danger

and he felt

that

before Homeric times

people were

essentially like

ants

or something

that they

their behavior

was largely

instinctual

and that the only time

they encountered

this phenomenon

of free will

the interrupting

of the instinctual pattern

was in situations

of great crisis

and impending danger

and then this thing

would literally

almost come out

of the sky

and say

get your ass

out of there

save yourself

well

then

over time

this

ability

to access

this higher

informational thing

was

like

again

the metaphor

of insisted

closed over

with the membrane

of the self

and made part

of the machinery

of the self

and that this is

what the ego is

the ego is

a Greek god

that you have frozen

like an ice cube

behind your eyes

and that you think

you are

this thing

and that

you know

this is just

a cultural myth

a necessary

weird idea

no more a true

statement

about the nature

of the mind

of the hominid

even

anything else

one of the conclusions

that novelty theory

leads to

in terms of its

feedback

into

social

here and now

stuff

is the idea

that

culture

is not your

friend

that culture

is a

an impediment

to

understanding

what's going

on

that's why

to my mind

the word

cult

and the word

culture

have a direct

relationship

to each other

culture is

a cult

you know

and if you feel

revulsion

at the thought

of somebody

you know offering

to the great carrot

or tithing

to some squirrely

notion

just notice

that your own

culture

is

an extremely

repressive

cult

that leads

to all kinds

of humiliation

and degradation

and automatic

and unquestioned

unthinking

behavior

there's

a tendency

to want

to celebrate

culture

springing

both

from the

French deconstructionists

and their fascination

with culture

and then

the

the effort

to build pride

through ethnicity

thing

well

that's all

very fine

but I think

the cultures

we should all

revere our

our ancestral cultures

the cultures

most of us

have our roots in

the actual culture

we came from

was probably

fairly squirrely

I mean

the American family

is what keeps

American psychotherapy

alive

and well

this is a cauldron

for the production

of neurosis

and

in some cases

little else

so

you know

part of

part of what

psychedelics do

is they

decondition you

from cultural

values

this is what makes

it such a political

hot potato

you know

if there's anything

since all culture

is a kind of

con game

the most dangerous

candy you can

hand out

is candy

which causes people

to start questioning

the rules

of the game

so you can have a

Stalinist state

a parliamentary

democracy

and

and a theocratic

state

and they all

can agree on

one thing

that psychedelics

are just

terrible

because

you know

then citizens

start asking all

kinds of hard

questions

and

and the

devotion

to the values

of the fatherland

become mired

in

pseudo intellectual

discourse

and

the next thing

you know

somebody has to be shipped

off to the camps

in order to

right

the situation

no

it definitely works

in the personal life

like I

you know

I've been building a house

in Hawaii

and while I've been building it

definitely cut back my intake

of psychedelics

because I don't want the answer

to the question

is this a good idea

until it's too late

to do anything about it

it's like St. Augustine's prayer

God grant me chastity

and count

and countenance

but not yet

yeah

the big ideas

that seems to be

in the notion

of the archaic revival

is that

the whole big thing

is really

conscious

and alive

the universe

the galaxy

the larger entities

and that's interesting

because it's a traditional

belief

that's held by

non-modern

non-scientific

cultures

and if in fact

our belief systems

aren't taking us

in that direction

such that that makes sense

to us

it's really interesting

but it also

sort of upsets

the current

description of evolution

within the

say the darkness

because

that seems to be

you know

based on the idea

that all material

and life is a big accident

that's moving forward

so I think

that one of the

you're talking about

today

is teleology

is going to

itself evolve

and absorb this

you know

whether or not one day

about understand that

and which is whether or not

you can

nature

since self similarity

shows you

at various levels

similar principles

and since

on our level

as human beings

anything that we make

we first

think about

it begins as thought

and then it becomes matter

right

and so if creativity

could be seen

as having a fractal dimension

it would be a way

to talk about

all kinds of

creation

by simply

understanding it

and it would suggest

that to modify

the big bang theory

a little bit

before there's a big bang

there would have to be

a big block

that idea

so I want to ask you

to comment on that

but also in relation

to the idea that

is also contained

in evolution

about the origin

of language

because some of the things

you're speaking about

from your DMT experiences

have a funny resonance

with creation

so you need naming

the animal

I haven't really been

all that comfortable

with the idea

that language would evolve

out of grunts and groans

when

say it's all

a system in language

and all kinds of languages

could be very different

but inside

they always have

and nature

and ecosystems

and languages

always seem to pop out

fully formed

until you could think

that language

rather than involving

from grunts and groans

evolved

in the opposite direction

that the first time

language was used

it was used with the power

that you ascribed

to the machine elves

that it was something

that was done

carefully and precisely

because it could manifest

form

or something like that

well

species come into

it's an accident

that there will be

a mutation

and a new species

similar to another species

will be born

and it will survive

and that will lead

to a new species

and that any

female creature

which gives birth

to a new species

is going to perceive

that species

as a birth defect

and is maybe

not going to want

it to survive

and then there's only one

one

and so

that Barbara Cloud book

I read

talked about nine dimensions

and said the sixth dimension

was the morphogenetic field

from which

all species

and organisms evolved

so I was kind of thinking

maybe along the lines

of the metaphor

of the computer

there's a software program

in which new species

are developed

and designed

and the whole way

in which they

integrate themselves

into existing ecosystems

etc.

somehow or other

it all gets worked out

and there's a mystery

that we don't see

and don't understand

by which these new forms

come into being

maybe they all

come into being at once

with a thousand

or a million creatures

instead of just one

having a struggle

well all this raises

a lot of stuff

most of which

I can't remember

because of my

devotion to cannabis

but let's go back

to the thing

about language

and the origins

of language

yeah the origins

of language

let's talk about that

for a minute

I think that

I've been thinking

about this

because I've been writing

about it

and here's what

I've come up with

part of what makes it

difficult for us

to think about language

clearly

in English

is that this word

language

is used by us

to mean

spoken language

and it also means

the general class

of linguistic activity

as in computer language

body language

so forth and so on

and what we

just think clearly

about language

we need to have

a clear distinction

between spoken language

and the general

syntactical organization

of reality

language

because that is old

honey bees do it

dolphins do it

termites do it

they all do it

different ways

octopi do it

there is much

of language

in nature

in fact you could

argue that all of

nature

is a linguistic

enterprise

because the DNA

essentially

is a symbolic

system

those codons

which code

for protein

are arbitrarily

assigned

in other words

by convention

there is no

chemical

relationship

between the

codons

and the proteins

they code for

any more

than there is

a relationship

between an English

word

and the thing

it

tense those are just conventionalized by probability over time so language is

deep in nature what is not deep in nature is speech speech is as artificial as

the water wheel the bicycle pump the Tesla coil and the space shuttle somebody

figured this out somewhere well so then people say well but this is hard to

understand it's hard to picture how it could happen well here's how I think it

happened my little example about the songs earlier was a stab at this but

here's more it's that all kinds all non genetic behaviors which are called

reasonably enough epigenetic behaviors are nevertheless they're not simply

expressions of free will they are under the control of a looser system of rules

than the genetic rules which are chemical and absolute the epigenetic behaviors are

under the control of syntactical constraints in other words we need to expand the

concept of syntax from the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language

to the rules which govern the behavior of any complex system so for example before

speech among human beings I think it was probably very touchy-feely if you watch

monkeys you see this they touch each other they they they stroke they grant they groom

they goose they push they do all of these things the repertoire of this kind of behavior if you're good at it may

be on the order of having four or five thousand words in your vocabulary well when we watch primates do

this kind of behavior we don't think of it as a language but in fact it is it's a

gestural language a couple of years ago some research was done where these people

took pre-verbal infants and they taught them standard American sign language before

they could speak so these little tiny children could sign pick me up please change me where is daddy i'm hungry i want to watch tv

and before they could ever utter a word well now what we're always told about spoken language is it's this miracle and that we're genetically hardwired for it well these experiments seem to imply we're even more genetically hardwired for standard American sign language which is

something very few of us will ever learn to use what does this mean well it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalize and hence probably older so i think there was there was a gestural language as complex as standard English probably in place before anyone ever uttered a word now what the psychedelic

seem to suggest is that you can get so hyped up on tryptomines that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock and the normally acoustically modulated processing of language flows over into the voice box and you begin to literally articulate syntax

you begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that's organizing gestural intent and it's like going from carving in stone to color tv

your listener immediately transfers loyalty to this much more spectacular form of behavior and so it's like literally that the word burst forth full blown based on a platform of gestural syntax that had been maybe millions of years in its formation it was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical

practical intent through the body so instead of coming out at the end of the fingers it came out at the end of the tongue flapping in the air stream and and this thing happened it's amazing to me that the straight linguists you know if you go to an academic university and study linguistics will teach you that language is no more than 35 to 40 thousand years old

language is everything we are everything we do you can't you can't you can't do anything without it and yet if it's that new then what it represents is simply a technology a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media and it's not hard to see what it represents is simply a technology a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media

you know why after all it works in the dark that's good uh it allows politics you can make speeches to large groups of people uh and uh uh it's uh well it's just very portable it's the cleanest technology ever put in place it when you think about it it's one of the weirdest abilities human beings exhibit

behavior this is absolutely uh it's just how how they managed to do that uh and of course the

picture writing we understand but there is similar to the breakthrough to speech is the breakthrough

to a phonetic alphabet where you see aha we don't have to portray the thing we intend all we have to

portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend and then you know you're just

roaring forward and from there to the printing press what is it a couple of thousand years or

something and and and then there's no going back uh so that's the part about language now what was

the second part after that well just whether you could think about creativity as a principle that

could have a practical dimension and that would be a way to think about design on a larger universal

order is having some consciousness well if you think of the universe as a as an engine which

it produces and conserves novelty and you think of it as a fractal thing a fractal hierarchy built up

and built downward of subsets of itself then in a sense every creative act is the paradigmatic act

of of the big bang i mean it always struck me you know that the end of the novelty wave which is up

down oscillate zero it's like it's a general map of all process we could be describing the life of the

energy output of a star or the firing of a single neuron or the birth and death of an economy uh in a

sense you get down to a fractal level where you can say all processes are the same they have a beginning

a middle and an end and if you know where you are in this concatenation of process you you can sort of

locate yourself in the cosmic domain uh the the thing that i tried to talk about this morning that we

need to map into our maps of reality is the acceleration i think it's a really weird idea to talk about a

thousand years in the future i mean good grief a thousand years in the future what do you imagine

will be left standing that you call home uh what would cast your mind back a thousand years king

canute was taking charge of things across northern northumbria and the anglo-saxons were making forays

along the coast of norway and uh you know very few of the concerns of the day have survived to this

moment and that was the slow moving part of the process we're going to move uh you know in the next

ten years further than we've moved since the time of king canute to to this morning so uh

it seems to me the most unlikely future scenario is one which assumes things will stay more or less the

same because we've put in place all these processes designed to make sure that does not happen you know

rapacious capitalism technological innovation bourgeois as social aspirations in the hearts of every man

woman and child on the planet uh urbanization connectivity all of these processes are designed to erase

reality as we as we as we know it yeah but you think of the uh kind of athletic uh paradigm uh involving the

states of consciousness they're called the waking state the true state and the smooth state and transcendental

force state and they use that on individual basis but also in regards to cosmology genesis and in fact

criticize the west saying well the west has taken the waking state as expanded and evolved its philosophy

philosophical views without accounting for these other states of consciousness well certainly the west

has built its house on a on a narrow foundation denying these other possibilities um

um on the other hand the under you know if well you get into all kinds of difficulties here how do you judge

whether or not a civilization has assimilated or explored the domains it's named its own uh one way is by

looking at the technological applications that it's created and for all this talking about these other

states of mind they seem actually as mysterious to the east as they are to the west uh i don't get the feeling

they're really navigating through what they're talking about in the past there may have been levels of

understanding it may be see that uh psychology though it's a mystery to us it may be that it's an easier

not to crack than the nut of matter and so i don't have any trouble believing that vedic india of 3500 bc may

have known all kinds of things about how the mind works and how to navigate through these imaginal spaces that

we've lost but the spirituality of modern india is thoroughly contaminated by 500 by a thousand years of commerce with islam and the west

uh it isn't that different really i mean vedic theology and german idealism are strikingly similar cousins

yeah cultural regularly it seems to me that a lot of the stimulus for novelty that was generated by the psychedelic

experience now may be generated without any virtual reality technological advancements and perhaps

would maybe make the psychedelic experience most necessary in order to be a point to observe

well definitely what you're getting at is the technology itself is a kind of psychedelic drug

that you know by chance or design the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it's totally

acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment uh and put it out that way so

the the the web is incredibly subversive simply the fact that all that information is there and available

in a world where control of access to information has always been the game

so yeah the way i see it is that the the psychedelic people

need to use the new information technologies to build more powerful and more compelling than the world has

ever seen uh call it virtual reality call it multimedia whatever you want but it's basically walk into

walk around boundaries will fall for ordinary people because you see when you build a virtual reality

in a sense what that technology is allowing you to do is it's allowing you to show people the inside of

your own head we have never had a technology that would do that we think the inside of our heads are all the

same but you know when i say to you that when i smoke dmt it unleashes a niagara of alien beauty if i had spent

the last 30 years building that niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go

then we would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going and so i really see art

as the great searchlight that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead and i think that art is about to

get teeth for the first time in human history i mean it's all very fine scratching on cave walls and film and

video and all that but it's always artifice you know you won't you never are convinced uh or only for

seconds that you're in the presence of reality when you're in the presence of art but we will build

art that will literally stand your hair on in and the amount of creativity in a single human mind is

as i said more than fills all the museums of this planet so what we need is to figure out how to get a

spigot into that and get this stuff out and then as james joyce said man will be dirigible well as

you may have surmised by now the way terence ran his uh workshops or at least that weekend was to

not use any kind of an outline but instead just respond to questions that would take us as he called it

into the valley of novelty i think that was the title of the workshop that weekend i've heard this

tape actually probably a half a dozen times or more now and you know i still hear something new each

time i listen to it so that's what i really uh recommend that you do right now you know go back

to the beginning of terence's talk and re-listen to it right now while it's fresh in your mind you know

there's there's a lot of really important information here that you don't want to miss and what i think

sometimes happen is terence will say something and you'll be off in the clouds thinking about what

he said and you'll miss about six thoughts in the meantime because he's a pretty rapid fire thinker

and before you go i just want to thank you again for joining this extended family of now thousands

of us here in the psychedelic salon it's good to get together with you again and jacques cordell

and wells my friends in chatul hayuk thanks again for the use of your great music here in the psychedelic

salon and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends

greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon

well first of all let me thank those of you who sent me emails to let me know that you're enjoying

these podcasts i do read all of them but you'll have to forgive me for not being too good at responding

do the best i can but as much as i'd i'd like to answer each of you i found that it was just taking

too much of my time away from a new book i'm working on so until i get that project finished i hope you don't

feel too bad that i have an answer each of you personally but as uh you can probably see i am

listening to your requests uh particularly the uh the uh loud and clear request i just uh recently

got to hear more of the terence mckenna seminar from the summer of 1998 and so uh without any further

need for an introduction on my part here's a continuation of last week's podcast of the

terence mckenna workshop where he was waxing eloquently about all things novel we said i think take

