I am most pleased and most happy to introduce our very special guest speaker tonight, Mr. Terence McKinney.
It's a pleasure to be here. It's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many faces, period.
I've never been to Port Hueneme before. Probably some of you feel the same way.
But I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. I was in New York last weekend at the Open Center and in Prague two weeks before that.
So this is the end of a long season of traveling. I'm not home yet, but at least I'm in my own time zone.
I want to especially thank Andy Voth and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard for
inviting me to participate. It represents a real commitment to free speech and First Amendment
rights, I think, for an art museum. Art museums have been taking some knocks recently, and so I
think they doubly should be commended for their courage. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned,
this is a benefit for botanical dimensions, which explains the
difference between the two. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned, this is a benefit for botanical dimensions,
which explains the difference between the two. And I want to explain, as Andy mentioned,
this is a benefit for botanical dimensions, which explains the difference between the two.
That's a double price over the ticket. All of this money will go to the preservation of medicinal plants
with a history of shamanic usage. That is the special focus
of our botanical garden in Hawaii. And before I start the formal lecture, I'd like
to just say a little bit about that. As you know, the rain forest of the world are being cleared out of
very frightening rate. And perhaps voices are beginning to be heard to halt this destruction
of the natural environment. But whether it's halted or not, the destruction of the knowledge
of native peoples concerning the uses of the plants in the rainforest, this is disappearing
without doubt in the next 30 years, because these people are moving into cities, taking jobs in the
ordinary market economy, and thousands of years of accumulated folk medical knowledge is being lost.
So the real world political work that Kat and I do is associated with botanical dimensions.
We conceived it together many, many years ago. And then about six years ago, Kat took it over, put it on its
official feet, made it a non-profit foundation, and has run it day to day since then with tremendous energy
and efficiency. So I'd like to acknowledge Kat McKenna here, my better half. In fact, my only good half.
And then I wanted to underscore what Andy said, a very special event two weeks from now at the Carnegie Museum.
Roy Tuckman, Roy of Hollywood, bon vivant, counter-cultural figure, informational ferret of our time,
will be recast as an experimental composer of great energy and imagination.
Thank you.
And I hope you'll all turn out for Roy. He's been a wonderful force in my life, and I think in the cultural life of Southern California.
Both Roy and Diane have done a wonderful job in raising the quality of public dialogue in Southern California,
which I think is a precondition for any kind of clear thinking about our future or our political situation.
So, here's to Roy and Diane.
Okay. Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity and the techniques by which the artist can refine his or her vision,
expand the vision, communicate the vision.
And...
Before I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity per se.
What is it in and of itself?
And when I think like that, of course, I cast my mind back to nature.
Nature is the great visible engine of creativity.
Against which all other creative efforts are measured.
And creativity in nature has a curious distribution.
It's something which accumulates through time.
If we stand back and look at the universe, we see that at its earliest moments, it was very simple.
It was a plenum.
It was without characters or characteristics.
It was what in Hindu mythology is called the turaya, which is described as attributeless.
And naturally, if something is without attribution, you can't say much about it.
It takes a while for it to undergo a declension into more creative realms.
And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference.
The precondition for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium.
What mathematicians now call chaos.
And through the life of the universe, as temperatures have fallen,
more and more complex compound structures have arisen.
And though there's been many a slipping back in this process,
over very large spans of time, we can say that creativity is conserved.
That the universe becomes more creative.
And out of that state of creative fecundity, more creativity is manifest.
So that from that point of view, the universe is almost what we would have to call an art-making machine.
An engine for the production of ever more novel forms of connectedness.
Ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.
And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly,
a set of principles that we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.
Nature's creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity.
We emerge out of nature.
Almost, and this idea, I think, was fairly present close to the surface of the medieval mind.
We emerge out of nature.
Almost as its finest work of art.
The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature.
This is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century.
The productions of nature.
And human creativity emerges out of that.
Whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of being,
or a more modern evolution.
Or an evolutionary view where we actually consolidate emergent properties
and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection.
Now, I'm sure that we couldn't carry out a discussion of this sort
without observing that the prototypic figure for the artist,
as well as for the scientist,
is the shaman.
The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history
that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist
into a single notion of caregiving and creativity.
And I think that, you know, to whatever degree art,
over the past several centuries, has wandered in the desert,
it is because this shamanic function has been either suppressed or forgotten.
