Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic
Salon.
Sharing the Salon with me today are several people who either made donations directly
to the Salon or who bought a copy of my audio book, The Genesis Generation, and who I think
of as our virtual host today.
And those generous people are Brock T, who actually bought a book and made a significant
donation to the Salon, Gary B, Robert T, Cord M, Revlin J, C Jones, and Michael M, long
time friend, and another long time listener and regular donor, Mark C.
Also I'd like to thank Xe Velvet who has given me some help in reducing the size of the podcast
files here.
As you may have noticed, beginning in podcast 261 I started using a little higher encoding
rate because I was tired of the audio sounding so tinny and ghosting a bit, but since my technique
with audio is actually just one of hit and miss, trial and error, and I seem to come in on
the error side a little more than I'd like.
Anyway, I've gone back after I've got this help from Xe Velvet and recompiled the podcast
from 261 up to the present, and they now have significantly reduced file sizes with little
noticeable degradation in the sound quality.
At least to my own tinnitus haunted ears, that is.
So thanks again for your time, Xe Velvet, and to our fellow Saloners on low bandwidth connections,
I give you my sincere apologies for those big files, and I'll do my best to keep that from
happening again.
And also, George, Jason, and Laura, hey, please don't think that I've forgotten about you.
I'll definitely get back to you eventually, but once again, I've overcommitted on several
projects that I'm involved in, and I'm having difficulty setting enough time aside right
now to work on the podcast, but hopefully I'll be able to remedy that very soon.
Now, for today's program, which is from this cassette tape that has been sitting on my desk
for over a month now, I guess, I finally just couldn't wait any longer to hear it, and as
you've no doubt already guessed, it's another talk by Terrence McKenna.
Now, this tape is also another one from the box of tapes that Diana Slattery sent to me
sometime last year, and the last tape that I pulled out of that box is the one I played
in Podcast 261, which at the time was the earliest recording of a Terrence McKenna lecture that
I'd come across so far.
But as I was putting that tape away after doing the podcast, another tape slipped out of the
box onto the floor, and that's the one I'm going to play for you right now.
And if the label on the tape is to be believed, the talk that we're about to hear is even a
little older than the previous McKenna talk that I played.
And so, thank you again, Diana, for sending these tapes for me to share with all of our
friends here in the cyberdelic space.
Now, the handwriting on the tape says, New and Old Maps of Hyperspace, McKenna, November 1982,
First Lecture, which I take to mean that this was perhaps the first lecture in a weekend
workshop series of some kind he was giving at the time.
Now, a few weeks ago, Bruce Dahmer asked Diana about the source of these tapes, but since
many of them were given to her a long time ago, she no longer can recall exactly who it
was that gave each and every one to her, so we don't really know where this tape came from.
I do know that there are some McKenna tapes floating around the net that mention maps of
hyperspace or something like that, and they might be from this same lecture series that
he was giving at the time, I guess.
But as you'll hear in a few minutes, you'll see why I decided to change the title a little
bit for today's podcast.
In any event, let's now give a listen to this November 1982 recording of Terence McKenna,
in which he still felt the need to introduce himself and explain his qualifications to the
audience, which I actually find quite charming.
So, let's now join Terence and friends one day, back in November of 1982, and listen to
how they saw the world situation back then.
The big issue these days, and nothing to do with his talk, is this idea of self-reflection
and of things that are self-referential things and the paradoxes that can come out of that.
And I find Terence McKenna a kind of self-referential person.
He's spoken to us at least once, twice I think, right.
And each time, I have experienced an almost hallucinogenic experience in listening to him talk.
And I'm looking forward very much tonight to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens,
and UFOs.
New and old maps of hyperspace.
Take off.
Well, thank you very much.
I'm very glad to be here.
Special thanks to Ruth and Arthur and the Institute for asking me back for a third time.
Perhaps the third time is the charm we'll see here.
My name is Terence McKenna, and my training is basically in shamanism and botany and ethnography.
And my interest is in hallucinogenic drugs, especially plant hallucinogens,
as they're used in a shamanic context.
And what impels me to speak to a room full of people like this is the belief that the major
important point regarding hallucinogens has been largely overlooked, even though we're
now 15 or 20 or 30, depending on how you count it, years into the psychedelic age.
The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience.
And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific
methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
So what I'm going to address this evening is essentially my own experience with hallucinogens
and how I extrapolate it into the world based on its own being and other people's psychedelic
experiences that I have interacted with.
Before I get into that, I want to clarify something about shamanism.
There are two schools about the basis of shamanism, shamanistic experience.
One is the older school exemplified by Marcia Liad, who holds that all narcotic shamanism is decadent.
He prefers drumming, dancing, self-mutilation, even ordeal poisons, all precede the efficacy of hallucinogens.
He believes they are resorted to when the tradition is vitiated and people are grasping at straws.
I take this to be simply a cultural bias of the school of anthropology that he exemplified
and the time in which his work was done.
Now, Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack and takes the position that non-narcotic shamanism
is decadent because it is on its way to becoming ritual.
In other words, drumming, fasting, flagellation, all these things work to a degree and sometimes.
And they are not dependable in the same way that hallucinogens are.
And this has created, this plays on Western people's biases in favor of the idea that you have to work hard to get somewhere
and if you don't work hard, it isn't useful.
My own experience in looking at non-narcotic shamanism, essentially non-narcotic shamanism in Indonesia and in Nepal,
was that Wasson's intuition was very correct.
There is a grasping after.
And I see that grasping after, blending into the evolution of all higher religions.
In other words, experientially, there is only one religion and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
But it is very difficult to maintain in an agrarian context.
Hunting and gathering societies, which have much less structured social hierarchies,
seem to be able to function with the hallucinogenic experience embedded in them.
As soon as you rise even to the level of primitive agriculturalists,
it becomes much more important to be able to get up in the morning and go to work
than it does to have these ecstatic experiences
because the plants have to be tended, the fields tilled, and so on.
I formed these opinions about non-narcotic shamanism early in my career of looking at this phenomenon.
I didn't contact narcotic shamanism until I went to the Amazon Basin initially in 1971.
And although I was familiar with the hallucinogenic state from growing up basically in the counterculture in Berkeley,
but what I found in South America after sifting through these various experiences
is that the family of drugs constellated around tryptophan,
specifically DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and psilocybin,
which is chemically very similar to DMT,
that these compounds had a relationship to reality far different from all the other hallucinogens,
the scopolamine, hyalcyamine, tropane family that you get in detoura and that kind of thing,
or LSD, which laboratory LSD does not occur in nature,
but isomers of it occur in nature,
although to be taken at hallucinogenic doses,
they must be taken at hundreds of times the amount.
So that's basically the scientific, medical, anthropological basis of what I'm saying,
a career spent in Asia and more recently in the Amazon looking at this phenomenon.
And I want to take my conclusions tonight and contrast them with the modern predicament
and try to make a model using the hallucinogenic experience,
a model that makes some of the anxieties of being human,
and especially some of the anxieties of being human in the 20th century context,
more palatable.
And to do that, I want to evoke a number of abysses,
a number of empty places that our minds tend normally to shy away from.
First to invoke them and then to integrate them
through the idea of what is conventionally called the UFO or the UFO experience.
