Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic
Salon.
Well, as promised, here is the next installment of the Terence McKenna workshop held in the
summer of 1998.
There's really an interesting cut in this segment where Terence explains how he got
involved in the rave scene and what he thought about the scene and the youth culture in general
at that point in time.
You'll also hear a short version of his theory about psychedelic mushrooms and the possibility
that they may actually be ETs that we're looking for.
And he ends with a message that the mushroom gave him about a simple, sure-fire way to save
the planet from an ecological disaster.
I'm sure you'll be interested in hearing that one.
Now, if you were with us for our last podcast from the Psychedelic Salon, you might remember,
at least depending on your current state of short-term memory function, of course.
What was I talking about?
Oh, yeah.
Our last podcast, we left Terence saying he'd just said about all he had to say about schizophrenia.
Well, but it turns out there was another question on that topic, so we'll pick up the conversation
with Terence right there.
Yeah, be kind.
The question about schizophrenia, I agree with you that a big part of it is just that
our culture should be more tolerant of people that are crazy.
If there was a place for them, then maybe less of them would be warehoused off, like people
in less developed countries.
Schizophrenics tend to do much better in those cultures.
But my question is the fact that a lot of them really are suffering, and they really are suffering
with the voices in their heads, and many of them do commit suicide because they're suffering
so much with those voices, and some of them do see the hospital as a place, a safe place for them.
How do you balance those two?
Yeah, well, I think the paranoid kind of schizophrenia is different from this process, schizophrenia,
and from having seen people in that state, it's clearly a very uncomfortable state.
These people are not happy, they don't like being where they are, it doesn't seem like a very functional state.
I think what we're dealing with is probably a group of pathologies that may or may not have common origins.
These may be completely different screw-ups, chemical or genetic screw-ups of one sort or another,
certainly the catatonic schizophrenic and the process schizophrenic present completely differently.
The catatonic doesn't move, has nothing to say, can't care for their own body functions.
The process schizophrenic wants to reorganize the company and call the president and talk, you know,
invest and invent and travel and speak and heal and cure and they're just all over the map.
It's a whole different style.
So, you know, in the classification of fungi, they have this classification called fungi obscurante,
and it just means everything we haven't classified.
And I think probably schizophrenia will be seen to be a group of unrelated phenomena,
requiring different kinds of intervention and different kinds of therapy.
You know, when the psychedelics were first coming on, everybody had the idea,
ah, these things are what was called psychotomimetics.
In other words, they imitate psychosis.
And so then people said, well, it must be that people produce,
that schizophrenics are overproducing DMT or they're producing LSD-like compounds in their blood.
And people went tearing off in search of the schizogen.
Well, the schizogen was never found.
Schizophrenics have slightly depleted levels of DMT than the ordinary population,
not dramatically depleted.
Analog as a real marker for schizophrenia has been found.
So it's more complicated than that.
And once you go back through the literature and compare with more attention to detail,
the differences are clear.
The paranoid schizophrenic hears visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare.
Hallucinogenic trips inevitably tend to be more positive than what schizophrenics are.
You have only encounters with zany, punning, self-transforming elf machines.
Compare that to these gray-faced proctologists who come in the middle of the night and look up your ass
and take you off and, you know, abuse you and surgically snip and tuck.
I mean, this is appalling stuff, the stuff of nightmare.
If there was a drug that did that, none of us would get near it, I dare say.
The evolution.
Because I was thinking that, or it just sounds really close to what you were talking about,
especially the neurogenetic level where you can tune into the actual DNA
and get sort of a readout of the evolutionary process and pattern.
Yeah, I like the model. I'm not sure of the mechanism.
On the other hand, one of the most mysterious issues in neurophysiology is the issue of memory.
In other words, where is it?
We know that in the course of your lifetime, every molecule in your body will be swapped out five times.
Well, then how can a 70-year-old woman remember the smell of her grandmother's dress when she used to climb up into her lap?
You know, we know that people can undergo horrific acts of cancer of the brain and this sort of thing,
and that their memory is, in some cases, virtually unscathed.
This has been, in fact, the greatest embarrassment of materialist science in the past 50 years, or one of them,
is they have made zilch on understanding memory.
And, you know, it's right smack in the center of everything we want to do.
It's a communication technology, it's a nanotechnology, it's a molecular genetic technology for information and storage retrieval
that works with images, music, sound, and we don't have a clue as to how it works.
We tend to believe that nature is fairly conservative
and that once you develop a mechanism that's good for a certain function,
you will find it iterated in other areas where that function is called upon.
The DNA, in a way, if you understand how it works, it's like a chemical learning system.
It templates the environment and it responds to environmental selection by building proteins of a certain type.
In a way, it's a chemical engine for responding to the environment.
Well, then, if you look at the nervous system, it's an electrochemical.
It's a combinatory system.
Information moves in the body down the nerve fibers at a pretty good clue, moving creatures.
Well, because every time it gets to a...
It stops being electricity and it turns into a complex chemical reaction to bridge the gap.
And so in the course of this electro to chemical to electro to chemical transmission of the signal,
it slows down to a few hundred miles an hour.
And that determines our speed as organisms.
Downstream, this may all be sped up.
Memory seems to work almost instantaneously.
But no mechanism is visible.
I mean, if you really want to look at a human function that's present in all of us and easily studied
and may hint principles in physics or miraculous new orders of nature,
human memory would be a real place to be.
Is today what you hope to get at, have hope to get out of your involvement with the rave scene?
And just what role do you think youth culture will have in the next 12, 13 years as we approach a possible singularity?
Well, I didn't intend to get involved in rave really.
I mean, I was interested in it.
When I went to England in 1990, I had a pretty academic schedule of lecturing.
But a lot of ravers came and the zippies were just getting organized around the club called Megatrip.
And I met Colin Shaman of the Shaman.
And then we talked about me doing something with Meta to South Africa.
Powerful and creative.
You know, people talk about the 1960s and what a great thing it was.
Well, I was there.
I'm zero.
And it lasted from about 1966 until early 1968.
And 1968 was called the Year of Rage or the Days of Rage.
That was all.
It was like a 27.
I don't understand the youth bashing tendency of this culture.
It seems to me one of the most chuckle-headed things that we're involved in is youth bashing.
That it's so somewhat like a little old they-reeliers and ponies on the machines in the morning.
And to run the payroll software.
So it's a very uneasy with rave culture.
I don't know.
I keep trying to back out of it.
It's different.
It's strange to go on stage.
But I have been with Santa Cruz.
And if you're in San Francisco, New Year's Eve will be at the Veterans Administration doing glossolalia and handling boa constrictors with light shows.
If only this had come when I was 20.
It's, I feel like Billy Pilgrim living my life.
And I'm poor enough.
Pump and Jack Flash.
It's a gas, gas, gas.
For sure it's a shamanic role.
But I'm sure, I mean, it would be beside and let a 22-year-old do it.
Let Spooky do it.
About the proctologists who come in the night, what do you think about the extraterrestrials?
You would never ask.
First of all, before I weighed in, visor down, razors flashing, let me say that I have at times proposed various,
because it seemed to me back in the mid-70s to take seriously the idea that there was an extraterrestrial penetration of the terrestrial ecology,
that the mushroom would be it.
The mushroom is alien enough in its life cycle, alien enough to survive the conditions of outer space.
And when complexed with a mammalian nervous system, it seems to want to download these messages from far away, shall we say.
So that's my idea of how an alien would be.
That the first problem you would have with a real alien would be to recognize.
It's going to be alien, for crying out loud.
This thing evolved on some other planet under a completely different chemical and regime of pressure and chemistry.
And, I mean, if you can't understand your next-door neighbor, what do you think it's going to be like to stare into the face,
if it has a face, of somebody from Zinebogonubi?
So the mushroom seemed alien enough, and it's also very low-key.
It looks as that.
Well, so then we're left with this residuum of testimony that something weird is going on.
I think this is like an intelligence test built into reality.
It presents itself as a mystery.
The people who pass the intelligence test in the middle of the night, they have collusion is,
whatever this is, it is not what it claims to be.
It is not what it appears to be.
They're very puzzled, and they say, well, but what?
Well, this now, we sort of get down to the nut of the masses peeling away from me and horror.
And I think we're very naive about how it works.
And let's see how I can give examples of this or start into it.
First of all, the media that we are embedded in are designed to amplify anomalies.
In other words, here's a story.
Man goes to work, does moderately good job.
No newspaper on earth would run this as a headline.
Why?
Because it's not news.
It's ordinary.
On the other hand, Volkswagen-sized chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts farm field.
This is news.
And if it passes the first gateway, which is the local news reporting apparatus, passes it on to the media and UPI and like that,
then it makes its way out into the electromagnetic medium.
Well, in the electromagnetic medium, the laws of perspective are weirdly distorted.
The further away you are from something, the more real it looks.
The closer you get to it, the less substantial it becomes in the world of media.
So, for example, let's say that the New York Times on a certain day reports that in a Massachusetts field,
a large chunk of ice has fallen.
And so you look at that and then you think to yourself,
well, let's see what Dilbert's up to.
Of course, with the New York Times, you will not be satisfied in your quest,
because there is no Dilbert, because the great grey maiden doesn't stoop to comics.
But suppose you're reading a civilized newspaper.
Well, then you just go and read Dilbert.
But a newspaper like that is designed to be read by five million, six million people per day.
Well, sure as hell, someone will open the paper to page 42,
chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts field,
and they will notice that the county in which this field is located contains their mother's maiden name initials.
And by that, and the dream they had the night before of something wet falling from the sky,
they realize that God has sent them a message.
And they call work, jump in the car, and head for Amherst or wherever the action is.
Well, meanwhile, the rest of us go on about our business, with one exception.
Editors of newspapers where the story has been put out are now getting feedback.
And people, so the editor calls up the cub reporter.
He says, we're really getting a lot of interest on that ice fall in Massachusetts deal.
I want you to drive up there and get the story, interview everybody, find out what's going on.
Is there a religious angle? Is there a this? Is there a that? What did people see?
So this guy thinks, you know, I have to find honest work.
But until then, I have to drive up to Massachusetts and find out what's going on.
The person for whom God was speaking to them and the reporter
encounter each other at the edge of what is now a drying mud hole.
And then he says, and who are you?
He says, well, funny you should ask.
I'm Dr. Raymond Hammarubi Bird, expert in telluric energies, ley lines, radius-thesic energy,
genies, afrites, and ancestor spirits.
And I can tell you what's going on here.
It confirms a theory that I published in my book.
You know, turning the world upside down in ten different ways.
I self-published my book, and you're off at this point.
And so, you know, to make a long story short,
and you maybe can't always follow this advice, but it's very good advice.
The irrational or the extraordinary.
It is legitimate to carefully examine the messenger.
The need to understand what is going on is to examine the messenger.
People don't do this.
They examine the testimony of the messenger.
So they say, now stand exactly where you were standing when the saucer first appeared.
Aha!
And so it was twenty degrees above the horizon, and it moves so we can calculate.
It must have been moving at this speed.
This is not the right question to be asking this person.
The right question to be asking is, have you ever seen a ghost?
What's your position on the resurrection?
How do you feel about homeopathy?
What's your position on major earth changes in the short-term projection of things?
And if you do this, you will begin to discover an epistemological naivete, I maintain,
that the illusion that you and this person are living in the same Idaho begins to break down.
They have categories and presuppositions and expectations that you can't follow along with.
And so the illusion of communication is necessary for there to be the mirage of an event.
It's essentially a way of putting it.
So these things are like informational viruses.
It's because of how we as organisms handle information.
For example, here's a counter way to approach.
Suppose you want to know how much electricity is running through a wire.
The way to do this is to measure 100 times, add these numbers together, divide by 100, and you will have the average amount of energy flowing through the wire.
Now suppose your 100 numbers fluctuate between 3 volts and 3.5 volts, except that measurement 72 tells you that 11,000 volts are running through this wire.
Well, what do you do with that reading if you're a good scientist?
You say, well, that's crazy.
That can't be right.
There's something wrong with that one.
Get that puppy out of there.
In other words, you reject the anomalous.
Instead of pouncing on it and triumphantly raising it on high for all to adore, you simply eliminate it.
The media works exactly the opposite.
It seizes on the, you know, every night a million people go out and look into the night sky.
They see zilch, the stars, the moon.
One person goes out, they see a triangular spaceship 800 feet across with red running lights broadcasting, you know, the second chapter of Mark.
Well, what are we told the next morning that this was seen and this disrupted the night sky over Phoenix or Alamogordo or someplace like that?
Always someplace you aren't, by the way.
People say, well, but is it all like that?
Is it all so much like that?
I think it pretty much is.
is uh people don't like i mean i've told stories here about strange events and but i've said
the real weirdness does not have to be treated with respect or as though it were fragile true
weirdness is true weirdness you can kick the tires honk the horn drive it around the block phony
weirdness is incredibly fragile and they don't want you to get near and you can only see it if
you stand here and please don't touch and the speaker is veiled and the voice is distorted because
the cia might kill him if they knew who he was a million reasons why it's just not totally
straightforward you know all resting on the preposterous notion that we couldn't stand
knowing the truth and therefore these things must be shielded from us well if we're so fragile why
weren't we shielded from the knowledge of the president's blow job i mean that shook up more
people than the knowledge that extraterrestrials are trading human fetal tissue for advanced technology
it's it seems to me that as psychedelic people we should be more immune to these rumors of miracles
signs and wonders than the rest of the population because we have a benchmark to measure it against and
the cultification of discourse and the the rising tolerance for raps which don't make sense is a really
weird aspect of the end of the millennium discussion that we're trying to have i mean somebody
on no evidence at all can can introduce the most preposterous and outlandish hypotheses into a
conversation and it has to be treated with the same respect that the the pronouncements of quantum
physics or or or evolutionary theory are retreat are treated um and then people say well how do you
not throw out the baby with the bath water well it's tricky i think we all need to get our razors
clarified and also a little less politesse would be all right i don't know what it's like here i
said all these things i'm saying to you now to rupert recently and he said well you're just
you know sinking in malibu-itis he said in an average english pub if somebody started raving about this
stuff there would be half a dozen people on their feet instantly just smearing it out of existence
well new upstate new york is halfway between london and malibu so maybe you're leavened with reason and
and temperance but there certainly is a lot of loose-headed metaphor building out there in the
intellectual marketplace we almost need a new vocabulary of fluff you know i mean there are different
kinds of fluff for instance there's what i call deep fluff which is fluff with a history so that would
be for example alchemy which is something dear to my heart alchemy is fluff with depth because it's
four thousand years old and even though it's never made good on its uh promises or agenda it just keeps
popping up in various places it's generated a rich literature it's deep fluff the kind of fluff that
freaks me out is where you get one person who never read uh the old testament never read plato
doesn't understand mathematics music history art literature religion economics or philosophy but
they have all the answers because when they were in the desert you know the archangel malingi appeared
to them and downloaded the entire shtick from a to z in 11 simple lessons which you they will share with you for a
significant portion of your income uh this kind of thing you should automatically you know the mushrooms
said to me once apropos of all this and i've tried to live by it it said from one human being to seek
enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach to seek enlightenment from another and
you know for me that puts in perspective all this malarkey about lineages and secret orders and
having to sweep up around the ashram for 15 years before they cut you any juice and all all of that stuff
if you know a truth which you cannot understand is of no use to you so don't tell yourself that the fact
that you don't understand quantum physics is okay because these guys at mit have it under control
until you understand it it's utterly useless to you so uh uh people live by hearsay and people delightedly
spread rumors of the miraculous people say whoa did you see that thing on tv the other night where they
had that air force colonel who claimed that he was there at roswell when there's a buzz a buzz and
really well to repeat this kind of stuff is the equivalent of taking home a newspaper with a headline
that says alien mom nine gives birth to dead christ uh this is not something people of intellectual
integrity involve themselves with isn't that a downer and it's especially a downer when i get more
specific than i have been here because of course it really becomes cogent when you tear into somebody by
example and the reigning cult of niceness precludes that i do too much of that because my own ox might be
gored but uh i do urge you to first your your money and attention with extreme miserliness when people
start telling you they have the answers there are no answers is to live without answers you know culture
is a kind of corks on you if you're smart till you're about 35 or 40 or 50 it takes longer for some
people but if you live long enough and you're paying attention you will eventually notice that culture
is a con it just wants to pick your pocket and get your vote and make a fool out of you and around age
35 45 55 people just say screw this i'm not going or they become defenders of it because they they somehow
see into a wisdom that it contains that i have not perceived i think really you know part of there
is an idea around that sometime in your mid-20s you mature and that then you are a fully mature human being
this is obviously not true you're still the maturation process goes on into the 30s and 40s
and if you live that long what you should end up being is an independent idiot an independent person
free of ideology free of fetishism consumer fetishism free of pathological attachments to other people
free of codependent relationships i mean these are all kind of things which people in their 20s are just
beginning to encounter as possibilities and and if you don't grow past these things then you become these
people who watch daytime tv and roam the malls and vacation in artificial paradises and you know a lot of
lottery attention to lotteries and publishers clearing house millions that are soon to arrive and
just a squirrely lifestyle hardly above the level of a laboratory rat
and and if consciousness expansion means anything it means thinking your way out of these cultural
cul-de-sacs and dilemmas you know don't buy anything uh because the very very rarely is what you are being
sold what it represents to be nor worth what it's being uh what's being asked do something about our
planet quickly well in terms of suggestions uh and we have 10 minutes left so i'll be able to get out
of here with how this usually provokes uh in in terms of suggestions when i have said to them i once said to
the mushroom how can we save the world somebody had challenged me in a group like this they said why
don't you ask it how we can save the world which i had never been being sort of it had never occurred
to me to be so blunt myself with it i said how can we save the world and without a moment's hesitation it
said each person should parent only once this is an astonishing idea this is not zero population
growth this is population falling by 50 every 20 years from here on out if if people in the high-tech
industrial democracies would limit themselves to one child almost immediately the destruction of the
earth's ecosystems and resources would halt we preach population control in the third world
but the statistics show that uh to a woman who has a child that child will consume between 800 and a thousand
times more resources in the course of its lifetime bangladesh or some other third this this one person one
child receives there would almost immediately be a visible slackening of the pressure on resources and
population is the is the thing which is driving everything over the edge and is not allowing any time for full reflection about land use implementation of technologies the political directions we want to go in
because everywhere you know no you just hurl money at problems like sanitation detoxification of land education of children
cleaning up of water supplies extension of early primary education and so forth and so on no matter how much money you throw at these problems you see no progress
because it's because it's all dragged down by burgeoning populations so uh and it's interesting i've always felt that the way to solve social problems
that's collective social problems is to find solutions which advance the agendas of individuals in other words some version of enlightened self-interest
and if you think about this one person one child thing what we're saying is uh how would you like to have increased leisure time
increased disposable income
and the sincere gratitude of humanity
and that your your procreative activity
and i would favor social policies that would give people cradle to the grave medical care and cancel their income tax and whatever it took
uh to to uh honor
people who did that because that is
the most significant single political act any one of us
could probably do
uh it's very practical it's a bumper sticker it astonished me when the mushroom said this i thought it was going to be a discord
it said you know one each person should parent only one child in a single sentence it offers probably
the only solution to our long-term
dilemma on this planet can we do it well we don't know it involves changing our habits
the hardest things we have uh to change it involves injecting novelty in an area where habits have ruled
for millennia and tens of millennia are reproductive uh behaviors on the other hand as primates we never
really get rocking and rolling until we're painted into a corner
now china is attempting to do something like this
but of course they stomatic circumstance than our own however if china continues to limit its population
that's the one piece of the puzzle missing from its ability to project its culture onto a global scale
if the rest of us pollute our social systems and drag the development of our economies with burgeoning
populations at the same time that the chinese population is falling and they are bringing their technologies
and infrastructure up to speed then we could find ourselves in a very different socio-political
uh circumstance not far downstream any comment on the on that whole idea it's an interesting idea i'm surprised
that there is no society for it i've never heard it discussed not radical lesbians not libertarians not and i
also thought when it first came up that there must be some hideous political flaw in it that some
radical feminist or somebody would spring forward and point out this appalling contradiction as to why
this couldn't be done or why this was utterly unacceptable and dehumanizing nobody has ever done that either
people have said the only criticism i've had of it is people have said uh that political power is based on
population but i argue that's not true if that were true india would be the second most powerful nation in
the world well what about france what about germany what about england so uh you know we are not in a
breeding race with the brown skinned people of the planet thinking like that is crazy making uh what determines
the viability of a society is the quality of life that it delivers to the greatest of people so i think one
person one child those of you who haven't yet entered the reproductive phase of your life you might
consider people have objected and said well but children need other children this is arguable the nuclear
family is not handed down from mount sinai the nuclear family is a late 19th century invention at the
convenience of industrial capitalism if there is a human model handed down from mount sinai it's the
extended family group the aunts the uncles the cousins all together in a in a long house or a compound well
we haven't lived like that in america since the 1840s uh and uh you know it was no way to live anyway
in 1800 the average american woman the average american woman gave birth 13 times in her life
uh this this this is no population this is not a behavior pattern we want to emulate i i think that
we are sentimental that the concept of the child is some kind of morbid download from 19th century
romanticism and that it's a morbid concept uh the child the child in our society is symbol of innocence
and victim of mayhem uh it would be you know in amazonian societies that i've observed children are small
versions of adults and as quickly as they can handle them they are given responsibilities and roles and they
participate in life birth death sexuality hunting rituals there is no this idea that we screen people from the
facts of life because they are innocent and fragile and it's a complete paradox in our society because
while we're dishing out this rhetoric of innocence we're creating a popular culture so steeped in images
of violence and abuse and rape and so forth that the idea that there are any secrets from anybody is a
pretty hollow rhetoric so we need to re-envision our relationship to children
they are more preended to treat them they are more central to our future than we have tended
to admit and our population policies if they don't swing around to take cognizance of of this
we'll probably derail all our best intents to build a sane and caring world anyway that's the opinion of an
extraterrestrial fungus on a matter of of human population you know i can still remember sitting in
that hot august room and sitting on a thin cushion that didn't do a thing to soften the hardwood floor
after a few hours and i was actually wishing uh terrence would call it a day because my butt was so sore
then he dropped that idea about each person having only one child and that idea caught my imagination
and attention so much that i forgot all about the pain it's really quite an elegant idea don't you think
and uh do you think that terrence take on the brave scene as of 1998 uh fits in today particularly the
point about using more psychedelics and dumping that meth crap you know you gotta watch that stuff it's
the easiest thing there is to get habituated to but i've never seen a good ending for someone who gets
hooked on meth or crack you know stick with the psychedelics use them right and you'll be all right i don't think
you can go wrong and i guess i should maybe say the previous announcement was brought to you by the
partnership of free drugs in america or something like that by the way that was a joke for those of
you who are just maintaining right now and maybe a little paranoid or something by the way uh if you
don't have a copy of boss drum by the shaman you ought to go out and pick up one just to hear terrence's
rap called re-evolution and i play it when i do a solo mushroom trip quite often i i like to sit in
the dark with headphones on and play that track just as the light show has started to come on you know if
you if you've heard that cut you remember the kind of eerie keyboard background intro where terrence
begins saying if the truth can be told so as to be understood it will be believed
i've always enjoyed hearing that particular rap particularly because i think as you just heard
terrence had just come from the club megatropolis and i think it was probably had been his first
rave experience at least according to the story he tells here and how appropriate is that that it's
terrence's first rave at the megatropolis in the uk you know as i'm sure most of you already know the
force behind that club was fraser clark who was uh with us here in the psychedelic salon for our
podcast number 16 where we were treated to fraser's famous epic monkey's trip a short history of the
human species which reminds me by the way that uh fraser just told me that he came across a recording
of a talk he gave at stanford university and i think it was probably must have been during the time he
was leading that zippy pro noia tour across the u.s a few years after terrence was first at the megatropolis
and this talk by the way is called rave culture in the end of the world and if all goes well i
should have a copy in hand and we'll podcast it in the near future right now there are either two or
three more podcasts left at this mckenna workshop and then we're going to hear the talk that nick sand gave at
the mine states 2001 conference at the time he was still under the heavy yoke of the u.s parole system
it's quite a powerful talk by a living legend in the psychedelic community can you say orange sunshine
before we go there's one last thing i'd like to point out and that's a new book by james kent that
hopefully will be published really soon some of you may not recognize james's name but
i'm sure you're already familiar with his work he was the former editor of the classic psychedelic
illuminations magazine of which i still have a few treasured copies in my library and james was also
the publisher of trip magazine sadly i i think that for our community there just weren't enough of us in
the psychedelic community to keep trip magazine alive right now trip and james can be found online at
www.tripzine.com
and if you go to that site right now which by the way is the spring of 2006 for you time travelers who
might come across this podcast in the far distant future anyhow right now you'll see a link to james's
new book psychedelic information theory and he's also posted the table of contents and several chapters for
you to read online i think that if you take the time to read a little this book you'll see that it's a
completely new take on the subject in fact james was recently invited to present his new psychedelic
information theory at the recent toward a science of consciousness conference which is a venue for
the real heavy hitters in consciousness research and as i said a minute ago our community wasn't able to
muster up enough subscriptions to keep trip magazine alive but now we've got another chance to make up for
it and if you go to the webpage at trip scene that has the link to the table of contents for his new book
there's also a link right below it to donate to the publishing fund for this groundbreaking book
if you donate five bucks you'll get a full online preview of the chapters as they become available and
the first hundred people who chip in fifty bucks will receive a numbered autographed copy of the limited
first edition i don't know how many of those hundred copies are left in fact i can guarantee that there is
at least uh less than a hundred now because uh i've ordered mine and so if you're interested and so
inclined why don't you give one of our our own your support to help to get this important book published
well i guess i've rambled on long enough for now i appreciate you being with us here today in the
psychedelic salon and i appreciate chateau hayuk for letting us use their music for these podcasts so
thanks again jacques cordell and wells and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space
greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon
well we're getting down to the end of this series of terence mckenna raps from a workshop that he gave
in the summer of 1998 and after today's program there's going to be at least one more podcast from this
workshop maybe two and then i plan on passing along the talk that my good friend nick san gave at the
mind states conference in the spring of 2001 after today's talk by terence i have a personal message
to pass along to those of you who are seriously involved in working with these ancient and
various sacred medicines but first i want to pick up with terence's riff on the black hats of human history
landscapes waving mushrooms shamans in suits of bone with mushrooms sprout situation on human
sexuality that what that was all about or why i was a part of a general theory of human evolution
that noticed the difference literally between so much as you have to learn how to do it it's
it seems many drugs are what i recommend with salvia is work with the five i've gotten a hold
of some five x extraction um incense would that be no that's probably strong smoking well you're
talking about previously then a longer question uh is there any of traces of psilocybin and skeletons
things like logical evidence for early human use of 500 years ago atlantis really existed but it sank
into an ocean it's it's there was an incredibly it's my question about any kind of uh direct
uh physical evidence things are of something else no i'm not i'm not arguing that at all i'm just
asking if somebody has done anything to establish you know um with some kind of measurement that
there's traces of something which is psilocybin skeletons or in the in the in the pottery or
something like that no there was the famous case of the ice man enjoy tremendously and i really thank
you for that um you described the world wide web as being you described the world wide web as being
possibly a um some sort of a device for capturing an alien intelligence and um i was wondering if we
could step back a little bit and just think of it as being sort of a site where uh sort of a homegrown
intelligence might sort of emerge you don't have to really need to imagine an alien intelligence
coming from outside it can sort of emerge from uh the web itself well yeah we touched on that
possibility too i that i think is more likely i the ai i think this is a real issue ralph who pooed it
problem for human beings first of all as someone last night mentioned the famous turing test which is
you call somebody calls you on the phone if you can't tell whether it's a person or a machine
and it is a machine then it is an artificial intelligence uh there are theories of emergent network
properties that hold that when you get enough simple switching devices connected together in a
complicated enough way that there will begin to be self-reflective forms of behavior and of course the net
is it is a vast self-monitoring self-observing self-designing uh thing and um you know we're making
it more and more flexible all the time like in a few months we're going to it's going to be able to call
processing power as needed to any task uh so the people who actually really know about it seem quite
concerned uh hans moravik who wrote a book called mind children the future of human and machine
intelligence he says that it's an inevitable consequence of the net and that we could never
