Numbered Workshop Lectures

You could just start out by talking about the relationship between technology and shamanism.

Well, you remember Iliad's basic book, which is Shamanism, the Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

That book was originally written in French, and in French, as I don't have to tell you,

the word technique has this dual meaning of both a way to do something and a technology.

So, from Iliad's point of view, shamanism was always about using techniques to achieve these, what he called, ruptures of plane.

And these ruptures of plane were these breakthroughs into these healing spaces.

And for him, it was always drugs, yoga, or deal, or maybe yoga slash or deal.

So, in a way, pushing on the frontier of language and pushing on the frontier of technique always brought some form of breakthrough.

I mean, I suppose the perfect example would be fire, where fire must have been something, we talked about the Smith thing yesterday.

But, so, fire, technology, the transformation, the visible transformation of materials through heat, and all of that leads straight into better weapons, stronger building materials, and so forth.

So, I mean, can you, do you see then, that even though the West turns away from the world view of, of pre-modern, enchanted, the enchanted universe,

is that there's still something in that process of technological development, which has, which is linked to those older technologies?

Well, the way chips are made and the way solid state objects are assembled, often is just a matter of bringing a mix of materials to a certain temperature and a certain proportion of materials,

and then standing back and then standing back and letting the laws of physics rearrange the atoms so that electricity or information or something flows through this in an unexpected way.

So, I think we're still involved in discovering what can be coaxed from the, from the physical world just by letting physical laws unravel themselves.

And that seems, to you, connected with an old, that the, the, the, the operation of doing that goes farther back than just modern science?

Yeah, at low temperatures it's about psychoactive drugs and brewing and combining biological materials, and then at higher temperatures it becomes about this other thing.

That's one thing you, you talked about in the, when you were talking about the moving image, that intrigued me as you, you mentioned the discovery of the unconscious of dreams,

which is by definition a world of fluctuating images, psychedelia, and film, and by extension we can talk about animation.

But it is interesting the way that, if you leave aside the different ontological spaces where these things occur, you do, you are pointing towards some similar logic of flowing images that are pregnant with something more than simply the surfaces of images.

Well, you looked at that thing about the film objects, right?

Yes.

Yeah, I, that was really interesting, I thought, to deconstruct film in that particular way.

What, like, what is it about that that seems kind of rich?

Well, it stresses the role of time in defining all these situations.

I mean, a film object is best applied, obviously, to film, but on the other hand, you and I are like that.

Or an automobile in traffic, or an investment over a decade, is still some kind of self-transforming thing, referent to its own structure, but constantly redefining itself.

That's very, the world is its own film, the world is its own kinetic unfolding.

And if you take that away, then you don't have a world.

If you look at, you know, what we're building with VR, what's just around the corner with these kind of three-dimensional interactive spaces and avatars,

and imagine a culture that's more and more based on that kind of interaction.

And, you know, obviously there's a kind of superficial shamanic or imaginative dimension to that.

But at the same time, it's clear that at least initially, and certainly in many of its guises, it will be driven by the same kind of chintziness, the same sort of crass, tinkly junk that really drives it.

Do you think it's just going to naturally evolve such that a kind of deeper shamanic world, or at least shamanic analog, will emerge in virtual reality?

Or does it actually require some real creative work to seed it?

It requires creative work, it requires that the people who build these realities understand how subtle what they're up against is, and not abandon a commitment to realism.

You know, the trick to making the shamanic world, virtual world compelling, is to fairly and truly convey it.

So you can't cut corners, you can't fake it.

So animation and the rules of vermal and all this stuff have to be faithfully executed so that this stuff really does blow people's minds.

So that people see, well, the human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul.

It doesn't leave you feeling like you're wearing too tight a pair of shoes.

And that's the dangers, it just becomes kind of a formulaic, too formulaic, too easy, not that the software couldn't use some improvement.

But I don't want it to become so easy to produce these virtual realities that there's no attention to detail or no sense of accomplishment in doing it.

What would the kind of ideal Terence McKenna virtual environment be?

Well, all of these, I guess you would call them models or explanations, beginning with basic chemistry right up to hierarchy and management theory,

because all these processes can be envisioned as interlocking sets of laws and that sort of thing.

So that's, I guess, what we're talking about, is how the world should become more visual, should ride more on a visual, on a vocabulary of visual assumptions that everybody has learned.

We all know that a Bugs Bunny cartoon is a land of explosions and falling anvils.

Well, we learned that, we were taught that, so there needs to be more of this kind of slotting in of, I don't know what you would call them, assumptions or gestalts that can be used as a vocabulary to communicate this stuff.

Like a language, a visual language.

Yes, exactly.

And do you, so do you see that, that some languages from the past, the imagery of alchemy or Egyptian art or, or things like that are kind of, can be seen as predecessors for a possible new visual language?