And different images of the artist have been held up at different times.
The artist as artisan,
the artist as handmaiden of a room,
the handmaiden of a ruling class or family,
the artist as designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization.
This notion of the artist as mystical journeyer,
as one who goes into a world unseen by others,
and then returns to tell them of it,
was pretty much lost in the post-medieval and renaissance conception of art
up until the late 19th century or early 20th century,
where, beginning with the Romantics,
there is a new permission to explore the irrational.
This really is the bridge,
the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist.
Permission to explore the irrational.
The Romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion.
Romantic love, specifically.
The Symbolists, in the mid-19th century,
did it by a re-emphasis
on the emotional content of the image
and a rejection of the previous rationalism.
And that emphasis on the image and on the emotions
set the stage then for what I take to be
the truly shamanic movements in art,
which begin really with Alfred Jarry
in the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Jarry, you may remember,
was the founder of something called
the Ecole du Pathophysique,
the pathophysical college.
Jarry announced pathophysics is the science.
The problem was nobody could understand
what it meant or what it stood for,
including Jarry.
Jarry was tight with L'Entremont,
who, you may recall, said,
I am fascinated with that kind of beauty
that arises when a sewing machine
meets a bicycle on an operating table.
See, this was a true effort
to bend the boundaries of art,
to create new permission,
permission really for the unthinkable.
And this, again,
reinforces the shamanic function.
What do we mean when we say the unthinkable?
We mean the envelope of that
which can be conceived.
And for at least 200 years,
the ostensible mission of the artist
has been to test the conceptual
and imagistic envelope
of what the society is willing to tolerate.
And this has taken many forms.
The deconstruction of imagery
that we get with abstract expressionism,
going back into impressionism
and the pointillists,
or the permission for the irrational imagery
of the unconscious.
Surrealism and German Expressionism
make use of this permission.
Always the idea being
to somehow destroy the idols of the tribe,
dissolve the conceptual boundary
of ordinary expectation.
Well, in order to do this,
it seems to me,
there is a precondition
for the creation of art,
which I call understanding.
And I don't mean this
in an intellectual sense.
I mean it in the sense
that Alfred North Whitehead
intended when he defined understanding
as the apperception of pattern as such.
As such.
There's nothing more to it than that.
You see, if we were to look at this room
and we were to squint our eyes,
and I'm doing this right now
and I see that the room divides itself
into people dressed in red
and people dressed in blue,
this is a pattern.
And it tells me something
about what I'm looking at.
Now I shift my depth of field.
Now I'm looking at where men are sitting
and where women are sitting.
This is a different pattern
and it tells me more
about what I am looking at.
The number of these patterns,
theoretically present
in any construction,
is infinite.
That says to me then
that the depth of understanding
cannot be known.
It cannot be known.
Everything is imminent.
William Blake makes this point, you know,
that you can see infinity
in a grain of sand.
So understanding then
is the precondition
for creativity.
And this understanding
is not so much intellectual
as it is visual.
Visual.
And in thinking about this,
I realized
what an influence upon my own ideas
in this area
Aldous Huxley was.
Not the Huxley that we might
ordinarily associate
with my concerns,
the Huxley of the doors of perception
and heaven and hell,
but the Huxley of a very modest book
that he wrote in the early 50s
called The Art of Seeing.
The Art of Seeing.
And in that book,
he makes the point
that a good art education
begins with a good drawing hand.
That to be able to coordinate
the hand and eye
and to see into nature,
to see into the patterns present as such
is the precondition
for a kind of approach
to the absolute.
Now out of this process
of seeing,
which I'm calling understanding,
the creative process
ushers in novelty.
And many of you have heard me speak of novelty
in another context.
In the context of nature
as a novelty producing engine
of some sort.
And ourselves almost as
the handiwork of nature.
But this same handiwork of nature
which we represent,
we also internalize
and re-express
through the novelty
of the human world.
Well now,
if we take seriously
the shamanic model
as a basis for authentic art,
then certainly
in the modern context,
what we see missing
from the repertoire
of the artist
are shamanic techniques.
And it's for the discussion
of these shamanic techniques
I believe
that I was brought here
this evening.
So I want you to cast your mind back
to a great seminal moment,
germinal moment
in the history of human thought
which was about 25,000 years ago
when the great glaciers
that had covered most
of the Eurasian land mass
began to melt.