turn back from this and there are a lot of essays on the net called what would ultra intelligence look
like in other words you know what would it be what would the global mind actually have to say or would it
have to say anything and what more importantly what would it do with its fingers on the world resource
extraction apparatus research and development facilities stock markets world price of gold platinum iridium
uh we it's an it's an impossible situation for us because we we have designed something potentially beyond
our can and something that's right smack in the middle of our lives on every level it's like you wanted
transcendence you've been whining about it for five thousand years eat this you know so and then people
say well what's the time scale the answer is we don't know because we like all cultures in all times and
places with new technologies we do not understand what we're doing we do not understand the consequences
of all this busy connecting and putting in place of ever faster hardware and expansion of bandwidth and
satellite satellite i mean we're as conscious as termites are of the real uh raison d'etre of what we do so in a way
perhaps we're already a very hard thing to think about because in all most all versions that can be discussed it sounds
paranoid and it also sounds cranky you know it sounds like you've got to be kidding and but it won't be the
way we think it will be this is the scary thing about it the one thing you may be sure about the ai
is you it won't be what you think it's going to be because the very definition of machine super intelligence
means it's going to think very very very differently from us we're going to find out stuff like are there
universal moral values are there moral values so universally binding that you can appeal to a global
integrated machine intelligence and say what you're doing is not fair and have it say oh excuse me
yeah you're right sorry old chum i think for me the insight i got yet last night which i hadn't had
before is that once the process starts it could be over and very very fast because you said that once
achieves the um self-consciousness of a flatworm from there to you know exceeding our intelligence could
be just a matter of minutes well again we'll find out if there are overarching uh moral dimensions
to the universe if it can go from paramecium to beyond the human stage in hours presumably it could
achieve bodhisattva hood within a matter of further hours and at that point hopefully it would achieve
the paranarvana and all sentient beings would be liberated from the illusion of samsara and we would
realize that this was what it was it was buddha 4.0 i'm sorry to what extent you think change is uh
cyclical um and i thinking more particularly of the archaic revival now um and to what degree it's uh
linear how things don't go back well i think it's cyclical on all levels except the largest level
cycle and that unlike the hindu cosmologies where cycles of time are always potentially nested in
larger cycles of time i think this thing called time is ultimately what engineers call a damped
oscillation that it it finally truly does the context of its being it is always cyclical range cycles and
cycles that operate uh you know in the quantum mechanical give an idea of how i think about it the theory
the way novelty down through these each one gets wilder soon the bottom is plank's constant which is 6.55
times 10 to the minus 23rd seconds technically one jiffy uh it if you if you think that uh you know we
don't go deeper than the jiffy level into time then when you are uh an uh an hour and 35 minutes
from the jiffy epoch the universe still has half of its morphological unfolding ahead of it
this is the mind-boggling thing this is why when people ask the question what will happen at the
singularity i just wave them off because it's like trying to see around eight corners at once in the last
hour and 35 minutes of the this hypothesized universe that i'm talking about it will go through more
change more morphogenetic unfoldment more interconnectivity than it has experienced in the
previous 72 billion years of its existence uh now people say well but that's crazy how could something
like that happen well excuse me wait a moment you know what the straight people are selling
they're selling that the universe
instantly well now i submit to you that this is the limit case for credulity if you believe that
my family owns a bridge over the hudson river that we will sell you very very cheaply the
idea that the universe could spring instantly from nothing for no reason is they're just saying you
know test them with this charlie if they'll buy that what wouldn't they buy for crying out loud and
this is tenant one of science essentially what science is saying is give us one free miracle
one free miracle we can just work with that we can unfold that invest that fold it back expand it
comment on it you know copy it rarify it uh well so then apparently you get one free miracle
when you play this game the how does it all work game well then i'll take my miracle at the end
thank you it seems to me that a miracle is far more likely to arise out of a very complex situation
a situation where you have physics and computers and civilizations and superconductivity and planets
and stars and oceans and gases and plasmas and a miracle you might shake a miracle out of such a rich
and juicy mix but to get a miracle out of nothing this is bizarre everyone hands yes yes
this uh singularity whatever it may be affects your daily life now you're building a house or saving
the planet i mean these things seem to pale into insignificance how does it affect my life just day-to-day
life your belief well when i when i got these ideas in 1971 and 72 and wrote the invisible landscape and all
that i was too hot for public consumption uh i was uh manic and grandiose i hope i wasn't as offensive as
some of the cases that i've experienced myself because i i tried never to lose my sense of humor or
my good taste but i did tend to be time meant nothing to me i mean i would corner people in rooms and
seven hours would go by and i was unrolling this is me i mean you have no idea how toned down and how
my whole career is about not not amping it up too much not raving too much not always appearing urbane
self-mocking ironical uh at home with the idea that i might be wrong
well these are the manners the schizophrenic must learn in order to pass among the normals
without them dropping a number three steel net mesh over you and hitting you with a tranquilizing dart
so uh but you know that was 72 82 92 it was my god
uh you know i'm slowly coming down from those trips and uh question pertains to is novelty theory
permission to sit on your ass and not be involved in political action or building community or not
i mean i don't take myself so seriously that i would cancel my obligation to political action
because of anything novelty theory i think that regardless of what our ideological positions and
speculations might be we should act as if do think that novelty theory implies not that what i or you may
do is particularly important but that the human enterprise is immense ralph has pointed out to me
that any invention or political movement uh religious revelation any great culture shaping thing that
you can think of if you study it carefully it always goes back to one person you know no committee ever had a
revelation uh revelations come uh to individuals so in terms of how i view my own life and everything
it seems to me it's like pure science fiction it seems to me you know i really identify with billy pilgrim
in uh slaughterhouse five something happened back there in the amazon jungle
and it turned my life into literature uh like unleashed zany thing and it's crazy it's a crazy kind of
literature it has a kind of nabakovian irony that is it's to what degree everybody experiences the end of
history and the end of millennium of a millennium that way i mean this is an enormous opportunity for us
that we're just dumb lucky to have had happen because you know the way they do history when they do it
uh the quick way is they look at every 500 years and everybody wasn't fortunate enough to be born on a
or live through a year that's a 500 or millennial year drops through the cracks but we'll all be looked at
zero ad1000 2000 3000 will be the sample i don't know where all this a week long we could have a month
long we could just spin endless tales and it is sitting here talking about it doesn't come close to being
being loaded is so hard to grok when you're really loaded when you're really out in the billows when it's
when you're really and so then the implications just filter down from a great it's as though i've i mean
i've always felt i'm not really religious in any ordinary sense but i've always felt this it's the
psychedelic thing is like a religion with a god that is present you know i was raised catholic they're always
yammering at you about how uh god is present on the altar some bread some wine some mumbo jumbo but i
think the reason the church financed the conquest of mexico the reason it was so furious in its of the
mushroom was because the people called it the flesh of the gods and it demonstrably was and you know i
i kid people about yoga and i've done them probably not enough to really know what i'm talking about
it's not how do i find like the end of spiritual child easy to be a seeker you just see how about you
but for me just as terence observed the sacred use of psychedelic medicines truly did end my spiritual
childhood by the time i began a serious investigation of these magical substances i'd already cleansed
my doors of perception about organized religion and had long since part ways from those rigid paternalistic
paths in fact i got so far off that path that i worked quite hard for several years in a very serious
attempt to become an atheist that path didn't work out uh too well for me because at the time i had access
to large quantities of free psychedelic mushrooms and believe me it's at least i found it pretty
impossible to be an atheist after having ingested six or seven grams of mushrooms of course i probably
don't have to tell you that do i and uh before i get too far off track i want to be sure to remind you
of the story terence just told about chatul hayuk the reason i want to point that out is that the music
you're hearing right now is from the group of the same name and uh jacques the driving force behind
chatul hayuk was very close to terence and hopefully one day we'll get shock here in the psychedelic salon to
tell you his story about a visit he had from mr t a short time after terence died i can tell you this it
gave me chill bumps when i heard it the first time also in the talk you just heard there was mention of a
dialogue that evening before between terence and ralph abraham in case you missed it i did podcast
that evening's discussion in two programs our number 19 in the psychedelic salon series is titled the
worldwide web in the millennium and podcast number 20 is the q a session that followed and now for a
personal message from yours truly if you've been listening to these podcasts for a while you might
notice that i've attempted to keep my personal stories out of the programs the main reason for
this is that i've always thought of myself more as a carnival barker you know all the all the actions in
the tent and my role is to get people's attention and guide them into the tent the other reason is that
these podcasts from the psychedelic salon were originally intended to be a test of podcasting
technology i never really expected these programs to reach such a wide audience so i've been giving
a lot of thought lately about what to do you know pick up the tempo a bit and produce even more programs
or just let it keep being an occasional hobby and these were my thoughts that were in my mind earlier
this week when i joined a few close friends in an ayahuasca session but my intention for the evening
didn't include anything about podcasting to tell you the truth i had some other issues big ones i thought
that i was looking for some guidance or answers from lady ayahuasca about however as is often the case she
had other plans for me that night all she really wanted to talk with me about was you actually each and
every one of you out there in cyberdelic space who join us here in the psychedelic salon and uh by the way
there are already tens of thousands of us that come together here each week and maybe we'll have to think
about doing a worldwide psychedelic tune-in to the salon all at the same time someday those fantasies are
for another day today i have a message to pass on to you that comes directly from lady ayahuasca herself
at least that's my take on it yours might be different but that's what makes the world so
interesting in our next podcast by the way you'll hear terrence say the truth doesn't require your
belief to exist but hokum does so here's my warning to you if you've had the honor of receiving the
gratuitous grace of lady ayahuasca well then you're going to probably understand this message as the way i'm
going to try to pass it along and if you've not yet had the opportunity to be under her spell then you
should probably treat this as hokum you know just a product of a overactive mind and uh perhaps it
really is but nonetheless it makes sense to me and you're going to have to be the judge of this yourself
so so here's what happened the energy in our circle was a lot stronger than usual that night and yet our
group was experienced enough and able to hold the energy well within the circle of our friends that
were sitting together in complete darkness as is our tradition and listening to our dear iowascaro sing
some beautiful acaros to the accompaniment of flutes and even our own voices joined in time to time when
the plant so moved us and i was gliding along on that lucid plane that manifests itself you know shortly
after the light show ends i was trying to sort out the issues i'd raised as i focused on my evening's
intention but i wasn't really getting anywhere you know i was just stuck in one of those crazy negative
loops that you get into sometimes you're not careful and so i was trying to get out of that loop when we
entered into one of the several minute long periods of absolute silence that we occasionally punctuate the
evening with and that uh that particular time the silence just hit me like it was a strong wind and
instantly my mind was just crystal clear not a thought in it and i don't know how long i remained like
that but a voice came from my left that broke the silence and said the future ain't what it used to be
and in an instant uh geez my mind began to laugh and as the cosmic giggle expanded it it felt as if it
was just wrapping itself around me and then it suddenly squeezed me and i got it all of a sudden i got it
and i think some of you can relate to those kind of moments now for those of you who are just beginning
to explore the the realm of the psychedelic if that nonsensical insane rap doesn't scare you away with
its total lack of what's commonly called reality then maybe you've come to the right place and for
those of you who have been encouraging me to tell a few of my own tales well maybe now you can see why i
hesitate to be honest i find most trip accounts to to be not very interesting except for the bad trips
you know i like to read them and learn what not to do anyway even i can see how this fits into the
hokum category and i was there so for me this really happened and and my words don't even come close to
describing what took place so i'll dispense with the how i got this message for you and i'll just pass it
along as best i can well the first thing i got was a profound insight to that
quirky little saying the future ain't what it used to be of course if the future remains what it used
to be then we're totally screwed you know our only hope is a species is to change course and that's when
lady ayahuasca began to speak and here's what she said as best as i can remember it the people who are
listening to these podcasts are beginning to understand that the hopi prophecy that says we are the ones we
have been waiting for not only refers to each of you you're also beginning to wake up to the fact that
you've incarnated in this time and place for a very specific reason the reason that we're all probably
still really trying hard to uncover and she went on to say that your instincts are probably a lot more
accurate right now than your reason and by the way she said you should probably start expecting
synchronicities to appear in your lives almost every day she went on to say please tell them that each
and every one of them and it was very clear that it was a specific each and every one of them is vitally
important right now as ralph abraham pointed out you know in normal times we should all go out and have
fun and make piles of money but these are not ordinary times and this is where she got into a discussion of
safety and i won't go into all the details but i was given a review of the lives of four of my very
close friends during the past nine months all of them are dead now two were suicides and the other two had
accidents with our sacred medicines none of them should be dead right now and each one of them was vitally
important now all we have to learn from is their mistakes because that's all they have left to give
this enterprise that we're now so deeply engaged in the point was that these were all highly experienced
psychonauts and all were over 40 years old right now of course our little clan is still in a state of
shock over these deaths but believe me we have all abandoned any casual attitude we had about these
substances because we found out that a casual attitude really will cause casualties so that part of the
message was clear always get as much information about the experience you are about to have as you
can and start at arrowid site that's www.erowid.org arrowid.org i know almost all of the people involved in the
the arrowid project and i can't speak highly enough about them arrowid.org is truly an impeccable website in
my humble opinion now i know that i've talked about safety before and i'll continue to talk about it in
future podcasts but somehow this is a different kind of message i'm trying to deliver right now you know
having been in intheospace most of you know that the most important things you learn there are impossible to
put into words you know they're truly ineffable and it's as much uh... more than just a simple feeling
it's it's a deep grokking if you know what i mean and i'm pretty sure that you do actually
the message uh... really did seem to be directed personally to to you to each and every one of you
and i'm going to stop here because i don't want to keep on going in this uh... airy fairy mode but
to be honest it makes me uncomfortable because i know it sounds like all that new age stuff that i
i can't really stand so let me say this another way forget the experience i had the other night
i'll just say this from me to you and hey maybe i should warn you you ought to take everything i say
with a grain of salt you know you should probably know that i've kissed the blarney stone on more than
one occasion i've been wrong a lot more than i've been right in my life so you've had a fair warning
now about that but this isn't blarney this is from my heart and my personal belief is that yes this is
it really is it we're actually here for the big one and why are we the ones that are so fortunate to
be here at such a pivotal moment in time well maybe it's because we've done this work for so many
lifetimes now that we've earned our ringside seats for the big show that has already begun
you know uh... i think it's hard to deny this if you really spent much time working and thinking
about this issue but the human species is now poised on the rim of a new chaotic attractor and i don't
think it's going to take much to tip this human slinky of consciousness into a new and improved basin
of attraction you know there's been a lot of talk about the hundredth monkey coming along and personally
i don't think it's even going to take that much you know there's a famous metaphor in chaos theory
which uh... is what i believe is currently governing our state of affairs right now on this little planet
so according to this metaphor the uh... flapping of butterflies wings in the amazon rainforest can
actually be the initial event in a cascade of events that eventually causes a hurricane
i believe that the metaphor also works for all of you who are joining us here in the psychedelic salon
i think it would be wonderful if one of you becomes that hundred butterfly you know the one who gives
our species its final little push that begins the next great stage in the evolution of our species
and i really hope it's one of you and together maybe it could be uh... all of us giving up that little push so
now i'll bet you guys who uh... wanted some personal stuff from me are sorry you know don't ask an irishman
to tell a story unless you've got a lot of time on your hands and in my case i hope you all keep in mind
the fact that everything i know uh... right now could very well be wrong you know it's happened to me before
back in the eighties before i first discovered mdma i was an irish catholic republican lawyer
today i'm still irish but uh... no longer do i believe any of that bullshit i believe back then
hardly any of it you know so my track record on uh... having uh... uh... e-line to the truth really
isn't that good so the only really good advice i can uh... give you is to experience these things for
yourself well that's the big difference between religion and a psychedelic experience one requires
a belief and the others literally an experience i don't know about you but i'll take experience over
belief any day well that should be about enough for now i want to thank you for being here again and i
look forward to joining with you uh... to be sure that the future ain't what it used to be
jacques cordell and wells better known as chateau hayuk thanks again for the use of your music and
we're all looking forward to the release of your new cd which i understand is almost ready right now so
thanks again and thanks to you dear terence thank you for being you for now this is lorenzo signing off from
cyberdelic space be well my friends linguistic archip greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and
i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon well we're slowly coming to the end of this series of
terence mckenna wraps and if you're joining us for the first time i guess i should let you know that
this is the ninth input looks like it's going to be a series of ten podcasts of sound bites from a
workshop terence mckenna gave in the summer of 1998 when we left him in the last podcast terence was
waxing eloquent about what happens to a seeker once she or he has found the magical essence of a true
psychedelic experience and as most of you already know once you have ingested a large dose of say
psychedelic mushrooms for the first time well there's simply no turning back after that moment
you know because from that moment on as as my friend tony rich once said when he was keynoting
uh an ayahuasca conference we do know what we know and now for those of you who haven't yet had a
a well-guided and profound psychedelic experience there uh there simply is no way to explain what a
an incredibly pure crystalline god-like experience this is as terence often said you can spend the
rest of your life sweeping out the ashram or following the rules of one of the paternalistic
hierarchical religions that are tearing this world apart or you can simply take the red pill
and experience the truth for yourself as i mentioned i think in the last podcast i was 42 years old before
i mustered up the courage to find out if i'd been lied to and i hope it doesn't take the rest of you
so long to wake up yourselves most of you have otherwise you probably wouldn't even be tuned in here
would you well that's enough from me right now let's uh let's listen to what the bard mckenna has to
say about how a great culture can lose its way it's a great puzzle how cultures lose their way i mean in
the 20th century we have the example of national socialism in germany uh in the course of this
weekend we've talked about how vedic india was based on the total celebration of some kind of psychedelic
and that it was lost 100 percent loss so that you know there are a few pundits in india who claim
they know what soma is but nobody can produce something which performs as advertised greater than indra
greater than brahma shaper of the world soma it's pouring forth from the
soma presses gushing forth to intoxicate the multitudes well what kind of drug is this that
you can have three daily pressings and intoxicate hundreds of people and and it has no reputation
for anything except the highest state of ecstasy and this goes on for 1500 years and then bingo
nobody knows what it is nobody makes it nobody can find it it's just something talked about in
old books how do cultures lose their way it's a hard thing for us to understand with our electronic
obsession with you know preserving everything digging in colonial outhouses and cataloging the
pottery shards and all this we're savers you know many times several times in chinese history there
have been enormous book burnings to basically dial back the cultural clock to zero and started ticking
again the burning of the alexandrian library was an event like that in the west i mean there were over
a million volumes in the alexandrian you know the guy who burned it said that there are two kinds of books
books here those who contradict the curse let it all and that was the second burning of the alexandrian
library it was also burned by a christian barbarian enthusiast called aleric the visigod the same clown
who burned it loose just have uh two brief questions the first one i just wanted um to um to know more
about the uh visual puns of the uh machine like elves and um or elf like machines and uh the second
question is uh i know of someone who recently went to holland and they brought back some tryptophan
and uh i've heard i've read something in the literature about combining uh nmao inhibitor
with tryptophan and uh i just wanted to know if you knew anything about uh the effects of that or
anything like that well i think tryptophan is an amal inhibitor i'm not sure there's a common amino acid
they're thinking of starting toward dmt i think you can start from tryptophan but i think it's easier
to go from an elf machine puns what exactly did you want to know about them just um just uh
if you could kind of elaborate on the three-dimensional four-dimensional like uh what maybe give an example
of i know it's kind of hard to put into words but yeah well kind of transformation of category
where things are made out of things which are impossible i mean as i said how can something be
made out of yesterday consomme and hope it's impossible to conceive and so in the presence of
these puns they they're they break down ordinary reality even more than it's broken down anyway in
the dmt state uh it's it's like you know it's not enough that you're loaded on this psychedelic
mega hallucinogen now they tell you crazy jokes which you get uh in that state it's sort of like the
surrealists use the opening the crack it would be a great choice to do this i'm thinking of who
this was renee magritte where you know foreground and isn't a psychoactive alkaloid that occurs in
and it's used traditionally although we interest in this field at all housewives accountants and so
for us so from that point of view um and many of them have also been scientists or or people with
who are credentialed in some way so to dismiss them as you know people who have had some kind of bias in
that area i don't think i think we'd have to delve into that a little bit more as i'm sure you've thought
about also i i just read an article um that was pretty incredible where i think a former air force
officer came forth and said that he had been responsible for planting uh technology from a
crashed saucer in major corporations you know in this country and that was eventually reverse engineered
and uh a lot of people feel are responsible for the increased technology since world war ii and
including the computer ship and a lot of other uh things that have come about recently and and
certainly revolutionized where we are right now so i just you know wanted to ask you again to uh if
did you hear me right is what you're wondering yeah right i know your previous writings have been
somewhat more more liberal in that regard and well um first of all let me say i saw that had some
encounter with uh like yourself possibly oh well if we by some encounter if what we mean is cosmic giggle
come near i don't think you can get through life without that happening the problem i have is first of
all um this is hard to talk about but maybe worth talking about first of all because of my position as
whatever i am i get to meet all these people off stage so to speak and it's not been a confidence
building experience i noticed you you had a tendency in your question to lead with credentials
an air force colonel a navy officer a nasa ex-nasa scientist and when i hear the phrase ex-nasa
scientist i reach for my revolver i think what we have to first of all nice people do not understand
how mendacious scheming lying and bizarre pathological people are they can't imagine it that's
essentially what being a nice person means is evil is a mystery to you uh i think that uh a lot of people
are making a lot of money spreading anxiety anxiety is uh and the earth change people one by one we tick past
the edgar casey prophecies that don't come true one by one you know now every piece of physical evidence
from the first 30 years of the ufo phenomenon has now been shown to be fake all none of those photographs
stand up under modern uh computer logical deconstruction and so what i i my method
for because i'm interested for because i'm interested in the weird the miraculous the bizarre the unearthly the
other but my method has been to to or the thing and then not believe hard questions and everybody else
goes and believes doesn't require your belief to exist requires a relationship between the consumer of the
the hokum and i've spent time i've argued with bud hopkins i've had lunch with whitley streber i've
argued vociferously with john mack and these people are uh thinkers you would not invest send them to
investigate a bus accident uh i'm sorry that this is true i didn't know this uh i assumed as
most people do but the word expert has meaning it has no meaning it's just a piece it's public relations
flackery you're a ufo expert if you say you're a ufo and when you go into the uh so my method has been
as i said to kick the tires and make it real the other thing is and people don't like this but to examine
the messenger you know you you mentioned in your question these people are normal
run-of-the-mill type people accountants lawyers so forth and so on in fact when you look at these
populations closely they're weird uh for example let's the abduction population a paper was written uh
showing that uh the abduction population tends to cluster in middle-aged white women uh of the middle
class who who uh do not who stay home what is that of people who watch more daytime tv than any of the rest
of us if if our average tv consumption is five and a half hours a day this population is pulling up the
slack for those of us who don't watch and is watching 15 hours a day this is an area where you know you
see the newspapers being vended at the grocery store virgin mom nine gives birth to alien christ
are we all clear that this is a joke all of us including the remedial readers and the people who just
got off the boat from somalia last week and everybody are we all looking at it through the eyes of a harvard
intellectual with a b.a in english literature uh i'm not sure so this is what i call the balkanization
of epistemology uh and part of it has to do with us all not nobody apparently this was left out of our
curriculum uh what's called rules of evidence you know if you're a lawyer you learn what are called
the rules of evidence what does a given set of fact what do a given set of facts actually mean
and in this ufo game people uh first of all they repeat things never with citation they say did you
see that article the other night or that thing on channel six a few weeks ago about this thing that
happened in argentina where this and it's never accompanied by citation so it's a multi-networked
game of telephone where these rumors move out and are endlessly adumbrated and and changed around
and uh all for the purpose of filling in people's blank spaces and i the the i don't like the the see
i think there are two phenomena i'm not saying there aren't strange lights in the sky that we may not know
what they are and that they could be anything subject b is the ufo community as a social phenomena
it's a paranoid community these myths that are being propagated are always myths of disempowerment
it's that they came to babylon and gave us an alphabet because we couldn't think it up ourselves
it's that they're giving us fiber optic technology and computer chips because we couldn't think it up
ourselves it's always about poor humanity receiving the large yes of the space brothers and all we have to
do is trade them human fetal tissue and some other stuff and they'll be happy it's uh it's a backward
fantasy that the media has drummed up into uh uh a hysteria if you really care speaks to you
then you must go and investigate it you cannot understand it by consuming it from the media uh because
all these people that you hear about jacques valet and bud hopkins and john mack the gods of this do you
think they would stand out if they were sitting here in this room do you think if we had them in front of
us that these would be towering geniuses or men of deeper insight than you and i get real you know it's
just it's just the new age book circuit it's just marketing and people making careers not that they're
insincere but they're limited as you and i are limited by our our understanding and our and our past
history uh i i was invited a few years ago to speak at a big ufo conclave in la and i had never been to
one and i thought as i'll bet most of you think who have a moderate interest in this but if you go to one of
these things what you will find is a whole bunch of sincere people who have had strange experiences
and who are trying to figure it out together not that is not what you find what you find is booths
the urantia book the raelians billy myer the palladians the roswell incident and these people operate side by
side having coffee holding smokers for each other and so forth and so on with no sense of co of cognitive
dissonance whatsoever you know they it doesn't ever strike them that if the raelians are right then how
can commander rama be right and if he's right how can billy myer and the police this doesn't come up
as an issue and you realize these people are having a lot of fun and but they are not this is a support
group for some kind of fallout from a religious hysteria this is not about the study of strange
lights seen in the sky at night and if you try to talk about that people will just look at you like
you know who let you in uh you know it's now all about channelings and prophecies and the rise of atlantis
and the beam from the center of the galactic uh whoop-dee-doo and the photon belt and the coming of
malchut sedek if matreya will get out of the way and on and on and on and i find the only defense
against this is the conjuring rod of irony and reason uh you know if it if it seems absurd it probably is
absurd now i'm not saying that the world isn't strange i'm actually saying that the world is
stranger than these cheerful ufo enthusiasts can even begin to imagine the stars are so
diffuse in space and time the evolutionary time spans available to life so vast that the idea that
the alien intelligence will you know communicate through sparkling-eyed blue-eyed middle-aged women
with bowl haircuts and moo-moos is mind-boggling to me and uh so it's just a matter of and you know how
do you tell and i have this argument with ralph all the time and rupert because they're both softer than i
am and i'm getting more hard-boiled in my old age because i see how a lot of people take all this stuff
much too seriously and can't even really think straight i read an interesting essay in a few months
ago in a in a book about all this by douglas stillings and he said when you encounter somebody with
a strange belief the question to we have been asking the wrong question the question we've been asking
is why do you believe this wrong question the question we should be asking is why do you believe that you
believe this because the interesting thing is these people don't act differently than you and me somebody
can claim they were an abductee and they did this and they did that they don't act the way i would act
if i were abducted if i were abducted i would come apart at the seams do you realize the implications of
being abducted by an alien spacecraft i don't think i would be satisfied to just tell my story to john
mack and become case number 232 and then sit back and let him handle the public relations fall out of it
these people do not behave as though their story was true they behave as though it's a story and so
somehow what we're dealing with here is clashes of epistemic values the carlos castaneda phenomenon
was a good example half the people who want to talk about castaneda want to talk about is it true or
not or was this guy some kind of a charlatan the other half says what kind of a question is that you
don't even understand the issue it doesn't matter whether without taking sides on that issue notice
that these two groups don't have much to negotiate because for them the very notion of truth has taken
on a different meaning one is saying the truth of myth is truth and the other is saying the truth of myth is
this is a bullshit concept we want to know if this is the truth or not um about psychotherapeutic use
of psychedelics and the lack thereof in this country and in other countries do you foresee an increase of that
with um
you
of the nation-state and the rise of the World Wide Web as you've sort of laid it out?