psychedelics you go and so this world of transience and flux becomes an eternal world so in that sense

it's the same thing uh whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing i think depends

on your meditation and your psychedelics uh meditations different meditations strive for

different things much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena this certainly would not be a

description of the psychedelic states have been complete merging complete ego loss and becoming a

oneness and that's another one but those have been both with the mushrooms and the

now through my highest meditation experiences it has been very similar where there is no self sense of

self and other it is it's just a flash of everythingness and nothingness it's non-doable seemingly

the center of singularity where holes clashing through each other where we're getting to another

dimension well in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum the most elegant

thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting point and the ending point

are are the same place yeah it's the place where all all is cotangent uh how we could get the universe

back into the primal dot in 12 years i don't know but there are some schemes to do that there's always

schemes to do it you know if the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation and it had an anti-matter

twin in a higher super space then there would be the potential at least for them to collide across all

points simultaneously and you would actually get the universe of matter disappearing instantly and you

would then be left with the universe made only of photons because they don't have an antiparticle what a

universe purely made of light what its physics would be like is hard to say but it sounds peculiarly like

certain gnostic hierophanies about gathering the light and and returning the light ultimately the meditation

path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data if the claims of both are to be respected

which is that they give deeper knowledge about uh about reality yeah as a kind of connection between that

and the point that you were just making previously about the expression of those uh interstates through

art whether what um your view might be on the use of some of the technologies today that are aimed at

providing access to those interstates in uh in a more uh you've mentioned about the psychedelic one of the

problems of the problems is bringing back the information and um so i'm thinking here about some of the

uh routines and particularly the technology of robert monroe aimed at providing to those states such that you

could bring that information all for it i just haven't seen anything that convinced me that anybody

had achieved it to any degree of significance uh yeah you know imagine a drug that did nothing more than

allow you to remember your dreams i mean that's not exactly shooting for the moon pharmacologically these

days and yet a drug which allowed you full recovery of your dreams might unleash god knows what because we don't

know what we dream uh the chemistry of dmt suggests that in deep rem sleep it's possible every single night you have a dmt flash but the it does not

transcript into short-term memory so uh or imagine a drug which allowed you to uh

uh enhanced long-term memory so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago and play it back

moment by moment by moment uh these again this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically we're not

talking immortality here we're just talking simple uh neurochemistry but all of these possibilities would

change uh life beyond recognition uh and i think these things should be pursued by any means necessary

you know it's a false dichotomy the the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things on the

match and they're not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics i this is just a con to keep

uh lineages in business i think because they don't want you going off the ranch and and uh charting your

own course uh but where shamanism becomes priestcraft it's already well on its way to senescence

uh terence what are you collectively perceiving together as a group taking mushrooms you collectively

perceiving similar phenomena without speaking in couple situations i've had telepathic things i've had in

group situations very quasi telepathic social interactions for what i mean by that is i'm recalling

an evening many years ago taking ayahuasca with these people and they had a weird scene going the shaman

was a good guy and a good shaman but he had a nephew who was a jerk and was sort of a pimp and kind of a

hustler and uh and the shaman was singing with his three friends these ancient ancient songs and this guy was

drunk on a guardiente and he would sing against them he would sing against them and this was in peru and

if you know the style of rural peruvians people are so polite and so not up front that no social problem

is ever dealt with directly people will will tolerate incredible bad behavior without turning on the person

and saying listen you're completely out of line knock it off so 30 people 30 peruvian campesinos were

witnessing this sing against and and the woman i was with at the time very much didn't like what was going

on and at the end of this this nephew the sobrino at the end of his song of raucous interruption i looked

up just as he ended the room was almost complete darkness i looked up just as he ended i saw her

look up and look at him with a look of utter disgust and when these red dot dart things got to him

it knocked him off his feet and i heard the old shaman was sitting right to my left and i heard him

turn to his friend and he said ah the gringa sends the the and so it was like wow

but you know then ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself and moves forward and there's no

time to say wait a minute folks says something paranormal just happened here i want to interview

everybody get your impression uh it's never you know when it's real it's always caught up in the

on moving flow of events well if you've taken the what you don't want to do is take here's this is

reasonable advice too i think where the problem area lies people think it lies in taking too much

it lies in taking too little because if you take too little you can resist it you can struggle with it

and then it can turn into a real mess because you're afraid of it and you actually have the power to some

degree to resist it what you want to do is take enough escape and that the transition from ordinary

reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible because the going up is somewhat terrifying for

example let's use psilocybin as the model here's how it works for me this is not tea this is eating raw

mushrooms it comes on more slowly

So, after an hour or so, you know, and the way I do it is I sit.

As soon as the mushroom enters my body, I sit and meditate.

I noticed in South America, they don't do it like this.

They dose the ayahuasca, and then everybody just goes on talking about their motorcycles

and the jobs at the sawmill and who's conning.

It's like totally, they toss it, there's a brief moment, they pour, they toss it down,

then they all go back to raving at each other about mundane life.

And then 30 minutes later, on the dot, the shaman blows his whistle or shakes his shakupah,

his leaf, dry leaf bouquet, and everybody settles down and it's like it comes on within two minutes.

As soon as the guy starts singing, he just invokes it.

The way I do it is I take the mushroom or the ayahuasca, and then I sit and I roll bomb and knead them,

and I just sit as I'm going to sit during the trip.

And I've unplugged the telephone and I've gotten everything squared away,

and it begins to come on at about the 40 minute or the 60 minute mark.

And there's sometimes some nausea as it comes on.

And then I smoke a bomber, or half a bomber.

And then it catapults it into the full deployment of the thing, where you just hang on.

There's about a 25 minute period where all, your only job is to hang on.

It builds.

It's like watching an atomic explosion on the other side of 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal glass.

I mean, you can't believe this is happening, quote unquote, in my mind.

You have the feeling that everybody from Seattle to San Diego is just crawled under their desk

as this thing tore past.

But it's in your mind.

And then there is the interaction with it, which moment to moment are pretty coherent.

But you lose it.

A lot of it does not transcribe into short-term memory.

And then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable.

The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it,

because language fails.

Because English, there are no words.

There are no words even close.

I mean, sometimes you'll bring out an image or a metaphor,

but out of five hours of tripping, you bring out half a notebook page of metaphors,

and yet you were entirely engaged during that time.

Now, this question about fear, which is a real question,

because when everything begins to slide,

if you are not, if it's more than most people who haven't done it,

I've heard that they've understood it's really going to happen,

and it's really going to happen to you,

and there's a tendency to clutch or to try and resist it,

the thing to do in those situations, I think,

and it's counterintuitive to how Western people think,

but the thing to do is to sit up,

not to assume the fetal position.

See, what you might tend to do is assume the fetal position

and tell yourself,

my God, this is the most appalling thing that's ever happened to me.

If I can just live through it, it'll be all right.

I've taken this drug.

If I can just wait through,

how long did they say it will be?

Seven hours.

I see it started two minutes ago.

If I can just, no, the thing to do is to sit up

and to sing, practical people,

to oxygenate your brain,

to move this, the entire,

this thing that's happened to you,

though it may have one claw in heaven,

its roots are in your neurophysiology

and in the chemistry of the drug.

You want to move your physiology around.

So oxygenating your brain can't fail to do this.

So you sing.

And this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power,

control, equilibrium, and so forth and so on.

Not always.

I mean, let's face it.

You're a product of a nutty society

and there are unexamined crevices

and uncleaned out drain traps in all of us.

And you're going to encounter that stuff.

The good news is,

the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that.

You will quickly discover taking psychedelics

that either you can work through your personal issues

and become a psychedelic explorer

or this is just stronger medicine

than you are up for

and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis

or whatever works for you.

Some people just can't take it.

Why is that?

Well, because what it does is it dissolves boundaries.

And most of us are over boundary defined.

But some of us are having an uphill battle

getting some boundaries in place

and realizing we are not the telephone

or the tree or the person we live with.

And so for those people

who are having trouble establishing

and maintaining boundaries,

this is the last thing on earth

they should get involved.

Cannabis.

In the state that you're experiencing,

the whole lot of ego or boundaries,

is it possible that your physical self

could just literally stop?

Because I have...

Well, people often, yes, wonder.

Often people wonder.

You get into a place where it's so unfamiliar

that the question comes up,

have I done it this time?

You know?

Am I dying?

Or am I in danger?

The answer is,

the odds are incredibly against you

being seriously in danger.

People don't die from psychedelics

unless they have heart conditions

or some incredibly rare medical condition.

The problem is that the ego feels threatened

by the boundary dissolution.

And its ace is your self-identification with it.

And it can actually say to you,

you are dying.

And here's the evidence.

You have to say, no.

It's unlikely.

And sing your way through it.

But this is really tough.

I mean, this is, you know,

the Buddhists talk about slaying the ego.

This is slaying the ego for real.

You must slay it.

Otherwise, it will spread panic

into your whole psychological system.

It will give way to panic and hysteria.

So, unless there is some real reason

to think you're dying,

and you should have done your homework,

you should know what to expect.

For example,

if you take LSD

and begin intense bouts of vomiting,

this is not a proper reaction to LSD.

Something is wrong,

either with the LSD

or with your relationship to it.

You should know what a tip,

because a typical trip

will put you through changes,

but is not dangerous.

But if you suddenly begin exhibiting

some symptom,

heart fibrillation,

or something like that,

then you want to have,

this is why then there's always

the issue of the buddy system.

Should there be somebody else there?

And what about all that?

My position is,

if you're anxious,

then you should have a sitter.

If you're going to do it alone,

you should certainly tell someone,

so that they will check on you

after a while.

I don't like doing it in groups

or with sitters,

because inevitably,

I get spun into them.

Go as deep as possible,

and even if I'm alone

with one other person,

culture is the third guess.

If you start,

I mean,

I've often found myself

in the middle of psychedelic trips

thinking,

I'm sure glad there's nobody else here

to see this,

because I'm sure it would alarm

an observer,

because I have my leg thrown

back up over my neck,

and I'm screaming in Urdu

or something.

But it's okay.

After a few minutes,

it's okay.

But if there were an observer,

they would feel the need

to do something.

And often,

like I've seen people

smoking DMT,

and people moan,

and they say,

no,

and they moan.

So then,

you know,

you get them back together

and constitute it,

and you say,

how was it?

And you say,

it was fantastic.

So you realize,

you know,

how they present

is not reliable.

Well,

setting has a great deal

to do with it,

and setting is a very complicated issue.

Setting means everything

from the astrological situation

at the time that you do it

to the physical surrounding

that you're in.

And it's also,

it's a roll of the dice.

You never know exactly

what you're going to get.

As far as the question

about Buddhism and all that,

you know,

when I started taking LSD,

I thought I saw

in Tibetan Tonka painting

and mandalas,

the echoes

of the same world,

pursued it,

went to Nepal,

studied Tibetan,

collected the art.

It's similar.

I don't know

what degree

the Buddhists,

the Mahayanists,

realize those states

without psychedelics.

I do know

that with those meditations,

those techniques,

those insights

are supercharged.

And I would suspect

that Tibetan Buddhism,

as it has its roots

in Vedic Hinduism,

there may be,

in its past,

Buddhism was brought

to Tibet

in 741

by Padma Sambhava.

There was an autofenous

shamanism

already present

throughout the Himalayas,

the Penpo.

And it was largely

based on cannabis

intoxication

at that point

in history,

not so much

in the present.

But I think

that this is

a fruitful area.

I just can't believe

that Mahayana Buddhism

could have gotten

as far as it did

without some reliance

on psychedelics.

And of course,

cannabis,

we in the West,

our style

is to smoke it.

And that's

a very mild

way of dealing

with it.

I mean,

if you eat,

if you have

unlimited amounts

of high-grade cannabis

and you eat

grams and grams

of it,

you will have

experiences

as extreme

as anything

that psilocybin

or ayahuasca

can deliver to you.

You only have

to read

the descriptions

of 19th century

writers

on cannabis.

Fitzhugh Ludlow,

S. Weir Mitchell,

these people,

their descriptions

of their trips

are as psychedelic

and as out of control

as any acid

reportage

or psilocybin

reportage.

So,

the relationship

of Indian

and Buddhist

spirituality

to cannabis

and other psychedelics

is not well

understood.

We do know

that the whole

Rig Veda

is a hymn

to a drug,

Soma.

But we don't know

what Soma is.

Well,

the fact that

invited

such a 95th

mandala

of the Rig Veda

says,

Soma is

greater than

Brahman,

greater than

Indra.

Could such

a great thing

be forgotten

and lost?

What culture

that how could

you possibly

that it must

have?

I think you

have to push

these psychedelics

to reach

these unitary

states.

What it

seemed,

what always

fascinated me

was hallucination

because it

seemed,

it was to me

the proof

that I was

dealing with

something outside

myself.

Well,

and here

was stuff

that amazed

me,

that I

couldn't make

up on my

own,

or that would,

you know,

a single image

would have taken

me hours

to draw and

figure out,

and here I was

getting 28 frames

a second

of this

unpredictable

stuff.

One of the

nice things

about the

tryptamines,

I think,

is they leave

the sense of

self pretty

much intact.

In other words,

it doesn't

distort who

you are.

It does

something to

your sensory

input.

DMT is

very surprisingly

like that.

You smoke

DMT,

you are

immediately

plunged into

an alien

universe,

but if you

can keep

pure wits

about you

and actually

notice how

you feel,

you don't

feel any

different.

You're not

smarter,

stupider,

you're not

more excited,

or once

you get

the initial

panic under

control,

you realize,

you know,

my God,

it didn't

lay a finger

on me.

I'm me,

I'm entirely

intact.

What has

happened is

that the

world has

been completely

replaced by

something

completely

unrecognizable,

an alien

that I have

no words

for,

that's

blowing my

mind,

that's

ripping apart

my philosophical

machinery as

I gaze upon

it.

But when I

bring my

attention back

into my

body,

I discover

I'm fine,

I'm okay.

It didn't

change my

mind,

you could

almost say.

It changes

100% the

reality around

you.

That's

powerful

because it

appears objective.

I mean,

the impression

you have

when you

smoke DMT

is,

this isn't

a drug,

that's

ridiculous.

Drugs,

you know,

make you

smarter,

make you

stupider,

make you

fall down,

make you

stay awake.

We know

what drugs

are.

This is

no drug,

this is

something

else,

hiding

under the

label

drug.

This is

a doorway

into another

modality that

exists all

the time,

independent of

my thoughts

or feelings

about it.

Is that

true?

Well,

I don't

know.

But it

certainly

doesn't seem

to be a

place constructed

to fit

human

expectations.

Like,

one of the

things that

always troubled

me about

DMT being

somewhat of

a Jungian

bent was

the question,

how come

there's no

hint of

this in

any

mythology

or religious

tradition

or alchemical

text or

fairy tale

or dream

or anything

else?

I mean,

if this is

so important

a part of

what it is

to be a

human being,

how can

it be so

deeply

buried,

so secret,

so unknown,

and yet just

one toke

away?

It's like

the,

it's still

that confounds

me,

because you

can read

all the

Hindu

scripture

or Sufi

mysticism

or all

the stuff

you want.