Well, this is where memory palaces and archetypes and all this stuff come in. That was always the hope. It's not clear it can be realized. I mean, that's why you go through the Maya, the Egyptian, the alchemical, looking for these universal gestalts of meaning.

But they're spread wide and far and it may have to be created de novo.

Well, that's part of the, I think, you know, more of a skeptic would really, would say, the idea of building a, you know, a universal language is an old and crusty dream.

Yes.

And when you get into the realm of, of actually having images involved in it in a kind of hieroglyphics of virtual space that are linked with meaning,

that it becomes even more challenging to imagine how you can make that kind of thing universal, unless it's the universe of, you know, the Nike swoosh.

You know, it's the universe of logos and advertising, which actually is somewhat like this, except that it's information content is...

And people spend a huge amount of money to establish these gestalts.

Exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, I, I don't, I'm not, many of our discussions have led to this point where we seem to say, well, there's something about the thermodynamics of information that we don't understand,

something about lexical categories, something about how language wants to emerge from the background of matrix, but something about how we process language holds this back.

So, then there's a negotiation at some kind of fractal edge and that, and that's where we are.

But not necessarily.

I mean, I, that's why I encourage everybody to think about animation and think about it in practical terms, to look at objects and pose these things to themselves as model, modelable problems.

Because out of that will come a language rich enough to support an actual form of human communication that's been very elusive, or maybe never in hand at all.

Well, it's really interesting when you talk to people or listen to people, how many people who take psychedelics have cartoon-like encounters with beings or, you know,

and you say, well, gee, this is weird, cartoons only go back to 1920 or 15 or something.

How weird that such an out there technical phenomenon could just grab a whole section of human psychology and camp there with that kind of tenacity.

And, to me, that indicates it has some kind of archetypal claim on that territory.

And a claim which it can only continue to tighten over time.

Have you ever seen that Scott McCloud book, Understanding Comics?

No.

Oh, that's worthwhile.

Is that a good one?

Yes, it's really worthwhile.

Very good.

I mean, it's just sort of getting at a grammar.

You know, a lot of cartoonists disagree with a very irascible lot, and a lot of comic people are like, no, it's not shit.

But it's a very interesting attempt to use the form itself to talk about the specifics of the form.

I mean, it's really about comic art, but it applies to some of these issues of animation and cartooning.

Well, the great genius of Disney, and Disney is my idea beyond Edison or Ford or anybody, of what we really mean by an American genius,

because he, you know, he had mice who wear gloves living inside his head, but he was able to create a mechanical technology to show people these mice.

So instead of just being put quietly away by his brother or something like that, he said, no, no, you don't understand.

Money.

This is worth money.

If we can show people these glove-wearing mice and talking ducks and all this stuff.

And then he was sufficiently a true American Yankee genius that he saw how to take a flip book and put it on celluloid and do all that.

Yeah, I think Disney is a very, very far out person.

I mean, he went to the Platonic ideas and came back with, you know, baskets full of them.

Released them in American towns and cities and did very well.

I mean, animation is a great place to see the reflection of things that are happening, you know, in the culture at large.

And certain people take it to incredible heights.

Have you seen, do you know that animation called Asparagus?

You should check it out.

It's about 20, maybe it's 15 or 20 years old, but it's as, you know, it's as real, it's very highly detailed, as realistic as a Van Eyck painting.

And totally surreal.

And there's also, do you know that one by Sally Cruikshank called Quasi at the Quackadero?

That's a DMT extravagance, a carnival, basically, a cartoon about a carnival, but a carnival crazy enough to convince you you should go take drugs, basically.

And Max Fleischer was a genius and all these people.

Fleischer was great. I mean, I think Fleischer is the true origin of underground comics.

I think that you find the most pregnant images of a certain kind of seedy, like the way that Rahr Crum presents a certain kind of seediness and sort of failure of the bodies and spaces.

And yet that's infused with a kind of like, you know, magical eye. So you really have that both in Fleischer, you really have the mania of the Betty Boop, but also a certain real kind of quotidian, almost proletarian graininess to these characters.

Yeah, it would be very hard to imagine post-modernity without Crum's input. I consider him an absolute psychedelic genius. Very few people have had the influence without the karma that Crum had.

He basically did all that stuff, sold the drawings and moved to a chateau in southern France and called it quits and got away with those moves.

I mean, that's one of the things, again, that I just find totally fascinating is like the magic of modernity.

You mean what a strange, strange thing this is?

Yeah, just the relationship of modernity to esoteric religious undercurrents and things which are not accounted for in enlightenment discourse.

Yeah, what if it just gets more and more like this? In other words, I think that's what's actually happening.

We're really headed for our own private Idaho. More faster, deeper, and with more panache than anybody ever dared suppose.