The rise in psychedelic therapy?
Well, because from what I understood of what you were saying, one of the main reasons why that's been, you know,
marginalized and pushed under and scheduled to the degree that it's been scheduled is because the nation-state,
it doesn't serve the nation-state to have psychedelic activity going on on a large scale.
And so if, you know, nation-states, you know, in the next 15 to 20 years go on the decline and are marginalized in their power and scope,
and, you know, either, you know, corporations or global community take over, do you foresee a rise in psychedelic use in the medical system?
Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, we talked about the world corporate entity that's emerging,
that the world is being replaced by from 200 nations to 1,000 corporations.
The values are very different. Corporations are not particularly interested in suppressing dissent in quite the same way that nations are,
because corporations don't argue their existence from a philosophical position.
The other thing is, corporations hate unregulated markets. And so I can imagine, I mean, drugs are a commodity,
an enormous money-making engine. And it would be better for everyone, cynics, users, purists, manufacturers, physicians, governments,
if drugs were simply an ordinary commodity. And if abuse of drugs was treated like any other mental aberration,
simply you would be dumped into the mental health and criminalized and humiliated.
Management and the legal system to treat it this way. Essentially, the situation now, the reason drugs are so severely repressed
when it's such a money-losing proposition to do that is because the nation state is carrying out a vestigital obligation to Central European Calvinism.
I mean, the reason drugs are illegal is because they're evil. Well, they may be evil.
Corporations, you have things that have to be manufactured. I've been dealing with the uprising in Chiapas, you know.
Somebody has to make the stuff. There is a point where there are uprisings and where it is shut down, where there is great violence that occurs. We don't hear about it.
You mean violence at the behest of corporatism. Indeed.
Yes, but it's nothing like erasing the cities of Europe by aerial bombing or something like that. I agree. There's a low level of...
It may be low level. It seems fairly high level where, you know, a company will go in and say, you know, Guatemala is becoming a socialist. Let's go to the law firm. We'll hire the lawyers.
They'll get in touch with the political people and we'll go down there and, you know, assassinate whoever so that United Fruit can continue. That's just, you know, an easy example.
Well, if assassination is a tool of corporate statecraft, I've always sort of leaned toward assassination. Have you ever noticed how few innocent people get ground up in assassinations?
I mean, if someone had assassinated Saddam Hussein, those hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers who were buried alive in the pits in the desert might have lived to tell the tale to their grandchildren.
But governments are horrified by assassination. Oh, Lord, no, you would never do that.
The entire fabric of diplomatic understandings established since the Congress of Vienna would come unglued.
It's far better to conscript a million eighteen-year-olds and send them off to try to kill the leader of international diplomacy.
You know, capitalism is so triumphant now that its salvation will probably have to be self-generated.
In other words, it's not going to come from slave uprisings or a papal insignical.
It's simply that capitalism is going to have to grow smarter, and they're trying to do this.
And once they smarten beyond a certain point, they will carry out what is essentially a Marxist analysis of their own situation
and realize we can't keep doing this because the open system of exploitable natural resources that we are assuming doesn't exist anymore.
And we can't lift everybody to the level of the American middle class without cutting down every tree and digging every vein of metal.
What was that for a wild ride? I only noted the major topics that Terence touched on in those brief 50 minutes or so.
And what I wrote down was how a great culture can lose its way, self-transforming machine elves,
the secret chief in the story of psychedelic psychotherapy, UFOs in the UFO community as a social phenomena,
the balkanization of epistemology, psychedelics in the age of the world corporate state, nanotechnology, time machines in the singularity.
And when you realize that he's not using notes, that this is all coming right off the top of his head,
well to me it's even more amazing, and his use of the language I think is exceptional.
But that was Terence.
By the way, have you been thinking about synchronicity since I mentioned it last week?
Well, here's one that happened just a few minutes ago.
I'd just finished editing the talk that you just heard and was thinking about how far out Terence could get,
talking about time travel and stuff like that, but from a rational, scientific, and yet very psychedelically philosophical point of view.
And right then I decided to check my email before I recorded this segment, and as I was waiting for it to download,
the thought popped into my head that I'd really give most anything right now to be able to hear a fireside chat
between Terence and the man I consider to be really right out there on the far edge of consciousness research.
That's my good friend Zoe Seven.
And you probably know the rest of the story by now, don't you?
Yep, the last message to come in was from Zoe.
Don't you love it when things like that happen?
When a little synchronicity like that happens to me, I explore it a bit to see if there's a message somewhere in there for me.
So I read Zoe's email with that in mind and noticed that one of the things he mentioned was a website that I suspect most of you have probably already heard about.
It's David J. Brown's site, Mavericks of the Mind, and you can find it at www.mavericksofthemind.com.
It's an interesting site that has interviews of many of the early luminaries of the psychedelic movement.
And in the interview with Terence, I found the following McKennaism.
He said,
We're moving towards something very much like eternal dreaming, going into the imagination and staying there,
and that would be like a lucid dream that knew no end, but what had a tight, simple solution.
The psychedelics, the near-death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries,
all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we've been living in this dimension.
I like that, don't you?
So thank you, Zoe Seven, for leading me to that.
And by the way, if you haven't read Zoe's first book, Into the Void, you might want to do that soon.
I think it's probably already close to becoming a classic.
In fact, if you go to our palenkenorte.org site, and that's the corner of matrixmasters.com where these podcasts originate.
So if you go to palenkenorte.org, and navigate to the 2003 original Burning Man lecture series,
and click on the title of our first palenkenorte lecture, you'll see some pictures of John Henna giving that talk,
and there in the foreground is a copy of Into the Void that you can see in several of the shots.
Maybe we're starting to reach so many of you now because of some extra mojo we got from Zoe way back there in the beginning, huh?
Anyway, after you read Into the Void, you'll probably want to read his next book, which has just been published.
And in a few weeks, we'll be able to get a copy shipped from here in the U.S.
Until now, the books were only shipping from Argentina, and the shipping cost is too high for most of us, yours truly included.
So, Zoe has fixed that, and soon Back from the Void will also be available in the U.S. with a very reasonable shipping price.
And Zoe's main website, by the way, is www.zoe7.com, Zoe7.com.
And before long, he'll have a couple of new sites operating as well.
I'll be sure to let you know when they come online.
So, I guess I should say stay tuned if that's a thing you can say in a podcast, huh?
One other little announcement I'd like to make is that Dr. Grobe would like to get the word out that he still needs seven more volunteers for his psilocybin study at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.
Now, before you get too excited, I need to tell you that the selection criteria is so strict for this study that you definitely don't want to qualify.
You see, the participant population is restricted to stage four cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety.
And since stage four means terminal, less than a year to live, it seems to me that you'd have to be a little anxious.
And you can get the details about this study at www.canceranxietystudy.org.
So, if you know of anyone who might meet the criteria, it would be nice of you to pass that URL along to them.
Well, the next podcast will bring this series of Terence McKenna Talks to a close.
And following that, we'll hear the talk that Nick Sand gave at the Mind States Conference in 2001, shortly after his release from prison.
Those of you who experienced the 60s might know of Nick, maybe not by name, but by the name of his most famous product, Orange Sunshine.
Well, I guess that about does it for today. I really do appreciate you joining us all here in the Psychedelic Salon.
And I want to thank you for all the kind emails you've sent.
If I ever get caught up again after this move I'm in the middle of right now, I might even be able to answer some of you.
If you don't hear back from me right away, it isn't because I don't care. I do read everything that comes in.
So, thanks again to all of you for being here.
And thanks again to Chateau Hayek for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Be well, my friends.
Dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
Have you ever had one of those times when all of your tech just seems to conspire against you?
And the sad part is that Mercury isn't even retrograde?
Well, that's what's been happening around the old Psychedelic Salon lately.
My plan was to get a better microphone and start producing more frequent programs.
But, as the fates would have it, a cascade of little changes to my system has resulted in a Niagara of problems.
And the main one is that I can't get any microphones to work properly on my PC right now.
So, after several days of frustration, I decided to use my trusty SanDisk MP3 recorder to finish this program
and get this podcast on its way to you before we all forget where we last left the good bard.
And so, it is that we've finally reached the end of this long series of Terence McKenna recordings.
I hadn't planned on doing so many of them in a row, but I hadn't heard these tapes in a long time,
and once I got started, I couldn't stop listening.
And from some of the comments you've sent, I hear it's the same with many of you.
You know, I keep telling myself that some night I'm going to self-medicate a bit
and listen to all ten of these McKenna rhapsodies in a row,
but I'm afraid that maybe my head would explode if I did.
So, let's get on with it.
Here's the tenth and final installment of a workshop Terence McKenna conducted in the summer of 1998.
Yeah, machine is a very general term.
I mean, the machine might be a mantra, a drug, a physical position.
I mean, this is the kind of stuff we were playing with at La Charrera,
but I'm now afraid of it because I know that it's real.
You have to believe you're going to fail to attempt to build a time machine
because no one in their right mind, if they thought it was going to work,
would in fact climb into the gleaming saddle and slam the lever forward.
You have to believe that you're going to fail or you wouldn't do that.
I had a particular psychedelic journey where I was going into the wormholes
and I was realizing, wow, if people really are serious about doing this, this is the way,
because I was actually feeling like I was able to go wherever I wanted.
But at that moment I refrained because, wow, this is real.
I can actually traverse through the timeless singularities or the timeless wormholes
and pop out at any point in space-time because it's all interconnected at that one point.
The name of the game is to bring back real information.
I mean, that's how you will convince the rest of us to do it and to believe you.
And I think it can be done. I think probably shamanism is about this.
But one of the things we talked about a little bit here, but maybe not enough,
is this bell, non-local information space that seems to lurk beneath the surface of ordinary reality.
For 50 years in quantum physics this was denied as so counterintuitive
and leading to such bizarre conclusions and possibilities that it must be.
impossible and now they've done experiments that pretty much show this is real this is real and
what it means is all the mystics of history were right you can journey from any place in the
universe to any other place instantly you can extract information that lies on the other side
of the cosmos instantly it's all done in the imagination the imagination is this sense
which you have that is your non-local perceptor your local perceptors are your eyes your ears
the surface of your body so far the non-local perceptor is the imagination and it's giving
you a continuous holographic readout of the bell non-local dimension and then and it's like a it's
like a cheat on your being trapped in in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of newtonian space and
time you are trapped in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of newtonian space and time but you have this
little tiny peephole this doorway into the entire cosmos all the races that ever were there all the
catastrophes and civilizations and philosophies and messiahs and so forth and so on and but you have
to like tune it 99.99999 percent of this bell information is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind
because it's on a scale too large or too small or it involves premises or environments or
presuppositions so bizarre that we can't grok them but the remaining 0.00001 percent of this data is
absolutely fascinating these works of art ruins planets herophanies strange music strange art strange ideas
endlessly to be explored and then to be brought back as much as can be it to the human camp and examine i mean we are hunters and gatherers in hyperspace as much as we are in in 3d and what we're roving and scanning for in those informational spaces is things which delight us or make life more comfortable or inform our relationship to each other or our
environment the future lies in the imagination you know the imagination is going to get louder and louder and louder and louder william blake saw this we talk about virtual realities designer drugs downloading ourselves into circuitry travel through time disincarnate bodies cloned identities gender shifting point of view shifting
shifting all of these things this is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics the rules of physics say you know you are a body you are on a planet you have weight you have momentum you have specific gravity you must behave like this and like this and like this and mind says no i want to be pure unleashed
i want to move from planet to move from planet with the twink of an eye i want to know everything see everything be everything feel everything and then by that means somehow i will make my way back to my higher and hidden source and who knows you know maybe this always awaited us beyond the grave and what we're doing in some sense is drawing death
the most profound of all boundaries and death itself becomes thin becomes transparent i mean i it's very easy to imagine technologies such that human identity will be scrambled beyond imagining you know if you can download yourself into certain make copies of yourself
and then you can have multiple identities and then you can have multiple identities uh in one of greg egan stories people have this thing inside them that is implanted when you're two years old that's called
it was it starts out being called the dual and it ends up being called the jewel and what it is is it's a thing which simply maps and studies your nervous being for the first twenty three years of your life well then when you're twenty three you go through this ceremony where the body is vaporized
is vaporized and the dual copy of your youthful self lives on uh this is within reach uh hans moravik has had the idea that you could take uh you could nano engineer bacteria such that they you could nano technologically engineer a leprosy bacteria because leprosy moves along the nerves from the point of
infection bacteria bacteria bacteria bacteria that would lay down on every nerve and so you would undergo these operations where you would slowly be changed into a thing of gold and silicon glass and arsenic but there would be no moment of transition no loss of consciousness no speed bump no transition of identity it's just over time you would become something completely eternal and machine like
you know that poem by william butler yates sailing to byzantium where he says once out of nature i would be a thing of gold and golden words and ladies of byzantium to sing of what was and what will be once out of nature what he means is when i am dead i will be a thing of gold and gold enameling there's the image of the flying saucer
coming out of the collective unconscious we want to become the stone we want to become somehow a living thing that is nevertheless has the character of machinery and objectification it's a very complex image in the human mind you know with christ at one end of the spectrum
and then all these adambrations and resonances the philosopher's stone the grail the gift magical object the talking stick the the jeweled self-revealing basketballs of the dmt state you know in the fifty-third fragment of her it makes no sense until you smoke dmt and then you find yourself in the presence of the
the aeon the archon of the world age it's a child at play with colored balls in some kind of a of a virtual reality yeah
ends up one of them is if you could talk a little bit about the tone that you and dennis used to intercalate uh
to me molecules in dna how you decided to use it that particular tone if it's occurred again in your life what it
may mean to you um as well as uh just a brief comment on uh gender ratios in your workshops whether there's more men than women usually you've talked a little bit about that before i've heard you say that men may be more drawn toward the psychedelic experience because of
uh some lack of uh intuitive knowledge about uh yeah well i don't know why exactly it is it certainly seems true that men
have a deeper relationship to drugs than women i think that's generally true even hard drugs don't seem uh as interested in drugs or drugs maybe those
uh as a deeper women are constantly burying the dead caring for the sing with miscarriages uh they may be more rock bottom realists
well you know the guys are harping a hundred thousand uh stuff like that i think you know the average i quoted the statistic in a different context but that in eighteen hundred the average american woman gave birth thirteen times
uh giving birth especially poop-dee-doo in traditional societies not psychedelic simply because they have enough the gender
into the internet and guru male female mathematical abilities seem to differ although i think that's changing i think the latest data is that women are pulling even medical graduates some places i don't know men are
are are maybe more boundary defined than women like women seem and again you make these statements you don't know whether you're making a biological
statement or a cultural statement but women seem more tolerant of bisexual and homosexual behavior they're sort of comfortable with all that
with all that where men male male sexual encounters are always defined to some degree by uh competitive shadow of competition uh
now what was the other part of your your question oh about the tone about the tone well this is a very specific question but in the story that's told in the invisible landscape
dennis seemed as he went around the bend to have insights into these like shamanic techniques that were real techniques
and that he could not only tell you what they were he could tell you how they worked and one of the things he insisted upon was that you could use your voice
voice to transduce energy into your own body and other people's bodies which this is no news
acoustical signals are a good way to transduce energy across space
but that you could actually use it almost like a
laser or something like that and that you could interfere with the normal chemistry of these drug molecules
enter into bonding situations that they would normally not
you do this by making them super conductive
you make them super conductive by
we tend to think still
so he said and that then
they would bond activity
a talk at the world future society
in chicago
and it was entitled beyond alternative medicine
and in that talk i talk
you know i bring up the internet
and i talk about the shift
from the industrial paradigm
to the information age and all that
kind of stuff
and i i was
presenting that and i was going down the list of the industrial things
massification
you know to customization
quantity
to quality
hard resources
to soft resources
and as i was looking at the list of the industrial age
and the information age
the thing that came off was
like masculinity
moving to femininity
and i said to myself
you could almost look at these columns
in front of this group
as testosterone loaded
and estrogen loaded
what in the hell is a man supposed to do
with testosterone
in the information age
so i throw that out at you
you know
how do we fit in
as you know
hunters and gatherers
in the information age
well the internet
is a large
and multi-level
forest environment
with all kinds of
a place
for the stealthy
and the swift
i think it's a place
steely-eyed
is rewarded
we're probably
this whole gender thing
it's locked into the
on the brink of
sending gender
but
having a different
relationship to it
as we have a different
relationship to our bodies
and
in the future
it will be thoughts
absurd
for people to think of themselves
as
heterosexual
homosexual
exclusive
this
Freud shows
these are almost
counter elements
i think
you know
hyperspace is going to
give a lot of
because it's at the center
of our biological
nature
is going to be one of the
most interesting things
about how we
manage
cyberspace
you know
the things that are usually
put against cyberspace
is that
small tv cameras
to
conference with people
at a distance
and go into these
reflectors
you'll log into a place
where there are
eleven guys
the
four
seem to be
masturbating
but not in a particularly
exhibitionistic
way
sort of half-heartedly
and
lackadaisically
and then other people
you can see them
they're staring at screens
and you're wondering
am i
do i look like that
am i staring at a screen
are they watching the people
masturbating
what is the relationship
between these people
is this an invited situation
is it a
situation of voyeurism
or is it a situation of
domestic carelessness
where this guy
forgot to turn off his
software
and you realize
these are the frantic
questions of someone
enraged by the breakdown
of public space
you say
i don't understand
what's happening here
are we
are we in a private space
are we in a public space
can people see us
what do they think
what's happening
it doesn't make any sense
you just have to
go with the flow
i don't know what those
people are doing
yeah
do most people who take
dmt have the same
encounter with the
machine like elves
and so how similar are they
and then also i'm wondering
what your
relationship is with law
enforcement
well the first question
everybody's different
and everybody takes the dose
differently and gets a different
amount and brings different
baggage
having said all that
i think
if the dose
the
the stronger
the higher the dose
the more everybody's experience
people get
fifty to seventy milligrams
in a big hit
they will go
to the realm
of the self transforming
machine elves
as described
by yours truly
they may not describe it
as i do
i've turned a number of people
on to dmt
i've listened to a lot of stories
and slowly
the
image that has emerged for me
if you want to think of the dmt place as an archetype
it's the archetype of the complex archetype
it's a rupture of plane
of the bizarre
and the transmundane
which shatters bourgeois packaged in several ways
first of all it's a great place for children
clowns
animals
bright music
cotton candy
the hurdy-gurdy
and the calliope
great place for children
but also
the circus traditionally packaged and marketed eros
i think my earliest intimation of sexuality and eros
was when i was a creature so small that i was wrapped in a blanket and handed from shoulder to shoulder
and i was taken to a circus
and i saw that the woman in the nearly naked woman in the little spangled costume hanging by her teeth up in the top of the tent spinning around and around working without nets
but i imprinted this thing very strongly and i got the feeling of the fear of death
the beauty of youth
flat you know the whole
so that's part of dmt
dmt is always characterized by clowns you know
they arrive in a tiny automobile exploding and chugging fifteen of them get out huge noses
huge shoes they're poking each other in the eye they're dropping anvils they're flinging irons around
But then just off the center ring, it gets weird.
You know, the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle,
the hermaphrodite, the harlequin,
it's all this strange stuff.
And then every child worth their salt
wants to run off with the circus.
The circus represents such a countervailing force
to middle-class respectability and small-town rules and so forth.
You want to run off with the circus.
I remember when I was a kid,
the town I grew up in every 4th of July
was the big festival of the town,
and a carnival would come.
And our parents would tell us,
you can't stay out after 9 o'clock at night
while the carnival is in town.
Well, why not?
Well, you just can't.
These carny people are different.
They're, you know, a little darker shade than most of us.
Some of them might use drugs.
Some of them may, God forbid, have once been divorced.
In the 50s, things were pretty screwed down.
And then when the circus would leave town,
of course, reality would seamlessly close over it,
where it had been,
and the city park would once again be a place for...
The archetype is, I think, the ruling thing of DMT.
It's made me a fan of Fellini's.
His wonderful circuses are very DMT-like
and have everything I'm talking about,
the erotic, the humorous, the menace,
the shadows, and the light.
As far as my relationship to law enforcement is concerned,
I'm happy to say I don't have any.
It disappoints people,
especially conspiracy theorists.
Of course, they can assume I'm lying,
but nobody has ever bothered me.
Years ago, I was a hashish smuggler,
and then they did bother me.
They indicted me when I was in India,
and I had a whole opera as youth
to come back and work all that out,
but that was all settled by the mid-70s.
Do I not have a relationship to law enforcement?
In other words, why don't they watch me,
bother me, tell me to shut up?
I mean, it's sort of disappointing to people to hear,
I think,
because I love it when people come up
and congratulate me on my courage
and say, you know,
we're so happy that you're doing what you do.
It must take enormous courage.
No, I think if it took enormous courage,
I probably wouldn't be doing it.
I just have made an assessment
of how things work,
and my assessment seems to be right,
and here's how they work.
Eggheads don't count in America.
It doesn't matter shit what we say here.
What drugs are about in America
is money, point of view.
You can bet your booties
that if in the next year
I cleared a million dollars
in untaxed money dealing drugs,
I would have trouble.
You would have trouble, too,
probably,
unless you're already in the mafia
or something,
and you've got it wired.
They hate not getting their cut.
Psychedelics generally
have not been big money makers.
They're not addicting.
So they've always been a side issue
for criminal syndicalism.
The criminal syndicates
that have marketed drugs,
psychedelic drugs,
with the possible exception of cannabis,
have just basically done it
for humanitarian reasons.
You know,
there's lots more money to be made
in heroin and cocaine
and MDMA
and all these things
than in true psychedelics.
Usually,
the only time you meet
idealistic criminals
is when you meet
psychedelic chemists
and the people
who distribute their wares.
Because if you're good enough
to make LSD,
you're certainly not a good idea
to make money with.
I think that people should,
are entirely too,
by creating a kid,
if you wanted information
about drugs,
it was like
the most forbidden thing.
Log on to lycineum.com
or to enormous,
ongoing discussions.
30 posts a day
to the salvia list.
30 posts a day
to the ayahuasca list.
You can't possibly
churn through
all this stuff,
let alone
the vast amounts
of material
that have been archived
and articles.
The first workshop
I saw you at
was about
five years ago
and I had done
quite a bit
of psilocybin
and LSD
but never DMT
and I heard you
talking about
coming into contact
with the alien
and the visual language
and I guess
I was quite skeptical
because it just seemed
like it was
a lot of romanticism
and then I had my experience
and it was all there.
These jeweled basketballs,
the carnival-like quality
so it kind of was
the evidence for me
that it was more than
just a vague memory
of a trip,
that it was really
something outside of
our own consciousness
that we weren't creating it
and experiencing
some variation
on our past.
Yeah, I mean
something, you know
we talk about DMT
and all this
remember
it's just
three tokes away
and it only lasts
ten minutes
so
your major problem
I suppose
is accessing it.
Well,
why are you sitting here
for crying out loud?
In other words
if you worked
at accessing it
24 hours a day
how the hell
long would it take
before you accessed it?
I know,
I'm sure
there are people
in this room
who could help you
so if you didn't
meet them this weekend
well then
you wandered
in the wilderness
what were you doing?
Sitting by the brook
browsing in the bookstore
you blew it.
It's
to be sought
and
what?