Occasionally,

sure,

you'll find

a phrase

or two

that could

be mapped

onto a

DMT state,

but nobody

has trumpeted

it,

nobody has

said,

this is

what it

is,

and yet,

as I say,

it's spread

throughout

nature,

it's been

known since

aboriginal

times,

we used

to years

and years

ago call

it the

secret,

and in

a way

it really

is the

secret.

Jorge

Luis

Borges

has a

story

called

The Cult

of the

Phoenix,

and he

talks about

a secret

that seems

profound

and yet

preposterous

to the

initiates,

and one

child may

initiate

another,

and ruins

are good

places

to do

this,

and he

just goes

on like

this for

a page

and a

half,

where you

realize

he must

be talking

about

DMT.

Yeah.

As you

brought up

before,

you're talking

about the

ego and

the consciousness

that I can't

say,

if we're

looking at

the ego

as a

fairly

recent

phenomenon,

and the

way I'm

sensing it,

the ego

is the

sense

itself,

and it

really

is that

constant

this is

me,

this is

what I

know,

and the

mystic

tradition

say the

true

so-called

enlightened

state is

the deconstruction

of the

sense

itself.

So doesn't

it seem

that the

this is

what I'm

getting

from the

journey I'm

taking,

I'm getting

intimation,

not of

the loss

of myself,

but it is

a sense

of the loss

of myself

in fact,

it's like

intimation

of the

future

where we're

functioning

on such

a different

level

that it's

beyond that

ego

construct.

You know,

we're really

telepathically

in connection,

the whole

sense of

self as

being this

limitation

of this

is me,

this is what

I know,

my history

is gone.

Yeah,

the great

cultural

accomplishment

of western

civilization

is this

thing called

the free

individual,

but now

that we're

on the

brink

of the

electronic

dispensation,

exactly

what we're

going to

do with

the free

individual

and how

that's

going to

look in

an era

where

consciousness

flows through

a thousand

portals,

it's not

at all

clear.

It's not

clear whether

we can

somehow

now carry

the idea

of the

free

individual

to an

even

higher

level

where

each of

us

will become

a kind

of

god

lord

over

our

own

creation

as

vast

in

time

and

space

but

virtual

as

the

cosmos

in which

we find

ourselves

embedded

or

whether

the

free

individual

is

going to

turn out

to have

been

the

problem

all

along

and

we're

going

to

abandon

it

and

become

some

kind

of

socialist

gas

or

some

collectivist

swarm

a

hive

mind

a

world

where

intelligence

flows

where

needed

and

identity

is

provisional

and

fleeting

and

unanchored

to

place

or

body

I

mean

much

of

this

goes

on

the

internet

you know

you can

be

an

eleven

year

old

girl

you

can

be

whatever

you

want

you

can

build

your

avatar

and

present

yourself

in

many

guises

it's

much

more

rock

and

roll

I

think

that

you

know

we

see

shamanism

from

the

outside

with

the

values

of

western

civilization

unconsciously

applied

in cultures

that are

taking

psychedelics

this

thing

which

we

call

singing

is

a

very

know

that

you

know

it's

an

ecstatic

and

complicated

and

synesthesia

experience

I mean

to

make

of

your

body

a

vibrator

for

sound

to

you

know

move

out

into

the

Pythagorean

octaves

with

the

human

voice

and

how

capable

of

sound

human

beings

are

no

other

animal

has

the

range

but

I think

we

had

a

lot

of

this

range

and

control

before

that

we

use

very

know

knowledgeably

like

ancestors

getting

90%

of the

nuance

of

these

meanings

because

they

go

so

gracelessly

into

English

when

a

shaman

talks

about

spirit

he's

using

a

term

as

technically

complicated

in his

mind

as

when

a

physicist

uses

the

term

beauty

to

describe

a

quark

you

know

it's

very

technically

defined

and we

tend

to

simplify

and then

suppose

that we

understand

part of

the thing

I found

with

hanging

with

shamans

in various

places

and times

is

that once

you get

past

the

language

barrier

what

shamans

are

simply

curious

people

intellectuals

of a

certain

type

in

Australian

aboriginal

says

I'm a

clever

fella

they

mean

you

know

I'm

a

shaman

well

that's

all

it

is

you

know

it's

somebody

who

pays

attention

to

how

things

actually

work

and

sort

of

transcends

the

culture

by

that

means

it's

a

weird

paradox

it's

that

the

shamans

who

are

the

keepers

of

the

cultural

values

are

also

necessarily

of

the

keepers

of

the

secrets

of

theatrics

and

so

they

live

their

lives

in

the

light

of

the

knowledge

that

it

all

rests

on

show

biz

you

know

everybody

else

is

a

true

believer

but

these

are

the

image

makers

the

people

who

actually

pull

the

strings

and

control

the

evolution

of

the

mythologies

and

in a

way

it's

a

situation

of

alienation

Mersilliad

talks

a lot

about

this

in

shamanism

the

archaic

techniques

of

ecstasy

and

in

history

the

eternal

return

talks

about

how

the

shaman

is

socially

marginal

politically

marginal

lives

at the

edge

and

is

feared

by

the

people

because

due

dealings

with

the

shaman

are

always

dealings

about

life

and

death

but

then

the

shaman

comes

forward

in

this

critical

role

as

go-between

as

mediator

between

the

cultural

mind

and

the

diseases

and

fate

and

the

shaman

mediates

in

many

languages

the

word

for

shaman

means

go-between

so

the

cost

of

this

or

the

price

of

this

for

the

shaman

himself

or

herself

is

a

kind

of

alienation

from

the

cultural

values

and

a

kind

of

understanding

that

it's

just

a

it's

a game

that's

kept

in

play

and

this

is

true

in

our

culture

as

well

you

don't

think

the

people

who

market

all

this

crap

and

produce

all

this

bad

art

and so

forth

and so

on

love

it

or

watch

it

or

consume

it

they

market

it

it's

basic

purpose

is

to

delude

the

and

distract

the

masses

so

the

psychedelics

what

they

bring

into

that

shamanic

situation

is

sort

of

rocket

fuel

for

the

project

of

cultural

detoxification

or

gnostic

rocket

fuel

into

a

realm

of

cultural

alienation

and

then

and

from

that

point

of

view

then

these

other

dimensions

of

reality

come

into

being

and

understanding

comes

into

being

I mean

one of

the

things

I

call

this

is

it

really

helps

to be

educated

it

really

helps

to

cram

a lot

of

information

and

experience

into

your

head

because

the

logos

are in

hidden

god

that

is

trying

to

reach

down

to

you

and

deliver

the

message

is

a

collage

really

compose

the

message

except

out of

bits

and

pieces

of

what

you

already

possess

and

so

you

know

this

came

home

to

me

very

forcefully

when

I

developed

the

time

wave

out

of

the

yi

ching

and

its

sequence

because

at

the

times

when

I

was

most

inflated

in

my

thinking

or

most

grandiose

in

my

thinking

one

of

the

issues

for

me

personally

was

why

me

you

know

why

are

you

downloading

this

millenarian

visionary

revelation

on

me

and

the

answer

from

the

mushroom

was

fairly

humbling

who

has

ever

walked

through

this

pasture

who had these 64 hexagrams in your head.

And that's all we needed.

We were just waiting for somebody

who could bring that much to the party.

And then we could arrange the details

and the mapping and the arranging.

But they had to arrive with that much,

and you're the first person.

So it was like nothing about, you know,

my fine genes or cosmic destiny,

but that just I was the first termite to happen

by carrying the right scrap of information in their head

that this thing could then manipulate.

Well, most DMT in the underground

has been synthesized from indole.

It's a fairly simple process,

like third-year organic chemistry.

DMT does occur in nature in many plants,

but usually there is little of it,

so you have to process a lot,

or it occurs complexed with other tryptamines

that have various psycho and physiological activities

that you don't want,

and that's very difficult to separate them.

DMT in the underground is made by underground chemists,

and if any of them are listening,

you might consider making a bit more,

because it's hideously hard to,

if you had an IND,

if you had a license to give it to human subjects,

but so few people have such paper.

Ability to manifest these miracles

at a rush hour hamburger stand.

Aside from the story you mentioned,

No, no, the answer is,

the truthful answer is always complicated,

although the truth itself is always simple.

If you're asking me to tell a story of a miracle

that I still cherish as authentic hallucinations,

the book, because you can see why,

but here's an incident that happened at La Cerrera

that didn't make it into the invisible landscape,

I don't believe.

Dennis had this notion

of what he called the good shit.

This developed in the days

after the ideas about hypercarbillation,

and he claimed it was like a fantasy,

it was like a joke,

it wasn't clear exactly what it was,

but it was this idea

that there was this hash somewhere

that had been rolled into cow dung,

and cut with cow dung,

and then infected with psilocybin mycelium,

so that the mycelium had completely replaced

the cow shit in this ball of hash,

or this hypothesized kilos of hash

somewhere in the world.

And so there was this psilocybinated,

at one point he envisioned us

actually forming a rock and roll band

which would play instruments

that would condense this stuff

out of the air over large audiences,

and we would go on tour,

and at the end of the tour,

history would be,

the whole thing would be in a shambles,

because Uncle John's band

really did come out of the woodwork.

But so at one point,

he predicted,

one night after he had been moved to the river,

and was sort of in semi-incarceration,

he predicted that the good shit

would come that night.

And by this time,

he was very suspect,

I was highly suspect,

everybody in the expedition

was polarized against everybody else,

and it was a pretty uptight scene.

I left with my girlfriend of the time,

and it may have even been the same night

as the Silver Key incident,

and it was pouring rain,

and we made our way

like a quarter mile,

half a mile back into the jungle

to this other place

where we were staying,

where the original experiment had been done.

And so then we get to the hut,

and it's pouring rain,

and I had scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold

for the expedition,

and we had smoked nothing

but this, for Columbia,

relatively reg weed for weeks.

So I got it out,

and I was fumbling with it,

and I got this thing lit,

and this little crumb,

this little burning thing

fell on the floor,

and I lifted it up,

and smelled it,

and the transubstantiation

had occurred.

It was, you know,

like Mazar-i-Sharif,

AAA, red lion, hashish

of some sort,

and I know hashish.

And here we were

in the center of the Amazon

in this hut,

in this pouring rain,

and I could tell

that it was the good.

It was the good shit.

It had actually manifest.

And I showed the woman

who was with me,

who was easily led

one way or another,

but anyway,

she didn't say it wasn't,

and I stayed up late that night

smoking this incredible hash,

and waiting for the rain

to stop,

so that at the first

gray light of dawn,

I could go down to the river

and confound my critics

with, you know,

the alchemical quintessence,

the concrescence,

the excreta bonum,

the good shit.

Here it was.

As dawn lifted,

I made my way

across this rainy

and sat down

by the hammock

of the sleeping form

of my most vociferous critic,

and sort of elbowed her awake,

and, you know,

there were other instances

where this was

the principle of work.

It didn't work.

It was the Cinderella

screw-up, you know.

It was just that

I was a char girl

who washed pots,

and there was no prince,

and there was no coach,

and there was no...

And plus,

I was once again

humiliated in the presence

of my critics

who had further reason

to think that, you know,

a check-in

to the local

mental health care

delivery system

might not be a bad idea.

These things happen.

Ah, the story

of the good shit.

Now, if that isn't

a perfect example

of an Irish bard

at the top of his form,

then I don't know what is.

That was really,

really classic

Terence McKenna,

you know,

from meditation

to the story

of the good shit.

What a delightful morning

that was.

I don't know about you,

but I thought

Terence was correct

in what he said

about the authenticity

of the psychedelic experience

relative to

achieving enlightenment

on the natch,

as he calls meditation.

Now, if you missed that,

you ought to maybe

go back and replay it.

I think it's around

the seven-minute mark

of this podcast.

I also thought

it was pretty cool

to hear Terence admit

that going up

on a psychedelic journey

can be quite terrifying.

You know,

on several other occasions

I heard him say

that if you weren't

somewhat scared

before a major

psychedelic journey,

then you really didn't

know what you're doing.

You know,

and I,

I completely agree

with that.

These sacred medicines

are, you know,

they're,

they're not just

little 4th of July

fireworks.

They're atomic bombs

and you darn sure

better know

what you're doing

before you start

playing with them.

And those you

who are regulars

here in the

psychedelic salon,

of course,

probably know

what I'm going to

say next,

and that is

always begin

every cosmic

exploration involving

plants or chemicals

at Erowid.

That's E-R-O-W-I-D.org.

That's the first stop

on every journey

a professional

psychonaut takes.

Start at Erowid.

Enough said.

Be very careful.

Always,

as you know,

err on the side

of caution.

But hey,

you guys already

know that,

otherwise you

wouldn't be

hanging around

here in the

psychedelic salon.

And I want to

thank you again

for being here.

Glad you stopped

by.

And dear Terrence,

wherever you may

be, thank you

so much for

everything that

you've given

to us all.

And I want you

to know,

by the way,

that I really

enjoyed your

rap about

virtual reality

and the possibility

of a hive mind

on the internet.

In case you

guys missed

that,

that's around

33 minutes

into this podcast.

So check it

out if you

were thinking

about something

else while he

was on that

role.

And as most

of you already

know,

our music here

in the psychedelic

salon is

compliments

of Chateau

Hayuk.

Thanks again

you guys.

Appreciate it.

And for now,

this is Lorenzo

signing off

from cyberdelic

space.

Be well,

my friends.

Linguistic

bar

chits.

Now

machines

from

cyberdelic

space.

This is Lorenzo

and I'm your host

here in the

psychedelic

salon.

So,

how are all

of you today?

Sorry it's

been so long

since I've

been here

in the salon

to get

another McKenna

talk out

but I'll

tell you

about that

story a little

later.

It is

good to have

you back

here again

though for

another installment

of Terrence

McKenna's

Walk in the

Valley of

Noddle

Tea.

And I

think you're

really going

to enjoy

this one.

Among other

things Terrence

does here

on this clip

I'm playing

is part

of his

famous rap

about the

transcendental

object at

the end

of time.

I know

most of

you have

heard that

once or

twice before

and so

it's one

I think

you'll

enjoy

so it's

a little

different

each time.