You mean in terms of building our own constructed world perspectives and communicating them to some degree, but not in a way that dominates ideologically?

Well, and we have no idea how strange the worlds we can create in the near term will be, and yet they will be. It's coming at you.

Right. But just how far back to go? What's witnessing this bizarre moment in history? What point is the perspective kind of sitting in?

That's the part I find really hard to figure out. Does that make sense?

Well, that's the question. Because what that boils down to is how real is it? How real is it?

Yeah, it's complicated. Every age seems to design its own image of its own dissolution. And they happen over and over again.

I mean, when I think about the 20th century, Europe, which is the source of world civilization, stomped flat twice.

Millions of refugees, you know, Auschwitz, the whole thing.

Meanwhile, you know, what went on in the far east of Asia and the Asian prosperity wars and all this. It's over and over again these cultures create their Ragnarok to act it out.

Way over the top. I mean, Germany for crying out loud.

Yeah, so how would you describe that character? What's the character of our dissolution?

I don't know. I guess it was Nietzsche who pushed the myth of the eternal return, right?

So it's some kind of, it's like a closed cycle of Hegelian dynamic where it just works itself out.

Then the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis, and the darkness. And then it starts over again.

That Nichols book that I told you about, Living Time, what was most impressive about that book was he lays out this idea of like time.

And he basically kind of presents a way of thinking about eternal return, which is that we're locked into these repetitive cycles that are eternally reiterating themselves.

The only way of changing their quality is to increase consciousness in the midst of them.

And so you affirm your, this life, this world, not some transcendent world and just the, and then try to solve it.

Like under the sign of this is always this way. And how does that mean to relate to the real as it presents itself as if there's no other thing that can be than that.

And then, but as you do this process, you change your relationship to this stream and then all this other heavy, heavy stuff happens.

But it was very interesting. It was like, because other, up to that point, I'd always said of the eternal return on a kind of philosophical level.

And I never thought, what does it mean to actually live in the world of the eternal return?

And that's pretty heavy.

That's interesting. Yeah, well, I've always felt like that reality was a kind of thing that the way you made progress was you grasped it in the sense that you grasp a mathematical or geometric proposition or something like that.

That it's something which once understood on some level, clears the way to advance a very short distance.

So that's what you're always trying to do is create this lexical space of presumed understanding and live inside that.

What are some of your wilder ideas about kind of technological situations?

Should it be happening?

In terms of media and technology are lying ahead.

Well, the vision I always saw as inevitable, and I still do, and I'm very attracted to it, and shall be sorry to miss it if I do.

And that is, I can imagine the 20th century defined, I mean the next century defined by a very huge spacecraft that are, that cycle from the inner to the outer solar system.

That seems to me the way to do it, to create these worlds which have like, say, 80 year orbits that carry them clear out to Uranus and all these places, and to the inner solar system.

And that these things are just self-constructed hives of human activity, and they invent their own raison d'etre at each point in these voyages.

And there's travel between them, but largely they are city-sized or larger constructs.

And that must be how it will work, powdering down asteroids.

And I would, you know, I would really like to see a breakout in the next century.

How long can we wait for star flight?

I mean, how long before the contradictions in terrestrial existence just become too tearing?

And you either have to go to some kind of fascism and really turn the screws, or things fly to pieces, you know?

Yeah.

But I really always felt as a science fiction fan and all that, that, that star flight, that galactic citizenship was what you're aiming for.

And even if you're the only fucking citizen, that's fine.

But if you have to go up to the great council of the Talixilu, or whatever that shit was in Dune.

But yeah, this flinging ourselves around the solar system and the enormous, that's obviously all doable.

In other words, it doesn't require any rearrangement of the laws of physics.

It just requires that we don't all murder each other and we continue to pursue commerce.

So this is reasonable in some level to expect.

And there needs to be, I wish there were a face on Mars or something like that, that would drag the popular imagination.

But I see the, I see strong movements in some levels for an imagination of Mars as a place to inhabit.

It seems like Mars is happening.

I mean, it's in the scientific imagination.

It's in the high science fiction imagination.

And why not?

I mean, it's a pretty cool idea.

I mean, it's insane.

And it's like, I wouldn't go first.

Or a 10,000th problem.

Well, between that and what's out at the edge of the solar system, it seems to get quite exotic.

And as what life is understood to be expands, it's all converging.

I mean, there are, there is mind under the ice of Europa.

Not, I don't know, mind.

That's the, but there's a lot of complicated and hard to define and edgy shit from, on, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

What do you mean like edgy shit?

Well, like, um, hot water trapped in methane environments under deep ice.

You know, there's this lake.

Oh, hot water in there for something.

And complicated chemistry.

And, you know, they're drilling into this lake in Antarctica that's under 4,000 meters of ice

and has been there 20 million years and utterly undisturbed in total darkness for, I mean, this insane geological.