It's an intelligence test
that would give it away
you're supposed
my job
which is telling you
this stuff exists
and I tell it
in such a dramatic way
that you're supposed
to doubt me
and so then
the only way
to prove
that I'm full of it
is to go out
and find this stuff
smoke it
and then come
find me
and tug at my wrist
and say
I smoked it
and
nothing
or whatever
and
one person
in 20
will be able
to do that
but the other 20
will come
you know
with flowers
offerings
incense
and the sound
of yellow brass
because
this is there
and it's a real thing
I mean
if I were to tell you
that you should go
meet the flying saucers
or go find Atlantis
or go find
Bodimine
for that matter
it's a pretty
tall order
where do you begin
but finding DMT
you know
it's matter
it's an object
in this world
you know
if you wanted
a print
by Hieronymus Bosch
you'd know
how to proceed
if you wanted
to buy
the Kolonur diamond
you'd know
how to proceed
if you needed
a Mercedes
you'd know
how to proceed
if you wanted
a first edition
of the poetry
of E.E. Cummings
you'd know
how to proceed
why do you have
so much trouble
figuring this out
just proceed
as you would
in the pursuit
of any other
defined material object
basically put the word out
that money
is no object
and
I'm sure
you'd be amazed
at how the market
responds
I'm wondering
I find my balance
in meditation
and psychedelics
have given me tools
I think
I'm wondering
if you have
any
suggestions
for
preparing ourselves
for this
evolutionary acceleration
you mean
practical
tools
basically
you know
in the short
term
I don't eat
for six hours
I don't call
that fasting
I just call it
emptying my stump
because I get
dizzy
and have
headaches
and I'm not
going to work
anyway
but I don't
eat meat
or stuff
sugar
and stuff
like that
leading into it
I fast
for six hours
and then
I do it
in a
to be interrupted
that would be
the problem
to be solved
in terms of
longer term
preparation
how do you
really
evading
wonder
imagination
and curiosity
curiosity
is really
the psychedelic
impulse
in the absence
of psychedelics
you know
if you like
to look at
things
paintings
ants
bugs
butterflies
flowers
pay attention
and then
the other
thing is
this weekend
that the
the alien
intelligence
is a
cold
you put
into your
head
the more
far
can be
you know
there are
people
say
you give
them DMT
and they
come down
with the
standard
it was
pretty
colorful
saying
somebody's
interested
in
you know
you want
fermented
mare's
milk
usually
you find
out
that by
behaving
in this
way
you end
so dims
the voice
of the
sweet
bard
McKenna
didn't
you love
the part
where he
said
that
the best
way
to prepare
for a
psychedelic
experience
is to
cultivate
wonder
imagination
and curiosity
and isn't
that exactly
what we're
all trying to
do here
in the
psychedelic
salon
at least
I hope
it is
which
reminds me
I wanted
to comment
on something
else
clear
and that
was
when he
said
if you
didn't
make a
connection
this
weekend
you
blew
it
well
I've
got to
take
issue
with
that
at least
the way
it
sounded
when I
heard
Terrence
say
that
just
now
I
thought
of
all
the
times
my
friends
and I
have
met
new
here
in the
psychedelic
salon
we're
exercising
our
first
amendment
rights
of
free
speech
and
talking
freely
about
psychedelic
medicines
but
we're
not
going
to
be
talking
about
where
or
how
to
find
these
sacred
medicines
because
I
truly
believe
that
when
your
mind
and
spirit
are
properly
prepared
and
ready
they'll
magically
manifest
themselves
to you
it
happened
that
way
for me
and I've
seen
it happen
that way
many times
since
so
be
patient
and
take
your
time
to
get
to
know
people
and
more
importantly
let
them
get
to
know
you
I
have
a
personal
rule
of
thumb
that
if
somebody
asks
me
if
I
can
help
them
find
one
of
our
sacred
medicines
and
if
I
it
there
there's
no
room
for
error
right
now
so
be
careful
be
really
careful
out
there
you
know
a few
years
ago
I was
told
that
90%
of
all
drug
bus
come
out
of
traffic
stops
and
the
other
10%
were
from
friends
who
rolled
over
on
them
so
be
warned
don't
drive
with
or
under
the
influence
of
these
substances
and
be
very
careful
about
making
new
friends
particularly
when
you
so
why
do
we
take
these
risks
well
maybe
it's
because
if
we
use
these
sacred
medicines
the
right
way
then
they
do
what
Terrence
said
psychedelics
make
you
aware
of
the
fact
that
life
is
beautiful
without
psychedelics
it's
true
you know
life
is
beautiful
and
for
me
it's
even
more
beautiful
with
all
of
you
being
here
with
us
in
the
psychedelic
salon
and
although
Terrence
didn't
end
this
heard
him
and
several
others
I
think
it
might
be
fitting
right
now
so
in
the
words
of
the
bard
McKenna
keep
the
old
faith
and
stay
high
for
now
this
is
Lorenzo
signing
off
from
cyberdelic
space
be
well
my
friends
greetings
from
cyberdelic
space
I'm
Lorenzo
and
I'm
your
host
here
in
the
psychedelic
salon
you know
I have
to
admit
that
I
had
a
lot
of
fun
putting
today's
program
together
in
one
of
my
never
ending
attempts
to
get
better
organized
I
was
cleaning
out
with
Terrence
McKenna
it
was
as
the
old
timers
would
say
it
was
back
in
the
summer
of
and
it
was
an
interesting
workshop
Terrence
gave
it
at a
place
that
he
called
a
new
age
watering
hole
and
so
I
guess
I
first
session
on
Friday
night
spent
a
couple
hours
going
around
the
circle
and
everybody
told
a little
bit
about
themselves
you
know
I
was
really
blown
away
to see
the
wide
range
of
people
who
had
been
drawn
together
for that
weekend
it
I
left
with
several
friends
that
I
know
I
have
for
the
rest
of
my
life
so
it
was
a
great
weekend
and
Terrence
of course
was
really
at the
top
of his
form
I
think
in
fact
I
about
how
the
internet
figured
into
Terrence's
time wave
theory
and
from
there
well
I
tell you
what
let's
just
listen
to
the
master
the
one
and
only
Terrence
McKenna
original prediction
was that there
would be a deep
plunge into
novelty
in 1996
that it
would be
the deepest
plunge
in the
90s
but that
was
based
on
my
mathematics
before
John
Sheliac
corrected
it
were
factored
in
it
showed
that
there
was
a
deep
plunge
into
novelty
where I
said
it
was
in
but
that
it
wasn't
the
deepest
it
was
the
second
deepest
the
deepest
was
I
believe
in
fall
of
which
was
right
when
the
internet
was
going
public
and the
world wide
web
was
coming
into
being
and
all
that
was
happening
the
plunge
that
I
felt
pretty
good
about
because
right
near
the
place
where
I
predicted
the
maximum
amount
of
novelty
we
got
within
days
of
each
other
the
announcement
of
the
shed
moment
that
the
president
of
the
United
States
felt
the
need
to
address
the
nation
on the
subject
of
extraterrestrial
life
was
a rare
moment
and then
within
eight days
of that
announcement
was the
announcement
of
Dolly
the
human race
passed
from which
there was
no going
back
then
because
basically
if you
can clone
a sheep
you can
clone
a human
being
and
these
technologies
are all
rushing
upon us
I mean
the body
is being
dissolved
as much
by advanced
medical technology
as it is
by
cyberspace
and the
internet
I read
this story
this amazing
story
recently
set
slightly
in the
future
and
this guy
has been
in this
very bad
accident
and
virtually
nothing
has survived
but his
brain
but they
have a
medical
technology
that they
can take
a fragment
of flesh
and
clone
him
and then
with
hormones
rapidly
age
the
infant
so that
in two
years
there will
be a
brand
new
adult
body
for his
brain
to be
transplanted
in
and
these
people
have
this
fantastic
medical
policy
but the
fine
prince
says
that
the
brain
can be
kept
alive
must be
kept
alive
by a
medically
approved
method
but the
insurance
company
reserves
the right
to choose
the
cheapest
method
and
the
cheapest
method
is
implant
into
the
body
wall
of the
co-signatory
of the
insurance
policy
so this
woman
carries
her
husband's
brain
for
two
years
inside
her
body
cavity
while
his
body
is being
grown
to
manhood
for the
transplant
it's a
dilemma
we all
may face
someday
she
yes
yeah
I
wanted to
ask you
about
novelty
and
psychedelics
and the
language
that
changes
through
the use
of them
I remember
reading
Maria
Sabina
saying
that
the
mushrooms
spoke a
different
language
to her
after
people like
Watson
came down
and began
to use
them
they
played
from
Spanish
to
English
from
Catholic
mushrooms
to
I don't
know
Harvard
mushrooms
or something
Harvard
mushrooms
I don't
know
so I
haven't
spoken
with
people
that
have
taken
DNA
I'm
a DMT
sorry
in
the
60s
very much
the people
I've talked
to
they did
said
it was
so
overwhelming
they
could
not
even
understand
the
language
I
haven't
read
about
this
anyway
well
one
place
there
aren't
many
places
you
can
read
about
it
one
place
you
can
read
about
it
is
there's
a book
edited
by
Michael
Harner
called
hallucinogens
and shamanism
Oxford
University
Press
and there's
an essay
in there
by Henry
Munn
called
The Mushrooms
of Language
which is
one of the
most eloquent
and beautiful
essays
ever written
on
psilocybin
it's
so
wonderful
Henry
Munn
then
harder
to get
but equally
interesting
is a
doctoral
study
that a
guy named
Horace
Beach
did
at
CIIS
and it's
called
something like
the perception
of audio
phenomenon
under the
influence
of
psilocybin
and he
interviewed
Bay Area
psilocybin
heads
about their
experiences
with language
and it's
very interesting
this is a
very interesting
area of
discussion
the
on DMT
and on
psilocybin
and they are
closely related
psilocybin
being for
phosphoryloxine
and dimethyltryptamine
the phosphorylated
form
of DMT
though they do
not
degrade
into
one pathway in the body it's a parallel pathway DMT is NN dimethyltryptamine these psychedelics
particularly seem to impact the language forming portion of the brain and this produces truly
bizarre states of mind because it's the language forming part of your brain that is explaining to
you moment to moment what is going on you know now I am eating now I am having sex now I am flashing
on DMT and when that part of the brain gets foobard then you really do have a puzzlement on your hands
because the end the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process on DMT the
these entities these machine like diminutive shape-shifting faceted machine elf type creatures
that come bounding out of the state and they come bounding out of my stereo speakers if I have my
eyes open they are like you know they're elfin embodiments of syntactical intent somehow syntax which is normally
the invisible architecture behind language has moved into the foreground and you can see it I mean
it's doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you it's crawling all over you and and what's happened
is that your categories have been scrambled or something and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible
and in the background and and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you
and the thing makes linguistic objects it sheds syntactical objectification so that it comes toward you
they come toward you they divide they merge they're bounding they're screaming they're squeaking
and they hold out objects which they sing into existence or which they pull out of some other place
and these things are are you know like jewels and lights but also like consomme and old farts and yesterday
and high-speed in other words they are made of non-material made of juxtapositions of qualities
that are impossible in three-dimensional space what they're like is and in fact this is probably what
what they are what they're like is they're like three and four and five-dimensional puns and you know how the pleasure
of a pun lies in the fact that it is it's not that the meaning flickers from a to b it's that it's simultaneously a and b
and b and when the pun is really funny it's an a b c d pun and it's simultaneously all these things
well that quality which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output
in other words a printed pun in the dmt world objects can do this objects can simultaneously manifest
more than one nature at once and for some and like upon the result is always funny it's amusing you cannot help but be
delighted by this thing doing this thing well so these syntactical animals or these linguistic elves are pulling this stuff
out and gesturing with it pushing it in your face saying look at this look at this and you are fascinated you know
pulled into it because each one is you know what how can this be happening it's it's not we're not in the world anymore
we're not in the word no artist however gifted could make one of these objects because they have qualities
extremely difficult to language qualities that no object in this world has and and so you're trying to wrap your mind
and say my god you know what is it because in spite of the fact that it's just a little thing you can tell by
looking at it that its implications are earth-shaking in other words that if I could suddenly pull one of these things
out of hyperspace and we would all look at it we would all realize that that was the ball game right there that
somehow this proved it was it did it ended it started it made it clear how can this be well I don't know you had to be
there sort of and then what lies be and then you what lies behind this or as you try to analyze the situation
you realize that these objects that these things are making are made by utterances that sound is how this trick is done
and meanwhile these things are saying or beaming at you the general vibe is strangely enough do not
give way to astonishment do not abandon yourself to wonder get a grip try to get a grip and notice what we're doing
pay attention this is the mantra pay attention pay attention somebody once asked me you know is it
dangerous and the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment but but death by astonishment is entirely
possible I'm not kidding I mean you are so fucking astonished that you you never felt your astonishment
astonishment circuits get a workout like that before I mean what is astonishment in this world it's like oh
this is a different form of astonishment this is
you know so
and and then the whole notion that's being pushed here is
is do this thing do this activity do as we do and you can sort of feel your intentionality or your inner something or
other reorganizing and there's this like heat it's quite akin to heartburn I won't metaphysicize
it but heat in your stomach and it just
moves up and then your mouth flies open and
you do you this stuff comes out which is a very highly
articulated syntactically controlled
non-english non-european
language behavior of some sort not
strictly speaking though I call it glossolalia
it's strictly speaking is not glossolalia glossolalia has been carefully
studied and it's a trance like
state on the
floors of these Pentecostal churches
in Guatemala
they measured pools of saliva
16 inches across
from people
who were in
ecstatic glossolalia this
is much more conscious
much more controlled it's almost like
a kind of spontaneous singing
but your mind steps aside
and this linguistic stuff
comes out and
you can see it
that's the amazing thing
it is not to be heard
even though it is carried
as an acoustical signal
its meaning resides
in what happens to it
when the acoustical signal is processed
by the visual cortex
that's the important thing
it is a new kind of language
it's a visible
three-dimensional language
it's not something
it's not something I ever heard about
or any mystical tradition
I ever heard about anticipated
but it's
it's as though
the process or the project
of language
which according to academic linguists
began no more than 50,000 years ago
the process of
doing language
in us
is not yet finished
and this thing we do with small
mouth noises
and each of us consulting
our own learned dictionary
and quickly decoding
each other's intent
this is a stumble bum
cobbled together
half-assed way to do
language
and what
we're on the brink of
or what these psychedelic states
seem to hold out
is a much more seamless
kind of fusion of minds
by generating topological manifolds
that we look at
rather than
that we
you know
localize into
designated
meaning
I didn't mention ayahuasca
this rap
but ayahuasca being the
along with the mushrooms
a natural
and shamanically
used for many millennia
doorway into these places
and what you find in
ayahuasca groups in the
upriver tribal situation
is people
the whole way the
ayahuasca taking
is set up
is to facilitate singing
the shamans get loaded
then they sing
then they go outside
and take a leak
and smoke
and talk
and in those intervals
you hear people say
things like
you know
I liked the
the violet
and yellow
part
but I thought
the olive drab
with the silver spattering
was way over the top
and you think
you know
what kind of a
kind of a critique
of a song is that
well it's the critique
of a song that is designed
to be looked at
nobody talks about
the sound
everybody talks about
the visual impression
left
by
the sound
and the
it was these
groups
these ayahuasca taking
groups that
when the German
ethnographers
got into the Amazon
in the early part
of the 20th century
they called
this chemical
telepathine
they recognized
you know
that
and the reputation
of ayahuasca is
group states of mind
well if you're naive
then you think
you're going to hear
everybody thinking
no
you're going to see
everyone
thinking
you know
you're going to see
what people mean
and
it's not that surprising
when you think of it
because obviously
the world arrives
at the surface
of our skin
as a seamless
body of
electromagnetic
and acoustical
and pheromonal
data
it's just that our eyes
our nostrils
our ears
our skin
we break up
this incoming flow
of data
and I
now we're close to
McLuhan country
here
I think what this hints
at
is that print
skewed
our
perceptual
our
perceptual
our perceptual apparatus
or our
style
of
parsing
perceptual data
toward
the acoustic space
so that for us
thought became a voice
you know
and very early in the Western tradition
this is so
Jehovah is a voice
in the Old Testament
the Logos
is a voice
in Hellenistic
philosophy
we're
the people
of the voice
you know
there's a passage
in
Philo
Judea
where he
talks about
the etymology
of the word
Israel
and he says
Israel
means
he who sees
God
he who sees
God
and then he says
he's
poses the question to himself
what is the more perfect
Logos
and then he says
the more perfect
Logos
is that Logos
which goes
from being
heard
to being
seen
without
ever passing
over
a
moment
of
noticeable
transition
well I've actually
seen
this happen
in psychedelic
states
where
you will be lying
in silent darkness
you hear
distant music
and
as
the music
gets closer
it's like a band
with
lights
and drums
coming over a hill
as the music
gets louder
it seems to
physically approach
and
a confusion
of light
turns into
you know
oom-pa-pa
brass band
dancing elves
cavorting
harlequins
and
less easily
described
denizens
of the imagination
and then it all
goes
thumping
and marching past
and disappears
but
it's a perfect example
of light
and sound
arriving together
in the hallucinogenic
space
the fact
that
we've talked here
or mentioned
that we have
DMT
in our
pineal glands
in our brains
what we haven't said
is we also have
compounds in that same
organ
very much like
what's in ayahuasca
occurring in the human
pineal gland
is a compound called
adenoroglomerotropine
but when you
give it its physical
chemical
nomenclature
it turns out
it's 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmelan
6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmelan
it's a very near relative
of harmine
and harmeline
so
I'm
you know
it doesn't
strain me to believe
that
perhaps in looking
at this phenomenon
we have
actually put our
finger on the place
the cutting edge
of the evolution of consciousness
right now
at the biochemical level
what's happening is
there is a
a shifting
or an acceleration
of the concentration
of harmine like
alkaloids and DMT
in the human pineal
and it's affecting
our probability
to process language
and it's pushing
and exacerbating
a bias
toward visual understanding
and I see this then
also reinforced
and accelerated
by the evolution of media
media
you know
in the last 150 years
we go from
photography
to color photography
to moving
colored photography
with sound
with stereophonic sound
and you know
pointing toward virtual reality
with more and more money
and more money
to be made
at each
step of the way
and clearly
with the
amounts of money
now it's
we're outspending
defense
for entertainment
we will produce
simulacrums
of imaginary worlds
and you know
engineering bench tests
will be to make it
as much like Hawaii
as possible
or as much like
Tibet
as possible
but what people will
really want to do
with these things
is make worlds
as strange
as we can stand
that are
in these virtual places
so whether it comes
through a natural evolution
of the human nervous system
or the evolution
of an advanced interface
with prostheses
that create virtual realities
I think the transformation
of how we do language
is part of this acceleration
into singularity
yeah
I believe you made a reference
in one of your books
to Julian James' book
The Origin of Consciousness
and the breakdown of bicameral mind
and the way we evolved
and God was like
a auditory hallucination
before I guess
our consciousness
really developed
and we were thinking
human beings
yeah Julian James
it didn't win him
too many friends
but he wrote a big book
and had this theory
that this thing
which we call
the ego
is so recent
in human beings
that it actually
didn't exist
at the time of Homer
and he goes into Homer
and he shows
that the God
always breaks through
in situations
of crisis
and danger
and he felt
that
before Homeric times
people were
essentially like
ants
or something
that they
their behavior
was largely
instinctual
and that the only time
they encountered
this phenomenon
of free will
the interrupting
of the instinctual pattern
was in situations
of great crisis
and impending danger
and then this thing
would literally
almost come out
of the sky
and say
get your ass
out of there
save yourself
well
then
over time
this
ability
to access
this higher
informational thing
was
like
again
the metaphor
of insisted
closed over
with the membrane
of the self
and made part
of the machinery
of the self
and that this is
what the ego is
the ego is
a Greek god
that you have frozen
like an ice cube
behind your eyes
and that you think
you are
this thing
and that
you know
this is just
a cultural myth
a necessary
weird idea
no more a true
statement
about the nature
of the mind
of the hominid
even
anything else
one of the conclusions
that novelty theory
leads to
in terms of its
feedback
into
social
here and now
stuff
is the idea
that
culture
is not your
friend
that culture
is a
an impediment
to
understanding
what's going
on
that's why
to my mind
the word
cult
and the word
culture
have a direct
relationship
to each other
culture is
a cult
you know
and if you feel
revulsion
at the thought
of somebody
you know offering
to the great carrot
or tithing
to some squirrely
notion
just notice
that your own
culture
is
an extremely
repressive
cult
that leads
to all kinds
of humiliation
and degradation
and automatic
and unquestioned
unthinking
behavior
there's
a tendency
to want
to celebrate
culture
springing
both
from the
French deconstructionists
and their fascination
with culture
and then
the
the effort
to build pride
through ethnicity
thing
well
that's all
very fine
but I think
the cultures
we should all
revere our
our ancestral cultures
the cultures
most of us
have our roots in
the actual culture
we came from
was probably
fairly squirrely
I mean
the American family
is what keeps
American psychotherapy
alive
and well
this is a cauldron
for the production
of neurosis
and
in some cases
little else
so
you know
part of
part of what
psychedelics do
is they
decondition you
from cultural
values
this is what makes
it such a political
hot potato
you know
if there's anything
since all culture
is a kind of
con game
the most dangerous
candy you can
hand out
is candy
which causes people
to start questioning
the rules
of the game
so you can have a
Stalinist state
a parliamentary
democracy
and
and a theocratic
state
and they all
can agree on
one thing
that psychedelics
are just
terrible
because
you know
then citizens
start asking all
kinds of hard
questions
and
and the
devotion
to the values
of the fatherland
become mired
in
pseudo intellectual
discourse
and
the next thing
you know
somebody has to be shipped
off to the camps
in order to
right
the situation
no
it definitely works
in the personal life
like I
you know
I've been building a house
in Hawaii
and while I've been building it
definitely cut back my intake
of psychedelics
because I don't want the answer
to the question
is this a good idea
until it's too late
to do anything about it
it's like St. Augustine's prayer
God grant me chastity
and count
and countenance
but not yet
yeah
the big ideas
that seems to be
in the notion
of the archaic revival
is that
the whole big thing
is really
conscious
and alive
the universe
the galaxy
the larger entities
and that's interesting
because it's a traditional
belief
that's held by
non-modern
non-scientific
cultures
and if in fact
our belief systems
aren't taking us
in that direction
such that that makes sense
to us
it's really interesting
but it also
sort of upsets
the current
description of evolution
within the
say the darkness
because
that seems to be
you know
based on the idea
that all material
and life is a big accident
that's moving forward
so I think
that one of the
you're talking about
today
is teleology
is going to
itself evolve
and absorb this
you know
whether or not one day
about understand that
and which is whether or not
you can
nature
since self similarity
shows you
at various levels
similar principles
and since
on our level
as human beings
anything that we make
we first
think about
it begins as thought
and then it becomes matter
right
and so if creativity
could be seen
as having a fractal dimension
it would be a way
to talk about
all kinds of
creation
by simply
understanding it
and it would suggest
that to modify
the big bang theory
a little bit
before there's a big bang
there would have to be
a big block
that idea
so I want to ask you
to comment on that
but also in relation
to the idea that
is also contained
in evolution
about the origin
of language
because some of the things
you're speaking about
from your DMT experiences
have a funny resonance
with creation
so you need naming
the animal
I haven't really been
all that comfortable
with the idea
that language would evolve
out of grunts and groans
when
say it's all
a system in language
and all kinds of languages
could be very different
but inside
they always have
and nature
and ecosystems
and languages
always seem to pop out
fully formed
until you could think
that language
rather than involving
from grunts and groans
evolved
in the opposite direction
that the first time
language was used
it was used with the power
that you ascribed
to the machine elves
that it was something
that was done
carefully and precisely
because it could manifest
form
or something like that
well
species come into
it's an accident
that there will be
a mutation
and a new species
similar to another species
will be born
and it will survive
and that will lead
to a new species
and that any
female creature
which gives birth
to a new species
is going to perceive
that species
as a birth defect
and is maybe
not going to want
it to survive
and then there's only one
one
and so
that Barbara Cloud book
I read
talked about nine dimensions
and said the sixth dimension
was the morphogenetic field
from which
all species
and organisms evolved
so I was kind of thinking
maybe along the lines
of the metaphor
of the computer
there's a software program
in which new species
are developed
and designed
and the whole way
in which they
integrate themselves
into existing ecosystems
etc.