And as

you know

this is

from a

workshop

that

Terrence

held

in the

summer

of 1998

at least

you know

that if

you've

thoughts

about the

year 2012

so keep

in mind

that this

was in

he's saying

this

and he

called

the year

a year

where there

could be a

possible

cultural

singularity

and I

point this

out because

the word

cultural

attached

to singularity

because

lately

there's

been some

discussion

on the

net

about

Terrence's

misunderstanding

of what

they see

as a

technological

or scientific

or mathematical

singularity

the criticism

I think

is mainly

coming from

the PhD

math and

physics

guys

who are

using the

term

much

more

precisely

than

I think

Terrence

intended

when

he spoke

of a

cultural

singularity

you know

more as

a poetic

term

I think

than

as a

scientific

one

so

you

scientific

types

out there

hey

loosen up

a bit

have a

talk or

two

and

listen

to how

a

bard

and

not

a

scientist

sees

these

interesting

times

that we

now

find

ourselves

in

now

enslave

yourself

to

the

machine

can

you

expand

on

the

date

and

this

whole

idea

what's

going

to

be

happening

in

your

idea

well

I

talked

this

morning

about

free

of

the

universe

is

that

information

which I

call

novelty

is

struggling

to

free

itself

from

habit

which I

call

entropy

and

that

this

process

which

informs

the

whole

history

of

the

universe

on

all

scales

chemical

biological

cultural

etc

is

accelerating

speeding

up

and

it

seems

as if

what

wants

to

happen

is

the

whole

cosmos

wants

to

change

into

information

or

put

another

way

in a

geometric

model

all

points

want

to

become

connected

the

thing

is

achieved

through

connectivity

the

path

of

complexity

to

its

goals

is

through

connecting

things

together

well

if

that's

true

then

you

can

imagine

that

there

is

an

ultimate

end

state

of

this

point

does

not

lie

too

far

ahead

of

us

in

time

given

the

acceleration

rates

of

all

these

technical

processes

so

at least

locally

so

on one

level

I think

there is

a cultural

singularity

a cultural

what I mean

by that

is

a place

in our

cultural

development

where we

can't

predict

or

understand

what

will

happen

to

us

a

kind

of

flip

point

if you

want

or

doorway

if you

want

or

revelation

if you

want

and

built

in

to

the

structure

of

space

and

time

it's

that

novelty

in

its

emergence

is

now

operating

at

such

a

fine

scale

that

it's

actually

reflected

in

the

lives

of

move

through

the

human

domain

and

into

smaller

and

more

rapid

and

compressed

essence

and

probably

in

our

lifetimes

and

what

will

this

mean

or

what

will

it

look

like

it

seems

to

me

it's

just

not

possible

to

say

because

we're

too

far

away

from

it

even

though

it's

only

years

in

the

future

if

it's

in

those

years

are

going

to

be

so

mutational

so

transformational

that

right

now

in

time

we

can't

see

around

the

corner

we're

summoning

strange

helpers

to

our

aid

the

machines

that we

had

such

confidence

in

controlling

are

actually

a

kind

of

intellect

of

some

sort

that

is

alive

and

with

us

in

the

historical

continuum

and evolving

at a

far

faster

rate

than

we

are

and

what

all

this

leads

to

and

how

it

works

is

very

difficult

to

predict

and

I'm

not

a

paranoid

I

don't

see

I

think

it's

very

difficult

to

predict

I

think

we

wished

for

transformation

western

civilization

built it

into

its

cultural

agenda

science

delivered

far more

than we

ever

dreamed

in terms

of

understanding

of matter

and energy

and space

and time

and now

under the

aegis

of market

capitalism

where

everything

is in

a state

of

furious

competition

somebody

is going

to put

something

together

that is

just going

to completely

redefine

and rewrite

the nature

of reality

itself

and my

bet is

it will

be some

kind

of a

technology

it may

it could

be a

drug

it could

be a

machine

I

would be

nice

to think

that it

might be

a technique

or a

teaching

but just

looking at

the history

of the

human

race

I'll bet

you

it's

some

kind

of

technology

slash

drug

type

thing

that is

just going

to be

plugged

in

to us

and our

consciousness

and our

aspirations

and it

may already

be here

it may

be the

internet

it may

be

nanotechnology

it may

be

biotechnology

and cloning

and quantum

teleportation

and virtual

reality

and all

the rest

of this

we are

just at

the brink

of taking

these various

pieces of

the god

magician

puzzle

and putting

them together

and figuring

out

what can

you do

what do

you do

if you

can do

anything

that's really

the question

at the end

of history

once you

have overcome

all limitation

what is

the human

agenda

do you

believe

that this

is something

that we

are just

we are

observing

or we

actually

play a

part in

its

development

so what

is the

purpose

of these

hallucinogenic

experiences

is it to

get information

so we can

influence the

outcome

or are we

just watching

no I

think we're

more than

watching

I think

we are

we spin

it

we're the

spin doctors

of the

thing

in other

words

if there is

a prophecy

which must

be fulfilled

it's a kind

of general

prophecy

something like

and man

shall become

dirigible

in the last

decades

or the first

decade

of the third

millennium

it's general

in other

words

what does

that mean

man becomes

dirigible

we turn

into air

ships

we become

oblate

spheroids

we what

what

what does

it mean

well

that's

open

to human

definition

through

specific

acts

of

creation

the levels

of novelty

or habit

in any

given

moment

will be

fulfilled

but how

they're

fulfilled

is a

matter

of human

decision

an example

which maybe

makes this

clearer

is from

statistics

for example

we know

that in the

next 12

months

between 8

and 11

people will

jump off

the Golden

Gate Bridge

who those

people will

be is

surely not

decided

today

they have

the right

through the

experiences

they meet

along the

way

to either

include

or disinclude

themselves

in that

group

so in

that same

way

I think

the future

the details

are ours

to fabricate

the great

landscape

over which

the city

of time

will be

built

is given

by natural

law

and where

we are

in time

is very

near

this

attraction

and then

people

happen

to be

so near

the

attractor

when

presumably

it could

have been

throughout

time

well

no

I don't

think

it's weird

I think

the strangeness

of our

condition

signifies

the nearness

of the

attractor

that

the reason

our world

is so

accelerated

the reason

all effects

are being

smeared

toward

Omega

is because

of the

nearby

presence

of this

cultural

black hole

this singularity

of technology

and biological

intent

that is

feeding

backwards

into time

these

apocalyptic

images

and I

you know

would predict

that

between

now and

there will

be

ever more

hysteria

squirrely

teachings

people

bawling out

their strange

despair

on every

street

corner

because

conscious

of which

each of us

shares a part

the thing

at the end

of time

is spinning

like a club

Christmas tree

ball

and it's

throwing off

scintillations

which are

distorted

images

of itself

the

transcendental

object

at the end

of time

infects

the history

that precedes

it

with the

images

of its

approaching

unfoldment

this is what

I mean

when I say

history

is the

shockwave

of eschatology

the presence

of history

on this

planet

means

that this

thing

is moving

beneath the

surface

when it

manifests

the institutions

of history

the way

a butterfly

sheds

a chrysalis

when it

breaks out

of its

metamorphose

period of

latency

the period

inside the

shell

for this

metamorphosing

super creature

is the

interested in

your reaction

to the

recent

announcement

by astronomers

that more

than 90% of

the universe

is composed

of something

called dark

matter

well this

is a

this has

been a

problem

in

astrophysics

for a

while

what it

is

to state

the

universe

seems to

hold

better

than it

should

given

the

amount

of

matter

that we

can

observe

is a

good

missing

it's

that

there's

a

law

missing

and

behold

what law

is it

it's

the

law

of

novelty

on one

level

because

if you

believe

there is

something

called

not

milky

way

it

dissipates

so

it's

that

and

if

this

were

proven

you

would

actually

have

begin

to

work

toward

a

quantified

measurement

of the

neutrino

and the

amount

that was

left

you would

proclaim

as the

novelty

constant

which

is

the

constant

which

then

causes

large

scale

structures

to

persist

through

time

for

no

other

reason

than

that

they

represent

higher

orders

of

organization

you know

recently

you know

the most

recent

ultra

revolution

in

astrophysics

which means

in the last

six weeks

these days

is the

discovery

that

their

evidence

in favor

is

the

universe

never

goes

to

its

initial

conditions

well in

astrophysics

there's been

this debate

does it

or doesn't

it

if

gravity

if the

force

of gravity

is at

a certain

level

then eventually

the outward

expansion

of matter

in the

universe

would be

halted

and the

whole thing

would implode

upon itself

the latest

findings

indicate

that

will

let's see

I've had

an experience

on drugs

and I've

read about

it

other people

have had

a similar

experience

which is

that

presented

to you

as

perception

is

of a

series

of stills

and

so this

resonates

for me

with some

teachings

in Buddhism

and

in

Sufism

that

basically

what appears

to us

as manifestation

is actually

coming through

as a series

of stills

and we

kind of

glue it

together

with our

mentation

of it

and I

wondered

if you

had come

across this

or you

have any

comments

on this

or you

think

it's

just a

stray

phenomenon

or is

it

some

cosmological

import

well

it's

certainly

interesting

that

film

and

talkies

and

all that

really

got

rolling

in the

twenties

which

is

when

quantum

theory

really

got

rolling

and

quantum

theory

is

on

one

level

a

theory

that

reality

is

delivered

as a

series

of

stills

you

know

this

mysterious

quantum

between

which

then

there

is

some

great

incomprehensible

gulf

and these

things

arrive this way. I know what you mean. I have seen the slideshow, the series of hallucinations

where it's click, and this thing hangs in space, no movement whatsoever. Click. Weird. And

interesting. But on the other hand, I've seen all kinds of weird themes and variations on

simply a visionary movie. That's one kind of hallucination. For instance, I sometimes

see text, and then as I watch the text, the level of sense and nonsense drifts. Words

flip over. Letters turn themselves upside down. Words that made sense are replaced by gibberish.

Well, now what kind of hallucination is that? You have to be a printhead. I mean, could

we toto have a hallucination like that where text was going through these variations? Ralph

has described to me mathematical hallucinations, you know, drifting parentheses and factorial

signatures and all this stuff moving around, and you're watching it, and you understand

it somehow. I've had those things like when you're a little kid, and you get it in a cereal

box, and you pull it one way, and the lion is in the cage. You push it one way, and the bars

become what the foreground reverses and becomes the background, and now there's a tiger in

the cage. And I describe the hallucinations with this. It's all and everything. You cannot

conceive of information in a way that the hallucinogens then can't see your bid and raise the ante.

The I Ching that qualified you in the eyes of the entity that it revealed the time wave. I have

a sense of an attractor. I see what the I Ching is, but I don't see the relationship.

Well, here it is in a nutshell, or a not-shall, as James Joyce said. I was not a sinologist. I was not a scholar of Confucian or Han Dynasty occultism. The good news is, the part of the I Ching that I looked at is older than all of that. My attention was drawn to, is the only way I can put it, by this teaching entity, was the sequence.

A sequence of the King Wen sequence. Little detail, King Wen is a person who may or may not have been a real person who supposedly lived around 1150 B.C., and he got into some political trouble and he was put into prison.

And while he was in prison, he arranged the sequences of the hexagrams of the I Ching into a sequence, which is called the King Wen sequence, which is the sequence traditionally used in China ever since.

Well, so the teaching voice said, look at the sequence. It was like posed as a dialogue between a teacher and a student. The question it posed for me is, is the sequence a sequence?

A traditional jumble sequence? Then there's a rule that makes it the jumble. Then there is no rule that orders it. It's just like a...

...not showing the pro-ing, the ebb and floor, recidivism is increasing. And when the wave, novelty, you know, you would be able to lay the wave over the past.

When you got a perfect match-up with past revolutions, breakthroughs, atrocities, migrations, language changes, and so forth, you would just propagate the wave forward into the future.

The object being used was that it was a damped oscillation, or it was a self-limiting cycle. So it didn't just go on and on to infinity. It actually had a finite end.

Well, the big surprise was when we got it matched up to history in the way that we felt millions of years in the future. This was in 1975. Discovered, no, it's 38 years.

Years ago, or 2,000 years ago, even as the Maya did it, whether you're doing it 38 years in advance of the moment.

That this is the message, the mathematical, astronomical, Pythagorean, and yourself caught a message.

I know absolutely how flaky this sounds, how unlikely, how lightly.

I'm here to found a wiggy experience that, unlike, you know, the problem with most people's really wiggy experiences,

is that it never gets down to, and it's unanchored, so people put you away, because they just say,

well, you have no proof that you're the Kvitz-Hederach sent from Arturus to lead mankind through milk and honey.

You just say this, and you know, and you say it too much, and too loudly, and inappropriately,

and so now we're going to drop a net over you, actually got down to a mathematical proposition,

a law, a hypothesized law, which is, it may turn out to be false.

It was a contained in the highest class of competition of all, which is in the realm of formal mathematical theory,

as did Pythagoras, as did some of Plato's work.

Like, if you're interested in this kind of thing, you know, read the Tenth Book of the Republic,

The Myth of Ur.

Do any of you recall what's going on there?

This is Plato, he's at this banquet, and then the conversation, like, takes this sudden left turn,

and he tells this story about this guy, Ur, who was a soldier and died, and was dead eight days,

and then came back, and then he lays out this rap, one of the most puzzling passages in the entire Platonic corpus,

The Myth of Ur, and it's this mathematical treatise about this thing called the spindle of necessity,

which is, the ratios are given, and how it's something inside something else,

and something turns one way, and something turns another way,

and the ratios are like this, and like this.

This is one of the most argued about passages in the ancient literature.

What is being described?

What does it mean?

Well, it's another one of these mathematical downloads.

I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the I Ching is true,

or is very close to the surface in all of that I Ching for a moment.

This is one of the world's oldest intellectual...

This is a mathematical notation system of some sort for the purpose of creating a physics of time,

a phenomenological description of the order of time based on human observation,

and it arises in a completely non-Western context.

It arises in a context, we presume, of shamanism and proto-Daoist values.

And I think that what happened was that people with a very different set of agendas

than those of Western civilization chased after an understanding of time

in the same way that we chased after an understanding of matter.

And the way you understand time is not by building enormous instruments

or clashing elements together.

No.

Time, the essence of understanding time, lies in understanding organism.

And so it yields to a very low-tech, observational style of natural science,

which we call yoga.

By looking inside the body and the mind,

as you still gross physiological functions,

subtler and subtler shells of vibration and emanation and physiological activity come into view.

And eventually, if you, my hypothesis is that eventually if you do this with sufficient care and attention,

you get down to some kind of level where you're actually at the level of the primal quantum mechanical vibrations

that lie behind everything.

In other words, you are in the realm of the primal patterns,

patterns whose activity downloads and eventuates as the macro-physical world.

In other words, you're in the realm of the butterfly's wing in the chaos theory that says

the butterfly's wing can start this in 64 irreducible species.

And the hexagrams of the I Ching are simply a way of noting and assigning each one a distinct gestaltung

for purposes of manipulation.

And in the same way that plutonium is not sulfur and tin is not oxygen,

these species of time display properties.

Time is not, as Newton thought, pure duration, some kind of intellectual abstraction necessary for a serial universe.

Time is a real thing.

It's as palpable as electricity.

It's as real as radiation.

It's a thing.

And so then what's going on is that objects which arise in time

carry the impress in their structure of the medium in which they arose.

This organism becomes a microcosmic downloading, a mapping of the architectonics of...

I don't find this occult at all.

This seems to me quite reasonable.

Let me give you an analogy to help you understand what I'm saying here.

Think of a sand dune.

Notice that when you envision a sand dune, that it looks like wind.

Wind, the thing in your mind looks like wind.

Well, now let's analyze what's going on here.

The sand dune looks like wind because sand dunes are made by wind.

Okay, what is wind?

Wind is a pressure gradient phenomenon that is variable in the sand dune.

It's a down-lung.

It's a one-dimensional picture of the wind.

If you had a good computer and you had a sand dune, you could compute backward from the sand dune to the speed of the wind.

Well, now, taking that image, think of it this way.

Think of the grains of sand as genes.

Think of the wind as 500 or 700 million years of time, moving those genes around, blowing them around, recombining them, breaking them apart, pushing them together.

At the end of that time in which it came to be.

So it is, in fact, an organism would have impressed upon it the categories.

Because we arose in time.

And you keep talking about biology and you talk about the leap from biology into culture.

And you talk about the medium.

What do you think of the Internet as the wind or the medium?