And they're culturing stuff out of it.

Out of the mud that's been under there.

It's alive.

It's still alive.

So.

Whoa.

That's, that's Cthulhu.

Yeah, isn't that.

Mountains of sadness.

Yes.

Exactly.

So, um, if I, you know, would be a great time to be a xenobiologist or, and it, it could

be Europa, it could be Titan, it could be Mars.

Oh, that would just be a, what a fascinating encounter.

Yeah, that's a great, a great wrap.

But that almost seems more likely.

We encounter some kind of weird life form underneath, but it's not, you know.

Interesting.

Hi, we are from Orion.

We're not interested in you.

We have no questions.

We have no answers.

This idea has been gaining strength for 20 years.

That life is not unique to Earth.

It must have drifted in on a chunk of stuff.

And it's, it's an alchemical rule.

It's the rule of homogeneity.

You know, as above, so below.

Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that

life is unique and arose on this planet only.

It's much easier for me to imagine that on a certain level, but at least the galaxy or our

local part of the galaxy has some kind of other minds in it.

I mean, it may be, it may be not true, but it's almost the same way of the way that we

model, you know, hopefully model a future.

It's almost like you kind of imagine that, so that all the, you know, Star Trek even is

kind of this weird dress rehearsal for a certain phase of this kind of realization.

That's just a story.

Just a science fiction story.

Well, but you could have said it of Jules Verne in 1885 and been right.

Yeah, it is a rehearsal.

And, you know, psychedelics kind of seem like, to me, imaginative rehearsals of some other

event.

And whether that event is merely my own individual death or some kind of cosmic event, I completely

suspend judgment on.

And I don't know if I will be able to.

I don't think I'll move from my present.

Position.

Position of like, well.

Who knows.

Yes, it's the big who knows.

So what do you think's up with the extraterrestrial imagery that features so heavily in some strands

of psychedelic experience?

You mean the cat-eyed, that kind of imagery?

The cat-eyed, alien, gray, pudgy, little...

That and just the sense of, I think it seems like a lot of people just even describe the

sense of an extraterrestrial intelligence or...

Well, remember we were talking last night about how everything wants to articulate itself.

Everything wants somehow to communicate and be perceived as language.

When that impulse...

Impulse.

...

is most clearly separated from its object or from its source, I guess you'd say,

then maybe that's what you get, is this Gumby-like, pure impulse toward communication or something like that.

I mean, it seems to me it's like looking at a pure function, a pure psychological function.

You see what I mean?

No longer rooted in its source being biology and the evolution of physical form on this particular planet.

Yeah.

And so that once it reaches a certain kind of...

It can actually walk away from itself and then there you have it.

And you're saying, you know, what is this? It's category confounding. It can't be.

It's an essence without an object or something like that.

Yeah, I've had some pretty profound moments of feeling like contact with something like extraterrestrial intelligence

without believing it even often in the interior of the trip that it was...

Oh, you mean while loaded?

Yeah, even at the time going, okay, this is...

I'll let this happen.

Yeah, this is a phenomenon occurring, rather than, oh, I'm finally seeing it.

And, uh, or maybe you're just sort of geared for it with science fiction, I don't know.

Okay.

So how real was it?

Well, I mean, it's, I mean, maybe it's just the language that I use for other, that, you know, if you present me with some kind of intelligence or communicating force that seems to be other, that's very high, you know, very evolved, that maybe I'm just going to tend to see it more as alien.

But even in terms of those buzzes, like the kind of weird way that sounds can, like, form these vibrating matrices, is they've often, like, they often take on a kind of more metallic quality and become more synthetic, and with that rising, begin to enter into an imagery realm that's very cosmic.

Peculiarly alien.

Peculiarly alien and technological, often, as opposed to natural.

Uh-huh.

That's the place.

And, uh, and that's, you know, this, that's like a lens or something of, I mean, because if you imagine if you're on, if, you know, histories, if you, if you imagine it pouring forward or moving rapidly forward, there's a kind of front edge that's very weird, because it's sort of like birthing all the whole sets of new.

Yeah, like a form.

Yeah, like, exactly.

Yeah.

I know that place.

Hmm.

What is the nature of the entities?

What constitutes their apparent agency or communicative agency?

Well, I think that's the question that remains unanswered.

You know, that's the grail of the thing.

What is the nature of the other, is basically what you're asking.

Is it a construct, a projection, or a discovery?

It's not clear to me what it is.

You feel like you've gotten any closer to that?

It's probably a discovery, which is the most radical conclusion.

I mean, I think that's probably what you think, too, based on your description of your DMT trip and all that, that ultimately it is irreducible.

You know, it is too weird to tell.

I don't know whether it was a CM Kornbluth story, but it was all about these aliens come by and contact the United Nations and all this.