somehow or other
it all gets worked out
and there's a mystery
that we don't see
and don't understand
by which these new forms
come into being
maybe they all
come into being at once
with a thousand
or a million creatures
instead of just one
having a struggle
well all this raises
a lot of stuff
most of which
I can't remember
because of my
devotion to cannabis
but let's go back
to the thing
about language
and the origins
of language
yeah the origins
of language
let's talk about that
for a minute
I think that
I've been thinking
about this
because I've been writing
about it
and here's what
I've come up with
part of what makes it
difficult for us
to think about language
clearly
in English
is that this word
language
is used by us
to mean
spoken language
and it also means
the general class
of linguistic activity
as in computer language
body language
so forth and so on
and what we
just think clearly
about language
we need to have
a clear distinction
between spoken language
and the general
syntactical organization
of reality
language
because that is old
honey bees do it
dolphins do it
termites do it
they all do it
different ways
octopi do it
there is much
of language
in nature
in fact you could
argue that all of
nature
is a linguistic
enterprise
because the DNA
essentially
is a symbolic
system
those codons
which code
for protein
are arbitrarily
assigned
in other words
by convention
there is no
chemical
relationship
between the
codons
and the proteins
they code for
any more
than there is
a relationship
between an English
word
and the thing
it
tense those are just conventionalized by probability over time so language is
deep in nature what is not deep in nature is speech speech is as artificial as
the water wheel the bicycle pump the Tesla coil and the space shuttle somebody
figured this out somewhere well so then people say well but this is hard to
understand it's hard to picture how it could happen well here's how I think it
happened my little example about the songs earlier was a stab at this but
here's more it's that all kinds all non genetic behaviors which are called
reasonably enough epigenetic behaviors are nevertheless they're not simply
expressions of free will they are under the control of a looser system of rules
than the genetic rules which are chemical and absolute the epigenetic behaviors are
under the control of syntactical constraints in other words we need to expand the
concept of syntax from the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language
to the rules which govern the behavior of any complex system so for example before
speech among human beings I think it was probably very touchy-feely if you watch
monkeys you see this they touch each other they they they stroke they grant they groom
they goose they push they do all of these things the repertoire of this kind of behavior if you're good at it may
be on the order of having four or five thousand words in your vocabulary well when we watch primates do
this kind of behavior we don't think of it as a language but in fact it is it's a
gestural language a couple of years ago some research was done where these people
took pre-verbal infants and they taught them standard American sign language before
they could speak so these little tiny children could sign pick me up please change me where is daddy i'm hungry i want to watch tv
and before they could ever utter a word well now what we're always told about spoken language is it's this miracle and that we're genetically hardwired for it well these experiments seem to imply we're even more genetically hardwired for standard American sign language which is
something very few of us will ever learn to use what does this mean well it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalize and hence probably older so i think there was there was a gestural language as complex as standard English probably in place before anyone ever uttered a word now what the psychedelic
seem to suggest is that you can get so hyped up on tryptomines that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock and the normally acoustically modulated processing of language flows over into the voice box and you begin to literally articulate syntax
you begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that's organizing gestural intent and it's like going from carving in stone to color tv
your listener immediately transfers loyalty to this much more spectacular form of behavior and so it's like literally that the word burst forth full blown based on a platform of gestural syntax that had been maybe millions of years in its formation it was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical
practical intent through the body so instead of coming out at the end of the fingers it came out at the end of the tongue flapping in the air stream and and this thing happened it's amazing to me that the straight linguists you know if you go to an academic university and study linguistics will teach you that language is no more than 35 to 40 thousand years old
language is everything we are everything we do you can't you can't you can't do anything without it and yet if it's that new then what it represents is simply a technology a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media and it's not hard to see what it represents is simply a technology a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media
you know why after all it works in the dark that's good uh it allows politics you can make speeches to large groups of people uh and uh uh it's uh well it's just very portable it's the cleanest technology ever put in place it when you think about it it's one of the weirdest abilities human beings exhibit
behavior this is absolutely uh it's just how how they managed to do that uh and of course the
picture writing we understand but there is similar to the breakthrough to speech is the breakthrough
to a phonetic alphabet where you see aha we don't have to portray the thing we intend all we have to
portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend and then you know you're just
roaring forward and from there to the printing press what is it a couple of thousand years or
something and and and then there's no going back uh so that's the part about language now what was
the second part after that well just whether you could think about creativity as a principle that
could have a practical dimension and that would be a way to think about design on a larger universal
order is having some consciousness well if you think of the universe as a as an engine which
it produces and conserves novelty and you think of it as a fractal thing a fractal hierarchy built up
and built downward of subsets of itself then in a sense every creative act is the paradigmatic act
of of the big bang i mean it always struck me you know that the end of the novelty wave which is up
down oscillate zero it's like it's a general map of all process we could be describing the life of the
energy output of a star or the firing of a single neuron or the birth and death of an economy uh in a
sense you get down to a fractal level where you can say all processes are the same they have a beginning
a middle and an end and if you know where you are in this concatenation of process you you can sort of
locate yourself in the cosmic domain uh the the thing that i tried to talk about this morning that we
need to map into our maps of reality is the acceleration i think it's a really weird idea to talk about a
thousand years in the future i mean good grief a thousand years in the future what do you imagine
will be left standing that you call home uh what would cast your mind back a thousand years king
canute was taking charge of things across northern northumbria and the anglo-saxons were making forays
along the coast of norway and uh you know very few of the concerns of the day have survived to this
moment and that was the slow moving part of the process we're going to move uh you know in the next
ten years further than we've moved since the time of king canute to to this morning so uh
it seems to me the most unlikely future scenario is one which assumes things will stay more or less the
same because we've put in place all these processes designed to make sure that does not happen you know
rapacious capitalism technological innovation bourgeois as social aspirations in the hearts of every man
woman and child on the planet uh urbanization connectivity all of these processes are designed to erase
reality as we as we as we know it yeah but you think of the uh kind of athletic uh paradigm uh involving the
states of consciousness they're called the waking state the true state and the smooth state and transcendental
force state and they use that on individual basis but also in regards to cosmology genesis and in fact
criticize the west saying well the west has taken the waking state as expanded and evolved its philosophy
philosophical views without accounting for these other states of consciousness well certainly the west
has built its house on a on a narrow foundation denying these other possibilities um
um on the other hand the under you know if well you get into all kinds of difficulties here how do you judge
whether or not a civilization has assimilated or explored the domains it's named its own uh one way is by
looking at the technological applications that it's created and for all this talking about these other
states of mind they seem actually as mysterious to the east as they are to the west uh i don't get the feeling
they're really navigating through what they're talking about in the past there may have been levels of
understanding it may be see that uh psychology though it's a mystery to us it may be that it's an easier
not to crack than the nut of matter and so i don't have any trouble believing that vedic india of 3500 bc may
have known all kinds of things about how the mind works and how to navigate through these imaginal spaces that
we've lost but the spirituality of modern india is thoroughly contaminated by 500 by a thousand years of commerce with islam and the west
uh it isn't that different really i mean vedic theology and german idealism are strikingly similar cousins
yeah cultural regularly it seems to me that a lot of the stimulus for novelty that was generated by the psychedelic
experience now may be generated without any virtual reality technological advancements and perhaps
would maybe make the psychedelic experience most necessary in order to be a point to observe
well definitely what you're getting at is the technology itself is a kind of psychedelic drug
that you know by chance or design the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it's totally
acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment uh and put it out that way so
the the the web is incredibly subversive simply the fact that all that information is there and available
in a world where control of access to information has always been the game
so yeah the way i see it is that the the psychedelic people
need to use the new information technologies to build more powerful and more compelling than the world has
ever seen uh call it virtual reality call it multimedia whatever you want but it's basically walk into
walk around boundaries will fall for ordinary people because you see when you build a virtual reality
in a sense what that technology is allowing you to do is it's allowing you to show people the inside of
your own head we have never had a technology that would do that we think the inside of our heads are all the
same but you know when i say to you that when i smoke dmt it unleashes a niagara of alien beauty if i had spent
the last 30 years building that niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go
then we would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going and so i really see art
as the great searchlight that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead and i think that art is about to
get teeth for the first time in human history i mean it's all very fine scratching on cave walls and film and
video and all that but it's always artifice you know you won't you never are convinced uh or only for
seconds that you're in the presence of reality when you're in the presence of art but we will build
art that will literally stand your hair on in and the amount of creativity in a single human mind is
as i said more than fills all the museums of this planet so what we need is to figure out how to get a
spigot into that and get this stuff out and then as james joyce said man will be dirigible well as
you may have surmised by now the way terence ran his uh workshops or at least that weekend was to
not use any kind of an outline but instead just respond to questions that would take us as he called it
into the valley of novelty i think that was the title of the workshop that weekend i've heard this
tape actually probably a half a dozen times or more now and you know i still hear something new each
time i listen to it so that's what i really uh recommend that you do right now you know go back
to the beginning of terence's talk and re-listen to it right now while it's fresh in your mind you know
there's there's a lot of really important information here that you don't want to miss and what i think
sometimes happen is terence will say something and you'll be off in the clouds thinking about what
he said and you'll miss about six thoughts in the meantime because he's a pretty rapid fire thinker
and before you go i just want to thank you again for joining this extended family of now thousands
of us here in the psychedelic salon it's good to get together with you again and jacques cordell
and wells my friends in chatul hayuk thanks again for the use of your great music here in the psychedelic
salon and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends
greetings from cyberdelic space this is lorenzo and i'm your host here in the psychedelic salon
well first of all let me thank those of you who sent me emails to let me know that you're enjoying
these podcasts i do read all of them but you'll have to forgive me for not being too good at responding
do the best i can but as much as i'd i'd like to answer each of you i found that it was just taking
too much of my time away from a new book i'm working on so until i get that project finished i hope you don't
feel too bad that i have an answer each of you personally but as uh you can probably see i am
listening to your requests uh particularly the uh the uh loud and clear request i just uh recently
got to hear more of the terence mckenna seminar from the summer of 1998 and so uh without any further
need for an introduction on my part here's a continuation of last week's podcast of the
terence mckenna workshop where he was waxing eloquently about all things novel we said i think take
psychedelics you go and so this world of transience and flux becomes an eternal world so in that sense
it's the same thing uh whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing i think depends
on your meditation and your psychedelics uh meditations different meditations strive for
different things much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena this certainly would not be a
description of the psychedelic states have been complete merging complete ego loss and becoming a
oneness and that's another one but those have been both with the mushrooms and the
now through my highest meditation experiences it has been very similar where there is no self sense of
self and other it is it's just a flash of everythingness and nothingness it's non-doable seemingly
the center of singularity where holes clashing through each other where we're getting to another
dimension well in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum the most elegant
thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting point and the ending point
are are the same place yeah it's the place where all all is cotangent uh how we could get the universe
back into the primal dot in 12 years i don't know but there are some schemes to do that there's always
schemes to do it you know if the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation and it had an anti-matter
twin in a higher super space then there would be the potential at least for them to collide across all
points simultaneously and you would actually get the universe of matter disappearing instantly and you
would then be left with the universe made only of photons because they don't have an antiparticle what a
universe purely made of light what its physics would be like is hard to say but it sounds peculiarly like
certain gnostic hierophanies about gathering the light and and returning the light ultimately the meditation
path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data if the claims of both are to be respected
which is that they give deeper knowledge about uh about reality yeah as a kind of connection between that
and the point that you were just making previously about the expression of those uh interstates through
art whether what um your view might be on the use of some of the technologies today that are aimed at
providing access to those interstates in uh in a more uh you've mentioned about the psychedelic one of the
problems of the problems is bringing back the information and um so i'm thinking here about some of the
uh routines and particularly the technology of robert monroe aimed at providing to those states such that you
could bring that information all for it i just haven't seen anything that convinced me that anybody
had achieved it to any degree of significance uh yeah you know imagine a drug that did nothing more than
allow you to remember your dreams i mean that's not exactly shooting for the moon pharmacologically these
days and yet a drug which allowed you full recovery of your dreams might unleash god knows what because we don't
know what we dream uh the chemistry of dmt suggests that in deep rem sleep it's possible every single night you have a dmt flash but the it does not
transcript into short-term memory so uh or imagine a drug which allowed you to uh
uh enhanced long-term memory so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago and play it back
moment by moment by moment uh these again this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically we're not
talking immortality here we're just talking simple uh neurochemistry but all of these possibilities would
change uh life beyond recognition uh and i think these things should be pursued by any means necessary
you know it's a false dichotomy the the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things on the
match and they're not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics i this is just a con to keep
uh lineages in business i think because they don't want you going off the ranch and and uh charting your
own course uh but where shamanism becomes priestcraft it's already well on its way to senescence
uh terence what are you collectively perceiving together as a group taking mushrooms you collectively
perceiving similar phenomena without speaking in couple situations i've had telepathic things i've had in
group situations very quasi telepathic social interactions for what i mean by that is i'm recalling
an evening many years ago taking ayahuasca with these people and they had a weird scene going the shaman
was a good guy and a good shaman but he had a nephew who was a jerk and was sort of a pimp and kind of a
hustler and uh and the shaman was singing with his three friends these ancient ancient songs and this guy was
drunk on a guardiente and he would sing against them he would sing against them and this was in peru and
if you know the style of rural peruvians people are so polite and so not up front that no social problem
is ever dealt with directly people will will tolerate incredible bad behavior without turning on the person
and saying listen you're completely out of line knock it off so 30 people 30 peruvian campesinos were
witnessing this sing against and and the woman i was with at the time very much didn't like what was going
on and at the end of this this nephew the sobrino at the end of his song of raucous interruption i looked
up just as he ended the room was almost complete darkness i looked up just as he ended i saw her
look up and look at him with a look of utter disgust and when these red dot dart things got to him
it knocked him off his feet and i heard the old shaman was sitting right to my left and i heard him
turn to his friend and he said ah the gringa sends the the and so it was like wow
but you know then ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself and moves forward and there's no
time to say wait a minute folks says something paranormal just happened here i want to interview
everybody get your impression uh it's never you know when it's real it's always caught up in the
on moving flow of events well if you've taken the what you don't want to do is take here's this is
reasonable advice too i think where the problem area lies people think it lies in taking too much
it lies in taking too little because if you take too little you can resist it you can struggle with it
and then it can turn into a real mess because you're afraid of it and you actually have the power to some
degree to resist it what you want to do is take enough escape and that the transition from ordinary
reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible because the going up is somewhat terrifying for
example let's use psilocybin as the model here's how it works for me this is not tea this is eating raw
mushrooms it comes on more slowly
So, after an hour or so, you know, and the way I do it is I sit.
As soon as the mushroom enters my body, I sit and meditate.
I noticed in South America, they don't do it like this.
They dose the ayahuasca, and then everybody just goes on talking about their motorcycles
and the jobs at the sawmill and who's conning.
It's like totally, they toss it, there's a brief moment, they pour, they toss it down,
then they all go back to raving at each other about mundane life.
And then 30 minutes later, on the dot, the shaman blows his whistle or shakes his shakupah,
his leaf, dry leaf bouquet, and everybody settles down and it's like it comes on within two minutes.
As soon as the guy starts singing, he just invokes it.
The way I do it is I take the mushroom or the ayahuasca, and then I sit and I roll bomb and knead them,
and I just sit as I'm going to sit during the trip.
And I've unplugged the telephone and I've gotten everything squared away,
and it begins to come on at about the 40 minute or the 60 minute mark.
And there's sometimes some nausea as it comes on.
And then I smoke a bomber, or half a bomber.
And then it catapults it into the full deployment of the thing, where you just hang on.
There's about a 25 minute period where all, your only job is to hang on.
It builds.
It's like watching an atomic explosion on the other side of 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal glass.
I mean, you can't believe this is happening, quote unquote, in my mind.
You have the feeling that everybody from Seattle to San Diego is just crawled under their desk
as this thing tore past.
But it's in your mind.
And then there is the interaction with it, which moment to moment are pretty coherent.
But you lose it.
A lot of it does not transcribe into short-term memory.
And then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable.
The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it,
because language fails.
Because English, there are no words.
There are no words even close.
I mean, sometimes you'll bring out an image or a metaphor,
but out of five hours of tripping, you bring out half a notebook page of metaphors,
and yet you were entirely engaged during that time.
Now, this question about fear, which is a real question,
because when everything begins to slide,
if you are not, if it's more than most people who haven't done it,
I've heard that they've understood it's really going to happen,
and it's really going to happen to you,
and there's a tendency to clutch or to try and resist it,
the thing to do in those situations, I think,
and it's counterintuitive to how Western people think,
but the thing to do is to sit up,
not to assume the fetal position.
See, what you might tend to do is assume the fetal position
and tell yourself,
my God, this is the most appalling thing that's ever happened to me.
If I can just live through it, it'll be all right.
I've taken this drug.
If I can just wait through,
how long did they say it will be?
Seven hours.
I see it started two minutes ago.
If I can just, no, the thing to do is to sit up
and to sing, practical people,
to oxygenate your brain,
to move this, the entire,
this thing that's happened to you,
though it may have one claw in heaven,
its roots are in your neurophysiology
and in the chemistry of the drug.
You want to move your physiology around.
So oxygenating your brain can't fail to do this.
So you sing.
And this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power,
control, equilibrium, and so forth and so on.
Not always.
I mean, let's face it.
You're a product of a nutty society
and there are unexamined crevices
and uncleaned out drain traps in all of us.
And you're going to encounter that stuff.
The good news is,
the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that.
You will quickly discover taking psychedelics
that either you can work through your personal issues
and become a psychedelic explorer
or this is just stronger medicine
than you are up for
and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis
or whatever works for you.
Some people just can't take it.
Why is that?
Well, because what it does is it dissolves boundaries.
And most of us are over boundary defined.
But some of us are having an uphill battle
getting some boundaries in place
and realizing we are not the telephone
or the tree or the person we live with.
And so for those people
who are having trouble establishing
and maintaining boundaries,
this is the last thing on earth
they should get involved.
Cannabis.
In the state that you're experiencing,
the whole lot of ego or boundaries,
is it possible that your physical self
could just literally stop?
Because I have...
Well, people often, yes, wonder.
Often people wonder.
You get into a place where it's so unfamiliar
that the question comes up,
have I done it this time?
You know?
Am I dying?
Or am I in danger?
The answer is,
the odds are incredibly against you
being seriously in danger.
People don't die from psychedelics
unless they have heart conditions
or some incredibly rare medical condition.
The problem is that the ego feels threatened
by the boundary dissolution.
And its ace is your self-identification with it.
And it can actually say to you,
you are dying.
And here's the evidence.
You have to say, no.
It's unlikely.
And sing your way through it.
But this is really tough.
I mean, this is, you know,
the Buddhists talk about slaying the ego.
This is slaying the ego for real.
You must slay it.
Otherwise, it will spread panic
into your whole psychological system.
It will give way to panic and hysteria.
So, unless there is some real reason
to think you're dying,
and you should have done your homework,
you should know what to expect.
For example,
if you take LSD
and begin intense bouts of vomiting,
this is not a proper reaction to LSD.
Something is wrong,
either with the LSD
or with your relationship to it.
You should know what a tip,
because a typical trip
will put you through changes,
but is not dangerous.
But if you suddenly begin exhibiting
some symptom,
heart fibrillation,
or something like that,
then you want to have,
this is why then there's always
the issue of the buddy system.
Should there be somebody else there?
And what about all that?
My position is,
if you're anxious,
then you should have a sitter.
If you're going to do it alone,
you should certainly tell someone,
so that they will check on you
after a while.
I don't like doing it in groups
or with sitters,
because inevitably,
I get spun into them.
Go as deep as possible,
and even if I'm alone
with one other person,
culture is the third guess.
If you start,
I mean,
I've often found myself
in the middle of psychedelic trips
thinking,
I'm sure glad there's nobody else here
to see this,
because I'm sure it would alarm
an observer,
because I have my leg thrown
back up over my neck,
and I'm screaming in Urdu
or something.
But it's okay.
After a few minutes,
it's okay.
But if there were an observer,
they would feel the need
to do something.
And often,
like I've seen people
smoking DMT,
and people moan,
and they say,
no,
and they moan.
So then,
you know,
you get them back together
and constitute it,
and you say,
how was it?
And you say,
it was fantastic.
So you realize,
you know,
how they present
is not reliable.
Well,
setting has a great deal
to do with it,
and setting is a very complicated issue.
Setting means everything
from the astrological situation
at the time that you do it
to the physical surrounding
that you're in.
And it's also,
it's a roll of the dice.
You never know exactly
what you're going to get.
As far as the question
about Buddhism and all that,
you know,
when I started taking LSD,
I thought I saw
in Tibetan Tonka painting
and mandalas,
the echoes
of the same world,
pursued it,
went to Nepal,
studied Tibetan,
collected the art.
It's similar.
I don't know
what degree
the Buddhists,
the Mahayanists,
realize those states
without psychedelics.
I do know
that with those meditations,
those techniques,
those insights
are supercharged.
And I would suspect
that Tibetan Buddhism,
as it has its roots
in Vedic Hinduism,
there may be,
in its past,
Buddhism was brought
to Tibet
in 741
by Padma Sambhava.
There was an autofenous
shamanism
already present
throughout the Himalayas,
the Penpo.
And it was largely
based on cannabis
intoxication
at that point
in history,
not so much
in the present.
But I think
that this is
a fruitful area.
I just can't believe
that Mahayana Buddhism
could have gotten
as far as it did
without some reliance
on psychedelics.
And of course,
cannabis,
we in the West,
our style
is to smoke it.
And that's
a very mild
way of dealing
with it.
I mean,
if you eat,
if you have
unlimited amounts
of high-grade cannabis
and you eat
grams and grams
of it,
you will have
experiences
as extreme
as anything
that psilocybin
or ayahuasca
can deliver to you.
You only have
to read
the descriptions
of 19th century
writers
on cannabis.
Fitzhugh Ludlow,
S. Weir Mitchell,
these people,
their descriptions
of their trips
are as psychedelic
and as out of control
as any acid
reportage
or psilocybin
reportage.
So,
the relationship
of Indian
and Buddhist
spirituality
to cannabis
and other psychedelics
is not well
understood.
We do know
that the whole
Rig Veda
is a hymn
to a drug,
Soma.
But we don't know
what Soma is.
Well,
the fact that
invited
such a 95th
mandala
of the Rig Veda
says,
Soma is
greater than
Brahman,
greater than
Indra.
Could such
a great thing
be forgotten
and lost?
What culture
that how could
you possibly
that it must
have?
I think you
have to push
these psychedelics
to reach
these unitary
states.
What it
seemed,
what always
fascinated me
was hallucination
because it
seemed,
it was to me
the proof
that I was
dealing with
something outside
myself.
Well,
and here
was stuff
that amazed
me,
that I
couldn't make
up on my
own,
or that would,
you know,
a single image
would have taken
me hours
to draw and
figure out,
and here I was
getting 28 frames
a second
of this
unpredictable
stuff.
One of the
nice things
about the
tryptamines,
I think,
is they leave
the sense of
self pretty
much intact.
In other words,
it doesn't
distort who
you are.
It does
something to
your sensory
input.
DMT is
very surprisingly
like that.
You smoke
DMT,
you are
immediately
plunged into
an alien
universe,
but if you
can keep
pure wits
about you
and actually
notice how
you feel,
you don't
feel any
different.
You're not
smarter,
stupider,
you're not
more excited,
or once
you get
the initial
panic under
control,
you realize,
you know,
my God,
it didn't
lay a finger
on me.
I'm me,
I'm entirely
intact.
What has
happened is
that the
world has
been completely
replaced by
something
completely
unrecognizable,
an alien
that I have
no words
for,
that's
blowing my
mind,
that's
ripping apart
my philosophical
machinery as
I gaze upon
it.
But when I
bring my
attention back
into my
body,
I discover
I'm fine,
I'm okay.
It didn't
change my
mind,
you could
almost say.
It changes
100% the
reality around
you.
That's
powerful
because it
appears objective.
I mean,
the impression
you have
when you
smoke DMT
is,
this isn't
a drug,
that's
ridiculous.
Drugs,
you know,
make you
smarter,
make you
stupider,
make you
fall down,
make you
stay awake.
We know
what drugs
are.
This is
no drug,
this is
something
else,
hiding
under the
label
drug.
This is
a doorway
into another
modality that
exists all
the time,
independent of
my thoughts
or feelings
about it.
Is that
true?
Well,
I don't
know.
But it
certainly
doesn't seem
to be a
place constructed
to fit
human
expectations.
Like,
one of the
things that
always troubled
me about
DMT being
somewhat of
a Jungian
bent was
the question,
how come
there's no
hint of
this in
any
mythology
or religious
tradition
or alchemical
text or
fairy tale
or dream
or anything
else?
I mean,
if this is
so important
a part of
what it is
to be a
human being,
how can
it be so
deeply
buried,
so secret,
so unknown,
and yet just
one toke
away?
It's like
the,
it's still
that confounds
me,
because you
can read
all the
Hindu
scripture
or Sufi
mysticism
or all
the stuff
you want.
Occasionally,
sure,
you'll find
a phrase
or two
that could
be mapped
onto a
DMT state,
but nobody
has trumpeted
it,
nobody has
said,
this is
what it
is,
and yet,
as I say,
it's spread
throughout
nature,
it's been
known since
aboriginal
times,
we used
to years
and years
ago call
it the
secret,
and in
a way
it really
is the
secret.
Jorge
Luis
Borges
has a
story
called
The Cult
of the
Phoenix,
and he
talks about
a secret
that seems
profound
and yet
preposterous
to the
initiates,
and one
child may
initiate
another,
and ruins
are good
places
to do
this,
and he
just goes
on like
this for
a page
and a
half,
where you
realize
he must
be talking
about
DMT.
Yeah.
As you
brought up
before,
you're talking
about the
ego and
the consciousness
that I can't
say,
if we're
looking at
the ego
as a
fairly
recent
phenomenon,
and the
way I'm
sensing it,
the ego
is the
sense
itself,
and it
really
is that
constant
this is
me,
this is
what I
know,
and the
mystic
tradition
say the
true
so-called
enlightened
state is
the deconstruction
of the
sense
itself.
So doesn't
it seem
that the
this is
what I'm
getting
from the
journey I'm
taking,
I'm getting
intimation,
not of
the loss
of myself,
but it is
a sense
of the loss
of myself
in fact,
it's like
intimation
of the
future
where we're
functioning
on such
a different
level
that it's
beyond that
ego
construct.
You know,
we're really
telepathically
in connection,
the whole
sense of
self as
being this
limitation
of this
is me,
this is what
I know,
my history
is gone.
Yeah,
the great
cultural
accomplishment
of western
civilization
is this
thing called
the free
individual,
but now
that we're
on the
brink
of the
electronic
dispensation,
exactly
what we're
going to
do with
the free
individual
and how
that's
going to
look in
an era
where
consciousness
flows through
a thousand
portals,
it's not
at all
clear.
It's not
clear whether
we can
somehow
now carry
the idea
of the
free
individual
to an
even
higher
level
where
each of
us
will become
a kind
of
god
lord
over
our
own
creation
as
vast
in
time
and
space
but
virtual
as
the
cosmos
in which
we find
ourselves
embedded
or
whether
the
free
individual
is
going to
turn out
to have
been
the
problem
all
along
and
we're
going
to
abandon
it
and
become
some
kind
of
socialist
gas
or
some
collectivist
swarm
a
hive
mind
a
world
where
intelligence
flows
where
needed
and
identity
is
provisional
and
fleeting
and
unanchored
to
place
or
body
I
mean
much
of
this
goes
on
the
internet
you know
you can
be
an
eleven
year
old
girl
you
can
be
whatever
you
want
you
can
build
your
avatar
and
present
yourself
in
many
guises
it's
much
more
rock
and
roll
I
think
that
you
know
we
see
shamanism
from
the
outside
with
the
values
of
western
civilization
unconsciously
applied
in cultures
that are
taking
psychedelics
this
thing
which
we
call
singing
is
a
very
know
that
you
know
it's
an
ecstatic
and
complicated
and
synesthesia
experience
I mean
to
make
of
your
body
a
vibrator
for
sound
to
you
know
move
out
into
the
Pythagorean
octaves
with
the
human
voice
and
how
capable
of
sound
human
beings
are
no
other
animal
has
the
range
but
I think
we
had
a
lot
of
this
range
and
control
before
that
we
use
very
know
knowledgeably
like
ancestors
getting
90%
of the
nuance
of
these
meanings
because
they
go
so
gracelessly
into
English
when
a
shaman
talks
about
spirit
he's
using
a
term
as
technically
complicated
in his
mind
as
when
a
physicist
uses
the
term
beauty
to
describe
a
quark
you
know
it's
very
technically
defined
and we
tend
to
simplify
and then
suppose
that we
understand
part of
the thing
I found
with
hanging
with
shamans
in various
places
and times
is
that once
you get
past
the
language
barrier
what
shamans
are
simply
curious
people
intellectuals
of a
certain
type
in
Australian
aboriginal
says
I'm a
clever
fella
they
mean
you
know
I'm
a
shaman
well
that's
all
it
is
you
know
it's
somebody
who
pays
attention
to
how
things
actually
work
and
sort
of
transcends
the
culture
by
that
means
it's
a
weird
paradox
it's
that
the
shamans
who
are
the
keepers
of
the
cultural
values
are
also
necessarily
of
the
keepers
of
the
secrets
of
theatrics
and
so
they
live
their
lives
in
the
light
of
the
knowledge
that
it
all
rests
on
show
biz
you
know
everybody
else
is
a
true
believer
but
these
are
the
image
makers
the
people
who
actually
pull
the
strings
and
control
the
evolution
of
the
mythologies
and
in a
way
it's
a
situation
of
alienation
Mersilliad
talks
a lot
about
this
in
shamanism
the
archaic
techniques
of
ecstasy
and
in
history
the
eternal
return
talks
about
how
the
shaman
is
socially
marginal
politically
marginal
lives
at the
edge
and
is
feared
by
the
people
because
due
dealings
with
the
shaman
are
always
dealings
about
life
and
death
but
then
the
shaman
comes
forward
in
this
critical
role
as
go-between
as
mediator
between
the
cultural
mind
and
the
diseases
and
fate
and
the
shaman
mediates
in
many
languages
the
word
for
shaman
means
go-between
so
the
cost
of
this
or
the
price
of
this
for
the
shaman
himself
or
herself
is
a
kind
of
alienation
from
the
cultural
values
and
a
kind
of
understanding
that
it's
just
a
it's
a game
that's
kept
in
play
and
this
is
true
in
our
culture
as
well
you
don't
think
the
people
who
market
all
this
crap
and
produce
all
this
bad
art
and so
forth
and so
on
love
it
or
watch
it
or
consume
it
they
market
it
it's
basic
purpose
is
to
delude
the
and
distract
the
masses
so
the
psychedelics
what
they
bring
into
that
shamanic
situation
is
sort
of
rocket
fuel
for
the
project
of
cultural
detoxification
or
gnostic
rocket
fuel
into
a
realm
of
cultural
alienation
and
then
and
from
that
point
of
view
then
these
other
dimensions
of
reality
come
into
being
and
understanding
comes
into
being
I mean
one of
the
things
I
call
this
is
it
really
helps
to be
educated
it
really
helps
to
cram
a lot
of
information
and
experience
into
your
head
because
the
logos
are in
hidden
god
that
is
trying
to
reach
down
to
you
and
deliver
the
message
is
a
collage
really
compose
the
message
except
out of
bits
and
pieces
of
what
you
already
possess
and
so
you
know
this
came
home
to
me
very
forcefully
when
I
developed
the
time
wave
out
of
the
yi
ching
and
its
sequence
because
at
the
times
when
I
was
most
inflated
in
my
thinking
or
most
grandiose
in
my
thinking
one
of
the
issues
for
me
personally
was
why
me
you
know
why
are
you
downloading
this
millenarian
visionary
revelation
on
me
and
the
answer
from
the
mushroom
was
fairly
humbling
who
has
ever
walked
through
this
pasture
who had these 64 hexagrams in your head.
And that's all we needed.
We were just waiting for somebody
who could bring that much to the party.
And then we could arrange the details
and the mapping and the arranging.
But they had to arrive with that much,
and you're the first person.
So it was like nothing about, you know,
my fine genes or cosmic destiny,
but that just I was the first termite to happen
by carrying the right scrap of information in their head
that this thing could then manipulate.
Well, most DMT in the underground
has been synthesized from indole.
It's a fairly simple process,
like third-year organic chemistry.
DMT does occur in nature in many plants,
but usually there is little of it,
so you have to process a lot,
or it occurs complexed with other tryptamines
that have various psycho and physiological activities
that you don't want,
and that's very difficult to separate them.
DMT in the underground is made by underground chemists,
and if any of them are listening,
you might consider making a bit more,
because it's hideously hard to,
if you had an IND,
if you had a license to give it to human subjects,
but so few people have such paper.
Ability to manifest these miracles
at a rush hour hamburger stand.
Aside from the story you mentioned,
No, no, the answer is,
the truthful answer is always complicated,
although the truth itself is always simple.
If you're asking me to tell a story of a miracle
that I still cherish as authentic hallucinations,
the book, because you can see why,
but here's an incident that happened at La Cerrera
that didn't make it into the invisible landscape,
I don't believe.
Dennis had this notion
of what he called the good shit.
This developed in the days
after the ideas about hypercarbillation,
and he claimed it was like a fantasy,
it was like a joke,
it wasn't clear exactly what it was,
but it was this idea
that there was this hash somewhere
that had been rolled into cow dung,
and cut with cow dung,
and then infected with psilocybin mycelium,
so that the mycelium had completely replaced
the cow shit in this ball of hash,
or this hypothesized kilos of hash
somewhere in the world.
And so there was this psilocybinated,
at one point he envisioned us
actually forming a rock and roll band
which would play instruments
that would condense this stuff
out of the air over large audiences,
and we would go on tour,
and at the end of the tour,
history would be,
the whole thing would be in a shambles,
because Uncle John's band
really did come out of the woodwork.
But so at one point,
he predicted,
one night after he had been moved to the river,
and was sort of in semi-incarceration,
he predicted that the good shit
would come that night.