And that the mimemic qualities that are occurring in culture, you know, tying into the genetic codes like biology does, is the real medium for unfolding what I mentioned to you earlier, the global intuition.

It seems like all of this stuff is fitting together these days.

Well, there's this thing called the 2 to the 6th n rule.

I'm not sure that I can quote it directly, but Benjamin Worf figured this out.

And it's that in any lexical tree, no category on any level can contain more than 2 to the 6th n members.

In other words, 64.

So, in a way, we're dimensionally imprisoned inside this.

Because our minds work this way and so do our bodies.

DNA, like the I Ching, runs on a code based on 64.

There are 64 codons coding for the various amino acids that make up all the proteins that organize organic nature.

Well, so, you have the I Ching, which categorizes time as having 64 categories.

You have the DNA, which arose as the most elegant expression of complexity in time, running on 64 categories.

Then you have the human brain running on the platform organization run by DNA.

And we discover through Worf's law, the 2 to the 6th n rule, that our lexical categories are ruled by these same limitations.

So, it appears, you know, what I said earlier this morning, that life is undergoing some kind of conquest of geometry.

And I almost picture it like protoplasm flowing into a crystal landscape.

We conquer this geometry by assuming its shape in some sense.

So, it transforms us even as we overrun it.

What a thought. What a thought.

It transforms us even as we overrun it.

You know, I guess the question is, are we becoming our machines, or are our machines becoming us?

Now, that's the real question today.

And did you catch the part about 2012 where he said,

We spin it. We're the spin doctors of this thing.

The details are ours to fabricate.

Alright, so, if that's the case, then, hey, let's start fabricating this thing in a more sustainable and less fearful way.

You know, I, actually, I guess I, no way I can tell you what to do to help our species prepare for some difficult times that I think are just ahead.

But, I can tell you to follow your heart.

You know, I'm sure that deep inside, you know what's the best road for you to take.

And, it may not be the easiest road, but, you know, it's the one with heart.

Well, I hope you enjoyed hearing more of Terrence McKenna today.

I've got a couple more of these to go, and I'll try to get them out as soon as I can.

I guess I ought to tell you that I'm in the process right now of moving to a new place,

and so, I won't be able to get a new podcast out every week, just like I'd like to,

but, I hope you'll bear with me until I can get resettled again.

Anyway, thanks for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon,

and thanks again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their fine music.

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

Be well, my friends.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Now, if you've heard our last three podcasts,

you know I've been cutting bits and pieces out of a weekend workshop with Terrence McKenna.

The year was 1998, and the big fear at the time was that the world would come to a very tragic end

with a Y2K failure.

And, of course, the biggest news from Washington was all about the president's blowjob in the Oval Office.

You know, just like now, they were very strange days.

The part I'm going to play right now is actually the very beginning of the workshop.

It was a Friday night, and the way Terrence started off was to go around the circle

and have everyone say something, just a little something about themselves.

And for privacy reasons, I've edited out all of the personal statements that were made,

and I've only included the comments by Terrence that some of these statements elicited.

And even though this is somewhat of a hodgepodge of thoughts,

I think you'll find Terrence's comments quite interesting.

And so, here is the one and only Terrence McKenna.

In the valley of novelty, I see familiar faces, unfamiliar faces.

These things are most interesting, at least to me,

when they're directed by the agendas of whoever's present.

The number of things on my mind, more than a weekend's worth of stuff,

all of it is very familiar to me.

I know what I think, mostly, most of the time.

So, getting what you want, it's fine to take it another direction.

I conceive of these things, and how they've evolved over the years.

Originally, my enthusiasm was for informing people about the psychedelic experience,

especially plants, and how that arose out of shamanism,

and how it, for Jungian models of the psyche.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

white bread culture as you can possibly achieve. It was a very stable environment to be brought

up in. It was the 50s. It was all tube furniture and bad television. But the ground I happened

to be fortunate enough to walk around on had clamshells, 150 million years old, scattered

through it, dinosaur bones, extinct fishes. And I, as a kid, I was a loner and I spent

a lot of time in these dry arroyos and washes where these fossils and stuff could be. William

James, simply personal experience, has attained a very fortunate incarnation, a culture in

a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is a kind of paradox that in our own time,

meaning in the last hundred years, all this information has arrived in our laps as the

hubristic enterprise, the city walls of Calvin's trolley, on each person's, uh, because, yeah,

I'm keen to play in straight ways because, of course, there is no more secret ways of being

absurd. It doesn't seem to bother.

So, you know, it's a frustrating situation because the literature tells you that DMT occurs

widely throughout nature, distributed through grasses, grain tissue, luminous trees, eaceous

plants, but when you actually go down to two problems, either following these podcasts

in order, then you know he was good on his word.

And now if you're confused about the order in which I'm podcasting this workshop, yeah,

well, it is called the Psychedelic Salon, you know, what'd you expect?

I hope you did pick up on Terrence's warning that some of the old tapes of his talks, earlier

tapes, may no longer be his opinions later on, and I'm sure that holds true for these

tapes as well.

These were recorded in August of 1998, and of course Terrence lived for another year and

a half or so after that, so some of these opinions he may have changed, so don't ever

quote Terrence McKenna and say this is what he believed at the end, because we don't know

all that for sure.

Like I said, don't even hold him to what's on these tapes, even though it was close to the

end of his life, although we didn't know it at the time.

No one did, of course.

And I hope you also caught what he said about one part of a psychedelic point of view includes

living a certain portion of your life without answers, and that's what separates psychedelic

medicines from any system out there.

So keep this in mind if you're thinking about becoming involved with these sacred medicines.

They can be very unforgiving if you abuse them, whereas most systems, like maybe yoga or something

like that, for example, are a little difficult to abuse, at least not quite in the same way

as you can with some psychedelics.

By the way, I do agree with Terrence about the value of John Major Jenkins' book, Maya

Cosmogenesis 2012.

It's really too bad Terrence isn't still around to comment on the work of Carl-Johan Kalamann,

which I think is more recent than that.

In fact, Kalamann's website, if you want to check it out, is www.calleman.com.

And personally, I got a lot out of his work, although I don't agree with some of his final

conclusions about what's ultimately taking place.

Nonetheless, Kalamann's take on the Mayan calendar as being a map of consciousness evolution is

quite fascinating and seems to be fitting in place quite well with the events of today.

But actually, right now, if you're thinking about buying a book about 2012, I'd hold off

for just a bit until Daniel Pinchbeck's new book comes out this spring.

I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard Daniel talk about his theories on 2012 on several

occasions.

And from what I know about the subject, I think he's got the best interpretation around.

The book, by the way, is titled 2012, The Return of Kayser Kotal.

And I just a couple minutes ago checked on Amazon and see that you can pre-order it there.

According to them, it will be released on May 6th of 2006.

And as you already know, Daniel has been a big supporter of Palenque Norte since its inception

at Burning Man in 2003.

And we really appreciate his support.

I hope some of you will return the favor and buy a few of his books.

I know you won't be disappointed.

Well, that's about it for today.

Looks like there's going to be, I'd say, probably at least two more of these Terrence McKenna

podcasts before I finish the tapes from this 1998 workshop.

And if you want to see all the podcasts, you haven't seen them, the previous ones, you

can go to our website, www.matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.

And we'll continue to post them to that page.

So thanks for stopping by.

It's good to see you back again.

And I use the word see you loosely for those of you who are maybe using too much medicine

and a little paranoid right now.

No, I cannot see you.

Just a figure of speech.

We don't know who downloads our podcasts or who listens to them.

And we just are happy to have you all out there.

So also a big thank you, by the way, to Chateau High-Yuk for the use of their music here in

the Psychedelic Salon.

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

Be well, my friends.

Musical, linguistic objects.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Now, if you've been here with us in the salon for the last four podcasts, you know that we've

been playing cuts from a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998.

The workshop, I guess you could say it consisted of four sections, because there was one on Friday

night, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday.

And also, Terrence and Ralph Abraham held a dialogue about the World Wide Web and the

Millennium on Friday, or no, it was on Saturday night to tell you about that.

And by the way, that interesting encounter is posted in podcast 19 and 20, in case you

missed it.

And I guess I should also mention that if you're getting our podcasts or our RSS feed to iTunes

or some other aggregator, we only leave about the most recent 15 podcasts on the list.

And so, if you want to get back ones, you can get a complete listing of all the Psychedelic

Salon podcasts.

Just go to Matrix Masters, www.matrixmasters.com, slash podcasts.

Or you can go to our other site, our audio site, Palenque Norte, P-A-L-E-N-Q-U-E-N-O-R-T-E dot

org, and click on the podcast link.

Now let's get back to Terrence, and we'll begin with a cut that has his, among other things,

has his rap about the Archaic Revival.

Where the idea there is, civilization has made us uncomfortable with our humanness, because

these various technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory

ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times.

And that, in a sense, what psychedelics do is they hit your reset button.

They address the animal body.

They address a deeper level than cultural conditioning.

And so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings that civilization has repressed

or transmuted in you.

And, you know, the whole premise of that book was that the 20th century, in many of its

cultural manifestations, from cubism to Dada, abstract expressionism, jazz, sexual permissiveness,

hallucinogenic drugs, youth culture, a whole bunch of things, were all impulses toward the

primitive, toward a return to a primal state of social organization.

And that, really, this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century.

The 19th century saw the triumph of hierarchical order, gentlemanly values, class structure, all

that constipated European.

And then the 20th century is experienced as chaos.

You know, cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them.

Freud announces that we are not just Christian ladies and gentlemen, but right beneath the surface,

the incest drive, cannibalistic drives, extremely violent, primitive impulses are there.

Jazz introduces syncopation into music.

Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper dancing.

I don't know.

You can figure it all out for yourself.

The point is, the whole of the 20th century is a turning back toward these values that had been repressed

for millennia, not only by Christianity, but by the Greek scientific philosophy, the fanatic alphabet,

urbanism, agriculture itself.

There was a very long period in the human adventure when all of those things lay in our future.

And we were far happier, I think, than judging by our lack of need to make egoistic statements

by building vast religious monuments or enslaving each other or setting down codes of laws,

so forth and so on.

And, of course, we'll never be like that again.

But there is an impulse in modern society to recapture those values.

And psychedelics are hugely effective at doing this.

I mean, all this talk of shamanism and Native Americanism and getting in touch with your body

and honoring gender shifts and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude,

a less categorical and constipated and print-defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles

and social polity.

Well, it's always interesting to me to do these around-in-the-circle things.

First of all, it seems to me, I mean, maybe this is self-congratulatory,

but it seems to me that people are extraordinarily serious and together.

I have a real nose for nuttiness, and I didn't so much as twitch this evening.

And this is a large group, so don't loosen your chains too much,

but congratulations for impressing me anyway as very sane.

This is an area where I think sanity counts.

There's no points gained for being fanatical or maniacal.

This isn't an area where you have to push you harder and faster than you may wish.

So once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest,

once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics,

the issue is no longer than the spiritual vehicle.

The issue suddenly becomes where is the break?

Because, you know, this is the fuel to go where you want to go.

This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.

Those issues are somehow now overcome.

It becomes a very different game now, a much subtler game.

The doorway stands open, and all it requires is courage,

which is not to say it doesn't require a lot.

It does require a lot, but what it is is courage.

You know, very few people go to the ashram for their daily meditation

with their knees knocking in terror over what is about to sweep over them.

They are pretty confident that they've got it confined and nailed down.

It isn't so with this.

I mean, I've done it many times.

There are many people here who've done it many times,

and the survivors are not confident.

It doesn't build hubris in you.

It doesn't promote bravado,

because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size

if you presume it or if you presume you understand it

or if you presume to use it.

So sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up.

I wouldn't get near that.

See more to understand more.

And what I do on a trip is damn near absolutely nothing.

You know, I have two or three J's rolled in front of me.

If I can get through them in the course of the evening,

all goals have been met.

To see, to understand, to remember.

It's an incredible statement about our humanness.

It's a double edge within us under the influence of these plants.

We have literally Niagara's of alien beauty.

I mean, when I go to Manhattan,

I go to the Met and the Guggenheim,

and I haunt the galleries of Soho.

When I take mushrooms,

I see more art in 20 minutes of behind-the-eyelids hallucination

in total darkness

than the human race seems to have produced

in the last thousand years.

Well, so on one level,

that's an incredible statement about the human capacity

to generate and be in the presence of beauty.

But the paradox is that

so few people know this,

that our ordinary styles of being,

our ordinary relationships to plants,

our main brand religions,

almost never carry us

into the sense of this potential for beauty.

And when I was young,

you know, in my early 20s,

wandering around India,

trying to sort all this out,

having taken some psychedelics,

but reading yogic texts

and Mahayana texts and all this,

I discovered in every culture

there is what I call wise old man wisdom

or wise old woman wisdom.

You know, in every culture at evening,

you see sitting on porches men smoking pipes,

old men.

And these guys know something.

They know something about life,

how to till the soil,

how to raise a family,

how to, you know,

shepherd children through their marriages

and so forth and so on.

But what I did not find in these cultures

was any knowledge of this gratuitous grace.

This is like a secret

and it's a true secret

in that telling it does not give it away.

I know this because I've been trying

to tell the secret for 25 years

to anyone who would listen

as you listen tonight.

And I don't know how many people hear,

what level people hear me.

And there are many problems.

First of all, there's the problem of dose.

You can take a little of a psychedelic substance

or an effective dose or too much

and medically not be in any particular danger.

The LD50 of these substances is such.

Let's take psilocybin as an example.

Psilocybin is effective at 15 milligrams,

145 pound person.

But the LD50 is something like

110 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

In other words, hundreds of times more

than a dose that you would swear

you were melting down,

you were becoming the earth,

you would never live to tell the tale.

And actually, you're in no medical experiences

of different dose levels.

I've always been interested

in what the literature describes as

what this means is that you're so loaded

that a guy standing there

with a completely convinced,

your total pretense dissolves.

At these higher doses,

machinery, logical description begins to come.

And in my experience,

someone mentioned the difference

between mystical experiences and psychedelics.

There are enormous similarities

and enormous differences.

If you study the mystical literature

of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,

it all triangulates toward unitary states.

Light, the ineffable, the unnameable,

the radiance, vocabularies like this,

which indicates some kind of homogeneity.

Well, in my experience,

though, when you push LSD,

there is something somewhat like that.

LSD is not my idea

of the paradigmatic hallucinogen.

It's different in many ways.

Psilocybin is more

the paradigmatic hallucinogen.

And when you push it,

there seems to be not this merging

into the radiance,

but a revelation of multiplicity,

of detail,

of complexification within complexification.

Everything gives way to everything else.

Everything is interconnected

to everything else.

But the impression is one

of an overwhelmingly bewildering

perfusion of phenomena.

And, you know,

I've discussed this with lamas

and these sorts of people,

and they say,

well, you're just,

you're in the realm of samsara.

You're in the realm of the multiplicity.