But somehow this book, To Serve Man, comes to the surface.

And then it's slowly realized that it's a cookbook.

And this really spoils the party.

What about the communications that come in from either the extraterrestrial, quote-unquote, or seeming, or the technological world?

Well, obviously, it requires discrimination to figure out.

You can't believe everything you hear.

The demons are of many kinds.

Some are made of ions.

Some of mind.

The ones of DMT, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.

And just because something can talk doesn't mean it isn't selling you something you may not want to hear.

Right.

Now, that time in that phrase, you said the ones on DMT can be...

But I've also heard you say ketamine there.

The ones on ketamine.

Have I said that about ketamine?

We need to control me a little more tightly.

What is your opinion on ketamine?

I think it's an interuterine memory drug.

I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of interuterine state.

It's echoic.

It's weightless.

It cancels the sense of gravity so you don't feel your lungs rising and falling.

It's...

I sort of agree with you.

I see its fascination.

I would not want to become embroiled in its tentacles because it seems to me a little too easy, a little too fascinating.

Do you think ketamine is hollower, partly because it's just a synthetic, but it hasn't emerged in the ancient matrix of the biosphere?

No, I think one of the big, one of the interesting unanswered questions is, why do these chemicals have the characters that they do?

Why do they have these personalities?

Why is there maya and imagery inside mushrooms and mescaline and this and that?

And so ketamine's character is simply somehow conferred from whatever strange dimension this is that sends these drugs their personalities.

It certainly is an interesting personality and Lily is, you know, John is a juggernaut.

Do you know him?

No.

Oh my god.

John's such a trip.

I mean, some people are just...

You see, but he's like, I mean, he's really kind of out.

Oh, definitely.

Like, you meet him and you're like, this guy's out.

Yeah, this guy is, there's nobody home.

This guy cannot be left alone at home.

And he's like me.

What a trip.

And such, you know, an amazing arrogance.

An amazing conviction of your own.

That you've got it all figured out.

Yeah, a relentless character.

He told me once, when we were at Esalen, the two of us standing somewhere, and he said,

Nature loves you ruthlessly.

Interesting observation.

Just ruthlessly acting.

Was he speaking specifically about you?

Yeah, he and I were the only two people present.

It was just a private conversation.

He used to have this Obi-Wan Kenobi robe that he wore around Esalen.

It was just hilarious.

And he would just show up out of the fog, you know, to lay these wraps on you.

Yeah, they didn't make too many of John.

Ketamine actually distills a certain element of the psyche and then just lets that element

interact with this whole weird plane.

And there's not a lot of connections with the animal body.

But the tryptamines are like carrying the animal body all the way through it all.

So it's all still archaic and there's sex and there's fear and all of these animals in this space.

Ketamine is like a little drop of like awareness, pure awareness, enters into this zone.

It is a bit like that.

You're completely, I mean, you know, if you remember like things in your life, they're all part of these networks of cosmic cause and they're so impersonal.

I mean, it's a very impersonal environment.

Sometimes on ketamine, I had the impression, it's like this all the time.

I simply don't notice, which isn't a very sense-making perception.

Yeah.

No, it does have an always already quality to it.

The whole quality time is very different than with also with striptamines, which have a more kind of propulsive.

Yeah, you're right about how it accentuates the animal body and just shows you some kind of hyper state of, I don't know, being.

Or even metabolism.

Yeah, something like that.

Where it's just 50,000% more powerful than you thought the specs would tolerate.

What do you think of MDMA?

It's, it never spun me like it apparently did other people.

It seemed very pleasant.

I didn't quite ever get, you know, the fight to save MDMA and all that.

I figured from what I was hearing around me that it was doing a lot of good in psychotherapy.

And so those people should be supported, but personally I never, it seemed, well it seemed like, very much like every drug as it's introduced into society.

It's usually claimed to solve relationship problems and then, well that's the best packaging, is to say, that a drug solves relationship problems.

Of course, the link to that right on the top was, you know, the warning that you could believe that you were deeply involved with somebody and wind up making stupid decisions.

Oh, well, when was that not true?

Yeah.

No, I remember the first time, I mean, that was specifically one of the stories that was told around him.

And that was relatively early, that being married.

You mean people deciding to marry the wrong person?

Or whatever, yeah, that kind of thing.

Because they...

Yeah, it's such an intimate experience.

I only had a few, I only took it a few times.

I find it extremely taxing on the system, in a way that I...

Oh, you mean the next day you feel terrible?

Yeah, I find it very taxing in a way that makes me very dubious about it.

It's an amphetamine, it's hard to take the A out of amphetamine.

Yeah, it's true.

The amphetamine down is really quite a monster.

I actually like crystal methadrine, but it's not worth it.

It just wears you too hard.