And by this time,
he was very suspect,
I was highly suspect,
everybody in the expedition
was polarized against everybody else,
and it was a pretty uptight scene.
I left with my girlfriend of the time,
and it may have even been the same night
as the Silver Key incident,
and it was pouring rain,
and we made our way
like a quarter mile,
half a mile back into the jungle
to this other place
where we were staying,
where the original experiment had been done.
And so then we get to the hut,
and it's pouring rain,
and I had scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold
for the expedition,
and we had smoked nothing
but this, for Columbia,
relatively reg weed for weeks.
So I got it out,
and I was fumbling with it,
and I got this thing lit,
and this little crumb,
this little burning thing
fell on the floor,
and I lifted it up,
and smelled it,
and the transubstantiation
had occurred.
It was, you know,
like Mazar-i-Sharif,
AAA, red lion, hashish
of some sort,
and I know hashish.
And here we were
in the center of the Amazon
in this hut,
in this pouring rain,
and I could tell
that it was the good.
It was the good shit.
It had actually manifest.
And I showed the woman
who was with me,
who was easily led
one way or another,
but anyway,
she didn't say it wasn't,
and I stayed up late that night
smoking this incredible hash,
and waiting for the rain
to stop,
so that at the first
gray light of dawn,
I could go down to the river
and confound my critics
with, you know,
the alchemical quintessence,
the concrescence,
the excreta bonum,
the good shit.
Here it was.
As dawn lifted,
I made my way
across this rainy
and sat down
by the hammock
of the sleeping form
of my most vociferous critic,
and sort of elbowed her awake,
and, you know,
there were other instances
where this was
the principle of work.
It didn't work.
It was the Cinderella
screw-up, you know.
It was just that
I was a char girl
who washed pots,
and there was no prince,
and there was no coach,
and there was no...
And plus,
I was once again
humiliated in the presence
of my critics
who had further reason
to think that, you know,
a check-in
to the local
mental health care
delivery system
might not be a bad idea.
These things happen.
Ah, the story
of the good shit.
Now, if that isn't
a perfect example
of an Irish bard
at the top of his form,
then I don't know what is.
That was really,
really classic
Terence McKenna,
you know,
from meditation
to the story
of the good shit.
What a delightful morning
that was.
I don't know about you,
but I thought
Terence was correct
in what he said
about the authenticity
of the psychedelic experience
relative to
achieving enlightenment
on the natch,
as he calls meditation.
Now, if you missed that,
you ought to maybe
go back and replay it.
I think it's around
the seven-minute mark
of this podcast.
I also thought
it was pretty cool
to hear Terence admit
that going up
on a psychedelic journey
can be quite terrifying.
You know,
on several other occasions
I heard him say
that if you weren't
somewhat scared
before a major
psychedelic journey,
then you really didn't
know what you're doing.
You know,
and I,
I completely agree
with that.
These sacred medicines
are, you know,
they're,
they're not just
little 4th of July
fireworks.
They're atomic bombs
and you darn sure
better know
what you're doing
before you start
playing with them.
And those you
who are regulars
here in the
psychedelic salon,
of course,
probably know
what I'm going to
say next,
and that is
always begin
every cosmic
exploration involving
plants or chemicals
at Erowid.
That's E-R-O-W-I-D.org.
That's the first stop
on every journey
a professional
psychonaut takes.
Start at Erowid.
Enough said.
Be very careful.
Always,
as you know,
err on the side
of caution.
But hey,
you guys already
know that,
otherwise you
wouldn't be
hanging around
here in the
psychedelic salon.
And I want to
thank you again
for being here.
Glad you stopped
by.
And dear Terrence,
wherever you may
be, thank you
so much for
everything that
you've given
to us all.
And I want you
to know,
by the way,
that I really
enjoyed your
rap about
virtual reality
and the possibility
of a hive mind
on the internet.
In case you
guys missed
that,
that's around
33 minutes
into this podcast.
So check it
out if you
were thinking
about something
else while he
was on that
role.
And as most
of you already
know,
our music here
in the psychedelic
salon is
compliments
of Chateau
Hayuk.
Thanks again
you guys.
Appreciate it.
And for now,
this is Lorenzo
signing off
from cyberdelic
space.
Be well,
my friends.
Linguistic
bar
chits.
Now
machines
from
cyberdelic
space.
This is Lorenzo
and I'm your host
here in the
psychedelic
salon.
So,
how are all
of you today?
Sorry it's
been so long
since I've
been here
in the salon
to get
another McKenna
talk out
but I'll
tell you
about that
story a little
later.
It is
good to have
you back
here again
though for
another installment
of Terrence
McKenna's
Walk in the
Valley of
Noddle
Tea.
And I
think you're
really going
to enjoy
this one.
Among other
things Terrence
does here
on this clip
I'm playing
is part
of his
famous rap
about the
transcendental
object at
the end
of time.
I know
most of
you have
heard that
once or
twice before
and so
it's one
I think
you'll
enjoy
so it's
a little
different
each time.
And as
you know
this is
from a
workshop
that
Terrence
held
in the
summer
of 1998
at least
you know
that if
you've
thoughts
about the
year 2012
so keep
in mind
that this
was in
he's saying
this
and he
called
the year
a year
where there
could be a
possible
cultural
singularity
and I
point this
out because
the word
cultural
attached
to singularity
because
lately
there's
been some
discussion
on the
net
about
Terrence's
misunderstanding
of what
they see
as a
technological
or scientific
or mathematical
singularity
the criticism
I think
is mainly
coming from
the PhD
math and
physics
guys
who are
using the
term
much
more
precisely
than
I think
Terrence
intended
when
he spoke
of a
cultural
singularity
you know
more as
a poetic
term
I think
than
as a
scientific
one
so
you
scientific
types
out there
hey
loosen up
a bit
have a
talk or
two
and
listen
to how
a
bard
and
not
a
scientist
sees
these
interesting
times
that we
now
find
ourselves
in
now
enslave
yourself
to
the
machine
can
you
expand
on
the
date
and
this
whole
idea
what's
going
to
be
happening
in
your
idea
well
I
talked
this
morning
about
free
of
the
universe
is
that
information
which I
call
novelty
is
struggling
to
free
itself
from
habit
which I
call
entropy
and
that
this
process
which
informs
the
whole
history
of
the
universe
on
all
scales
chemical
biological
cultural
etc
is
accelerating
speeding
up
and
it
seems
as if
what
wants
to
happen
is
the
whole
cosmos
wants
to
change
into
information
or
put
another
way
in a
geometric
model
all
points
want
to
become
connected
the
thing
is
achieved
through
connectivity
the
path
of
complexity
to
its
goals
is
through
connecting
things
together
well
if
that's
true
then
you
can
imagine
that
there
is
an
ultimate
end
state
of
this
point
does
not
lie
too
far
ahead
of
us
in
time
given
the
acceleration
rates
of
all
these
technical
processes
so
at least
locally
so
on one
level
I think
there is
a cultural
singularity
a cultural
what I mean
by that
is
a place
in our
cultural
development
where we
can't
predict
or
understand
what
will
happen
to
us
a
kind
of
flip
point
if you
want
or
doorway
if you
want
or
revelation
if you
want
and
built
in
to
the
structure
of
space
and
time
it's
that
novelty
in
its
emergence
is
now
operating
at
such
a
fine
scale
that
it's
actually
reflected
in
the
lives
of
move
through
the
human
domain
and
into
smaller
and
more
rapid
and
compressed
essence
and
probably
in
our
lifetimes
and
what
will
this
mean
or
what
will
it
look
like
it
seems
to
me
it's
just
not
possible
to
say
because
we're
too
far
away
from
it
even
though
it's
only
years
in
the
future
if
it's
in
those
years
are
going
to
be
so
mutational
so
transformational
that
right
now
in
time
we
can't
see
around
the
corner
we're
summoning
strange
helpers
to
our
aid
the
machines
that we
had
such
confidence
in
controlling
are
actually
a
kind
of
intellect
of
some
sort
that
is
alive
and
with
us
in
the
historical
continuum
and evolving
at a
far
faster
rate
than
we
are
and
what
all
this
leads
to
and
how
it
works
is
very
difficult
to
predict
and
I'm
not
a
paranoid
I
don't
see
I
think
it's
very
difficult
to
predict
I
think
we
wished
for
transformation
western
civilization
built it
into
its
cultural
agenda
science
delivered
far more
than we
ever
dreamed
in terms
of
understanding
of matter
and energy
and space
and time
and now
under the
aegis
of market
capitalism
where
everything
is in
a state
of
furious
competition
somebody
is going
to put
something
together
that is
just going
to completely
redefine
and rewrite
the nature
of reality
itself
and my
bet is
it will
be some
kind
of a
technology
it may
it could
be a
drug
it could
be a
machine
I
would be
nice
to think
that it
might be
a technique
or a
teaching
but just
looking at
the history
of the
human
race
I'll bet
you
it's
some
kind
of
technology
slash
drug
type
thing
that is
just going
to be
plugged
in
to us
and our
consciousness
and our
aspirations
and it
may already
be here
it may
be the
internet
it may
be
nanotechnology
it may
be
biotechnology
and cloning
and quantum
teleportation
and virtual
reality
and all
the rest
of this
we are
just at
the brink
of taking
these various
pieces of
the god
magician
puzzle
and putting
them together
and figuring
out
what can
you do
what do
you do
if you
can do
anything
that's really
the question
at the end
of history
once you
have overcome
all limitation
what is
the human
agenda
do you
believe
that this
is something
that we
are just
we are
observing
or we
actually
play a
part in
its
development
so what
is the
purpose
of these
hallucinogenic
experiences
is it to
get information
so we can
influence the
outcome
or are we
just watching
no I
think we're
more than
watching
I think
we are
we spin
it
we're the
spin doctors
of the
thing
in other
words
if there is
a prophecy
which must
be fulfilled
it's a kind
of general
prophecy
something like
and man
shall become
dirigible
in the last
decades
or the first
decade
of the third
millennium
it's general
in other
words
what does
that mean
man becomes
dirigible
we turn
into air
ships
we become
oblate
spheroids
we what
what
what does
it mean
well
that's
open
to human
definition
through
specific
acts
of
creation
the levels
of novelty
or habit
in any
given
moment
will be
fulfilled
but how
they're
fulfilled
is a
matter
of human
decision
an example
which maybe
makes this
clearer
is from
statistics
for example
we know
that in the
next 12
months
between 8
and 11
people will
jump off
the Golden
Gate Bridge
who those
people will
be is
surely not
decided
today
they have
the right
through the
experiences
they meet
along the
way
to either
include
or disinclude
themselves
in that
group
so in
that same
way
I think
the future
the details
are ours
to fabricate
the great
landscape
over which
the city
of time
will be
built
is given
by natural
law
and where
we are
in time
is very
near
this
attraction
and then
people
happen
to be
so near
the
attractor
when
presumably
it could
have been
throughout
time
well
no
I don't
think
it's weird
I think
the strangeness
of our
condition
signifies
the nearness
of the
attractor
that
the reason
our world
is so
accelerated
the reason
all effects
are being
smeared
toward
Omega
is because
of the
nearby
presence
of this
cultural
black hole
this singularity
of technology
and biological
intent
that is
feeding
backwards
into time
these
apocalyptic
images
and I
you know
would predict
that
between
now and
there will
be
ever more
hysteria
squirrely
teachings
people
bawling out
their strange
despair
on every
street
corner
because
conscious
of which
each of us
shares a part
the thing
at the end
of time
is spinning
like a club
Christmas tree
ball
and it's
throwing off
scintillations
which are
distorted
images
of itself
the
transcendental
object
at the end
of time
infects
the history
that precedes
it
with the
images
of its
approaching
unfoldment
this is what
I mean
when I say
history
is the
shockwave
of eschatology
the presence
of history
on this
planet
means
that this
thing
is moving
beneath the
surface
when it
manifests
the institutions
of history
the way
a butterfly
sheds
a chrysalis
when it
breaks out
of its
metamorphose
period of
latency
the period
inside the
shell
for this
metamorphosing
super creature
is the
interested in
your reaction
to the
recent
announcement
by astronomers
that more
than 90% of
the universe
is composed
of something
called dark
matter
well this
is a
this has
been a
problem
in
astrophysics
for a
while
what it
is
to state
the
universe
seems to
hold
better
than it
should
given
the
amount
of
matter
that we
can
observe
is a
good
missing
it's
that
there's
a
law
missing
and
behold
what law
is it
it's
the
law
of
novelty
on one
level
because
if you
believe
there is
something
called
not
milky
way
it
dissipates
so
it's
that
and
if
this
were
proven
you
would
actually
have
begin
to
work
toward
a
quantified
measurement
of the
neutrino
and the
amount
that was
left
you would
proclaim
as the
novelty
constant
which
is
the
constant
which
then
causes
large
scale
structures
to
persist
through
time
for
no
other
reason
than
that
they
represent
higher
orders
of
organization
you know
recently
you know
the most
recent
ultra
revolution
in
astrophysics
which means
in the last
six weeks
these days
is the
discovery
that
their
evidence
in favor
is
the
universe
never
goes
to
its
initial
conditions
well in
astrophysics
there's been
this debate
does it
or doesn't
it
if
gravity
if the
force
of gravity
is at
a certain
level
then eventually
the outward
expansion
of matter
in the
universe
would be
halted
and the
whole thing
would implode
upon itself
the latest
findings
indicate
that
will
let's see
I've had
an experience
on drugs
and I've
read about
it
other people
have had
a similar
experience
which is
that
presented
to you
as
perception
is
of a
series
of stills
and
so this
resonates
for me
with some
teachings
in Buddhism
and
in
Sufism
that
basically
what appears
to us
as manifestation
is actually
coming through
as a series
of stills
and we
kind of
glue it
together
with our
mentation
of it
and I
wondered
if you
had come
across this
or you
have any
comments
on this
or you
think
it's
just a
stray
phenomenon
or is
it
some
cosmological
import
well
it's
certainly
interesting
that
film
and
talkies
and
all that
really
got
rolling
in the
twenties
which
is
when
quantum
theory
really
got
rolling
and
quantum
theory
is
on
one
level
a
theory
that
reality
is
delivered
as a
series
of
stills
you
know
this
mysterious
quantum
between
which
then
there
is
some
great
incomprehensible
gulf
and these
things
arrive this way. I know what you mean. I have seen the slideshow, the series of hallucinations
where it's click, and this thing hangs in space, no movement whatsoever. Click. Weird. And
interesting. But on the other hand, I've seen all kinds of weird themes and variations on
simply a visionary movie. That's one kind of hallucination. For instance, I sometimes
see text, and then as I watch the text, the level of sense and nonsense drifts. Words
flip over. Letters turn themselves upside down. Words that made sense are replaced by gibberish.
Well, now what kind of hallucination is that? You have to be a printhead. I mean, could
we toto have a hallucination like that where text was going through these variations? Ralph
has described to me mathematical hallucinations, you know, drifting parentheses and factorial
signatures and all this stuff moving around, and you're watching it, and you understand
it somehow. I've had those things like when you're a little kid, and you get it in a cereal
box, and you pull it one way, and the lion is in the cage. You push it one way, and the bars
become what the foreground reverses and becomes the background, and now there's a tiger in
the cage. And I describe the hallucinations with this. It's all and everything. You cannot
conceive of information in a way that the hallucinogens then can't see your bid and raise the ante.
The I Ching that qualified you in the eyes of the entity that it revealed the time wave. I have
a sense of an attractor. I see what the I Ching is, but I don't see the relationship.
Well, here it is in a nutshell, or a not-shall, as James Joyce said. I was not a sinologist. I was not a scholar of Confucian or Han Dynasty occultism. The good news is, the part of the I Ching that I looked at is older than all of that. My attention was drawn to, is the only way I can put it, by this teaching entity, was the sequence.
A sequence of the King Wen sequence. Little detail, King Wen is a person who may or may not have been a real person who supposedly lived around 1150 B.C., and he got into some political trouble and he was put into prison.
And while he was in prison, he arranged the sequences of the hexagrams of the I Ching into a sequence, which is called the King Wen sequence, which is the sequence traditionally used in China ever since.
Well, so the teaching voice said, look at the sequence. It was like posed as a dialogue between a teacher and a student. The question it posed for me is, is the sequence a sequence?
A traditional jumble sequence? Then there's a rule that makes it the jumble. Then there is no rule that orders it. It's just like a...
...not showing the pro-ing, the ebb and floor, recidivism is increasing. And when the wave, novelty, you know, you would be able to lay the wave over the past.
When you got a perfect match-up with past revolutions, breakthroughs, atrocities, migrations, language changes, and so forth, you would just propagate the wave forward into the future.
The object being used was that it was a damped oscillation, or it was a self-limiting cycle. So it didn't just go on and on to infinity. It actually had a finite end.
Well, the big surprise was when we got it matched up to history in the way that we felt millions of years in the future. This was in 1975. Discovered, no, it's 38 years.
Years ago, or 2,000 years ago, even as the Maya did it, whether you're doing it 38 years in advance of the moment.
That this is the message, the mathematical, astronomical, Pythagorean, and yourself caught a message.
I know absolutely how flaky this sounds, how unlikely, how lightly.
I'm here to found a wiggy experience that, unlike, you know, the problem with most people's really wiggy experiences,
is that it never gets down to, and it's unanchored, so people put you away, because they just say,
well, you have no proof that you're the Kvitz-Hederach sent from Arturus to lead mankind through milk and honey.
You just say this, and you know, and you say it too much, and too loudly, and inappropriately,
and so now we're going to drop a net over you, actually got down to a mathematical proposition,
a law, a hypothesized law, which is, it may turn out to be false.
It was a contained in the highest class of competition of all, which is in the realm of formal mathematical theory,
as did Pythagoras, as did some of Plato's work.
Like, if you're interested in this kind of thing, you know, read the Tenth Book of the Republic,
The Myth of Ur.
Do any of you recall what's going on there?
This is Plato, he's at this banquet, and then the conversation, like, takes this sudden left turn,
and he tells this story about this guy, Ur, who was a soldier and died, and was dead eight days,
and then came back, and then he lays out this rap, one of the most puzzling passages in the entire Platonic corpus,
The Myth of Ur, and it's this mathematical treatise about this thing called the spindle of necessity,
which is, the ratios are given, and how it's something inside something else,
and something turns one way, and something turns another way,
and the ratios are like this, and like this.
This is one of the most argued about passages in the ancient literature.
What is being described?
What does it mean?
Well, it's another one of these mathematical downloads.
I am still willing to argue that what I put down about the I Ching is true,
or is very close to the surface in all of that I Ching for a moment.
This is one of the world's oldest intellectual...
This is a mathematical notation system of some sort for the purpose of creating a physics of time,
a phenomenological description of the order of time based on human observation,
and it arises in a completely non-Western context.
It arises in a context, we presume, of shamanism and proto-Daoist values.
And I think that what happened was that people with a very different set of agendas
than those of Western civilization chased after an understanding of time
in the same way that we chased after an understanding of matter.
And the way you understand time is not by building enormous instruments
or clashing elements together.
No.
Time, the essence of understanding time, lies in understanding organism.
And so it yields to a very low-tech, observational style of natural science,
which we call yoga.
By looking inside the body and the mind,
as you still gross physiological functions,
subtler and subtler shells of vibration and emanation and physiological activity come into view.
And eventually, if you, my hypothesis is that eventually if you do this with sufficient care and attention,
you get down to some kind of level where you're actually at the level of the primal quantum mechanical vibrations
that lie behind everything.
In other words, you are in the realm of the primal patterns,
patterns whose activity downloads and eventuates as the macro-physical world.
In other words, you're in the realm of the butterfly's wing in the chaos theory that says
the butterfly's wing can start this in 64 irreducible species.
And the hexagrams of the I Ching are simply a way of noting and assigning each one a distinct gestaltung
for purposes of manipulation.
And in the same way that plutonium is not sulfur and tin is not oxygen,
these species of time display properties.
Time is not, as Newton thought, pure duration, some kind of intellectual abstraction necessary for a serial universe.
Time is a real thing.
It's as palpable as electricity.
It's as real as radiation.
It's a thing.
And so then what's going on is that objects which arise in time
carry the impress in their structure of the medium in which they arose.
This organism becomes a microcosmic downloading, a mapping of the architectonics of...
I don't find this occult at all.
This seems to me quite reasonable.
Let me give you an analogy to help you understand what I'm saying here.
Think of a sand dune.
Notice that when you envision a sand dune, that it looks like wind.
Wind, the thing in your mind looks like wind.
Well, now let's analyze what's going on here.
The sand dune looks like wind because sand dunes are made by wind.
Okay, what is wind?
Wind is a pressure gradient phenomenon that is variable in the sand dune.
It's a down-lung.
It's a one-dimensional picture of the wind.
If you had a good computer and you had a sand dune, you could compute backward from the sand dune to the speed of the wind.
Well, now, taking that image, think of it this way.
Think of the grains of sand as genes.
Think of the wind as 500 or 700 million years of time, moving those genes around, blowing them around, recombining them, breaking them apart, pushing them together.
At the end of that time in which it came to be.
So it is, in fact, an organism would have impressed upon it the categories.
Because we arose in time.
And you keep talking about biology and you talk about the leap from biology into culture.
And you talk about the medium.
What do you think of the Internet as the wind or the medium?
And that the mimemic qualities that are occurring in culture, you know, tying into the genetic codes like biology does, is the real medium for unfolding what I mentioned to you earlier, the global intuition.
It seems like all of this stuff is fitting together these days.
Well, there's this thing called the 2 to the 6th n rule.
I'm not sure that I can quote it directly, but Benjamin Worf figured this out.
And it's that in any lexical tree, no category on any level can contain more than 2 to the 6th n members.
In other words, 64.
So, in a way, we're dimensionally imprisoned inside this.
Because our minds work this way and so do our bodies.
DNA, like the I Ching, runs on a code based on 64.
There are 64 codons coding for the various amino acids that make up all the proteins that organize organic nature.
Well, so, you have the I Ching, which categorizes time as having 64 categories.
You have the DNA, which arose as the most elegant expression of complexity in time, running on 64 categories.
Then you have the human brain running on the platform organization run by DNA.
And we discover through Worf's law, the 2 to the 6th n rule, that our lexical categories are ruled by these same limitations.
So, it appears, you know, what I said earlier this morning, that life is undergoing some kind of conquest of geometry.
And I almost picture it like protoplasm flowing into a crystal landscape.
We conquer this geometry by assuming its shape in some sense.
So, it transforms us even as we overrun it.
What a thought. What a thought.
It transforms us even as we overrun it.
You know, I guess the question is, are we becoming our machines, or are our machines becoming us?
Now, that's the real question today.
And did you catch the part about 2012 where he said,
We spin it. We're the spin doctors of this thing.
The details are ours to fabricate.
Alright, so, if that's the case, then, hey, let's start fabricating this thing in a more sustainable and less fearful way.
You know, I, actually, I guess I, no way I can tell you what to do to help our species prepare for some difficult times that I think are just ahead.
But, I can tell you to follow your heart.
You know, I'm sure that deep inside, you know what's the best road for you to take.
And, it may not be the easiest road, but, you know, it's the one with heart.
Well, I hope you enjoyed hearing more of Terrence McKenna today.
I've got a couple more of these to go, and I'll try to get them out as soon as I can.
I guess I ought to tell you that I'm in the process right now of moving to a new place,
and so, I won't be able to get a new podcast out every week, just like I'd like to,
but, I hope you'll bear with me until I can get resettled again.
Anyway, thanks for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon,
and thanks again to Chateau Hayouk for the use of their fine music.
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Be well, my friends.
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
Now, if you've heard our last three podcasts,
you know I've been cutting bits and pieces out of a weekend workshop with Terrence McKenna.
The year was 1998, and the big fear at the time was that the world would come to a very tragic end
with a Y2K failure.
And, of course, the biggest news from Washington was all about the president's blowjob in the Oval Office.
You know, just like now, they were very strange days.
The part I'm going to play right now is actually the very beginning of the workshop.
It was a Friday night, and the way Terrence started off was to go around the circle
and have everyone say something, just a little something about themselves.
And for privacy reasons, I've edited out all of the personal statements that were made,
and I've only included the comments by Terrence that some of these statements elicited.
And even though this is somewhat of a hodgepodge of thoughts,
I think you'll find Terrence's comments quite interesting.
And so, here is the one and only Terrence McKenna.
In the valley of novelty, I see familiar faces, unfamiliar faces.
These things are most interesting, at least to me,
when they're directed by the agendas of whoever's present.
The number of things on my mind, more than a weekend's worth of stuff,
all of it is very familiar to me.
I know what I think, mostly, most of the time.
So, getting what you want, it's fine to take it another direction.
I conceive of these things, and how they've evolved over the years.
Originally, my enthusiasm was for informing people about the psychedelic experience,
especially plants, and how that arose out of shamanism,
and how it, for Jungian models of the psyche.
Okay.
Thank you so much.
white bread culture as you can possibly achieve. It was a very stable environment to be brought
up in. It was the 50s. It was all tube furniture and bad television. But the ground I happened
to be fortunate enough to walk around on had clamshells, 150 million years old, scattered
through it, dinosaur bones, extinct fishes. And I, as a kid, I was a loner and I spent
a lot of time in these dry arroyos and washes where these fossils and stuff could be. William
James, simply personal experience, has attained a very fortunate incarnation, a culture in
a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is a kind of paradox that in our own time,
meaning in the last hundred years, all this information has arrived in our laps as the
hubristic enterprise, the city walls of Calvin's trolley, on each person's, uh, because, yeah,
I'm keen to play in straight ways because, of course, there is no more secret ways of being
absurd. It doesn't seem to bother.
So, you know, it's a frustrating situation because the literature tells you that DMT occurs
widely throughout nature, distributed through grasses, grain tissue, luminous trees, eaceous
plants, but when you actually go down to two problems, either following these podcasts
in order, then you know he was good on his word.
And now if you're confused about the order in which I'm podcasting this workshop, yeah,
well, it is called the Psychedelic Salon, you know, what'd you expect?
I hope you did pick up on Terrence's warning that some of the old tapes of his talks, earlier
tapes, may no longer be his opinions later on, and I'm sure that holds true for these
tapes as well.
These were recorded in August of 1998, and of course Terrence lived for another year and
a half or so after that, so some of these opinions he may have changed, so don't ever
quote Terrence McKenna and say this is what he believed at the end, because we don't know
all that for sure.
Like I said, don't even hold him to what's on these tapes, even though it was close to the
end of his life, although we didn't know it at the time.
No one did, of course.
And I hope you also caught what he said about one part of a psychedelic point of view includes
living a certain portion of your life without answers, and that's what separates psychedelic
medicines from any system out there.
So keep this in mind if you're thinking about becoming involved with these sacred medicines.
They can be very unforgiving if you abuse them, whereas most systems, like maybe yoga or something
like that, for example, are a little difficult to abuse, at least not quite in the same way
as you can with some psychedelics.
By the way, I do agree with Terrence about the value of John Major Jenkins' book, Maya
Cosmogenesis 2012.
It's really too bad Terrence isn't still around to comment on the work of Carl-Johan Kalamann,
which I think is more recent than that.
In fact, Kalamann's website, if you want to check it out, is www.calleman.com.
And personally, I got a lot out of his work, although I don't agree with some of his final
conclusions about what's ultimately taking place.
Nonetheless, Kalamann's take on the Mayan calendar as being a map of consciousness evolution is
quite fascinating and seems to be fitting in place quite well with the events of today.
But actually, right now, if you're thinking about buying a book about 2012, I'd hold off
for just a bit until Daniel Pinchbeck's new book comes out this spring.
I haven't read it yet myself, but I've heard Daniel talk about his theories on 2012 on several
occasions.