These abysses are basically four embedded in a fifth.
The four are the biological abyss that is represented by death and dying
that is the central crisis of every individual existence.
And almost as a reflection of that crisis on a higher plane,
the historical abyss represented by the end of history and the apocalypse
and possibly the millennium, but in any case,
the end of history that Western religion, whether it be Judaism, Christianity, or whatever,
has appointed to our world and made basic to Western man's view of things,
and which now, because of the existence of nuclear weapons and this kind of thing,
poses a terminal threat to the culture.
So, two abysses, the biological and the historical,
the latter being symbolized in the apocalyptic crisis.
A third abyss could be called the psychological,
and this is represented by dreams, most in general experience,
and by hallucinogens.
It is this casting off from the moorings of the ego,
making the night-sea journey into the other,
and being at the mercy of, call it the collective unconscious,
the overmind of the species, what have you.
The fourth abyss, which is one whose emergence is unique in our time,
is the actual physical abyss which surrounds this planet
for light years in all directions.
Because suddenly now, because of our level of technology
and scientific mapping,
we realize that it is there,
and we realize that it is a source of our cosmic loneliness,
and we realize that it presents an immense challenge
of the sort we like to accept as a Western culture,
challenges of energy, engineering, and distance.
So these are the four abysses,
the abyss of space,
the abyss of death,
the abyss of the psychedelic experience,
and the abyss of dying.
And these four general categories
have to be seen embedded
in a somewhat subtler kind of abyss,
which is the abyss of the unspeakable.
In other words, that language,
which is the primary tool of cognition of the species,
casts nets against these other gulfs
and comes away with different kinds of maps.
But you cannot put much trust in these maps
unless you've carried out a thorough analysis of language.
And once you've done that,
for sure you will not put much trust in any of these maps
because the thinness of the web on which it all is hung
will be readily apparent.
Okay.
It's my assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites
is to try to unify them,
to create a coincidencia positorum
as was done in alchemy,
to not force the system to closure,
but to try and leave the system open enough
so that the differences can resonate
and become complementary rather than antithetical.
So I would like to unify here not two dualisms,
but these four oppose these pairs.
You could think of them as the quadripartite elements
of a kind of mandala.
The means to unifying that mandala
is integration of the psychedelic experience.
Specifically, I'm going to make the assumption,
specifically the psilocybin or tryptamine experience.
And what it appears to be
is something which is much more assimilable
to the science fiction metaphor of a parallel universe
than it is to the Freudian metaphor
of the repression of desire
or even the Jungian metaphor
of a collective species-wide memory and experience bank.
It is much more, I think,
of the character of a parallel continuum.
And in order to erect the intellectual edifice
of the past thousand years,
this possibility has had to be ignored,
much in the way that you would apply Occam's razor
to a situation and just say,
well, we will not admit the more complex phenomenon
because we should form a theory
that is true to the simplest phenomena first
and then build out from it.
And this has worked in a demonic kind of way
in the sense that we have taken command
of the atomic world,
which is a very simple world
compared, for instance,
to the variables that you meet in sociology or biology.
But at the cost of formulating theories
about how the world is put together
that nowhere come tangential to experience.
So we have a bizarre situation
where our best models of reality
that are kept for us by the priesthood of science
are like exhibits in a museum
because they cannot be mapped on
to the simple fact of individual experience.
Shamanism, on the other hand,
is this worldwide, since Paleolithic times,
tradition which says that
you must make your own experience
the centerpiece of any model of the world
that you build.
No amount of readings from meters,
whether they're metering cyclotrons
or any other kind of instrument,
are going to satisfy you.
Once you understand that,
then what the task becomes
is one of making sense
of these metaphors, so-called,
or myths, so-called,
that are the pre-Western, pre-print,
pre-literate mappings of the world.
An example of how this problem
distorts other problems
is the problem of extraterrestrial contact,
which is...
The way science presents
the problem of extraterrestrial contact
is that we are alone
and that to assuage our cosmic loneliness,
we should build ever larger radio telescopes
and million-channel signal analyzers
and sift the radio noise
coming from the stars
and eventually, if a signal is found,
an immense philosophical turning point
will have occurred
and we will then place ourselves
in the context of the cosmos.
This is actually a red herring kind of argument
because outside of the highly technical
Western societies that have evolved
in the last 300 years,
people have been talking to the other
since man began.
Angels, demons, fairies, sprites, elves,
all of this is as phenomenologically
a part of human experience
as, we'll say, birds of paradise,
which I'm sure none of you have ever had anything to do with,
but believe inflexibly that such creatures exist
because it is allowed by the experts that they exist.
What psilocybin focuses as a problem
that these other hallucinogens do not
is it allows a dialogue with the other
that is full of give and take.
In other words, there are entities
in the hallucinogenic world
that psilocybin and DMT
and a few other not well-known
or widely distributed plant hallucinogens induce.
I think it was William Blake who said
the truth cannot be told
so as to be understood without being believed.
And this is the kind of information
that is coming through the psilocybin experience.
It is information which you have to believe it.
You have to believe it
because it has this ring of authenticity.
It is the logos.
It is the word somehow.
And what is being said
is that our alienation
and this word is interesting, alienation.
Our alienation from ourselves
has caused us to set up a number of straw men
that are keeping us from building
actually a mature model
of how the universe really works.
The content of the dialogue with the other
is a content that indicates
that man's horizons are infinitely bright,
that death is in fact,
well, as Thomas Vaughan put it,
the body is the placenta of the soul.
And this fact has not yet been assimilated
because it runs counter to Western reductionist,
but this idea that the body is placenta to the soul
is not an object of faith or a dogma.
It's a program for activity.
The activity that it implies should be undertaken
is a familiarization with the soul.
And the soul has been banned from Western thinking about the self
for nigh on 400 years,
at least in leading circles.
But I take this concept very seriously.
And I think, if any of you are familiar with the literature of alchemy,
alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct,
a wholeness, a thing which has many properties,
which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter,
which can do anything.
This is the last gasp of the soul
before it's submerged completely.
In other words, it became trapped
in an association with phonic matter
in the last historical epoch
before it disappeared completely from Western consciousness.
Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin,
allow a searchlight to be thrown
on these deeper levels of the psyche,
as Jung correctly stated.
But it is not a museum of archetypes
or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume.
It is a frontier of wholeness
into which any person so motivated
and so courageous as to wish to do it
can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.
In other words, it is a dimension of vertical gain
that is real and is present in all of our lives
and that we do not acknowledge except as an anomaly
because we have been told that it's an anomaly.
We have been told that these perceptions
have to be devalued.
The result of this is to so distort
the psychic life of the species
in the present historical context
that we have this UFO disease
which is essentially a rupture
into three-dimensional space
of this archetype of wholeness
and it haunts time like a ghost
and it haunts human experience in the 20th century
because it is a symbol of alienation
and the word alien has in fact come to be applied
to this thing.
It is alien.
It comes from the stars.
It is totally non-human.
It has great potential for mankind
but it can barely be Englished at all.
And actually, what it is
is the self
in the form in which it is most accessible
to the ego
given the ego's programming
with all the scientific garbage
about the density of life in the universe
the distance to the stars
the probability of chemical evolution
occurring here and there and yonder.