Yeah, it's too hard.

It's like, it's fun, but...

Every gear is flopping on its axle by the time you're through.

Yeah.

Do you have a position about the relationship of the psychedelic experience to non-psychedelic mysticism?

Oh, I think I see what you're trying to get at.

Some kind of...

What's the neoplatonic...

What's the platonic connection to the psychedelic experience?

That's one way of thinking, right?

Yeah, in that sense, yeah.

I mean, maybe we need to ask the question over again.

But the psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing.

It isn't just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.

It's actually a product of the...

Well, I mean, it's hard to English it, but the product of the fractal laws that govern information theory.

That's a theme, I mean, that Neil Stevenson and all these people understand.

That it really is all about how everything is put together at the informational level.

There's no deeper truth.

And so all this talk about code and virtual reality and how the portions of our reality might be code running in some way.

And all of this.

This is all, I think, trying to get at something about information theory that needs to be fundamentally understood

before we can all together take the next step to the next level.

What's the relationship between what's happening with these information networks

and this kind of object or matrix or fecund, hyperdimensional...

You mean, how does our own cyberspacial technology relate to the presence of this neoplatonic-er object of...

Mm-hmm.

Well, that sounds like this dialogue you want to get in on with the garland of letters

or the Kabbalah or, I mean, mathematics is somehow this web of something which holds nature together

and seems to spring out of a higher mind of some sort.

I mean, mathematics is really what it's all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.

And that makes sense platonically and from this neoplatonic thing, you know, that's...

And by neoplatonic, I mean Proclus and Plotinus and those people who came about 500 years late after Christ.

Have you been to Ravenna?

That's where they have these mosaics that are...

Because it was basically a theory of pixelation.

It was an elemental theory.

So they were tiny, pure, undividable elements of essence that went together to produce phenomena.

Well, all those people came out around the end of the sixth or early seventh century.

It was Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry.

Yeah, Plotinus.

He had the right idea.

And you know, it was late Gnosticism.

So all this star magic and really wild theories of stellar...

Well, it was when the hermetic corpus was settling nicely into position.

All those doctrines of calling down the voices and all that.

But do you think we're in some sense in a structurally resonant position vis-à-vis late antiquity?

Let me think about that for a minute.

Always in some degree because these fractal things are just endlessly echoing and re-echoing inside the structure of time.

But, yeah, I mean, what we share with that era is a kind of fundamentally existential confusion about what's going on.

So doubt itself becomes a philosophical position.

Which, in fact, all doubt means is I'm shopping, thank you.

So, you know what I mean?

But what about that sense of this matrix, this network?

This thing you mine for language?

Yeah, I sort of see it like that.

That there's something you...

That all the metaphors of alchemy,

which are, you know, locating the deposit, extracting, concentrating, alloying, fabricating,

apply to this enterprise of language and literature and art.

And clearly that's, you know, basically what it's all about.

And you have to get in there somehow to this, to the main vein.

And once you're there, it's just pure, pure logos.

And that's the way I've always gotten at it.

I figure that's the way the really smart money gets at it.

The Melville, the Joyce, these voices that you find.

Are somehow channeling closer to that, from a position closer to that matrix.

Yeah.

Or whatever.

And that that's what real channeling is, is getting close to that kind of...

To that fecundee.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing that's so wrong about the...

I didn't really get this totally explicitly, but about like a lot of channeled material.

Is that I have no doubt that you can set yourself up into a psychic information network wherein you,

human ego at this point in history, are aware or become aware of the presence of another personality and voice,

which then you bring through and write down.

I'm not saying nothing about ontology, something about perception, psychology.

But the thing is, is that the stuff that gets transmitted, so much of it is so bad.

And so literalistic and so boring.

Because it's not actually close to that.

Because that is so rich with...

It's because as you say, it's too easy.

You have no doubt people can do it.

And you're right, they can do it.

And then, so then what you get is C plus material.

Have you ever seen an image of the letters that were on the golden plates?

The Mormon books?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, the Brody book, they have them reproduced.

Yeah.

It's just that whole notion of these highly compressed scripts.

I mean, if you imagine like this thing we were talking about in psychedelic space of this kind of matrix of possible languages or possible logics, which then end up kind of fleshing out into all this sort of other stuff.

That there must be languages that are like farther upstream that we can't really capture in full left brain, you know, alphabet parsing mind.

Right.

It's a little challenging for that mind, and yet it still has the character of a language.

It's like the Hebrew alphabet, that mystical idea of an alphabet.

No, Ralph and I have talked about stuff like this about, you probably know or have heard of this guy Stan Tenen.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

Well, he is into this thing where he has this shape and as you illuminate it from different angles, you get different Hebrew letters cast as shadows.

So Ralph said, you know, this implied then that there was this hyper object which cast all these shadows.