Perhaps...

but the sense of a hierarchy of judgment doesn't feel right somehow this all and

everything this teeming multiplistic universe that is revealed seems to carry

a message of ecstatic and transcendental import it it all and everything in

Gurdjieff's phrase and one of the ideas that I want to explore with you in the

course of the weekend is you know most discussions of psychedelics orbit around

what will it be like when I take it well that's very interesting and of course

important to the individual but to me an equally interesting question is what has

been the impact of this experience on the evolution of human beings over

hundreds of thousands of years in other words what is it that we share with this

plan not only with another order of being which it certainly is but the great

confounding from my excursions into these places is that there is an organized

intelligence in there out there over there are more alien than the cheerful

pro bono proctologists that haunt the trailer courts not interested in our

gross industrial output or in imparting technology upon us what does it mean that

our culture has sealed us off from this information I mean our culture claims

under the aegis of science to bring us news of quasars the chasms of time and space

away news of the activities at the nucleus of the cell at the heart of the atom and

yet here's a world that begins right behind your eyebrows that any mention of it

either brings talk of mental pathology or how you've transgressed certain laws of the

village in other words this culture has reared the edifice of empirical

understanding and modern science and existential philosophy this edifice has

all been put in place in complete ignorance and denial of a fact of experience that is

approximately as easy to access as orgasm different means but nevertheless not far

away and yet we we in the west have navigated for fifteen hundred to two thousand years with this

simply an easily repressed rumor how did we get into this situation in other words if there was a

primordial era of shamanism and plant symbiosis and and mediated relationship with nature through the

guy of intelligence how did we fall then into the domain of post renaissance post medieval post

industrial culture and then what is the implication for the future of in this dark hour of complete rational

rational reductionism materialism so forth and so on in the darkest hour of our commitment to these

things this news stab original people that we have marginalized and and humiliated in the process of

building our own version obviously i'm not going to try to answer these questions tonight but this to my mind

and you know in the 11th century when the islam swept across asia minor in isfahan in iran they built these immense mosques with mosaiced

vaulted roofs and one of the great historians of islam said of the city of isfahan in the 10th century he said it is half the world

the city half the world in a way psychedelics are half and yet how few people have ever visited these sites have ever stared into these particular vistas of beauty

uh and and and as was said in going impact of these psychedelics where they hit us hardest is in the domain of visionary imagining

and the effort to communicate about our visionary imaginings in other words where they hit us hardest

is in the domain of art and invention and novelty and we have built a culture that however hostile it may be to the psychedelic experience

it is incredibly uh friendly toward novelty innovation creativity cultural evolution uh celebration of difference so forth and so on

so i would like to believe that the long prodigal journey of western humanity to a well nigh perfect understanding of the nature of matter and energy and space and time

that that that prodigal journey can only be redeemed and made meaningful if the things learned in the shamanic descent into history

which it is a shamanic descent i mean we have achieved what the alchemists only dreamed of and we've achieved it strangely enough by abandoning their illusions

they were epistemologically naive you do not discover fusion by endlessly rarefying mercury you do not disentangle dna by heating chemical vessels in horse dung

uh we had to abandon the naivete of alchemy to achieve its goals which were mastery of space and time uh control of human longevity

control of human longevity and health and psychological well-being well at the center of the alchemical ideal was the idea of the stone

something part mineral part mental ritual something drawn out of nature but perfected by human artifice

and then reflecting back upon man a perfect world created through magic this is the faith of the renaissance magi

marcello facino and campanella and these people it's it's a different idea than the idea of man as a fallen creature and or or science's notion of man as a mute witness to a meaningless universe

the magical ideal that these things eyes and support is the idea that humanity is somehow the co-partner

a full partner in creation and that what what uh god has brought into being the human imagination uh can perfect

and it's a necessary faith for our time because the power that we have is so great if the power that science has given us

does not serve a transcendental ideal then it will serve uh some kind of fascist ideal and most people will be reduced

reduced to equations and uh parts of of a machine that does not serve the human individual or the human community

psychedelics are uh a catalyst for the imagination they ease the ante in the historical poker game they show that there is more

than one way to skin a cat and we have come to a bifurcations immense choices the decisions and the processes that are put in place

in the next twenty years will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and this planet are made or broken as a cosmic concern

well consciousness is the key what we are what is dragging our boat is an absence you know we are we have one foot in

angelhood and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape and the tension between these two on a global scale is excruciating

so if psychedelics if there is one chance in a thousand that they contribute an increased measure of consciousness to this situation

then they are uh a precious gift a resource an option a possibility uh to be explored i don't advocate these things

because i think it's a sure thing or a or a safe path the eschaton i advocate them because they're the only game

in town you know if hortatory preaching could have done the trick then the sermon on the mount would have been

the turning of the corner but we have buddha we have christ we have these examples of enormously insightful

spiritual beings who have delivered their message and humanity has continued to flop on the seamy side

so uh it's it's not about an idea an idea is not sufficient to transform us it's about an experience

and this is the only experience i know that in the time given to us on the scale given to us we

have a hope of actually cutting through the the detritus of our historical experience

and building a true human community is this nice my parents used to make me go outdoors

scrambling around in the nearby after that building and launching rocket with standing lots of fun but

there was certainly lots of fun inside books uh so last night was sort of a first pass at all of this

there were questions left unanswered and threads untied uh and now you've had a certain amount of

time to absorb all that before i launch into some wrap of my own is there anything anybody wants to carry

forward yeah i don't think anyone else i haven't really mentioned it either but you work in in others

trying to tie that to other systems of order dna calendars and stuff it's also difficult to understand

yeah well we several people last night mentioned novelty theory but then you're right the

eaching itself wasn't mentioned which we could do and i have done five-day workshops on nothing but

the eaching especially its mathematical deconstruction so we'll talk about all of this probably this morning

if i feel like it novelty order in nature since we're talking around it and through it i might as well

just do it what does it have to do with psychedelics and all that well the connect the bridge of connection

gush and psychedelics is in my opinion when correctly managed end up giving you a big idea

where you simply have observe this bewildering other dimension and try to come to terms with it and then

come out and then live in the light of it because it's made the universe so much bigger but uh following

uh like a shamanic model of a journey to obtain a gift or to recover a lost jewel or this is the shamanic

motif it's always one of loss and recovery uh these flights into this realm of the logos the real stamp of

authenticity on them comes when you bring back a new idea something brand new that proves that you're not

just and so i you know knew this and aspired to a new idea whatever that might be that i had no notion

of what it was and my problem as an intellectual throughout my entire life has been it's hard for

me to go to depth with anything you know i study roman history for a year i study german for a year i

study the maya for a year but i never could get that professional mania that leads you into becoming you know

uh a real academic in a specialized sense um the the idea uh somehow these psychedelic experiences set

you up for it they're not the only way but they're the only way where you have some managerial control

the other methods all seem to be driven from the unconscious for instance if you read thomas

kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions you discover there that these huge rational idea

systems were downloaded in very shady and shaky mystical ways the classic example that i always give

because it's basically is that you know renee descartes invention of scientific materialism was at the

behest of an angel an angel appeared to him in a dream he records it in his diary and the angel

says the conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number you know and he awakens

the founder of french derivatively as whole branch of modern science at the behest of an angel in this occult

drive to understand nature uh this is the amazing thing that the greeks unleashed this idea that

we can not only mythologize but there is another way of looking at it we can understand it and you know

they started out simply what is air what is fire you know after 2500 years of this we are now

pretty much figured out what the standard moves are you know the history of chinese philosophy and the

history of western philosophy are the same schools by different names you know you get atomic materialists

you get spiritualists you get what's called occasionalism you get all the possible adumbrations

of a mind's position in relationship in the search for these ideas well my idea which came to me i take

i don't say i channeled it because i find that vocabulary infantile and obnoxious but on the other hand i

don't play that i don't feel that was definitely unfolded sensational once you begin to talk about them

that ordinary people like you and i by talking about them can actually satisfy ourselves that these two

aspects of nature these two weighted as you go back in time from the present moment the universe becomes a

simpler place this is a is a huge generalization and it's true and let's state it now a slightly different

way let's imagine we're at the moment of the big bang the universe flashed into existence 15 billion or

however many billion years ago a simple thing you know nanoseconds of its existence it was some kind of

integrated plenum it was smaller than the diameter of a particularity was co-extensive in this tiny area

and then it began to expand many milliseconds it was a pure electron plasma there was only a certain kind

of physics only the physics of pure electrons the universe had to cool over minutes and millennia for

atomic systems to form that electrons could actually go into orbit around around

the atomic core and not be overcome by the greater dissipative power of high thermal radiation so until

the universe cooled below a certain point atomic systems as it were couldn't crystallize out and then they

did and there was their phenomena in nature emerged in david bones phrase emergent phenomena there had been

only a universe of pure electrons suddenly there was a universe of hydrogen and helium atoms much more

complex so then the whole story of the universe is a story of progressive complexification accompanied by this

phenomenon of and uh the the universe of hydrogen and helium atoms uh under the influence of gravity these things

things were aggregated into huge masses where pressure rose at the center of these masses from the weight of the stuff above

and at a certain point the the the curve of pressure passed through a point where an a new phenomenon

phenomenon hidden in the structure of being but previously not by any phenomenon uh

uh emerged a new phenomenon fusion the stars began to burn and uh this process of nuclear burning this nuclear

chemistry heavier elements instead of the universe now of hydrogen and helium suddenly you have a universe which

contains sulfur and iron and for us and at that point you know it's like the rest was inevitable

the rest is just filling in the blanks drawing the dots i mean it takes uh 14 billion years but with carbon

present in the in the in the universe the which i identify and call novelty could begin

the long march for this teleological ideal this purpose at the end of time what makes this idea radical one of the things

which makes it radical is that it doesn't simply assume that history and becoming is the unfolding of necessity

it assumes instead that there's some kind of an attractor that events are not just bubbling forward

probabilistically and randomly but that they're actually caught in some kind of field that is pulling

everything toward a conclusion and this perception is the universe has grown more complex now this

is a huge law it's a statement about physical matter statement about organic organization it's a statement about

culture and society it's a statement about your own psychology things complexify through time science has never

said this it's not even i mean the theory of evolution says biological systems grow more in a real phobia against

any teleological implication from that but this is a general rule which i submit to you you by investigating

the nature of things uh on your own can completely satisfy yourself that this is true when you start

thinking that way that it begins to look like nature on all scales is some kind of a of an engine which produces

complexity and then conserves it and uses it as a platform to proceed deeper into complexity it's a kind of

anti-type thermodynamic flow it's a dissipative it's what's called autopoiesis tendency completely overlooked by

science in fact science's most secure statement is maxwell's second law of thermodynamics which tend to

disorder means is closed systems kind of a um chemistry because what's happening in biology is complex materials

and so a chemical process which would ordinarily ride down into entropy and obey the second law of

thermodynamics it actually is trapped in a kind of basin of attraction far from equilibrium and uh people you know

know physical chemists look at this and say well but it's ephemeral it's just it just happens on the surface

of the earth and it's very fragile and death is everywhere it's a fluke basically but this is just their

professional bias because you can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil

record 4.83 billion years deep the stars that you see when you look out at the milky way at night

the average star is 500 last 500 million years so we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable

slow burning type of star life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars

themselves by five times you can't discount biology biology is clearly a player on a cosmic scale in this

universal game of capturing energy and resisting entropy so uh novelty theory says that uh this general law

that nature conserves complexity reaches its culmination or its most interesting intersection of

discursiveness in ourselves we then look different to ourselves by this theory because we are the most novel

phenomenon around. Suddenly, what positivist materialism teaches about man's place in nature

is that we're lucky to be here. It's a cosmic accident. Purpose is conferred. It's this

totally existential, you're on your own, make it up, don't make it up, who cares, doesn't

matter anyway, kind of modernism. If in fact nature, we have identified nature's purpose

as to create and conserve complexity, then suddenly we become, we are returned for the

first time since the 16th century to the center of the cosmic stage of a universal drama of

salvation and redemption. Isn't that weird? I think so. Yeah?

Thinking about making that shift to considering the human experience is kind of central to our

understanding of the planet, and then seeing some of the environmental movements like Earth

first that place a large emphasis on the item of ecosystems and other animals and plants as

as on the same level of us. It's kind of a dichotomy, I think, between some of the movements trying

to save the planet. You know, some of the environment comes from rather so humans not even be here. And that

is a way to put the necessary factors in place to save the planet. Whereas this side of the argument

says that we need to realize how special we are and what's going on up here to be able to rebalance things.

It's kind of a strange line to walk between valuing ourselves and not over-valuing ourselves. Can you see that?

No, I agree. It's very tricky. There's almost like a bifurcation where it's hard to see how you can go,

how you can have the cake and eat it too. The concept of the forward escape, which I'm tending more and more

to believe in, that it's a desperate strategy from a military escape. And forward escape is where you realize the

only way out is right up the center. And then you have to get traction and go right up the center.

What's happening is that so much power is being given to man or taken by man from the universe

to the power of scientific understanding that we are becoming the masters of the planetary destiny,

whether we want to be or not. And you're right. It seems to be between some kind of primitivism,

an archaic revival that abandons technology and tries to redial the last sane moment we ever knew,

or some kind of gnostic rejection of the world of nature and matter and a complete commitment to machine symbiosis

and a cosmic destiny and, you know, life extension, star flight, cloning, the whole mega trip.

And of course, it's not going to be one or the other. It's going to be both and. There's going to be a spectrum of possibility.

How the actual details of like, how do you go to the stars and save the earth? I don't propose to discuss it or really know.

I do think, you know, the French sociologist, Jacques Gouloul once said, he said,

there are no political solutions. There are only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.

And he wrote a whole book in which he defined these terms, political solutions, propaganda, technical solutions.

And I, I tend to think that's true. What we have to deal with in this millennial narrow neck of constricted possibility,

where it still feels as though the human race could skid off into the ditch,

is we have to deal with the fact that we have built institutions that do not serve human purposes,

but that are like automata or golems among us, corporations, religions, cabals, ethnic tribalism, you know,

and these things are like the psychotic architectonics of the unconscious that the information age is causing to suddenly emerge for the inspection of those who have eyes to see.

We, we, we are, our humanness is not endangered by our machines.

It's endangered by these institutional entities that, and the most spectacular and obvious example of it is corporate capitalism.

Simply because corporate capitalism has the intelligence of a termite at the organismic level.

And all it understands is its, its agenda, and its agenda is to take cheaply extracted raw materials

and fabricate them into expensive finished products which are sold to well-heeled markets in the high-tech industrial democracies.

And it can't, it can't propagate that cycle on the closed surface of this planet much longer without the contradictions becoming unbearable.

But it doesn't know that, you know, it has a very low-grade intelligence.

So how we communicate, you know, we're all ready to switch on a dime to the new paradigm if we can just figure it out.

The problem is to switch these enormous dinosaur-like institutions, our lives and our economies and our scientific research establishments

and our, you know, civil hierarchy and so forth and so on.

Well, I'm going to have to cut it off right now, I'm afraid, or we'll probably all get a case of Terence Overload.

Yeah, I've been taking a few notes while I listen because I want to write a description of this podcast for our web page.

So I've been jotting a few little notes about what Terence was talking about, and so far I've counted eight major topics he's covered in just the past 50 minutes.

They're probably more than that depending on how you break down his ideas.

So if you didn't already realize how many things he's covered in such a short period of time, it might be worth going back for another listen.

In fact, I'm going to do just that myself as soon as I get this file posted.

So hey, thanks for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon.

And Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chatelle Hayouk.

Thanks again for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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

Be well, my friends.

Transforming, musical, linguistic objects.