It is, in other words,
something which in order not to alarm us
has disguised itself
as an extraterrestrial being
but is in fact
the collectivity of the human psyche
signaling a profound historical crisis.
I talked about this before.
I talked about the danger
of succumbing to belief in UFOs
because of the damage it did to free will
and that, yes, the UFO is a
it is making war on science
because science has created
such a masculine overbalance
in the intellectual life of the species
that this automatic mechanism
has been triggered.
A history-stopping archetype
is being released
into the skies of this planet
and if we are not careful
it will halt all intellectual inquiry
in the same way
that the Christos archetype
halted intellectual inquiry
in the Hellenistic age.
I don't want to go into this too deeply
but it's clear to me
that Hellenistic science
was destroyed by the Christos archetype
because the Demacritian atomists
and materialists who ran Roman civilization
had no patience whatsoever
with this superstition
that was being circulated
among the servants
about a man who rose from the dead
and all that went with it
but before they knew what had happened
their whole civilization was in ruin
because the archetype had frozen
the forward thrust
of this masculine, dominant
ethically depotentiated
technologically obsessed
slave-built society
and for a thousand years
hydrostatics, mathematics, metallurgy
you name it
that was nothing
only the words of one Galilean radical
could occupy the time
of any intellectual successfully
okay, we have now
two thousand years later
fought our way somewhat clear
of that problem
but the problem it solved
which is the problem of this masculine
overbalance
and this obsessive technological thrust
this dehumanizing thrust
has reached an even more intense peak
and now appears the flying saucer
with the capacity of undoing that
by again destroying science
by simply being a miracle
that's all that is required
to wreck science
is a miracle
visible worldwide
and because scientists say
that that can't happen
consequently if it does happen
new language
i can't say
because science
is a miracle
that they have to be
back to the point
of the fact that
the goal is to be
to be able to
continue to change
whether they can
control or study
or study
are they
that they can
in a way
and they can
they can
all
the food
because
they can
Their house is in real disorder.
So I touched on this before, any of you who heard me.
Tonight I want to talk more about the flying saucer,
not from the point of view of the people who are going to get the whammy
when it appears unbidden, but from the point of view of an insider.
In other words, one can do more than simply say,
oh yes, I understand what this is, the overmind is visibly manifest in the skies of earth
in order to skew history toward an eschatological mode
that will stifle inquiry in order, basically, to preserve the species from extinction.
But a mature humanity could get into a place
where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings
from messiahs and flying saucers
that come along every thousand years or so
to mess up the mess that has been created
and to try and send people off on another tack.
And the way to do this
is to look at the abysses that confront man
as species and individuals and try to unify them.
And I think that psilocybin offers a way out
because it allows a dialogue with the overmind
that is not, you won't read about it in Scientific American or anywhere else.
You will carry it out.
And the carrying out of this dialogue
will essentially eschatologize you as a person
and lift you out of the historical context.
It's like Stephan Dedalus said in Ulysses,
history is the nightmare that I am trying to awake from.
Well, I would turn it around a bit
and say history is what I am trying to go to sleep from
in order to get away from it.
In other words, the dream is eschatological.
The dream is zero time and outside of history.
Escape into the dream.
Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs,
that they are for escapists.
I think the people who make this charge
hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapists.
Escape.
Escape from the planet,
from death,
and from the problem, if possible,
of the unspeakable.
This, so now,
to say a bit about death and dying,
if you leave aside the last 300 years
of historical experience
as it was handled in Europe and America
and examine the phenomenon of death,
the doctrine of the soul
in all its ramifications,
Neoplatonic, Christian,
dynastic, Egyptian, etc.
I am sure you are all familiar
with some or all of these.
What you get is the idea
that there is a light body
or a thing,
an intellect,
that is somehow mixed up in the body
during life
and at death or at dying
is involved in a crisis
in which these two envelopes separate
and one loses its raison d'etre
and falls into dissolution,
metabolism stops,
and the other one goes,
we know not where,
perhaps nowhere,
if you believe it doesn't exist,
but then you have the problem
of trying to explain life,
which, by the way,
though science makes great claims
and has done very well
in systems of nuclear particles
and even simple atomic systems.
The idea that science
can make any statement
about what life is
or where it comes from
is preposterous.
Science has nothing to say
about how you can decide
to close your hand into a fist
and it happens.
This is utterly outside the realm
of scientific explanation
because what we see
in that phenomenon
is mind as a first cause.
In other words,
we see matter.
It's an example of telekinesis.
Matter is caused by mind to move.
So science has,
we need not fear
the sneers of science
in the matter of the fate
or origin of the soul.
There,
and as I say,
my thrust into this
has always been
the psychedelic experience,
but I've been thinking recently
more about dreams
because dreams are
a much more generalized form
of experience
of the hyperdimension
or the mode
in which life
and mind
seem to be embedded
and looking at dreams
and looking at what
people with shamanic traditions
say about dreams,
you come to the realization
that experientially
for those people
it is a parallel continuum.
The shaman accesses it
with hallucinogens
or other things
which I mentioned
but most efficaciously
with hallucinogens
but everybody else
accesses it
through dreams.
Now,
Freud's idea
about dreams
was,
I forget the German term,
but he called
the day residues.
He always felt
that you could trace
the content of the dream
down to a distortion
of something
that happened
during the day
or, you know,
during waking time.
I think that
it's much more useful
to try and make
actually a kind
of geometric model
of consciousness
and to take seriously
the idea
of a parallel continuum
and to say
that the mind
and the body
are embedded
in the dream
and the dream
is a kind,
not a kind of,
but a higher order
spatial dimension
so that
in sleep
you are released
into the real world
of which
the world of waking
is only the surface
and in a very,
in a very literal sense
it's the surface.
It's the surface
in a geometric sense
that there is a plenum
and recent experiments
in quantum physics
tend to back this up.
There is a holographic plenum
of information.
Information,
all information
is everywhere.
Information that is not here
is nowhere
and that information
stands outside
of historical time.
It's like Plato said,
time is the moving image
of eternity.
Eternity,
it does not have
a temporal existence,
even the kind
of temporal existence
where you say
it always existed.
It does not have
temporal duration
of any sort.
It is eternity.
We are not,
we are not primarily
biology
with mind
emerging
as a kind
of iridescence,
a kind
of epiphenomenon
at the higher levels
of organization
of biology.
We are in fact
hyperdimensional objects
of some sort
which cast
a shadow
into matter
and the matter,
the shadow in matter
is the body
and at death
what happens
basically
is that the shadow
withdraws
or the thing
which casts
the shadow
withdraws
and metabolism
ceases
and matter
which had been
organized
into a dissipative
structure
in a very localized
area
sustaining itself
against entropy
by cycling material
in and degrading
it and expelling
it.
That whole phenomenon
ceases
but the
thing which
ordered it
is not affected
by that
and when I make
these declarative
statements
I'm making them
from the point of view
of this shamanic tradition
which touches
all these higher religions.
Everything
basically
except rationalism
holds to some version
of what I'm saying.
So then
the psychedelic
the dream
state
and the psychedelic
state
acquire
great import
because
there is then
a task
to life
and the task
to life
is to
become familiar
with this
thing
which is
causing
being
and to
be familiar
with it
at the moment
of passing.