And he said, given sufficient computing power, you could compute upstream, as you say, and toward higher dimensional objects that would eventually shed all shadows of all letters in all languages.

And that there would actually be a kind of like omega object or something that was the source of all meaning.

So this thing you and I were talking about last night or today about mining the veins of organized entelechy or whatever relate to this concept of this like gnosis shedding,

hyper object that is somewhere up in the Imperium.

I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty evocative.

Well, it relates to this garland of letters stuff.

I really think, I mean, I had experiences leading up to the thing at La Charrera, you know, when I was young that just seemed to imply that sound was it.

And that you could do things with sound, with your voice, that it was all natural stuff, but everything up to probably splitting the atom if you knew how to do it.

So do you do you subscribe kind of at least loosely to the idea that behind a lot of religious and mystical literature at some level of depth lies psychedelic experience, you know, produced through ingesting of some kind of psychoactive substance?

Well, I think so. And I think more so since I've had cancer, because I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people and non-lethal.

In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body mind dislocation and have it not kill you.

So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.

Because then you imagine all of the chemical conditions under which people have over a million years.

Not just drugs, diet, temperament, genetics, and now this, all these various things.

It turns out the mind is far more malleable than it is.

Because it's easier to, well, what am I trying to say?

I'm trying to say the mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.

And so as people make their way through these states of mind induced by brain architecture, cancer, diet, drugs, genetics, whatever,

there's a much broader human database than I realized.

Well, other than the seizure itself that you've kind of described to me,

and I guess the drugs you're on now in terms of waking up with these completely bizarre things,

what are some of the other like really unusual mind states that you found yourself in since this all began?

Well, they're hard to describe.

Like one kind is, I call it, losing categories,

where it will become an enormous effort to decide whether there should be one or two of something,

something completely trivial.

But this one or two thing indicates to me some kind of lexical break,

or some kind of peculiar, I mean it's hard to, in English, but you see what I mean?

Yeah.

I love the idea that you, you woke up with the idea that you'd found another number between...

Oh, I, that I discovered a whole number between three and five or something that had previously been overlooked.

That was a funny idea.

And, but mostly it's some very hard to communicate idea about how concepts form these things called lexical objects,

that are like topologically closed, so they can't really be cross-related.

So all understanding becomes a kind of an illusion of some sort.

Wow, that's kind of intense.

Yeah, it is a weird idea.

Well, now that I have all these medical problems with brain and brain function,

I have a much greater appreciation for the boundaries of eccentricity.

I mean, now I understand.

It doesn't take drugs.

There are a lot of people running around who are crazy as shithouse owls,

and are achieving it on the natch.

And their testimony now has to be weighed as well.

So, this surprises me.

I didn't realize that, you know, a malfunctioning brain could leave you functioning enough to report to work

and tell your story and presumably write novels and meet deadlines and all these other things, you know, that people do.

And I don't know how many other people realize this either.

Because that's sort of how, I mean, how you feel?

Yeah.

I mean, I now live in a world defined by, pretty much by prescribed drugs.

And my doctors are telling me I have to take this stuff to stay alive, basically.

So, how many people are living in a world psychologically defined by, in that way?

Quite a lot.

But you seem to be largely parents.

They're the full, you know...

Well, I recall who I'm supposed to be.

So, we're not trading that into, like...

But in some fundamental sense, do you feel like you're standing on a different ball?

I would like to get all these drugs out of my system.

The Depakote and the steroids and all that.

Because it makes mentally moving on a level surface feel like walking uphill.

You know, so...

And these are mild drugs, I think.

These are...

not. What about the people who've been diagnosed schizophrenic or bipolar this or something?

What are these people taking and what is it making them think about reality?

You've taken serotonin reuptake inhibitors, haven't you?

You mean like Prozac? Yeah, but those are designed to help you out.

These other things all you deal with is side effects.

Oh yeah, yeah. It's a different thing.

I thought you were talking more about, but schizophrenia, don't they treat with all sorts of neurotransmitter modulating drugs

which presumably are there to help them out?

Well, they're to help them out.

They may be there to help the rest of us out.

Like for instance, this drug I take, Depakote, the first thing that it supposedly deals with is mania.

Well, I'm taking a drug for mania. I don't have mania. Do I? Did I? Would I? Should I? Will I? Could I? Do I want to? And so forth and so on.

You didn't feel like you had any bit of mania in you before?

At times I've been accused of mania, but by idiots.

And I guess because of the war on drugs, somewhat concealed in all that is the willingness of the establishment to allow experimentation with drugs, the effect of which on tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people would have social consequences that were maybe unintended or unmanaged.

Like I've wondered, you know, the statistic you hear, Prozac is the most prescribed drug in the world now and a billion people take Prozac.

Is it really? It's something like that.