And from what I know about the subject, I think he's got the best interpretation around.
The book, by the way, is titled 2012, The Return of Kayser Kotal.
And I just a couple minutes ago checked on Amazon and see that you can pre-order it there.
According to them, it will be released on May 6th of 2006.
And as you already know, Daniel has been a big supporter of Palenque Norte since its inception
at Burning Man in 2003.
And we really appreciate his support.
I hope some of you will return the favor and buy a few of his books.
I know you won't be disappointed.
Well, that's about it for today.
Looks like there's going to be, I'd say, probably at least two more of these Terrence McKenna
podcasts before I finish the tapes from this 1998 workshop.
And if you want to see all the podcasts, you haven't seen them, the previous ones, you
can go to our website, www.matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
And we'll continue to post them to that page.
So thanks for stopping by.
It's good to see you back again.
And I use the word see you loosely for those of you who are maybe using too much medicine
and a little paranoid right now.
No, I cannot see you.
Just a figure of speech.
We don't know who downloads our podcasts or who listens to them.
And we just are happy to have you all out there.
So also a big thank you, by the way, to Chateau High-Yuk for the use of their music here in
the Psychedelic Salon.
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Be well, my friends.
Musical, linguistic objects.
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
Now, if you've been here with us in the salon for the last four podcasts, you know that we've
been playing cuts from a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998.
The workshop, I guess you could say it consisted of four sections, because there was one on Friday
night, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday.
And also, Terrence and Ralph Abraham held a dialogue about the World Wide Web and the
Millennium on Friday, or no, it was on Saturday night to tell you about that.
And by the way, that interesting encounter is posted in podcast 19 and 20, in case you
missed it.
And I guess I should also mention that if you're getting our podcasts or our RSS feed to iTunes
or some other aggregator, we only leave about the most recent 15 podcasts on the list.
And so, if you want to get back ones, you can get a complete listing of all the Psychedelic
Salon podcasts.
Just go to Matrix Masters, www.matrixmasters.com, slash podcasts.
Or you can go to our other site, our audio site, Palenque Norte, P-A-L-E-N-Q-U-E-N-O-R-T-E dot
org, and click on the podcast link.
Now let's get back to Terrence, and we'll begin with a cut that has his, among other things,
has his rap about the Archaic Revival.
Where the idea there is, civilization has made us uncomfortable with our humanness, because
these various technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory
ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times.
And that, in a sense, what psychedelics do is they hit your reset button.
They address the animal body.
They address a deeper level than cultural conditioning.
And so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings that civilization has repressed
or transmuted in you.
And, you know, the whole premise of that book was that the 20th century, in many of its
cultural manifestations, from cubism to Dada, abstract expressionism, jazz, sexual permissiveness,
hallucinogenic drugs, youth culture, a whole bunch of things, were all impulses toward the
primitive, toward a return to a primal state of social organization.
And that, really, this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century.
The 19th century saw the triumph of hierarchical order, gentlemanly values, class structure, all
that constipated European.
And then the 20th century is experienced as chaos.
You know, cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them.
Freud announces that we are not just Christian ladies and gentlemen, but right beneath the surface,
the incest drive, cannibalistic drives, extremely violent, primitive impulses are there.
Jazz introduces syncopation into music.
Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper dancing.
I don't know.
You can figure it all out for yourself.
The point is, the whole of the 20th century is a turning back toward these values that had been repressed
for millennia, not only by Christianity, but by the Greek scientific philosophy, the fanatic alphabet,
urbanism, agriculture itself.
There was a very long period in the human adventure when all of those things lay in our future.
And we were far happier, I think, than judging by our lack of need to make egoistic statements
by building vast religious monuments or enslaving each other or setting down codes of laws,
so forth and so on.
And, of course, we'll never be like that again.
But there is an impulse in modern society to recapture those values.
And psychedelics are hugely effective at doing this.
I mean, all this talk of shamanism and Native Americanism and getting in touch with your body
and honoring gender shifts and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude,
a less categorical and constipated and print-defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles
and social polity.
Well, it's always interesting to me to do these around-in-the-circle things.
First of all, it seems to me, I mean, maybe this is self-congratulatory,
but it seems to me that people are extraordinarily serious and together.
I have a real nose for nuttiness, and I didn't so much as twitch this evening.
And this is a large group, so don't loosen your chains too much,
but congratulations for impressing me anyway as very sane.
This is an area where I think sanity counts.
There's no points gained for being fanatical or maniacal.
This isn't an area where you have to push you harder and faster than you may wish.
So once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest,
once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics,
the issue is no longer than the spiritual vehicle.
The issue suddenly becomes where is the break?
Because, you know, this is the fuel to go where you want to go.
This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.
Those issues are somehow now overcome.
It becomes a very different game now, a much subtler game.
The doorway stands open, and all it requires is courage,
which is not to say it doesn't require a lot.
It does require a lot, but what it is is courage.
You know, very few people go to the ashram for their daily meditation
with their knees knocking in terror over what is about to sweep over them.
They are pretty confident that they've got it confined and nailed down.
It isn't so with this.
I mean, I've done it many times.
There are many people here who've done it many times,
and the survivors are not confident.
It doesn't build hubris in you.
It doesn't promote bravado,
because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size
if you presume it or if you presume you understand it
or if you presume to use it.
So sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up.
I wouldn't get near that.
See more to understand more.
And what I do on a trip is damn near absolutely nothing.
You know, I have two or three J's rolled in front of me.
If I can get through them in the course of the evening,
all goals have been met.
To see, to understand, to remember.
It's an incredible statement about our humanness.
It's a double edge within us under the influence of these plants.
We have literally Niagara's of alien beauty.
I mean, when I go to Manhattan,
I go to the Met and the Guggenheim,
and I haunt the galleries of Soho.
When I take mushrooms,
I see more art in 20 minutes of behind-the-eyelids hallucination
in total darkness
than the human race seems to have produced
in the last thousand years.
Well, so on one level,
that's an incredible statement about the human capacity
to generate and be in the presence of beauty.
But the paradox is that
so few people know this,
that our ordinary styles of being,
our ordinary relationships to plants,
our main brand religions,
almost never carry us
into the sense of this potential for beauty.
And when I was young,
you know, in my early 20s,
wandering around India,
trying to sort all this out,
having taken some psychedelics,
but reading yogic texts
and Mahayana texts and all this,
I discovered in every culture
there is what I call wise old man wisdom
or wise old woman wisdom.
You know, in every culture at evening,
you see sitting on porches men smoking pipes,
old men.
And these guys know something.
They know something about life,
how to till the soil,
how to raise a family,
how to, you know,
shepherd children through their marriages
and so forth and so on.
But what I did not find in these cultures
was any knowledge of this gratuitous grace.
This is like a secret
and it's a true secret
in that telling it does not give it away.
I know this because I've been trying
to tell the secret for 25 years
to anyone who would listen
as you listen tonight.
And I don't know how many people hear,
what level people hear me.
And there are many problems.
First of all, there's the problem of dose.
You can take a little of a psychedelic substance
or an effective dose or too much
and medically not be in any particular danger.
The LD50 of these substances is such.
Let's take psilocybin as an example.
Psilocybin is effective at 15 milligrams,
145 pound person.
But the LD50 is something like
110 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
In other words, hundreds of times more
than a dose that you would swear
you were melting down,
you were becoming the earth,
you would never live to tell the tale.
And actually, you're in no medical experiences
of different dose levels.
I've always been interested
in what the literature describes as
what this means is that you're so loaded
that a guy standing there
with a completely convinced,
your total pretense dissolves.
At these higher doses,
machinery, logical description begins to come.
And in my experience,
someone mentioned the difference
between mystical experiences and psychedelics.
There are enormous similarities
and enormous differences.
If you study the mystical literature
of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,
it all triangulates toward unitary states.
Light, the ineffable, the unnameable,
the radiance, vocabularies like this,
which indicates some kind of homogeneity.
Well, in my experience,
though, when you push LSD,
there is something somewhat like that.
LSD is not my idea
of the paradigmatic hallucinogen.
It's different in many ways.
Psilocybin is more
the paradigmatic hallucinogen.
And when you push it,
there seems to be not this merging
into the radiance,
but a revelation of multiplicity,
of detail,
of complexification within complexification.
Everything gives way to everything else.
Everything is interconnected
to everything else.
But the impression is one
of an overwhelmingly bewildering
perfusion of phenomena.
And, you know,
I've discussed this with lamas
and these sorts of people,
and they say,
well, you're just,
you're in the realm of samsara.
You're in the realm of the multiplicity.
Perhaps...
but the sense of a hierarchy of judgment doesn't feel right somehow this all and
everything this teeming multiplistic universe that is revealed seems to carry
a message of ecstatic and transcendental import it it all and everything in
Gurdjieff's phrase and one of the ideas that I want to explore with you in the
course of the weekend is you know most discussions of psychedelics orbit around
what will it be like when I take it well that's very interesting and of course
important to the individual but to me an equally interesting question is what has
been the impact of this experience on the evolution of human beings over
hundreds of thousands of years in other words what is it that we share with this
plan not only with another order of being which it certainly is but the great
confounding from my excursions into these places is that there is an organized
intelligence in there out there over there are more alien than the cheerful
pro bono proctologists that haunt the trailer courts not interested in our
gross industrial output or in imparting technology upon us what does it mean that
our culture has sealed us off from this information I mean our culture claims
under the aegis of science to bring us news of quasars the chasms of time and space
away news of the activities at the nucleus of the cell at the heart of the atom and
yet here's a world that begins right behind your eyebrows that any mention of it
either brings talk of mental pathology or how you've transgressed certain laws of the
village in other words this culture has reared the edifice of empirical
understanding and modern science and existential philosophy this edifice has
all been put in place in complete ignorance and denial of a fact of experience that is
approximately as easy to access as orgasm different means but nevertheless not far
away and yet we we in the west have navigated for fifteen hundred to two thousand years with this
simply an easily repressed rumor how did we get into this situation in other words if there was a
primordial era of shamanism and plant symbiosis and and mediated relationship with nature through the
guy of intelligence how did we fall then into the domain of post renaissance post medieval post
industrial culture and then what is the implication for the future of in this dark hour of complete rational
rational reductionism materialism so forth and so on in the darkest hour of our commitment to these
things this news stab original people that we have marginalized and and humiliated in the process of
building our own version obviously i'm not going to try to answer these questions tonight but this to my mind
and you know in the 11th century when the islam swept across asia minor in isfahan in iran they built these immense mosques with mosaiced
vaulted roofs and one of the great historians of islam said of the city of isfahan in the 10th century he said it is half the world
the city half the world in a way psychedelics are half and yet how few people have ever visited these sites have ever stared into these particular vistas of beauty
uh and and and as was said in going impact of these psychedelics where they hit us hardest is in the domain of visionary imagining
and the effort to communicate about our visionary imaginings in other words where they hit us hardest
is in the domain of art and invention and novelty and we have built a culture that however hostile it may be to the psychedelic experience
it is incredibly uh friendly toward novelty innovation creativity cultural evolution uh celebration of difference so forth and so on
so i would like to believe that the long prodigal journey of western humanity to a well nigh perfect understanding of the nature of matter and energy and space and time
that that that prodigal journey can only be redeemed and made meaningful if the things learned in the shamanic descent into history
which it is a shamanic descent i mean we have achieved what the alchemists only dreamed of and we've achieved it strangely enough by abandoning their illusions
they were epistemologically naive you do not discover fusion by endlessly rarefying mercury you do not disentangle dna by heating chemical vessels in horse dung
uh we had to abandon the naivete of alchemy to achieve its goals which were mastery of space and time uh control of human longevity
control of human longevity and health and psychological well-being well at the center of the alchemical ideal was the idea of the stone
something part mineral part mental ritual something drawn out of nature but perfected by human artifice
and then reflecting back upon man a perfect world created through magic this is the faith of the renaissance magi
marcello facino and campanella and these people it's it's a different idea than the idea of man as a fallen creature and or or science's notion of man as a mute witness to a meaningless universe
the magical ideal that these things eyes and support is the idea that humanity is somehow the co-partner
a full partner in creation and that what what uh god has brought into being the human imagination uh can perfect
and it's a necessary faith for our time because the power that we have is so great if the power that science has given us
does not serve a transcendental ideal then it will serve uh some kind of fascist ideal and most people will be reduced
reduced to equations and uh parts of of a machine that does not serve the human individual or the human community
psychedelics are uh a catalyst for the imagination they ease the ante in the historical poker game they show that there is more
than one way to skin a cat and we have come to a bifurcations immense choices the decisions and the processes that are put in place
in the next twenty years will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and this planet are made or broken as a cosmic concern
well consciousness is the key what we are what is dragging our boat is an absence you know we are we have one foot in
angelhood and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape and the tension between these two on a global scale is excruciating
so if psychedelics if there is one chance in a thousand that they contribute an increased measure of consciousness to this situation
then they are uh a precious gift a resource an option a possibility uh to be explored i don't advocate these things
because i think it's a sure thing or a or a safe path the eschaton i advocate them because they're the only game
in town you know if hortatory preaching could have done the trick then the sermon on the mount would have been
the turning of the corner but we have buddha we have christ we have these examples of enormously insightful
spiritual beings who have delivered their message and humanity has continued to flop on the seamy side
so uh it's it's not about an idea an idea is not sufficient to transform us it's about an experience
and this is the only experience i know that in the time given to us on the scale given to us we
have a hope of actually cutting through the the detritus of our historical experience
and building a true human community is this nice my parents used to make me go outdoors
scrambling around in the nearby after that building and launching rocket with standing lots of fun but
there was certainly lots of fun inside books uh so last night was sort of a first pass at all of this
there were questions left unanswered and threads untied uh and now you've had a certain amount of
time to absorb all that before i launch into some wrap of my own is there anything anybody wants to carry
forward yeah i don't think anyone else i haven't really mentioned it either but you work in in others
trying to tie that to other systems of order dna calendars and stuff it's also difficult to understand
yeah well we several people last night mentioned novelty theory but then you're right the
eaching itself wasn't mentioned which we could do and i have done five-day workshops on nothing but
the eaching especially its mathematical deconstruction so we'll talk about all of this probably this morning
if i feel like it novelty order in nature since we're talking around it and through it i might as well
just do it what does it have to do with psychedelics and all that well the connect the bridge of connection
gush and psychedelics is in my opinion when correctly managed end up giving you a big idea
where you simply have observe this bewildering other dimension and try to come to terms with it and then
come out and then live in the light of it because it's made the universe so much bigger but uh following
uh like a shamanic model of a journey to obtain a gift or to recover a lost jewel or this is the shamanic
motif it's always one of loss and recovery uh these flights into this realm of the logos the real stamp of
authenticity on them comes when you bring back a new idea something brand new that proves that you're not
just and so i you know knew this and aspired to a new idea whatever that might be that i had no notion
of what it was and my problem as an intellectual throughout my entire life has been it's hard for
me to go to depth with anything you know i study roman history for a year i study german for a year i
study the maya for a year but i never could get that professional mania that leads you into becoming you know
uh a real academic in a specialized sense um the the idea uh somehow these psychedelic experiences set
you up for it they're not the only way but they're the only way where you have some managerial control
the other methods all seem to be driven from the unconscious for instance if you read thomas
kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions you discover there that these huge rational idea
systems were downloaded in very shady and shaky mystical ways the classic example that i always give
because it's basically is that you know renee descartes invention of scientific materialism was at the
behest of an angel an angel appeared to him in a dream he records it in his diary and the angel
says the conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number you know and he awakens
the founder of french derivatively as whole branch of modern science at the behest of an angel in this occult
drive to understand nature uh this is the amazing thing that the greeks unleashed this idea that
we can not only mythologize but there is another way of looking at it we can understand it and you know
they started out simply what is air what is fire you know after 2500 years of this we are now
pretty much figured out what the standard moves are you know the history of chinese philosophy and the
history of western philosophy are the same schools by different names you know you get atomic materialists
you get spiritualists you get what's called occasionalism you get all the possible adumbrations
of a mind's position in relationship in the search for these ideas well my idea which came to me i take
i don't say i channeled it because i find that vocabulary infantile and obnoxious but on the other hand i
don't play that i don't feel that was definitely unfolded sensational once you begin to talk about them
that ordinary people like you and i by talking about them can actually satisfy ourselves that these two
aspects of nature these two weighted as you go back in time from the present moment the universe becomes a
simpler place this is a is a huge generalization and it's true and let's state it now a slightly different
way let's imagine we're at the moment of the big bang the universe flashed into existence 15 billion or
however many billion years ago a simple thing you know nanoseconds of its existence it was some kind of
integrated plenum it was smaller than the diameter of a particularity was co-extensive in this tiny area
and then it began to expand many milliseconds it was a pure electron plasma there was only a certain kind
of physics only the physics of pure electrons the universe had to cool over minutes and millennia for
atomic systems to form that electrons could actually go into orbit around around
the atomic core and not be overcome by the greater dissipative power of high thermal radiation so until
the universe cooled below a certain point atomic systems as it were couldn't crystallize out and then they
did and there was their phenomena in nature emerged in david bones phrase emergent phenomena there had been
only a universe of pure electrons suddenly there was a universe of hydrogen and helium atoms much more
complex so then the whole story of the universe is a story of progressive complexification accompanied by this
phenomenon of and uh the the universe of hydrogen and helium atoms uh under the influence of gravity these things
things were aggregated into huge masses where pressure rose at the center of these masses from the weight of the stuff above
and at a certain point the the the curve of pressure passed through a point where an a new phenomenon
phenomenon hidden in the structure of being but previously not by any phenomenon uh
uh emerged a new phenomenon fusion the stars began to burn and uh this process of nuclear burning this nuclear
chemistry heavier elements instead of the universe now of hydrogen and helium suddenly you have a universe which
contains sulfur and iron and for us and at that point you know it's like the rest was inevitable
the rest is just filling in the blanks drawing the dots i mean it takes uh 14 billion years but with carbon
present in the in the in the universe the which i identify and call novelty could begin
the long march for this teleological ideal this purpose at the end of time what makes this idea radical one of the things
which makes it radical is that it doesn't simply assume that history and becoming is the unfolding of necessity
it assumes instead that there's some kind of an attractor that events are not just bubbling forward
probabilistically and randomly but that they're actually caught in some kind of field that is pulling
everything toward a conclusion and this perception is the universe has grown more complex now this
is a huge law it's a statement about physical matter statement about organic organization it's a statement about
culture and society it's a statement about your own psychology things complexify through time science has never
said this it's not even i mean the theory of evolution says biological systems grow more in a real phobia against
any teleological implication from that but this is a general rule which i submit to you you by investigating
the nature of things uh on your own can completely satisfy yourself that this is true when you start
thinking that way that it begins to look like nature on all scales is some kind of a of an engine which produces
complexity and then conserves it and uses it as a platform to proceed deeper into complexity it's a kind of
anti-type thermodynamic flow it's a dissipative it's what's called autopoiesis tendency completely overlooked by
science in fact science's most secure statement is maxwell's second law of thermodynamics which tend to
disorder means is closed systems kind of a um chemistry because what's happening in biology is complex materials
and so a chemical process which would ordinarily ride down into entropy and obey the second law of
thermodynamics it actually is trapped in a kind of basin of attraction far from equilibrium and uh people you know
know physical chemists look at this and say well but it's ephemeral it's just it just happens on the surface
of the earth and it's very fragile and death is everywhere it's a fluke basically but this is just their
professional bias because you can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil
record 4.83 billion years deep the stars that you see when you look out at the milky way at night
the average star is 500 last 500 million years so we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable
slow burning type of star life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars
themselves by five times you can't discount biology biology is clearly a player on a cosmic scale in this
universal game of capturing energy and resisting entropy so uh novelty theory says that uh this general law
that nature conserves complexity reaches its culmination or its most interesting intersection of
discursiveness in ourselves we then look different to ourselves by this theory because we are the most novel
phenomenon around. Suddenly, what positivist materialism teaches about man's place in nature
is that we're lucky to be here. It's a cosmic accident. Purpose is conferred. It's this
totally existential, you're on your own, make it up, don't make it up, who cares, doesn't
matter anyway, kind of modernism. If in fact nature, we have identified nature's purpose
as to create and conserve complexity, then suddenly we become, we are returned for the
first time since the 16th century to the center of the cosmic stage of a universal drama of
salvation and redemption. Isn't that weird? I think so. Yeah?
Thinking about making that shift to considering the human experience is kind of central to our
understanding of the planet, and then seeing some of the environmental movements like Earth
first that place a large emphasis on the item of ecosystems and other animals and plants as
as on the same level of us. It's kind of a dichotomy, I think, between some of the movements trying
to save the planet. You know, some of the environment comes from rather so humans not even be here. And that
is a way to put the necessary factors in place to save the planet. Whereas this side of the argument
says that we need to realize how special we are and what's going on up here to be able to rebalance things.
It's kind of a strange line to walk between valuing ourselves and not over-valuing ourselves. Can you see that?
No, I agree. It's very tricky. There's almost like a bifurcation where it's hard to see how you can go,
how you can have the cake and eat it too. The concept of the forward escape, which I'm tending more and more
to believe in, that it's a desperate strategy from a military escape. And forward escape is where you realize the
only way out is right up the center. And then you have to get traction and go right up the center.
What's happening is that so much power is being given to man or taken by man from the universe
to the power of scientific understanding that we are becoming the masters of the planetary destiny,
whether we want to be or not. And you're right. It seems to be between some kind of primitivism,
an archaic revival that abandons technology and tries to redial the last sane moment we ever knew,
or some kind of gnostic rejection of the world of nature and matter and a complete commitment to machine symbiosis
and a cosmic destiny and, you know, life extension, star flight, cloning, the whole mega trip.
And of course, it's not going to be one or the other. It's going to be both and. There's going to be a spectrum of possibility.
How the actual details of like, how do you go to the stars and save the earth? I don't propose to discuss it or really know.
I do think, you know, the French sociologist, Jacques Gouloul once said, he said,
there are no political solutions. There are only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.
And he wrote a whole book in which he defined these terms, political solutions, propaganda, technical solutions.
And I, I tend to think that's true. What we have to deal with in this millennial narrow neck of constricted possibility,
where it still feels as though the human race could skid off into the ditch,
is we have to deal with the fact that we have built institutions that do not serve human purposes,
but that are like automata or golems among us, corporations, religions, cabals, ethnic tribalism, you know,
and these things are like the psychotic architectonics of the unconscious that the information age is causing to suddenly emerge for the inspection of those who have eyes to see.
We, we, we are, our humanness is not endangered by our machines.
It's endangered by these institutional entities that, and the most spectacular and obvious example of it is corporate capitalism.
Simply because corporate capitalism has the intelligence of a termite at the organismic level.
And all it understands is its, its agenda, and its agenda is to take cheaply extracted raw materials
and fabricate them into expensive finished products which are sold to well-heeled markets in the high-tech industrial democracies.
And it can't, it can't propagate that cycle on the closed surface of this planet much longer without the contradictions becoming unbearable.
But it doesn't know that, you know, it has a very low-grade intelligence.
So how we communicate, you know, we're all ready to switch on a dime to the new paradigm if we can just figure it out.
The problem is to switch these enormous dinosaur-like institutions, our lives and our economies and our scientific research establishments
and our, you know, civil hierarchy and so forth and so on.
Well, I'm going to have to cut it off right now, I'm afraid, or we'll probably all get a case of Terence Overload.
Yeah, I've been taking a few notes while I listen because I want to write a description of this podcast for our web page.
So I've been jotting a few little notes about what Terence was talking about, and so far I've counted eight major topics he's covered in just the past 50 minutes.
They're probably more than that depending on how you break down his ideas.
So if you didn't already realize how many things he's covered in such a short period of time, it might be worth going back for another listen.
In fact, I'm going to do just that myself as soon as I get this file posted.
So hey, thanks for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon.
And Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chatelle Hayouk.
Thanks again for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
Be well, my friends.
Transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
Help machines.
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
Well, I hope you're not getting tired of this series of Terence McKenna podcasts because there are still a few more to go.
And in today's program, Terence talks about the cascade of history, human-machine symbiosis, and the Internet, among other things.
And we'll begin with his rap about time and the evolution of animal life on this planet.
So, let's hear what Terence McKenna thinks about all the changes now taking place at such a mind-bending range here on our beautiful little planet.
What I think of it is, I think that, you know, Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics are only part of the story.
And that you also have to look at the work that Celia Prigozhin did in the sixties and seventies,
where he showed that there is this principle, which they called different things,
but basically it was random perturbation to higher states of order.
And that this occurred in systems of all levels of complexity that actually sometimes systems spontaneously organize themselves into more complex forms.
So, in the entropic state that you're talking about, which resembles a Bernoulli gas,
a model of dissipation of the particles of gas,
the opposite end of the spectrum would be this notion that all points in the matrix become cotangent,
which requires a higher dimension that is still trivial.
And that's what I think it is.
I think that biology, like this process which we've called novelty or complexification,
that we say is increasing through time, starts simple, ends complicated.
One way of talking about it is to think of it as language is in conquest of dimensional expression,
or something is seeking to manifest itself in a domain of time and space, of higher and higher dimension.
Because if you go back to the earliest biological emergence,
they're like fixed slimes, these early life forms.
They're essentially points.
They don't move through space.
They have no eyes.
They have no organs of perception.
They are simply points of being.
Well then, still later in the process,
they break free from their stationary points and they become motile.
But they still have no perception.
No, they're just groping now.
Now they're groping specs of being.
And they've gone from being points to the equivalent of lines.
Well then, finally, light sensitive chemistry sequesters itself in the membrane.
And these things begin to have a notion of a gradient.
That the action is where the light is.
That the food is where the light is.
And so then, this generates the concept here and there, which is a time-bound concept.
Suddenly, time springs into being.
There is the notion of the execution of will over time.
Well then, the rest of the story of the evolution of animal life, right up to 50,000 years ago,
is simply the story of better eyes, better muscles, better coordination,
better ability to move through this revealed topological manifold with a temporal.
But then, the advent of spoken language.
What language is about is the recovery of memory at a later date.
It's a data, it's a data recall system.
And then you talk about the past.
And you not only talk about it, but you strategize from it.
Hunting strategies, erotic fantasy, mate-getting strategies.
When you get to writing, this time-binding function is now totally explicit.
The game is out in the open.
The purpose of these behaviors is to keep the past from slipping away.
And so we write down king lists and dynastic histories and this sort of thing.
Well, from this point of view that I'm pushing here for a moment that evolution is the conquest of dimensionality,
you can see then that the primate conquest of time through time-binding technology is the phenomenon that we call human history.
This is apparently what we're about.
This is why we speak.
Why we write.
Why we invent phonetic alphabets and mathematical notation.
Because we are binding time.
Well, you can then propagate that process forward to say,
well, then what would satisfy this drive?
Well, nothing less than a complete conquest of time itself.
In the same way that as we look back in the history of biology,
we see these other dimensional barriers were crossed.
From stationary, from in situ existence, to motility, to a sense of light, to coordination of three dimensional space,
now coordination of fourth dimensional space.
And to make this leap to the full coordination of 4D, it requires some kind of machine symbiosis.
It requires prosthesis.
It requires that we redesign and extend our nervous system over the entire planet.
And that we undergo some kind of metamorphosis and become, instead of, you know, semi-cannibalistic primates,
machine tenders of a global nervous system, some of which is gold and copper and glass,
and some of which is flesh and DNA and neurons.
And this whole thing is in a state of self-designing foment.
And that, you know, I don't know how we got here, but it leads me to the second point I wanted to make earlier when I was talking about novelty.
I said there were two things which science had overlooked.