In other words
the metaphor
is used
by several
traditions
of a vehicle
an after death
vehicle
an astral body
something like that
and shamanism
and
certain yogas
Taoist yoga
claim very clearly
that the purpose
is to familiarize
yourself
with this
after death
body
in life
and then
the act
of dying
will not
create
confusion
in the psyche
you will
recognize
what is happening
you will
know what to do
and you will
make the clean
break
and
there does
seem to be
the possibility
of a
problem
in dying
in other words
what I'm telling
you is not
that you're
condemned
to eternal life
I'm saying
it's a possibility
that you can
muff it
through ignorance
in other words
at the moment
of death
there is
a kind
of a
separation
it's like
birth
the metaphor
is trivial
but perfect
it is
there is a
possibility
of
damage
of
incorrect
activity
again
William Blake
who said
that
as you start
into the
spiral
there is
the possibility
of falling
from the
golden track
into
eternal
death
but it is
only a
crisis
of a
moment
it's a
crisis
of
passage
and the
whole
purpose
of shamanism
and of
life
correctly
lived
is
to
strengthen
the soul
and to
strengthen
the relationship
to the soul
so that
this
passage
can be
cleanly
made
okay
this
is
not
anything
earth
shaking
or
it's
well known
it's
a
traditional
position
actually
but now
I want
to
assimilate
one more
abyss
into this
model
one
less
familiar
to us
as
rationalists
but well
familiar
to us
just one
level
deeper
in the
psyche
as
Christians
and
westerners
and that
is
this
idea
that the
world
will
end
that there
will be
a
final
time
that there
is not
only
the
crisis
of the
death
of the
individual
there is
the crisis
of the
death
of the
species
what
this
seems
to be
about
is
that
from the
time
that there
is an
awareness
of the
existence
of the
soul
we'll
say
circa
50,000
BP
until
the
moment
but
it
is
the
entire
span
of
history
times
five
in that
period
everything
hangs
in the
balance
because
it is
a mad
rush
from
monkeydom
to
starship
hood
and
in
the
leap
across
those
25,000
years
energies
are
released
religions
are
shot
off
like
sparks
philosophies
evolve
and die
science
arises
magic
arises
all
of
these
things
which
control
power
with
greater
and
lesser
degrees
of
ethical
constancy
appear
there
is
the
possibility
as
in the
metaphor
of
dying
there
is
the
possibility
of
mucking
it
no
doubt
that
we
are
now
in
the
final
seconds
of
that
crisis
a
crisis
which
involves
the
end
of
history
the
departure
from
the
planet
the
triumph
over
death
and
the
release
of
the
individual
from
matter
we
are
in
fact
closing
distance
with
the
most
profound
event
a
planetary
ecology
can
encounter
which
is
the
freeing
of
life
from
the
dark
chrysalis
of
matter
the
old
metaphor
of
psyche
as
the
butterfly
is
a
species
wide
metaphor
we
must
undergo
a
metamorphosis
in order
to
survive
the
momentum
of
the
historical
forces
already
in
motion
well
if
you
know
anything
about
evolutionary
biology
you
know
that
man
is
considered
to
be
an
unevolving
species
in
the
biological
evolution
of
man
ceased
and
evolution
became
a
cultural
phenomenon
tools
languages
and
philosophies
began
to
evolve
but
the
human
somotype
began
to
remain
the
same
and
so
we
are
very
much
like
people
a
long
time
ago
but
technology
is
the
real
skin
of
a
technological
shell
we
take
in
matter
that
is
has
a
low
degree
of
organization
we
put it
through
mental
filters
and
we
extrude
lindisfarne
gospels
space
shuttles
all of
these
things
this is
what
we
do
we're
like
coral
animals
embedded
in
a
saucer
or
the
soul
exteriorized
in
three
dimensional
space
it's
as
James
Joyce
said
it's
the
problem
of
how
man
may
be
dirigible
right
and
how
man
may
be
dirigible
is
basically
by
turning
himself
inside
out
in
other
words
the
body
must
become
an
interiorized
hologrammatic
object
embedded
in
a
state
hyperdimensional
matrix
which is
eternal
so that
man
wanders
through
Elysium
in his
body
this is
a kind
of
Islamic
paradise
that I'm
putting out
here
wanders
through
Elysium
in his
body
experiencing
all the
pleasures
of the
flesh
but not
realizing
that he
is a
holographic
projection
of a
solid
state
matrix
that is
micro
miniaturized
super
conducting
and
nowhere
to be
found
it is
part
of
the
plenum
and
we
all
history
is about
producing
prototypes
of this
situation
with
greater
and greater
closure
toward the
ideal
so that
airplanes
automobiles
condominiums
space
shuttles
space
colonies
star
ships
of the
hardware
speed of
light
spin
dizzy
drive
type
all of
these
are
as
Mircea
Liad
says
self
transforming
images
of flight
that speak
volumes
about man's
aspiration
to self
transcendence
so that
we are
our wish
our salvation
and our only hope
basically
is to
end the
historical
crisis
by becoming
the alien
by
ending
alienation
by recognizing
the alien
as the
self
in fact
recognizing
the alien
as
an
overmind
which holds
all the
physical laws
of the
planet
intact
in the
same way
that you
hold an
idea
intact
in your
mind
in other
words
givens
which are
thought to
be
so
written
adamantine
are actually
merely
the moods
of the
god
if you
will
which we
happen to
be
and the
whole
thing
about
human
history
is
recovering
this
piece
of
lost
information
so that
man may
be
dirigible
or
again
to quote
Finnegan's
Wake
Moycane
is the
red light
district
of Dublin
here
in
Moycane
we
flop
on the
seamy
side
but up
in the
end
prospector
you
sprout
all
your
worth
and you
woof
your
wings
so if
you want
to be
phoenixed
come and
be
parked
it's that
simple
you see
but it
takes courage
to be
parked
when the
grim
reaper
draws near
a blessing
in disguise
Joyce
calls
so
to me
what
psychedelics
point out
and where
I think
society
will go
once they
are
integrated
to the
point
where
large
groups
of people
can
plan
research
programs
without
fear
of being
persecuted
for it
is
it
models
the
after
death
state
it
may
do
more
than
model
it
may
essentially
reveal
the
nature
of it
that
our
mind
what we
each
call
our
mind
can
be
the
modalities
of
appearance
and
understanding
can be
shifted
so
that
we
and
then
problems
like
the
existence
of
extraterrestrials
and that
kind of
thing
become
trivial
because
the
one
mind
that
I'm
talking
about
contains
all
experiences
of the
other
there
is
not
the
Newtonian
universe
deployed
throughout
the
parsecs
and
kiliocosms
of
physical
space
and
the
interior
mental
universe
they
are
the
same
thing
we
perceive
them
as
unresolvable
dualisms
because
of
what
is
called
or
what
I
call
a
code
the
quality
of
the
code
meaning
the
language
we
use
to
discuss
this
problem
has
these
built
in
dualisms
this
is
a
problem
of
language
all
codes
have
code
qualities
except
the
logos
the
logos
is
perfect
and
therefore
it
partakes
of
no
quality
other
than
itself
but
so
long
as you
deal
so
long
as
you
map
with
something
other
than
the
logos
there
will
be
code
qualities
and
the
dualism
built
in
to
our
language
makes
the
death
of the
species
the
death
of the
individual
these
seem
to be
opposed
things