Help machines.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

Well, I hope you're not getting tired of this series of Terence McKenna podcasts because there are still a few more to go.

And in today's program, Terence talks about the cascade of history, human-machine symbiosis, and the Internet, among other things.

And we'll begin with his rap about time and the evolution of animal life on this planet.

So, let's hear what Terence McKenna thinks about all the changes now taking place at such a mind-bending range here on our beautiful little planet.

What I think of it is, I think that, you know, Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics are only part of the story.

And that you also have to look at the work that Celia Prigozhin did in the sixties and seventies,

where he showed that there is this principle, which they called different things,

but basically it was random perturbation to higher states of order.

And that this occurred in systems of all levels of complexity that actually sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms.

So, in the entropic state that you're talking about, which resembles a Bernoulli gas,

a model of dissipation of the particles of gas,

the opposite end of the spectrum would be this notion that all points in the matrix become cotangent,

which requires a higher dimension that is still trivial.

And that's what I think it is.

I think that biology, like this process which we've called novelty or complexification,

that we say is increasing through time, starts simple, ends complicated.

One way of talking about it is to think of it as language is in conquest of dimensional expression,

or something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space, of higher and higher dimension.

Because if you go back to the earliest biological emergence,

they're like fixed slimes, these early life forms.

They're essentially points.

They don't move through space.

They have no eyes.

They have no organs of perception.

They are simply points of being.

Well then, still later in the process,

they break free from their stationary points and they become motile.

But they still have no perception.

No, they're just groping now.

Now they're groping specs of being.

And they've gone from being points to the equivalent of lines.

Well then, finally, light sensitive chemistry sequesters itself in the membrane.

And these things begin to have a notion of a gradient.

That the action is where the light is.

That the food is where the light is.

And so then, this generates the concept here and there, which is a time-bound concept.

Suddenly, time springs into being.

There is the notion of the execution of will over time.

Well then, the rest of the story of the evolution of animal life, right up to 50,000 years ago,

is simply the story of better eyes, better muscles, better coordination,

better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal.

But then, the advent of spoken language.

What language is about is the recovery of memory at a later date.

It's a data, it's a data recall system.

And then you talk about the past.

And you not only talk about it, but you strategize from it.

Hunting strategies, erotic fantasy, mate-getting strategies.

When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit.

The game is out in the open.

The purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.

And so we write down king lists and dynastic histories and this sort of thing.

Well, from this point of view that I'm pushing here for a moment that evolution is the conquest of dimensionality,

you can see then that the primate conquest of time through time-binding technology is the phenomenon that we call human history.

This is apparently what we're about.

This is why we speak.

Why we write.

Why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation.

Because we are binding time.

Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say,

well, then what would satisfy this drive?

Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself.

In the same way that as we look back in the history of biology,

we see these other dimensional barriers were crossed.

From stationary, from in situ existence, to motility, to a sense of light, to coordination of three dimensional space,

now coordination of fourth dimensional space.

And to make this leap to the full coordination of 4D, it requires some kind of machine symbiosis.

It requires prosthesis.

It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet.

And that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis and become, instead of, you know, semi-cannibalistic primates,

machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass,

and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons.

And this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment.

And that, you know, I don't know how we got here, but it leads me to the second point I wanted to make earlier when I was talking about novelty.

I said there were two things which science had overlooked.

And then I, first one, which is that nature is a novelty producing and conserving engine.

The second thing that science has overlooked and culture has overlooked that is related to the first.

And it's this.

It's that this process of producing novelty that the universe is about is not going on at a steady rate.

It's going on faster and faster as we approach the present.

It's like what mathematicians call a cascade.

It began slowly and has moved with greater and greater acceleration from the very first moments of its existence.

So the early history of the universe is dull news.

It's slow moving.

I mean, stars are condensing.

Galaxies are ordering themselves.

This is the stuff of tens of millennia, of greater spans of time.

Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show.

Geology and astrophysics have receded into the background.

And where the action, the mutation, the change, the shifts is happening is on the surface of planets in interface with atmospheres and cosmic environments and asteroidal impacts and melts and all these various things that went on.

For life before that, a long, long period, the archaeozoic.

But you talk about Dullesville.

I mean, there's nothing going on there.

Well, then, when you reach a million years, it's as though this process of the emergence of novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line, the hominids, but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude.

So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years.

You know, languages are changing, pottery designs.

And as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious.

Now, and so what novelty theory is saying is this is not an easily explained phenomenon.

It's not simply a natural consequence of our being in the world.

That's looking at it backwards.

Somehow our being in the world means that the world process is approaching some kind of definitive cusp in its development.

In other words, that human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature.

That human history, 25,000 years is all it is, is like a shimmer, an aura, something which flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes or whatever it is that it's going to go.

And so for us, you know, human history has this enormous dramatic impact because our lives last 70 or 80 years if we're lucky.

I mean, we're as ephemeral as mayflies.

For us, human history is 1500 generations.

But in terms of the species, it's, it's, it's, it's a fever.

It's a moment that has come upon us.

And now we're deep, deep, deep into it and deep enough into it, I think, that we can begin to actually talk about what lies at the other, at the other side.

You know, our religions have become almost the architectures of our social hopes and the, this coincidence of calendrical synchronism that we're undergoing.

And what I mean by that is that the Mayan civilization fixated on the helical rising of the winter solstice sun and the galactic center, an event which occurs only once every 26,000 years, occurs in 2012.

They fixated on this.

And our calendar, you know, reformed by journalists in the 15th century and originally founded by a Roman dictator, misses the same 26,000 year node with a millennial date by only 12 years.

So, you know, that's 0.001% on a scale of 5,000, of 10,000 years.

So, for all practical purposes, these two calendars both reach very important culmination dates, very near to each other in eternity.

What does this mean?

Well, if you're a Jungian Eve in the greater, larger dynamics of the unconscious, it means that on the wheel of cosmic time, somehow the appointment of the end of a world year has arrived.

Why is it keyed to the galactic center?

I wouldn't, at this point, care to speculate.

I could be dragged into it, but it's probably not the best way to spend our time.

That this phenomenon of novelty conservation, which has been going on for a very long time throughout the whole life of the universe, is now happening so rapidly that it's down into the scales of time where it's discernible in a human lifetime.

In fact, less than a human lifetime.

Now change defines everything, even for such microbes as ourselves, where before we were embedded, as it were, in the much more slow-moving processes of climate change and glaciation advance and retraction and that sort of thing.

Now we make our own time, and we even talk about downloading ourselves into machines.

Well, as we sit here, we're functioning at about 100 hertz, about 100 cycles a second.

If you were downloaded into even today's desktop computer, you'd be running at 200 megahertz.

Suddenly, 2012 would appear as far away in time as the bust-up of Pangea is in the other direction, because you would have stretched how much you can jam into a moment.

It's very easy to suppose that we're on the brink of a weird kind of pseudo-immortality, where time spent in circuitry is essentially time spent in eternity.

And people will choose, toward the close of their lives, to migrate into the virtual realms where the laws of physics are replaced by the laws of the programmers.

You really then are entering into your own private Idaho.

So, but Teilhard Desjardins, for those of you who don't know his work, was a Jesuit paleontologist and primatologist who wrote, in the 1950s, the Omega Point, the phenomenon of man.

And in a way, nothing I say, or little that anybody has said about cyberspace, about the meltdown of humanity into some electronic collectivity, has been Sir Pierre de Chardin.

He had this idea that human beings were on this earth, and that they would generate what he called the new sphere.

And the new sphere was simply the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic and television signals, which surround the earth, that we would build a new atmosphere, as it were, a technosphere.

And information is a very key concept in all of this.

What I call novel, you know, this is a vision of being where there is a struggle between these two antithetical forces.

One described by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, the other described by novelty theory, progogines, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc., etc.

And they are, in every situation, locked in struggle.

The amount of order in any situation is dictated by the unique configuration of the local novelty winds.

order, order in bills, which is that in the very short term, it's libertarian geeks, not psychedelic, not in spiritual in any sense of the word,

and vague process.

The curve of formation, the number of papers being published,

the curve of the amount of energy being released, so forth and so on.

All these curves reach infinity somewhere before 2025.

What does it mean to say these curves reach infinity?

Nobody knows. It's a singularity. It doesn't make sense.

It's a mathematical contradiction.

What it means is your model is broken.

What is going to happen has so many dimensions embedded in it

that your simple propagations of curves method of analyzing it

are giving you crazy data that makes no sense.

And, you know, I'm being semi-unemployed.

I have the leisure to spend many hours a day reading journals

and surfing the net and so forth.

And I'm telling you, all these esoteric fields of knowledge,

all these solid-state physics, quantum encryption,

drug design, genetic engineering, long-base interferometry,

on and on and on, these cabals of secret societies,

in each case, they're reaching out for the ultimate pieces of knowledge

in their field.

And no one is coordinating the implications of all this

across the face of the rising tidal wave of understanding.

What really is happening is that a very...

Under the aegis of this key concept of information.

Information is more primary than time and space.

More primary than light and electromagnetism.

Information is the stuff of being.

It's all you will ever know.

It's all you can ever know.

The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior of information.

And it's almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own.

It's almost as though, you know, it's a virtual life form

that is running on a primate platform.

Danny Hillis, who wrote,

liked to imitate each strange noise.

Some strange noises are easier to make.

And so you begin to have a population of short bursts,

populations, we'll call them songs.

Some of these songs are easy to remember and some are not.

And that's the environment of selection.

So the easy to remember songs survive.

And the hard to remember songs go extinct.

And there's only a limited number of human beings.

The songs must also compete for this resource.

And to this point, the human beings have been like a parasite.

Or the host.

And the songs begin to aggregate around repetition.

Then a kind of virtual life form in syntax.

And is essentially time-sharing and piggybacking our nervous system.

But at some point, we insisted around it somewhat the way a cell membrane

trapped early bacteria and turned them into mitochondria.

So now we can think with this linguistic symbiote that shares our brain space.

However, it's very interesting.

This idea, I mean, this may seem trivial to you.

It's new to me, so I'm into it.

I read this book by George Dyson called Darwin Among the Machines.

And I highly recommend this book.

This is a great book, fun book.

And one of the points that he makes in there that I had sort of, I mean, when you hear it,

you say, yeah, I always sort of knew that.

But I had never quite grokked it in its full implications.

One of the points he makes in there is that when we talk to each other,

when we make sense to each other,

what we say can be perfectly formulaic through symbolic logic.

In other words, that the branch of mathematics called symbolic logic

is capable of portraying human language and human logical processes perfectly.

But the interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic,

is the language which machines speak with great fluency.

This is the great bridge between us and the machines,

that fundamentally we speak the same language,

that and to a human being and and to a microprocessor mean the same thing.

So there is this, there is no great barrier.

It's all conceptual between us and machine intelligence.

Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence

to arrive and complicate our social dialogue

because in a sense it's already here.

In a sense we are putting a great deal of effort into creating it.

And in a sense its emergence depends on this very same appetite for novelty

that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of molecular chemistry.

And again, it's happening at these very high megahertz rates.

Machine evolution will not be like human evolution

because what it took us 50,000 years to achieve,

it can achieve potentially through distributed processing in minutes, hours.

Hans Moravik says of artificial intelligence,

we may never know what hit us.

It will simply be, come to be.

And what would that look like?

We have no idea.

Or its relationship to us at all.

Linguistic analogies?

Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way.

But it's like that.

Novelty theory and Rupert's theories of the morphogenetic field

are very closely related.

He doesn't believe in a temporal attractor.

He believes things are pushed by necessary casuistry.

But the unfolding of the morphogenetic field

and the unfolding of the time wave,

you're talking about the same thing.

You're talking about the four...

You see, in a way, what science is all about

is it will tell you what is possible.

If you want to know if something is possible,

you ask the expert in that science.

But what science can't tell you,

and what you usually really want to know,

is out of the class of the possible,

what things will actually occur.

And we have no theory for this, strangely enough.

We have no theory for out of the class of the possible.

I mean, I suppose somebody who was a fundamentalist

or some kind of Christian might say,

well, God's will.

Out of the class of what is possible,

what comes to be is God's will.

Well, that would be one theory of what it is

that winnows the actual from the possible.

A scientist would say pre-existing conditions.

In other words,

somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born

skew it toward its ultimate developmental end state.

I mean, it's the idea, it's almost like the law of karma or something,

that by the circumstances into which you find yourself,

then you are carried forward to some conclusion

that was inevitable based on that.

Novelty theory is not a,

it's not a predestination.

It doesn't say that the future has happened.

If you believe the future has happened,

you have all kinds of philosophical problems on your hands

because, you know,

for truth as a concept to have any meaning,

you have to have error.

However, if you think what you think

because you can't think anything else,

which is what predestination is,

well, then what does the search for truth and meaning look like

in a cosmos like that?

It's meaningless.

No.

In a predestined cosmos,

you think what you think

because that's what you think

and you can't think anything else

and it doesn't have anything to do with truth.

So, there must be at least that much freedom.

Freedom to err in the mind.

But, of course,

the mind through the body

is an extension into the world.

You know, for all the huffing and puffing

of modern science and neurophysiology,

they still can't tell you

how you can think

I will close my hand

and close it.

I mean, this is mind over matter.

This is telekinesis.

This is...

Science is just completely baffled

as to how this can take place at all.

It's a fundamental miracle.

Been good for 5,000 years.

Still knocking them dead.

And it's by that trick

that we don't understand how it's done

that will and mind and intent

enters the world

and cities get built

and armies sent marching

and religious revelations written down

and so forth and so on.

But I think that the...

You see, for years,

I was like crying in the wilderness

about this ramping up

towards some kind of hyper-complex unravelment

of the social machine

in the very short term.

But now I feel much more confident

than I was 10 years ago.

Now 10 years closer to the end date

because the Internet looks to me

like the backbone

of the emergent thing.

I mean, the Internet

is a huge

and not fully comprehended

cultural step

that we have now

totally committed ourselves to.

It's nothing less

than the building

of a thinking nervous system

the size of the entire planet.

And our most important...

We're wedded to this thing.

Our banking,

military planning,

corporate capitalization,

long-term planning,

design process,

inventory control,

resource extraction,

everything is running

on this strange companion

that we built to be indestructible

because we built it

at the height of the Cold War.

And so, you know,

it has no nodes of control

and it's the most complex thing

ever put in place

on this planet

since DNA, you know,

cooked itself

out of the primal ocean.

Yeah.

Again, somehow,

are those people

that have had these experiences

going to be spared

a certain type of...

Yeah, you put your finger on it.

It's that to the degree

that people are psychedelic,

they will be less anxious

about what will happen

because what psychedelics show you

is that there is life

after history.

There is something

outside of culture.

If you don't know that

by one means or another,

then you will define

what is happening

as, you know,

the end of the world,

the literal apocalypse,

the collapse of everything,

when in fact

that's not what it is.

It's just the collapse

of historical print-based

cultural models

and models of the self

and the psyche.

I embrace it.

I mean, I...

We're not about to blow out here

or go extinct

and we didn't...

We never escaped

from the yoke of nature.

Nature is...

You know, nature has taken

some hits

in this neighborhood.

Sixty-five million years ago

an object encountered

the earth

that nothing larger

than a chicken

on the entire planet

survived that encounter.