So my question is, when do the rest of us get some of the benefit of this? In other words, when is the guy putting my fruit in my sack going to become a more pleasant person?

The guy pumping gas. All these people on Prozac, pretty soon it should begin to feed into the body politic as a sort of feeling of goodwill and temperance.

But I haven't actually seen it.

But yes, I would like to live for quite a while longer.

But it is very interesting. Cancer as a metaphor for modern life and how people live, how they think about their politics and diet and money and all of the rest of it.

And probably my generation was more exposed to toxins than any other in history.

Because there were not only all the toxins of the pre-modern world, but then all the plastics, adhesives and so forth.

Well, it seems so basic that Cancer is a socially, physically constructed metaphor for all these other processes that are happening on different levels.

It's almost like that plane of the real responds with an appropriate metaphor for all these processes of inflation and neg-entropy burning development.

The revenge of matter or something. Yeah. Or the revenge of synthetic matter.

But what is your prognosis?

Well, it's a little hard to figure out. I think it depends on the doctor you believe.

The doctor who just did the surgery said he got it all. He has an incredible reputation, like third best in the world or something with survival rates and all that.

So maybe he did get it all. In which case, I'm the same. We're the same. I just have to get strong.

On the other hand, the survival rate for this shit is very low. Zilch in some people's opinion.

They say there's no escape. There's always cells left. They always return. You can only have so many craniotomies.

So those people say six months to a year of life, which is really a drag to take on board.

My own intuition is I'm not sure. I can't tell what's going on. It certainly is a weird situation to have fall upon you, especially a person like myself who's never had...

I've never been a sick person or concerned with any of this. I had no idea there was so much morbidity around me.

Whereas Dante, you know, I had not thought death had undone so many, he says when he looks into the infirmary.

It's a sobering thought.

So that's it. And what you do is you constantly try to get stronger and hope that no bad news comes down the pike.

Do you feel more intimate with death?

Oh, absolutely. No. You spend every waking minute...

Well, I don't know every waking minute, but for the past six months, let us say death has been a daily accompaniment of my thoughts.

And dying is the more troubling subject. Death is the great who knows. Dying, on the other hand, might be unpleasant, prolonged, has a terrible effect on the people around you.

Full of fear and pain. And misapprehension.

Misapprehension?

Well, people don't know what it is. So they don't know what they're looking at.

And they, you know, are they losing you? Are you passing to the great, you know, the meaning culmination and answer to it all?

Or are you on an extended wing downward into darkness?

And it really plays people.

The internal subjective perception of the shutdown of the nervous system at death. I think that's a really interesting question.

You mean to what degree are these things different and similar?

Yeah, that in some ways what happens with both psychedelic and mystical visionary experience and certain relationships to apocalyptic form to the end of the world are things all transforming.

There's a point where the self dies, and it might happen in a millisecond, but subjectively would be the end of the world.

Yeah, and because I think everything works basically the same way, it would have a fair profundity.

Because you would be seeing the primal assembly language code.

But the whole idea of psychedelics is an end, you know, is a rehearsal for that kind of event.

Yeah, it's like Buddhism with turbocharged or something.

Now you can run through the bardo or take the diamond sutra for a spin.

How does one live your life in the shadow of such an event?

You know, what does it mean to live in the shadow of a different kind of culmination?

Or how does one live in a post-human world?

Well, maybe that's how you actually can change your existential more.

That's what you deal with.

That's the peg you move is this image of your own fate or end of life or how it's what exactly all this stuff is worth to you.

And as you move that around, you see things differently.

Absolutely.

How has a lifetime of psychedelic youth, an adult lifetime, teenage, sort of set you up for facing death?

Well, I guess it leads you to the idea that things are probably more complicated than you can suppose.

Therefore, supposition is not to be trusted.

So, in other words, given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death?

It's bound to be mighty strange. Life was mighty strange.

And I'm curious.

I don't think anybody would be curious.

I mean, it's an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life, death, because it composes your mind for it wonderfully.

And you, you know, start paying attention, asking the questions.

And I have no insight into what it will be, but I suspect it isn't what anybody thinks it is.

I mean, the argument that nature has this desire to preserve form is, I think, self-evident on enormous scales of space and time, and very local scales of space and time.

So, why fight it?

It must be that, that the, that somehow matter is spiritualizing itself, or mathematicizing itself, or somehow.

Right, becoming virtual forms.

So, and what psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises.

I mean, I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle, the fact that that can happen to your mind.

So, it means all kinds of things are possible.

Uh, nothing is to be assumed or prejudged, given A, biology, B, psychedelics and culture.

Probably that's a long enough list, but those two things alone secure the weirdness of being, you know, sufficiently.

We can call it quits.

It's late too.

You should get your rest, Terrence.

Yes, I should.

We all should.

Thank you.