likewise
the
problems
biology
and by
extrapolation
exobiology
pose
by examining
the
physical
universe
versus
the
angel
and
demon
haunted
world
that
death
psychology
is
reporting
on
is
again
set
up
as
a
dichotomy
all
that
is
needed
to
go
beyond
an
academic
understanding
of what
I've been
saying
is
to
have
the
experience
of
the
tryptamine
molecule
has
this
unique
property
of
releasing
the
structured
self
into
the
over
self
and
each
person
who has
that
experience
undergoes
a mini
apocalypse
a mini
entry
and mapping
into
hyperspace
for
society
to
change
in
this
direction
nothing
is
necessary
except
for
this
experience
to
become
an
object
of
general
concern
now
what
I'm
not
saying
everybody
should
rush
out
and
take
mushrooms
in
case
you
thought
that's
what
I
was
saying
but
I
am
saying
that
these
fields
of
information
which
I
don't
know
if
you're
like
me
but
my
experience
of
these
things
is
basically
literary
I
read
Plotinus
I
read
Heraclitus
I
read
all
this
stuff
and
I
try
to
integrate
it
intellectually
but
it
is
a
plane
of
experience
that
is
directly
accessible
and
the
role
that
each
of
us
plays
in
relationship
to
transformation
that
this
hints
of
in
other
words
in
this
theory
there
is
a
kind
of
teleological
bias
there
is
a
belief
that
there
is
a
hyper
object
called
the
over
mind
or
god
or
what
have
you
that
casts
shadow
into
time
and
history
is
the
experiencing
of
this
shadow
and
as
you
draw
closer
and
closer
to
the
source
of
the
shadow
the
paradoxes
intensify
the
rate
of
change
intensifies
the
because
what
is
happening
is
that
this
hyper
object
is
beginning
to
ingress
into
three
dimensional
space
one
way
of
the
dream
and
the
waking
world
and
the
world
of
the
dream
begin
to
become
one
so
that
the
school
of
flying
saucer
criticism
which
has
said
flying
saucers
are
hallucinations
was
in a
certain
sense
correct
in
that
the
laws
which
operate
in
the
dream
the
laws
which
operate
in
hyperspace
can
at
times
operate
in
three
dimensional
space
when
the
barrier
between
the
two
modes
becomes
weak
and
then
you
have
these
curious
experiences
sometimes
called
psychotic
breaks
sometimes
called
whatever
but
which
always
have
a
tremendous
impact
on the
person
they're
happening
to
because
there
seems
to be
an
exterior
component
that
hysterous
claim
that
this
is
a
psychological
phenomenon
because
these
are
changes
in the
world
what
Jung
calls
synchronicity
and
made a
certain
model
of
but
what it
really is
is that
an
alternative
physics
is beginning
to impinge
on
reality
and it
is the
physics of
light
essentially
light
is composed
of photons
photons
have no
anti-particle
this
means
that
there
is
no
dualism
in the
world
of
light
and
if
you
try
to
imagine
the
experience
from the
point of
view
of a
thing
made
of
light
you
realize
I'm
sure
you're
all
familiar
with
the
conventions
of
relativity
which
say
that
time
slows
down
as
you
approach
the
speed
of
light
but
what
is
never
said
about
that
is
that
if
you
move
at
the
speed
of
light
there
is
no
time
whatsoever
there
is
an
experience
of
time
zero
so
if
you
imagine
for a
moment
yourself
to be
made
of
light
or
in
possession
of
a
vehicle
which
can
move
at
the
speed
of
light
there
you
can
traverse
from
any
point
but
the
amount
of
time
that
has
passed
in
the
relativistic
universe
is
whatever
it
is
four
and
a
half
years
but
if
you
move
at
very
great
distances
if
you
cross
250,000
light
years
across
to
Andromeda
you
still
have
an
experience
of
time
zero
the
only
experience
of
time
that
you
have
is
a
subjective
time
that
is
created
by
your
own
mentation
but
in
relationship
there
is
no
time
whatsoever
you
exist
in
eternity
you
have
become
eternal
now
of
course
the
universe
is
aging
at a
staggering
rate
all
around
you
in
this
situation
but
you
perceive
it
as
a
fact
of
the
universe
the
way
we
perceive
Newtonian
physics
as
a
fact
of
this
universe
so
you
time
as
the
moving
image
of
eternity
you
are
then
away
from
the
moving
image
you
exist
in
this
static
mode
I
believe
that
this
is
what
technology
pushes
toward
and
that
there
is
no
opposition
between
you
know
ecological
balance
and
the
people
who
want
to
leave
the
planet
and
the
hyper
technologists
and the
hyper
naturalists
all
of
historical
entity
which is
becoming
eminent
is
the
human
soul
and
it
is
the
monkey
body
has
served
to
carry
to
this
moment
of
release
and
it
will
always
serve
as
a
focus
of
self
image
but
it
will
exist
in
a
world
made
by
the
suffices
the
rising
out
of
the
gnostic
universe
of
iron
that
traps
the
light
all
these
metaphors
this
is
what
it
means
it
means
release
into
the
human
imagination
very
shortly
a
as
it
were
a dry
run
for this
phenomenon
will
take
place
in
the
form
of
space
exploration
and space
colonies
because
there
the
coral
reef
like
man
that
has
extruded
technology
all over
the
surface
of
the
earth
will
be
freed
at
last
from
the
constraints
of
anything
but
his
own
imagination
and
the
limitations
of
materials
so
that
for
instance
the
earliest
space
colonies
of
course
there
will
be
an
effort
to
duplicate
the
ecosystem
of
Hawaii
and
this
and
that
you
know
these
like
exercises
in
ecological
understanding
to prove
you know
what
this is
under
control
we will be
released into the realm of art
which is what we have always striven for
we will make our world
all of our world
and the world we came from will be maintained as a garden
but what Iliad indicated as these endless metaphors of self-transforming flight
will be realized momentarily as the technology of the space colony
what is lining up right behind that of course is the fact that the transition from earth
to space is a staggeringly tight genetic filter
a much tighter filter than any previous frontier ever has been even the the filter
the genetic demographic filter represented by the new world it's said that you know
the vitality of america is because only the dreamers and the pioneers and the schemers
made the trip across
this will be even more true of the transition to space and the technological conquest of space
will set the stage then for the interiorization of that metaphor and the conquest of inner space
and the collapse of the state vectors associated with this technology deployed in newtonian space
and then man will have become more than dirigible
I think a break here
A couple more things, and then there seem to be a lot of questions, so I'll throw it open for questions.
But before I do that, I mentioned this book, The Invisible Landscape, that my brother and I wrote,
and I'll say just a bit about it because it relates to what's been said.
I spoke in general terms about the technology which would interiorize the body, exteriorize the soul,
spoke of it as a long-term technological goal, meaning visible within the next hundred or so years,
following on to space travel, that sort of thing.
But what The Invisible Landscape is about is an effort to short-circuit that chronology
and to actually, in a certain sense, force the issue.