And guess what

it cleared the way for?

The flowering plants,

the source of all

these compounds

we're so interested in,

and the ascendancy

of the mammalian order,

our dear selves.

We are here

because of the most

appalling bad-haired day

this planet ever endured.

So, you know,

when you start judging

this stuff

and saying, you know,

what's good,

what's bad,

it's very hard to say.

Nature is incredibly profligate

and will take enormous chances

to preserve novelty,

to keep the novelty game going.

And so I feel, you know,

that in a sense

nature will open a way for us.

Nature is interested

in this process.

We represent

the greatest step

in organizational

realignment

and redesign

since life left the oceans.

Yeah.

It's grace.

It's, you know,

it's the will of God

that makes these more

and more complex systems

fall into place.

This relates to a question

which was unanswered here

this morning,

which was about teleology.

The Darwinian theory

of evolution

is very hostile

to teleology.

First of all,

what is teleology?

Teleology is the idea

that the universe

has a purpose.

And Darwinian evolution

is hostile to this

because Darwinian evolution

arose in 19th century England

where the reigning

intellectual paradigm

was called deism.

And deism

is the idea

that God made the universe

like a clockmaker

and then he went away

and left it going.

In other words,

the divine clockmaker,

the universe

was structured

by a force

which is now

withdrawn from it.

And Darwin

and his circle

were very

clearly atheistic.

and they wanted

to see biology

as requiring

no purpose

to direct it.

And so

they created

the dual concept

of random mutation

and natural selection.

Random mutation

is just that

because of

copying errors,

radiation,

drift,

and a toxic material

in the cellular environment

that the DNA

messages degrade.

So that's mutation.

Then random selection

is that this DNA

is then subjected

to the selective

winnowing out

that the environment

lays against it.

So by the meshing

of these two processes,

this is Darwinian theory,

by the meshing

of random mutation

and natural selection,

you get the slow

incremental emergence

of new forms.

And these forms,

some of which

confer advantage

and some don't.

Most don't.

And they're eliminated.

Those that do

stay in the system

and incrementally

the system

seeks to come

to equilibrium

with the selective

forces that are

operating on it.

But these selective

forces,

which are

continent,

incidental radiation

from space,

weather,

climate change,

so forth and so on,

because these factors

are themselves

changing over time,

mutating,

the system

can never come

to equilibrium.

And so for

Darwinian evolution,

evolution is what's

called a random walk.

the system

destabilizes,

it corrects itself.

It destabilizes,

it corrects.

It destabilizes,

it corrects.

And after billions

of years of this,

lo and behold,

you get animals

like ourselves.

But these

19th century evolutionists

were keen

to say,

do not imagine

that this is

God's purpose

or that the

final form

was prefigured

in the original form.

No, this just

happened

like this.

Well,

now

we've had

150 years

to absorb

all this.

In the meantime,

Mendelian genetics,

the particulate nature

of the gene

has been understood,

the molecular nature

of the gene

has been understood.

We can say

some new things

about this.

Also,

we are no longer

under the spell

of deism.

That's a crank idea

that nobody

is that keen for.

And so,

it's a different

intellectual world.

Well,

now,

when we look

at nature,

we see

a kind

of different

picture.

We see

that

where Darwin

said,

nature is all

red in tooth

and claw,

we see

that the way

to be a

successful

species,

the way

to survive,

is to make

yourself

indispensable

to your

neighbors.

then,

instead of

attempting to

push you

down and

extinguish you,

if you can

cut deals with

everybody in

your neighborhood

providing various

chemicals or

energy supplies

or other

affects in

the environment,

then everybody

will begin to

pull your way.

So,

in fact,

cooperation is

what is

maximized

among

species.

And a huge

complex organic

system like a

coral reef or a

rainforest is

actually attempting

to come to an

equilibrium of

balance that is

the point of

greatest benefit

for the greatest

number of

organisms and

species in the

system.

well,

this is a

whole different

picture.

And it

opens the

possibility,

i.e.

these new

sciences like

complexity

theory,

global dynamics,

chaos theory,

have made it

now respectable

to think about

processes that

are drawn by

something in

the future

rather than

pushed from

behind.

In the

19th century

that was

inconceivable.

All that

was known

was the

chain of

cause and

effect.

But now

we see that

the temporal

landscape has

what are called

basins of

attraction in

it, and

that certain

processes are

actually drawn

forward by

their presumed

end states.

And so

it seems

less outlandish

to us,

I think,

to suppose

there is a

purpose.

And also

we see a

level of

global integration

and global

mutation that

Darwin could...

The idea of

elements of

time having

their particular

qualities,

have you

correlated that

with astrology

at all?

Well, it's

somewhat like

astrology,

except astrology

believes that

planets and

stars and

the arrangements

among them

represent shifts

in a kind

of energy

field.

In a way,

this is more

abstract.

Wang Pi,

who was a

medieval

Chinese mystic,

his thought

comes eerily

close to my

own, in that

he... the way

he pictured

this was that

you have the

sequence moving

in an abstract

dimension, but

you have the

sequence moving

at a certain

speed, and

overlaying that

is another

sequence moving

at a different

speed, and

over that

another version

of the King

Wen sequence

moving at

another speed,

and that a

given moment

is a slice

through these

levels that

creates a

unique

juxtaposition

of the

levels.

So it is in

that sense

very astrological,

but it is

all calculated

independent of

any observation

of nature.

Although, if

it is true,

then it is

interesting that

there are

correlations in

the cycles in

the King

Wen sequence

to astrological

cycles.

Specifically,

the system

that I

elaborated on

one level

contains a

cycle of

384 days.

That is the

number of

lines,

6 times

64,

the number

of lines

in a

complete

sequence of

the I Ching,

384 days.

Well, it

happens to

be 13

lunar cycles.

Exactly.

Well, then

if you take

it times

64,

you get

a number,

67 years,

0.10425

days,

which is

6 sunspot

cycles.

And sunspot

cycles also

occur in

33-year

cycles.

Well,

it's known

that the

Han,

early Han

dynasty

Chinese knew

about sunspot

cycles.

They were the

first people

to observe

them.

So, you know,

without

hypothesizing

super technologies

or any kind

of Atlantis

type stuff,

we see that

the King

Wen sequence

could have

been a

kind of

gear used

in a

system of

multiplicands

that predicted

lunar cycles,

sunspot cycles

on two

levels,

and then,

with one

further

multiplication,

this

processional

great year,

this 26,300

year cycle.

So it's a

neat kind

of resonance

calendar,

and given

the sorry

state of

Chinese

calendar

making in

historical

time,

it's

interesting

that you

can derive

a very

accurate

calendar

from the

I Ching,

more accurate

than the

calendar we're

presently

operating on.

If you use

a 384-day

year length,

the problem,

of course,

is that a

year of that

length would

precess

against the

sun,

but this

may have

been for

political

or religious

or philosophical

reasons

acceptable

at the

time that

calendar was

formulated.

The fancy

is that there

was a

war,

a calendrical

war,

in the

pre-Shang

dynasty

time,

a war

between

the

solar

materialists

and the

lunar

mystics,

and it

was basically

a war

about how

the calendar

should be,

because,

you know,

the calendar

is the

largest

frame of

reality.

For

instance,

our calendar

with its

fixed

equinoctial

points

is a

lie.

Our

calendar

promotes

a belief

in the

permanence,

and in

fact,

everything

is

slipping

and sliding

around.

The fact

that the

equinoctial

points are

traversed

every year

on the

same

solar

year

day

gives

rise

to a

kind

of

patriarchal

hubris.

the

difference

between

schizophrenic

and a

psychedelic

traveler

being

that

maybe

one

can't

navigate

its

way

back.

I was

wondering

two

things.

One,

have you

any work

with

schizophrenics,

and what

was that

interaction

like?

The other

was

more a

take on

culture,

the common

channel-surfing

couch potato,

that it

has some

schizophrenic

quality to

it.

I was

thinking of

the movie

Twelve Monkeys

with the

Brad Pitt

character in

the asylum

when he

says that

the thing

that separates

a sane

citizen

from

insanity

is how

much

he allows

his culture

to

straightjacket

him.

Well,

I don't

know,

schizophrenia

is a very

complicated

subject

because

several

syndromes

which are

quite

different

are all

lumped

under

schizophrenia.

You know,

probably

the kind

of

schizophrenia

that I'm

sensing

you want

to talk

about

is what's

called

process

schizophrenia.

This is

where somebody

becomes really

spun up

and it

can come

after days

of not

sleeping

or something

and then

people begin

to have

really funny

ideas

and they

want to

tell

everybody

about them

and they

go to

the manager

of the

business

with

fantastic

ideas

that are

going to

make a

whole bunch

of money.

The problem

is they

just don't

make sense

to anybody

but them

or they

start hearing

voices

or they

become

convinced

that they

have a

special

mission

and it

turns out

that this

phenomenon

which we

pathologize

pretty

confidently

actually

is not

that

different

from

people

who

are

having

real

legitimate

breakthroughs

and

understanding

their lives

in new

ways.

It's a

shifting

and reordering

of the

dominance

of the

psyche

and I

tend to

agree

he's

dead

now

but

R.D.

Lange

the English psychiatrist R.D. Lange

what I observed of schizophrenia

went on at La Cerrera

in those days that are described

in True Hallucinations

and my really strong conviction

coming out of that was

it should not be interfered with

by depressive drugs

that it's some kind of

of a process

of a healing

of an acting out

and that the biggest favor

you can do the person

is to let them

to the greatest degree possible

do what they want to do

and not interfere with them

and if you medicate them

and incarcerate them

the thing is aborted

and squashed and distorted

and then they have a great deal

of trouble ever getting their act together

I was very fortunate

I mean how many psychiatric residents

have ever seen an untreated schizophrenic

you know I mean

the minute these people

hit the front door of a hospital

they're given

stelazine or lithium

or something

and yet you know

it seems more as though

Jung was on the right track

this is a process

in the dynamics of the unconscious

that wants to

work itself out

to a conclusion

now obviously

if they have violent fantasies

or seem dangerous to themselves

or other people

you can't let that go on

but I think

the treatment of schizophrenia

is largely

at the convenience

of the practitioner

and people are warehoused

and you know

if I were going crazy

I think the thing

that would really

throw me over the edge

would be to be put

with a bunch of

really crazy people

it's always seemed

so odd to me

that if you go bananas

they put you with

all the other people

who've gone bananas

who are the worst models

for you to be

in the presence of

and are quite unsettling

to normal people

let alone people

who are having

boundary dissolution

and self-identity problems

so yeah

yeah

there's some studies

that show that

what it creates

is a

in schizophrenic states

there's a more common

shift in brainwave rhythms

which is associated

with an enhanced immune system

and resultant less cancer

and I've been curious

as to whether or not

the use of psychedelics

may also provide

those frequent shifts

which are probably

more necessary to health

so as soon as we depress

for instance

schizophrenics

what happens is

they go back to

normal cancer rate

of the normal population

so their immune system

doesn't function as well

so in terms of looking

at enhanced immune function

whether or not

frequent shifts

which coming in and out

of psychedelics

may

and I don't know

if you know anything

about that

well in some sense

the kind of process

schizophrenia

the messianic

grandiose schizophrenia

that we're talking about here

is an overexpression

of self-definition

and in that sense

you would expect

a enhanced immune system

to accompany it

the immune system

defines the chemical self

so if the self

is somehow being

overexpressed

to the point

where it becomes

a pathology

or a burden

on the functioning

of the social group

then it wouldn't surprise me

that the immune system

would be functioning

very efficiently

well I guess that's about it

for us today too

say did you catch that bit

that Terence did

about the internet

just keep in mind

that this talk

was given in

the summer of 1998

and the net

was still

pretty new and unknown

to the majority of people

even here in the United States

and it was

during some conversations

with Terence

during that weekend

along with the dialogue

between him

and Ralph Abraham

that Saturday night

that inspired my

last book

The Spirit of the Internet

which by the way

you can read online

on the

matrixmasters.com site

and as soon as I can

get around to it

I'm going to put it up

in PDF version

online

you can just download it

for free

and print it out yourself

and read it

a little easier

than reading the

HTML pages

soon actually

that'll be the only way

you're going to get

a hardback copy

or a printed copy

because I've finally

gotten down to the last

few hundred of the

paperback copies

soon I can start

stop carrying all that

around every time I move

well it's really too bad

Terence is still with us

today so he can

join in some of the

discussions about

human-machine symbiosis

that are taking place

on some of the more

esoteric online lists

today

his understanding

I think of how big

a role the internet

is going to play

and is going to play

in the years

immediately ahead

he was just really

ahead of his time

right back then

can you imagine

what a fantastic rap

he could spin off

from one of the

current discussions

on some of the

AI lists

about the odds

of the first

general artificial

intelligence

to manifest itself

being in favor

of that event

taking place

on what is currently

the largest

interconnectable

public computer

complexes in the world

namely Google's

I'll lead you

to speculate

on that one

on your own

for now

it does present

some interesting

possibilities though

particularly since

Google already

uses a lot

of technology

a lot of bots

robots

to do its work

and they're

really good

at what they do

for one example

when these podcasts

started becoming

more popular

I had to find a way

to pay for the

increased bandwidth

that we were using

so I decided to try

adding a strip

of Google's

AdSense ads

on some of my blogs

so at the main

matrixmasters.com site

I decided to test it

first in my

war on drugs blog

just to be sure

there wasn't any

way that

they would

put up some ads

with that

just say no bullshit

stuff like that

so I did a

test

and the very first

ad that came up

was for legal services

from a good friend

of mine

Richard Boyer

some of you

probably already

recognize that name

because in addition

to his private

law practice

Richard is

director of the

Center for

Cognitive Liberty

which is

one of the websites

you definitely

need to have

bookmarked

if you don't know

already

you can find that

at www.cognitiveliberty.org

anyway

when

Google

when the Googlebot

pulled that ad up

first

I knew right then

that Google

probably knows

a lot more about me

than most of my

friends do

because I can

guarantee you

that Google

is the only one

of that group

who's read

every single one

of the million

plus words

on the thousands

of pages

I've posted

on the

matrixmasters.com

site in the last

seven years

so beware

or

I would suggest

rather you be bold

and blog your thoughts

on Google

after all

if the

big artificial

intelligence

wakes up

in Google's

network

one day

don't you want

it to know

a little about you

in your own words

well

I think I'll

leave you with that

with a shoe on

for a while

maybe have a little

smoke

kick back

and kick around

some of these

thoughts

you know

some of these

out of the box

ideas

what have you got

to lose

you know

if you start

thinking way

outside of your

particular cultural

box these days

you know

unless you're

perfectly satisfied

with the life

you're living

right now

you don't have

a lot to lose

just by

trying a few

new ideas

on for size

give it a try

you know

thinking can really

be a lot of fun

at least when you

get really far

outside the box

just be sure

to keep one foot

on the ground

though

you know

we want to be

sure to see you

all again

back here

in the psychedelic salon

for our next podcast

when we'll continue

this series

of Terrence McKenna

from the summer

of 1998

so thanks for

being here today

and as always

thanks to

Chateau Hayuk

for the use

of their music

here in the

psychedelic salon

and for now

this is Lorenzo

signing off

from cyberdelic space

be well

my friends

I'll see you next time

and I'll see you next time