And then I, first one, which is that nature is a novelty producing and conserving engine.
The second thing that science has overlooked and culture has overlooked that is related to the first.
And it's this.
It's that this process of producing novelty that the universe is about is not going on at a steady rate.
It's going on faster and faster as we approach the present.
It's like what mathematicians call a cascade.
It began slowly and has moved with greater and greater acceleration from the very first moments of its existence.
So the early history of the universe is dull news.
It's slow moving.
I mean, stars are condensing.
Galaxies are ordering themselves.
This is the stuff of tens of millennia, of greater spans of time.
Once you get down to the last 500 million years on this planet, biology is the main show.
Geology and astrophysics have receded into the background.
And where the action, the mutation, the change, the shifts is happening is on the surface of planets in interface with atmospheres and cosmic environments and asteroidal impacts and melts and all these various things that went on.
For life before that, a long, long period, the archaeozoic.
But you talk about Dullesville.
I mean, there's nothing going on there.
Well, then, when you reach a million years, it's as though this process of the emergence of novelty both concentrates itself in nature into a single line, the hominids, but it also intensifies itself by orders of magnitude.
So change is then happening on a scale of hundreds of years.
You know, languages are changing, pottery designs.
And as we approach the present, this becomes more and more furious.
Now, and so what novelty theory is saying is this is not an easily explained phenomenon.
It's not simply a natural consequence of our being in the world.
That's looking at it backwards.
Somehow our being in the world means that the world process is approaching some kind of definitive cusp in its development.
In other words, that human history is the shockwave of some greater event about to emerge out of the order of nature.
That human history, 25,000 years is all it is, is like a shimmer, an aura, something which flashes across animal nature in the geological millisecond before the thing goes or whatever it is that it's going to go.
And so for us, you know, human history has this enormous dramatic impact because our lives last 70 or 80 years if we're lucky.
I mean, we're as ephemeral as mayflies.
For us, human history is 1500 generations.
But in terms of the species, it's, it's, it's, it's a fever.
It's a moment that has come upon us.
And now we're deep, deep, deep into it and deep enough into it, I think, that we can begin to actually talk about what lies at the other, at the other side.
You know, our religions have become almost the architectures of our social hopes and the, this coincidence of calendrical synchronism that we're undergoing.
And what I mean by that is that the Mayan civilization fixated on the helical rising of the winter solstice sun and the galactic center, an event which occurs only once every 26,000 years, occurs in 2012.
They fixated on this.
And our calendar, you know, reformed by journalists in the 15th century and originally founded by a Roman dictator, misses the same 26,000 year node with a millennial date by only 12 years.
So, you know, that's 0.001% on a scale of 5,000, of 10,000 years.
So, for all practical purposes, these two calendars both reach very important culmination dates, very near to each other in eternity.
What does this mean?
Well, if you're a Jungian Eve in the greater, larger dynamics of the unconscious, it means that on the wheel of cosmic time, somehow the appointment of the end of a world year has arrived.
Why is it keyed to the galactic center?
I wouldn't, at this point, care to speculate.
I could be dragged into it, but it's probably not the best way to spend our time.
That this phenomenon of novelty conservation, which has been going on for a very long time throughout the whole life of the universe, is now happening so rapidly that it's down into the scales of time where it's discernible in a human lifetime.
In fact, less than a human lifetime.
Now change defines everything, even for such microbes as ourselves, where before we were embedded, as it were, in the much more slow-moving processes of climate change and glaciation advance and retraction and that sort of thing.
Now we make our own time, and we even talk about downloading ourselves into machines.
Well, as we sit here, we're functioning at about 100 hertz, about 100 cycles a second.
If you were downloaded into even today's desktop computer, you'd be running at 200 megahertz.
Suddenly, 2012 would appear as far away in time as the bust-up of Pangea is in the other direction, because you would have stretched how much you can jam into a moment.
It's very easy to suppose that we're on the brink of a weird kind of pseudo-immortality, where time spent in circuitry is essentially time spent in eternity.
And people will choose, toward the close of their lives, to migrate into the virtual realms where the laws of physics are replaced by the laws of the programmers.
You really then are entering into your own private Idaho.
So, but Teilhard Desjardins, for those of you who don't know his work, was a Jesuit paleontologist and primatologist who wrote, in the 1950s, the Omega Point, the phenomenon of man.
And in a way, nothing I say, or little that anybody has said about cyberspace, about the meltdown of humanity into some electronic collectivity, has been Sir Pierre de Chardin.
He had this idea that human beings were on this earth, and that they would generate what he called the new sphere.
And the new sphere was simply the atmosphere of electronic and radar and radio and telegraphic and television signals, which surround the earth, that we would build a new atmosphere, as it were, a technosphere.
And information is a very key concept in all of this.
What I call novel, you know, this is a vision of being where there is a struggle between these two antithetical forces.
One described by the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, the other described by novelty theory, progogines, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc., etc.
And they are, in every situation, locked in struggle.
The amount of order in any situation is dictated by the unique configuration of the local novelty winds.
order, order in bills, which is that in the very short term, it's libertarian geeks, not psychedelic, not in spiritual in any sense of the word,
and vague process.
The curve of formation, the number of papers being published,
the curve of the amount of energy being released, so forth and so on.
All these curves reach infinity somewhere before 2025.
What does it mean to say these curves reach infinity?
Nobody knows. It's a singularity. It doesn't make sense.
It's a mathematical contradiction.
What it means is your model is broken.
What is going to happen has so many dimensions embedded in it
that your simple propagations of curves method of analyzing it
are giving you crazy data that makes no sense.
And, you know, I'm being semi-unemployed.
I have the leisure to spend many hours a day reading journals
and surfing the net and so forth.
And I'm telling you, all these esoteric fields of knowledge,
all these solid-state physics, quantum encryption,
drug design, genetic engineering, long-base interferometry,
on and on and on, these cabals of secret societies,
in each case, they're reaching out for the ultimate pieces of knowledge
in their field.
And no one is coordinating the implications of all this
across the face of the rising tidal wave of understanding.
What really is happening is that a very...
Under the aegis of this key concept of information.
Information is more primary than time and space.
More primary than light and electromagnetism.
Information is the stuff of being.
It's all you will ever know.
It's all you can ever know.
The rest are ghostly hypotheses to explain the behavior of information.
And it's almost as though it has a syntactical life of its own.
It's almost as though, you know, it's a virtual life form
that is running on a primate platform.
Danny Hillis, who wrote,
liked to imitate each strange noise.
Some strange noises are easier to make.
And so you begin to have a population of short bursts,
populations, we'll call them songs.
Some of these songs are easy to remember and some are not.
And that's the environment of selection.
So the easy to remember songs survive.
And the hard to remember songs go extinct.
And there's only a limited number of human beings.
The songs must also compete for this resource.
And to this point, the human beings have been like a parasite.
Or the host.
And the songs begin to aggregate around repetition.
Then a kind of virtual life form in syntax.
And is essentially time-sharing and piggybacking our nervous system.
But at some point, we insisted around it somewhat the way a cell membrane
trapped early bacteria and turned them into mitochondria.
So now we can think with this linguistic symbiote that shares our brain space.
However, it's very interesting.
This idea, I mean, this may seem trivial to you.
It's new to me, so I'm into it.
I read this book by George Dyson called Darwin Among the Machines.
And I highly recommend this book.
This is a great book, fun book.
And one of the points that he makes in there that I had sort of, I mean, when you hear it,
you say, yeah, I always sort of knew that.
But I had never quite grokked it in its full implications.
One of the points he makes in there is that when we talk to each other,
when we make sense to each other,
what we say can be perfectly formulaic through symbolic logic.
In other words, that the branch of mathematics called symbolic logic
is capable of portraying human language and human logical processes perfectly.
But the interesting thing is that this language, symbolic logic,
is the language which machines speak with great fluency.
This is the great bridge between us and the machines,
that fundamentally we speak the same language,
that and to a human being and and to a microprocessor mean the same thing.
So there is this, there is no great barrier.
It's all conceptual between us and machine intelligence.
Machine intelligence is the most likely form of alien intelligence
to arrive and complicate our social dialogue
because in a sense it's already here.
In a sense we are putting a great deal of effort into creating it.
And in a sense its emergence depends on this very same appetite for novelty
that allowed us to squeeze ourselves out of the rules of molecular chemistry.
And again, it's happening at these very high megahertz rates.
Machine evolution will not be like human evolution
because what it took us 50,000 years to achieve,
it can achieve potentially through distributed processing in minutes, hours.
Hans Moravik says of artificial intelligence,
we may never know what hit us.
It will simply be, come to be.
And what would that look like?
We have no idea.
Or its relationship to us at all.
Linguistic analogies?
Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way.
But it's like that.
Novelty theory and Rupert's theories of the morphogenetic field
are very closely related.
He doesn't believe in a temporal attractor.
He believes things are pushed by necessary casuistry.
But the unfolding of the morphogenetic field
and the unfolding of the time wave,
you're talking about the same thing.
You're talking about the four...
You see, in a way, what science is all about
is it will tell you what is possible.
If you want to know if something is possible,
you ask the expert in that science.
But what science can't tell you,
and what you usually really want to know,
is out of the class of the possible,
what things will actually occur.
And we have no theory for this, strangely enough.
We have no theory for out of the class of the possible.
I mean, I suppose somebody who was a fundamentalist
or some kind of Christian might say,
well, God's will.
Out of the class of what is possible,
what comes to be is God's will.
Well, that would be one theory of what it is
that winnows the actual from the possible.
A scientist would say pre-existing conditions.
In other words,
somehow the circumstances into which any phenomenon is born
skew it toward its ultimate developmental end state.
I mean, it's the idea, it's almost like the law of karma or something,
that by the circumstances into which you find yourself,
then you are carried forward to some conclusion
that was inevitable based on that.
Novelty theory is not a,
it's not a predestination.
It doesn't say that the future has happened.
If you believe the future has happened,
you have all kinds of philosophical problems on your hands
because, you know,
for truth as a concept to have any meaning,
you have to have error.
However, if you think what you think
because you can't think anything else,
which is what predestination is,
well, then what does the search for truth and meaning look like
in a cosmos like that?
It's meaningless.
No.
In a predestined cosmos,
you think what you think
because that's what you think
and you can't think anything else
and it doesn't have anything to do with truth.
So, there must be at least that much freedom.
Freedom to err in the mind.
But, of course,
the mind through the body
is an extension into the world.
You know, for all the huffing and puffing
of modern science and neurophysiology,
they still can't tell you
how you can think
I will close my hand
and close it.
I mean, this is mind over matter.
This is telekinesis.
This is...
Science is just completely baffled
as to how this can take place at all.
It's a fundamental miracle.
Been good for 5,000 years.
Still knocking them dead.
And it's by that trick
that we don't understand how it's done
that will and mind and intent
enters the world
and cities get built
and armies sent marching
and religious revelations written down
and so forth and so on.
But I think that the...
You see, for years,
I was like crying in the wilderness
about this ramping up
towards some kind of hyper-complex unravelment
of the social machine
in the very short term.
But now I feel much more confident
than I was 10 years ago.
Now 10 years closer to the end date
because the Internet looks to me
like the backbone
of the emergent thing.
I mean, the Internet
is a huge
and not fully comprehended
cultural step
that we have now
totally committed ourselves to.
It's nothing less
than the building
of a thinking nervous system
the size of the entire planet.
And our most important...
We're wedded to this thing.
Our banking,
military planning,
corporate capitalization,
long-term planning,
design process,
inventory control,
resource extraction,
everything is running
on this strange companion
that we built to be indestructible
because we built it
at the height of the Cold War.
And so, you know,
it has no nodes of control
and it's the most complex thing
ever put in place
on this planet
since DNA, you know,
cooked itself
out of the primal ocean.
Yeah.
Again, somehow,
are those people
that have had these experiences
going to be spared
a certain type of...
Yeah, you put your finger on it.
It's that to the degree
that people are psychedelic,
they will be less anxious
about what will happen
because what psychedelics show you
is that there is life
after history.
There is something
outside of culture.
If you don't know that
by one means or another,
then you will define
what is happening
as, you know,
the end of the world,
the literal apocalypse,
the collapse of everything,
when in fact
that's not what it is.
It's just the collapse
of historical print-based
cultural models
and models of the self
and the psyche.
I embrace it.
I mean, I...
We're not about to blow out here
or go extinct
and we didn't...
We never escaped
from the yoke of nature.
Nature is...
You know, nature has taken
some hits
in this neighborhood.
Sixty-five million years ago
an object encountered
the earth
that nothing larger
than a chicken
on the entire planet
survived that encounter.
And guess what
it cleared the way for?
The flowering plants,
the source of all
these compounds
we're so interested in,
and the ascendancy
of the mammalian order,
our dear selves.
We are here
because of the most
appalling bad-haired day
this planet ever endured.
So, you know,
when you start judging
this stuff
and saying, you know,
what's good,
what's bad,
it's very hard to say.
Nature is incredibly profligate
and will take enormous chances
to preserve novelty,
to keep the novelty game going.
And so I feel, you know,
that in a sense
nature will open a way for us.
Nature is interested
in this process.
We represent
the greatest step
in organizational
realignment
and redesign
since life left the oceans.
Yeah.
It's grace.
It's, you know,
it's the will of God
that makes these more
and more complex systems
fall into place.
This relates to a question
which was unanswered here
this morning,
which was about teleology.
The Darwinian theory
of evolution
is very hostile
to teleology.
First of all,
what is teleology?
Teleology is the idea
that the universe
has a purpose.
And Darwinian evolution
is hostile to this
because Darwinian evolution
arose in 19th century England
where the reigning
intellectual paradigm
was called deism.
And deism
is the idea
that God made the universe
like a clockmaker
and then he went away
and left it going.
In other words,
the divine clockmaker,
the universe
was structured
by a force
which is now
withdrawn from it.
And Darwin
and his circle
were very
clearly atheistic.
and they wanted
to see biology
as requiring
no purpose
to direct it.
And so
they created
the dual concept
of random mutation
and natural selection.
Random mutation
is just that
because of
copying errors,
radiation,
drift,
and a toxic material
in the cellular environment
that the DNA
messages degrade.
So that's mutation.
Then random selection
is that this DNA
is then subjected
to the selective
winnowing out
that the environment
lays against it.
So by the meshing
of these two processes,
this is Darwinian theory,
by the meshing
of random mutation
and natural selection,
you get the slow
incremental emergence
of new forms.
And these forms,
some of which
confer advantage
and some don't.
Most don't.
And they're eliminated.
Those that do
stay in the system
and incrementally
the system
seeks to come
to equilibrium
with the selective
forces that are
operating on it.
But these selective
forces,
which are
continent,
incidental radiation
from space,
weather,
climate change,
so forth and so on,
because these factors
are themselves
changing over time,
mutating,
the system
can never come
to equilibrium.
And so for
Darwinian evolution,
evolution is what's
called a random walk.
the system
destabilizes,
it corrects itself.
It destabilizes,
it corrects.
It destabilizes,
it corrects.
And after billions
of years of this,
lo and behold,
you get animals
like ourselves.
But these
19th century evolutionists
were keen
to say,
do not imagine
that this is
God's purpose
or that the
final form
was prefigured
in the original form.
No, this just
happened
like this.
Well,
now
we've had
150 years
to absorb
all this.
In the meantime,
Mendelian genetics,
the particulate nature
of the gene
has been understood,
the molecular nature
of the gene
has been understood.
We can say
some new things
about this.
Also,
we are no longer
under the spell
of deism.
That's a crank idea
that nobody
is that keen for.
And so,
it's a different
intellectual world.
Well,
now,
when we look
at nature,
we see
a kind
of different
picture.
We see
that
where Darwin
said,
nature is all
red in tooth
and claw,
we see
that the way
to be a
successful
species,
the way
to survive,
is to make
yourself
indispensable
to your
neighbors.
then,
instead of
attempting to
push you
down and
extinguish you,
if you can
cut deals with
everybody in
your neighborhood
providing various
chemicals or
energy supplies
or other
affects in
the environment,
then everybody
will begin to
pull your way.
So,
in fact,
cooperation is
what is
maximized
among
species.
And a huge
complex organic
system like a
coral reef or a
rainforest is
actually attempting
to come to an
equilibrium of
balance that is
the point of
greatest benefit
for the greatest
number of
organisms and
species in the
system.
well,
this is a
whole different
picture.
And it
opens the
possibility,
i.e.
these new
sciences like
complexity
theory,
global dynamics,
chaos theory,
have made it
now respectable
to think about
processes that
are drawn by
something in
the future
rather than
pushed from
behind.
In the
19th century
that was
inconceivable.
All that
was known
was the
chain of
cause and
effect.
But now
we see that
the temporal
landscape has
what are called
basins of
attraction in
it, and
that certain
processes are
actually drawn
forward by
their presumed
end states.
And so
it seems
less outlandish
to us,
I think,
to suppose
there is a
purpose.
And also
we see a
level of
global integration
and global
mutation that
Darwin could...
The idea of
elements of
time having
their particular
qualities,
have you
correlated that
with astrology
at all?
Well, it's
somewhat like
astrology,
except astrology
believes that
planets and
stars and
the arrangements
among them
represent shifts
in a kind
of energy
field.
In a way,
this is more
abstract.
Wang Pi,
who was a
medieval
Chinese mystic,
his thought
comes eerily
close to my
own, in that
he... the way
he pictured
this was that
you have the
sequence moving
in an abstract
dimension, but
you have the
sequence moving
at a certain
speed, and
overlaying that
is another
sequence moving
at a different
speed, and
over that
another version
of the King
Wen sequence
moving at
another speed,
and that a
given moment
is a slice
through these
levels that
creates a
unique
juxtaposition
of the
levels.
So it is in
that sense
very astrological,
but it is
all calculated
independent of
any observation
of nature.
Although, if
it is true,
then it is
interesting that
there are
correlations in
the cycles in
the King
Wen sequence
to astrological
cycles.
Specifically,
the system
that I
elaborated on
one level
contains a
cycle of
384 days.
That is the
number of
lines,
6 times
64,
the number
of lines
in a
complete
sequence of
the I Ching,
384 days.
Well, it
happens to
be 13
lunar cycles.
Exactly.
Well, then
if you take
it times
64,
you get
a number,
67 years,
0.10425
days,
which is
6 sunspot
cycles.
And sunspot
cycles also
occur in
33-year
cycles.
Well,
it's known
that the
Han,
early Han
dynasty
Chinese knew
about sunspot
cycles.
They were the
first people
to observe
them.
So, you know,
without
hypothesizing
super technologies
or any kind
of Atlantis
type stuff,
we see that
the King
Wen sequence
could have
been a
kind of
gear used
in a
system of
multiplicands
that predicted
lunar cycles,
sunspot cycles
on two
levels,
and then,
with one
further
multiplication,
this
processional
great year,
this 26,300
year cycle.
So it's a
neat kind
of resonance
calendar,
and given
the sorry
state of
Chinese
calendar
making in
historical
time,
it's
interesting
that you
can derive
a very
accurate
calendar
from the
I Ching,
more accurate
than the
calendar we're
presently
operating on.
If you use
a 384-day
year length,
the problem,
of course,
is that a
year of that
length would
precess
against the
sun,
but this
may have
been for
political
or religious
or philosophical
reasons
acceptable
at the
time that
calendar was
formulated.
The fancy
is that there
was a
war,
a calendrical
war,
in the
pre-Shang
dynasty
time,
a war
between
the
solar
materialists
and the
lunar
mystics,
and it
was basically
a war
about how
the calendar
should be,
because,
you know,
the calendar
is the
largest
frame of
reality.
For
instance,
our calendar
with its
fixed
equinoctial
points
is a
lie.
Our
calendar
promotes
a belief
in the
permanence,
and in
fact,
everything
is
slipping
and sliding
around.
The fact
that the
equinoctial
points are
traversed
every year
on the
same
solar
year
day
gives
rise
to a
kind
of
patriarchal
hubris.
the
difference
between
schizophrenic
and a
psychedelic
traveler
being
that
maybe
one
can't
navigate
its
way
back.
I was
wondering
two
things.
One,
have you
any work
with
schizophrenics,
and what
was that
interaction
like?
The other
was
more a
take on
culture,
the common
channel-surfing
couch potato,
that it
has some
schizophrenic
quality to
it.
I was
thinking of
the movie
Twelve Monkeys
with the
Brad Pitt
character in
the asylum
when he
says that
the thing
that separates
a sane
citizen
from
insanity
is how
much
he allows
his culture
to
straightjacket
him.
Well,
I don't
know,
schizophrenia
is a very
complicated
subject
because
several
syndromes
which are
quite
different
are all
lumped
under
schizophrenia.
You know,
probably
the kind
of
schizophrenia
that I'm
sensing
you want
to talk
about
is what's
called
process
schizophrenia.
This is
where somebody
becomes really
spun up
and it
can come
after days
of not
sleeping
or something
and then
people begin
to have
really funny
ideas
and they
want to
tell
everybody
about them
and they
go to
the manager
of the
business
with
fantastic
ideas
that are
going to
make a
whole bunch
of money.
The problem
is they
just don't
make sense
to anybody
but them
or they
start hearing
voices
or they
become
convinced
that they
have a
special
mission
and it
turns out
that this
phenomenon
which we
pathologize
pretty
confidently
actually
is not
that
different
from
people
who
are
having
real
legitimate
breakthroughs
and
understanding
their lives
in new
ways.
It's a
shifting
and reordering
of the
dominance
of the
psyche
and I
tend to
agree
he's
dead
now
but
R.D.
Lange
the English psychiatrist R.D. Lange
what I observed of schizophrenia
went on at La Cerrera
in those days that are described
in True Hallucinations
and my really strong conviction
coming out of that was
it should not be interfered with
by depressive drugs
that it's some kind of
of a process
of a healing
of an acting out
and that the biggest favor
you can do the person
is to let them
to the greatest degree possible
do what they want to do
and not interfere with them
and if you medicate them
and incarcerate them
the thing is aborted
and squashed and distorted
and then they have a great deal
of trouble ever getting their act together
I was very fortunate
I mean how many psychiatric residents
have ever seen an untreated schizophrenic
you know I mean
the minute these people
hit the front door of a hospital
they're given
stelazine or lithium
or something
and yet you know
it seems more as though
Jung was on the right track
this is a process
in the dynamics of the unconscious
that wants to
work itself out
to a conclusion
now obviously
if they have violent fantasies
or seem dangerous to themselves
or other people
you can't let that go on
but I think
the treatment of schizophrenia
is largely
at the convenience
of the practitioner
and people are warehoused
and you know
if I were going crazy
I think the thing
that would really
throw me over the edge
would be to be put
with a bunch of
really crazy people
it's always seemed
so odd to me
that if you go bananas
they put you with
all the other people
who've gone bananas
who are the worst models
for you to be
in the presence of
and are quite unsettling
to normal people
let alone people
who are having
boundary dissolution
and self-identity problems
so yeah
yeah
there's some studies
that show that
what it creates
is a
in schizophrenic states
there's a more common
shift in brainwave rhythms
which is associated
with an enhanced immune system
and resultant less cancer
and I've been curious
as to whether or not
the use of psychedelics
may also provide
those frequent shifts
which are probably
more necessary to health
so as soon as we depress
for instance
schizophrenics
what happens is
they go back to
normal cancer rate
of the normal population
so their immune system
doesn't function as well
so in terms of looking
at enhanced immune function
whether or not
frequent shifts
which coming in and out
of psychedelics
may
and I don't know
if you know anything
about that
well in some sense
the kind of process
schizophrenia
the messianic
grandiose schizophrenia
that we're talking about here
is an overexpression
of self-definition
and in that sense
you would expect
a enhanced immune system
to accompany it
the immune system
defines the chemical self
so if the self
is somehow being
overexpressed
to the point
where it becomes
a pathology
or a burden
on the functioning
of the social group
then it wouldn't surprise me
that the immune system
would be functioning
very efficiently
well I guess that's about it
for us today too
say did you catch that bit
that Terence did
about the internet
just keep in mind
that this talk
was given in
the summer of 1998
and the net
was still
pretty new and unknown
to the majority of people
even here in the United States
and it was
during some conversations
with Terence
during that weekend
along with the dialogue
between him
and Ralph Abraham
that Saturday night
that inspired my
last book
The Spirit of the Internet
which by the way
you can read online
on the
matrixmasters.com site
and as soon as I can
get around to it
I'm going to put it up
in PDF version
online
you can just download it
for free
and print it out yourself
and read it
a little easier
than reading the
HTML pages
soon actually
that'll be the only way
you're going to get
a hardback copy
or a printed copy
because I've finally
gotten down to the last
few hundred of the
paperback copies
soon I can start
stop carrying all that
around every time I move
well it's really too bad
Terence is still with us
today so he can
join in some of the
discussions about
human-machine symbiosis
that are taking place
on some of the more
esoteric online lists
today
his understanding
I think of how big
a role the internet
is going to play
and is going to play
in the years
immediately ahead
he was just really
ahead of his time
right back then
can you imagine
what a fantastic rap
he could spin off
from one of the
current discussions
on some of the
AI lists
about the odds
of the first
general artificial
intelligence
to manifest itself
being in favor
of that event
taking place
on what is currently
the largest
interconnectable
public computer
complexes in the world
namely Google's
I'll lead you
to speculate
on that one
on your own
for now
it does present
some interesting
possibilities though
particularly since
Google already
uses a lot
of technology
a lot of bots
robots
to do its work
and they're
really good
at what they do
for one example
when these podcasts
started becoming
more popular
I had to find a way
to pay for the
increased bandwidth
that we were using
so I decided to try
adding a strip
of Google's
AdSense ads
on some of my blogs
so at the main
matrixmasters.com site
I decided to test it
first in my
war on drugs blog
just to be sure
there wasn't any
way that
they would
put up some ads
with that
just say no bullshit
stuff like that
so I did a
test
and the very first
ad that came up
was for legal services
from a good friend
of mine
Richard Boyer
some of you
probably already
recognize that name
because in addition
to his private
law practice
Richard is
director of the
Center for
Cognitive Liberty
which is
one of the websites
you definitely
need to have
bookmarked
if you don't know
already
you can find that
at www.cognitiveliberty.org
anyway
when
Google
when the Googlebot
pulled that ad up
first
I knew right then
that Google
probably knows
a lot more about me
than most of my
friends do
because I can
guarantee you
that Google
is the only one
of that group
who's read
every single one
of the million
plus words
on the thousands
of pages
I've posted
on the
matrixmasters.com
site in the last
seven years
so beware
or
I would suggest
rather you be bold
and blog your thoughts
on Google
after all
if the
big artificial
intelligence
wakes up
in Google's
network
one day
don't you want
it to know
a little about you
in your own words
well
I think I'll
leave you with that
with a shoe on
for a while
maybe have a little
smoke
kick back
and kick around
some of these
thoughts
you know
some of these
out of the box
ideas
what have you got
to lose
you know
if you start
thinking way
outside of your
particular cultural
box these days
you know
unless you're
perfectly satisfied
with the life
you're living
right now
you don't have
a lot to lose
just by
trying a few
new ideas
on for size
give it a try
you know
thinking can really
be a lot of fun
at least when you
get really far
outside the box
just be sure
to keep one foot
on the ground
though
you know
we want to be
sure to see you
all again
back here
in the psychedelic salon
for our next podcast
when we'll continue
this series
of Terrence McKenna
from the summer
of 1998
so thanks for
being here today
and as always
thanks to
Chateau Hayuk
for the use
of their music
here in the
psychedelic salon
and for now
this is Lorenzo
signing off
from cyberdelic space
be well
my friends
I'll see you next time
and I'll see you next time