It's the story, or rather it's the intellectual underpinnings of the story of an expedition to the Amazon
by my brother and myself and several other people in 1971 in which my brother formulated an idea
that involved using harming and harmaline.
These are compounds which occur in banisteriopsis capi, which is the woody vine that is the basis for ayahuasca.
And ayahuasca is one of these planned hallucinogens that releases you into this dimension I'm discussing.
An effort to use harming in conjunction with the human voice in what we call the experiment at La Chorera,
which was basically, you can take it as very loose science or very tight magic,
but it was an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of these harming molecules
metabolizing in vivo in the body in such a way that they would bind preferentially into certain molecular structures.
Our candidate at the time was DNA.
I think Frank Barr has convinced me that there's as great a likelihood that it involves binding into melanin bodies
is as likely a possibility as that it involves DNA,
but it involves binding into a molecular site where information is stored
so that this information is then broadcast in essentially in the mind in such a way
that you begin to get a readout on the structure of the soul.
In other words, this was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the cat, if you will,
to hang a superconducting telemetric psychedelic device on the overmind
so that there would be a continuous readout of information from this dimension.
And the success or failure of this, you may judge by reading the book
because the first half of the book describes the experiment,
the theoretical underpinning of the experiment.
The second half of the book describes the theory of the structure of time
that derived from the bizarre mental states that followed upon the experiment.
I don't claim that we succeeded.
I just claim that our theory of what happened is better than any theory
any of our critics have been able to bring forward.
But whether we succeeded or not, that kind of thinking points the way.
In other words, when I say, when I speak of the technology of building the starship,
I imagine it will be done with voltages far below the voltage of a common flashlight battery.
This is, after all, where the voltage is, where the most interesting phenomenon go on in nature.
Thought is that kind of phenomenon.
Metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.
So I think that an aquarium science or a science that places the psychedelic experience
at the center of its program of investigation should move toward a practical realization of this goal.
The goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the over-self
so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the over-self
so that the anxiety of being cast into matter,
of apparently facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of death,
of apparently facing a tremendous species crisis in the form of the apocalypse,
the crisis of limitation in physical space by being planet-bound,
all of these things can be obviated by cultivating the soul, basically,
by practicing shamanism using these tryptamine drugs that I've described.
And my plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may be listening to my voice
is to look again at psilocybin, to not lump it with the other psychedelics,
to realize that it is a phenomenon unto itself and it has an enormous potential for transforming mankind,
not simply transforming the people who take it,
but it is like an art movement or a mathematical understanding or a scientific breakthrough.
It holds the possibility of transforming the entire society
simply by virtue of the information that is coming through.
This is a source of Gnosis and the voice of Gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.
I like to think that when these Franciscans and Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the 16th century,
they immediately set about stamping this thing out.
The Indians called it Tiananakotl, the flesh of the gods.
Well, the Catholic Church has a monopoly on theophagia
and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on.
Now, 300, 400, whatever it is, years after that initial contact,
I think that Eros, which retreated from Greece and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity,
retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, essentially,
and then was finally pushed into seclusion there,
it now re-emerges in Western consciousness.
And our institutions, our epistemology, all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued
that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities,
we can release this thing once again.
I mean, the logos can be unleashed once again.
And the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus,
that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people.
And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.
And this is the promise that is held out.
And I realize that it may seem to some a nightmare vision,
but it is all historical changes of immense magnitude have had that quality
because they propel people into a completely new world.
Are there any questions?
Yes.
I agree with you that this is a strongly held position.
I always in my explorations have recourse to my own experience.
And I've not had good luck with any of these other techniques.
I spent time in India, practiced yoga, scoured the various rishis, roshis,
geishas and gurus that Asia had to offer.
And I believe they must be talking about something.
But in my experience, it is so pale and so far removed from the actual closure
with the intense tryptamine ecstasy that I don't really know what to make of it.
And I am willing to believe these things are possible.
I just must be a very grounded person.
Well, maybe it's a shortcut.
Well, Tantra, for instance, claims to be that's what Tantra means, is the shortcut path.
And certainly they might be on the right track.
Sexuality, orgasm, these things do have tryptamine-esque qualities to them.
But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens,
is information, immense amounts of information.
In my experience, a hallucinogen like LSD, the hallucinations seem largely to be somehow related
to the structure of the optic nerve, or they are essentially trivial.
They are geometric patterns, shifting lights, this and that, but unless synergized by another drug.
The classic psychedelic experience that started it all with Huxley and those people
was, I believe, 200 micrograms of LSD and 30 milligrams of mescaline.
And I would believe that that would deliver a visionary experience rather than an experience of hallucinations.
And the difference is, what psilocybin shows you is not colored lights and moving grids.
It shows you places, jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic form of incredible complexity.
Just click, click, click.
There is no possibility that this could be construed as noise of any sort.
It is, in fact, the most highly ordered visual information that you ever experience.
Much more highly ordered than the visual experience I'm having at this moment of this room.
But information in the form of a flood of data, that isn't gnosis.
I mean, could you spell out what you mean?
You certainly must mean something more important than the volume of data.
No, no.
I think I talked about this last time, that Philo-Judeus talks about what he calls a more perfect logos.
He says a more perfect logos would be beheld rather than heard.
In other words, the formulation you get in the Gospel of John, in principio ad verbum ad verbum car factum est.
In the beginning was the word, yes, it was the word in the beginning, but this is a strange kind of word.
It is a word which is visually beheld.
And the language in which the gnosis communicates is a language of visual forms such that there is no ambiguity about meaning
because there is no recourse to a dictionary of agreed upon signification.
It is purely beheld.
This is why it's very hard, one of the main problems of psychedelic drugs is to bring back information
because it is hard to English it.
And the reason it's hard to English it is because it's like trying to make a three-dimensional rendering of a fourth-dimensional object.
Only through the medium of sight can the true modality of this logos be perceived.
That's why it's so interesting, and I should have maybe talked more about it,
that psilocybin and ayahuasca, which is this aboriginal drug which uses tryptamine to make it run,
is there's a telepathic component, which is there is a shared state of mind
because the unfolding hallucination is shared in complete silence.
And, you know, it's very hard to prove this to a scientist,
but if four people are having this experience, you know,
one person can, like, monologue it and then cease the monologue and another person will take it up.
Everyone is seeing the same thing.
And this, it is the quality of being visual information, to answer your question, Arthur,
that seems to make this logos believable in the way that I quoted William Blake
when he said the truth cannot be told.
That is very powerful.
And you do believe it.
You do believe it.
But I was going to say that you said you have a seeing,
and we say QED after the demonstration in geometry,
but the Hindus say, behold.
Now, the seeing involved there, I wouldn't think of as visual,
but it does get the word seeing, the name seeing.
You somehow, your whole, what I was, I wouldn't say mind, your being resonates.
I like to use the term recognize.
You see that, let's say, this is the same thing as the other thing.
And I don't know whether it's seeing, but it,
seeing is a good word, but it isn't, I wouldn't call it visual.
No, well, it isn't exactly visual.
I mean, again, to quote Philo-Judeus on the logos,
he says that the logos goes from a thing heard to a thing seen
without ever crossing through a quantized transition point.
And yet this seems impossible.
It seems a logical impossibility because it is either one or the other.
And yet, when you actually have the experience,
you see, aha, it is as though thought, which is heard,
the thought, which is heard, becomes more and more intense
until finally its intensity is such that with there being no jump or glitch,
you now are beholding it in the three-dimensional visual space
and you command it.
And this is very typical of suicide.
Yes?
I have two questions.
One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue,
I was wondering if you could kind of be more descriptive in that regard.
And the other thing was,
as far as the effects of this type of experience,
especially over, say, a prolonged period of time on the body
and the body as an energy system,
and how do you balance that
or how do you counteract possible negative effects?
Okay, well, I'll take the last part first,
which is about the body.
I'm not an abuser.
It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience.
And I feel, you know, I never have lost my respect for it.
I mean, I really feel dread is one of the emotions that I always feel as I approach it
because I have no faith that my sails won't be ripped this time.
I always make the metaphor, you know,
it's like sailing out onto a dark ocean in your little skiff.
And, you know, you may view the moon rising serenely over the calm black water
or something the size of a freight train may roar right through your scene
and leave you clutching at an oar.
And I don't know, astrology is maybe helpful in figuring out when to go and when not to go,
but there needs to be a way to figure out when to go and when not to go.
Now, your question about the dialogue, I mean this very literally.
It speaks to you, you speak to it.
It says things.
I don't know how many of you have read the book that my brother and I wrote
under pseudonyms called Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.
But in the introduction there, there's a rap which is all about
I am old, 50 times older than thought in your species, and I came from the stars.
Well, that's verbatim, you know.
I just was writing it furiously.
And sometimes it's very human.
I mean, my approach to it is Hasidic.
I rave at it.
It raves at me.
We argue about what it's going to cough up and what it isn't.
And I say, well, look, you know, I'm the grower.
You can't hold back on me.
And it says, well, but if I showed you the flying saucer for five minutes,
you would figure out how it works.
And I said, well, you know, come through.
I remember once I asked it, what was it?
It has these many manifestations.
Sometimes it's like Dorothy.
Sometimes it's like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker.
And I asked it one time, what are you doing on Earth?
And it said, well, you know, you're a mushroom.
You live cheap.
It's very, this was a quiet neighborhood till the monkeys got out of control.
I can understand, you know, at least in my own way,
you know, how this idea about an over-consciousness or, you know,
casting a shadow and that our psychedelic experience or dream experience
has to do with getting in touch with that.
But you said that some, I'm not really positive about this.
This is why I need some clarification on, is that in some sense that those brief experiences,
that sometimes something about that our experience was in order to get back there
and that was the reason for us to be.
Let me see.
Well, I think that this object, as a friend of mine said,
history is the shockwave of eschatology.
In other words, we are living in a very unique moment,
10 or 20,000 years long, where this immense transition is happening.
And the object at the end of and beyond history,
which is the human species transformed into this eternal, superconducting,
over-mined spacecraft thing, is casting a shadow back through time.
And all religion, all philosophy, all wars, pogroms, persecutions,
are because people do not get the message right.
And that's because there is both the forward-flowing casuistry of being,
causal determinism,
and the interference pattern that is formed against that
by the backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyper-object
throwing its shadow across the landscape.
So we exist, there is a great deal of noise.
This situation called history is totally unique.
It will only last for a moment.
It began a moment ago.
It will only last for a moment.
But in that moment, there is like this tremendous burst of static
as the monkey goes to godhood,
and there is this crossing of the,
I don't like to call it the casuistry,
but the efficacy of the eschaton,
this final eschatological object,
and the forward flow of entropic circumstance.
Does that get it for you?
Maybe.
Well, I have a little bit of trouble,
you know, thinking kind of like which came first.
Are you saying the chicken or the egg?
Are you saying that this over-consciousness
has something to do with...
Well, I'm certainly saying that life is necessary,
that life is, that we, it is not the idea
that we are, have been skewed onto a siding
called organic existence,
and that our actual place is in eternity.
No, there is something about,
this is a very important part of the cycle.
It is, it is a filter.
Remember, I mentioned that I thought
that there was the possibility of extinction.
There was the possibility of falling into physis forever.
And so in that sense,
the metaphor of the fall is valid.
There is a spiritual obligation.
There is a task to be done.
It isn't, though, simply something as simple-minded
as following a set of somebody else's rules.
It's that the noetic enterprise
is a primary obligation of being
in this circumstance.
And your salvation is linked to it.
Because if you do...
And not everyone has to read alchemical texts
or study superconducting biochemistry
to make the transition.
Most people make it naively
by thinking clearly about the present at hand.
But we and I,
we are intellectuals trapped
in a world of too much information.
Innocence is gone for us.
We cannot expect to cross the Rainbow Bridge
through the act of a good act of contrition.
That won't be sufficient.
We have to understand.
And I recall, you know,
Whitehead said,
understanding is the perception of pattern as such.
Because to fear death
is to not understand what's going on.
And to even see it as a big deal
is to not understand what's going on.
Although I don't claim to have reached
that exalted plane.
But cognitive activity
is the defining fact of humanness.
Language, thought, analysis,
art, poetry, myth-making.
These are the things that point the way
toward the realm of being of the eschaton.
That is what Joyce means
when he says man may become dirigible.
In other words,
man may be released
into a realm of pure engineering.
The imagination is everything.
This was Blake's perception.
This is where we come from.
This is where we're going.
And it is only to be approached
through cognitive activity.
I think.
Can you comment on the importance
of your discussion
of the I Ching in your book?
Well, very briefly.
Because I always have the feeling
this part bores people
more than any other
because it tinges on tiny details.
But briefly,
what the Logos said to me
was that time
is not simply a homogeneous medium
where things occur.
You can think of it
as a fluctuating density
of probability
so that though science
will tell us
what can happen
and what cannot happen,
we have no theory
that explains
why out of everything
that could happen,
certain things undergo
what White had called
the formality
of actually occurring.
And this was what
the Logos sought to explain to me.
Why out of all the myriad things
that could happen,
certain things undergo
the formality of occurring.
And it is because
there is a hierarchical,
a modular hierarchy
of waves
of temporal conditioning
or temporal density
or, in other words,
a given moment,
it is more likely
for a certain event
rated highly improbable.
it is more probable
at some moments
than others.
And taking that simple perception
and being led
by the hand
by the Logos,
we were able
to construe maps
of time
which we run
on a computer
and which give
a map
of the ingression
of what I call novelty,
the ingression
of novelty
into time.
Now, as a general statement,
it's obvious
that novelty
generally
is increasing.
It has been
since the very beginning
of the universe
because first
there was only
the possibility
of nuclear interaction
and then
as temperatures fell
below the bond strength
of the nucleus,
atomic systems
could be formed
and then
as temperature fell
molecular systems
could be formed
then much later
life became possible
and then
as very high
life forms,
complex life forms
evolved,
thought became possible,
culture was invented
then with the invention
of printing
and language
and then printing
and then electronic
information movement
and this kind of thing.
What is happening
is there is
an ingression
of novelty
toward what Whitehead
and I took his term
called concrescence
and this is
a tightening gyre
everything is
flowing together
and in fact
the man-made lapis
the alchemical stone
at the end of time
occurs when
everything flows together
when the laws
of physics
are obviated
and the universe
disappears
and what is left
is the tightly
bound plenum
the monad
if you wish
able to express itself
for itself
rather than
able only
to cast a shadow
into Pisces
as its reflection
and I
don't
I speak
I come very close
here to classical
millenarian
and apocalyptic
and thought
my view
of the rate
at which change
is accelerating
and the way
the gyre
is tightening
causes me to think
and the way
it predicts this
that it is not long
it is soon
50 years
25 years
35 years
then this event
will occur
it is the entry
of the species
into hyperspace
but it will
appear to be
the collapse
of the state vector
and the end
of physical laws
and the release
of the mind
into itself
and all these
other images
the starship
the space colony
all that
These are precursors, again, the idea that history is the shockwave of eschatology. As you close distance with the eschatological object, the reflections it is throwing off become more and more true to the thing itself.
And in the final moment, God stands revealed. There are no more reflections of the mystery. The mystery in all its nakedness then is seen, and nothing else exists. But what this is, decency can safely scarcely hint at.
You're listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
I don't know about you, but I kind of like that part back there where Terence was talking about the body being the placenta of the soul.
And to be honest, in my long battle to rid myself of the stories that had been drilled into my brain in Catholic school, well, I've more or less quit thinking in terms like soul.
But when Terence made that statement a while back, it somehow resonated with the old memories or something, and then it immediately combined with the thought of how old I seem to be getting.
So my first thought after that was, hell, if that's true, I'd better get to work pretty soon or a very rough-edged soul is going to pop out of this body slash placenta.
But when I think about it, my soul, or whatever we want to call it, is probably in its best shape when I'm having a good time doing things like having a few tokes and listening to Terence McKenna.
So if that's what it takes, then I'm not only up to it, I'm all for it.
But, you know, back before that, at least for me, I think that Terence made the clearest statement about death that I've heard from him yet.
You remember what I'm talking about?
It was when he said that there may be a problem about death that the psychedelic experience helps to prepare you for.
And to tell the truth, that's something that I've felt very deeply about for a long time now.
And while only a very few of my experiences were dark, they all could be called explorations in the land after death, I think, something like that.
And I've also found that the transition from the time that you ingest a substance until you've reached the plateau, well, it can often be quite tricky and sometimes even brutal.
But after having gone through a wide range of these experiences, I have to say that I've really lost all fear of dying to at least to the point where I've convinced myself that when my time comes, I'll be able to sail on through that experience quite gently.
Of course, it's much easier for me to say that it doesn't bother me to think about dying because, you know, I've already had a life that's been really filled with fun and adventure.
And while I'm planning on being active for another 25 years or so, I don't have the feeling that, you know, I really have to cling to life rather than just enjoy each day I have.
And I sure wish that I'd had this attitude earlier in life because it's a lot more enjoyable just taking it day to day and not trying to plan for a future that, at least for me, never actually got here the way I planned early on.
And I guess that after I think about it, though, the future that actually did get here for me is several orders of magnitude better than the one I originally planned for myself.
And I hope that holds true for you in your life as well.
Now, was it just me or near the end of this talk, when Terence was going into his rap about how the universe has constantly been increasing its novelty content,
that he began to sound almost like that crackpot preacher who recently and quite wrongly predicted that the end of the world would take place on May 21st?
Here's part of what Terence said at the end of that rap, and I quote,
It's not long, it is soon, 50 years, 25 years, 35 years, then this event will occur.
End quote.
And the event that he was talking about, of course, was his somewhat poetic version of the eschaton.
Now, since this talk was given in 1982, I guess that means his prediction for the eschaton is sometime between 2007 and 2032.
So, I guess 2032 is the next end of the world date that Hollywood will be focusing on once we get to the end of 2012.
However, my wish for you is that you don't latch on to any of these end-time prophecies, no matter what their source.
Unless I miss something, never in the entire history of humanity has a prediction about the end of the world come true.
So, I'm going to go along with the odds in accepting the fact that the only eschaton that I'm ever going to experience is my own personal eschaton.
And, outside of exercising and watching my diet, I don't see a lot more that I can do about that one.
Now, on a little happier note, I'm pleased to report of a recent return from the dead.
And, that is the wonderful news that Zandor and Mrs. Z have got the growreport.com forums back online.
Unfortunately, the company where Zandor was hosting the forums didn't do proper backups,
and so all of the postings from last July until now have been lost.
And, it's really a tragedy because there was a lot of very excellent discussion that took place on the forums in that time.
But, past is past, and now we can get back to those wonderful and very robust, but without flaming, discussions that the growreport.com is so famous for.
Another positive announcement is that if, like me, you enjoy podcasts that aren't all talk, but which also include music and comedy,
there are two that I highly recommend.
One is a relatively new podcast by the host of the weekly Planet London Radio Live and Interactive Sunday Smoking Sessions that you can find online.
And, that's the one and only Scooby Snacks.
He's been podcasting for a few months, and already by his podcast number five, he has reached what I think is a really high level of professionalism.
And, that got me to go back and listen to his latest show more than once, even.
Now, fast forward another hundred podcasts, and we get to my long-time variety podcast favorite, Lefty's Lounge.
And, if you look at Lefty's Listing on iTunes, you'll see only 105 podcasts of today for Lefty's Lounge,
but I've been listening to Lefty even before the lounge, way back when he was doing a show called Story Time with Lefty.
In fact, I think I even called in and told a story or two on that one.
Now, if my memory serves me right, I forgot to congratulate Lefty on his hundredth program with his current Lefty's Lounge show.
But, I'm here to tell you, 101, 102, 103, and onward each keep getting better.
So, a belated congratulations, Lefty, and keep them coming, particularly the comedy, which I think of as intellectual music for the soul.
You know, I just couldn't imagine a world without comedy.
It would be a bleak world without music, to be sure, but who would want to live in a world without laughter?
Not me.
And, Lefty always has a lot of good comedy, which lately has been featuring some more clips from Joe Rogan, who is one of my all-time favorite comedians.
And, I think I've mentioned this before, but Joe also has a podcast that you probably would like.
So, check out Lefty, Joe, and Scooby Snacks' podcast if you want some more really feel-good time each week.
Finally, I want to also point you to my friend KMO's podcast, number 258, which is titled Navigating the Screaming Abyss,
and features an interview that KMO did with Dennis McKenna.
In fact, it was KMO who inspired me to title today's program with that interesting word, abyss, in it.
For, as you know, Dennis McKenna, Terrence's younger brother, is about to begin writing a biography of his brother,
and is nearing the end of a Kickstarter campaign titled, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
And, I just checked Dennis' Kickstarter website and see that in the past week, another 121 people have made pledges for this campaign,
but with only 11 days left before it closes, he's still somewhat shorter the target amount.
So, if you happen to get a little cash as a graduation present or something, you might want to pay a little of it forward,
so that years from now, when Dennis and the rest of the elders of that period are long gone,
their stories will still live on in our collective tribal memory.
Well, that's going to do it for now, and so I'll close today's podcast by reminding you that
this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License.
And, if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
And, if you're interested in the philosophy behind the salon, you can hear something about it in my novel,
The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
And, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Be well, my friends.