And human populations
that had been islanded
from each other
for about 15 millennia
began to re-contact each other
and reconnect.
And out of this comes
what is called
the Magdalenian Revolution
from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago.
And what it is,
is nothing less than
a tremendous explosion
of creativity
and aesthetic self-expression
on the part of the human species.
We find
for the first time
bone and antler technology
takes its place
along with stone technology.
Musical instruments appear
over a wide area.
And cave paintings,
some paintings in areas and recesses
so remote from the surface of the ground
that it takes several hours
to reach them,
are painted and set up
in dramatic tableaus
specifically designed
to bring together
sound, light, and dance
in hierophanies,
extravaganzas of aesthetic output
that invoke
a kind of transcendent other
that human beings
for the first time
are trying to come to grips with
and make some kind
of cultural statement about.
And this pulling into matter,
of the ideas
of human beings,
first, you know,
in the forms of
beadwork
and chipped stone
and carved bone,
within 20,000 years,
ushers into the kinds of
high civilizations
that we see around us
and points us toward
the kind of extraplanetary
mega civilization
that we can feel
operating on our own present
like a kind of great attractor.
Now, this whole
intellectual adventure
in exteriorization
of ideas
is entirely
an aesthetic adventure
until very recently
utility is only
a secondary consideration.
The real notion
is a kind of
seizure
by the tremendum,
by the other,
which then forces us
to take up matter,
clay, bone, flint,
and put it through
a mental process
where we then excrete it
as objects that have
lodged within them ideas.
This seems to be
the special, unique,
transcendental function
of the human animal,
is the production
and condensation
of ideas.
And what made it possible
for the human animal
is language.
If you're seeking
the thumbprint
of the transcendental
on the myriad phenomena
that compose life
on this planet,
to my mind,
the place to look
is human language.
Human language represents
an ontological break
of major magnitude
with anything else going on
on this planet.
I mean, yes,
bees dance
and dolphins squeak
and chimpanzees
do what they do,
but it's a hell of a step
from there to
Wallace Stevens,
let alone William Shakespeare.
Language,
is the unique province
of human beings.
And language
is the unique tool
of the artist.
The artist is
the person
of language.
And I've,
you know,
given a lot of thought
to this because
the work that I've done
with psilocybin mushrooms
and the observations
of psychedelic plant use
in the Amazon
centered around ayahuasca,
lead me to the conclusion
that it is the synergy
and catalysis
of language
that lies behind
not only the emergence
of human consciousness
out of animal organization,
but then its ability
to set a course
for a transcendental dimension
and pursue that course
against all the vicissitudes
of biology and history
over 10 or 15,000 years.
Language has made us
more than a group
of pack hunting monkeys.
It's made us a group
of pack hunting monkeys
with a dream.
Out from that dream
has given us
our glory and our shame,
our weaponry,
our technology,
our art,
our hopes,
our fears.
All of this arises
out of our own ability
to articulate
and to communicate
with each other.
And I use this
in the broadest sense.
I mean, for me,
the glory of the human animal
is cognitive activity,
song, dance, sculpture,
poetry,
all of these cognitive activities.
When we participate in them,
we cross out of the domain
of animal organization
and into the domain
of a genuine relationship
to the transcendent.
As you know, shamans,
in all times and places,
gain their power
through relationships
with helping spirits,
which they sometimes call ancestors,
sometimes call nature spirits.
But somehow,
the acquisition
of a relationship
to a disincarnate intelligence
is the precondition
for authentic shamanism.
Now, nowhere in our world
do we have an institution like that
that we do not consider
pathological,
except in the now
very thinly spread tradition
of the muse
that artists,
alone among human beings,
are given permission
to talk in terms of
my inspiration
or a voice which told me to do this
or a vision
that must be realized
or realized.
The thin line,
the thin thread
of shamanic descent
into our profane world
leads through
the office of the artist.
And so,
if society
is to somehow
take hold of itself
at this penultimate moment,
as we literally waver
on the brink of planetary extinction,
then the artist,
like Ariadne,
following her thread
out of the labyrinth,
is going to have to follow
this shamanic thread
back through time.
And you know,
one of the most disempowering things
that has been done to us
by the male dominant culture
is to brush out
our footprints
into the past.
We don't have a clue
as to how we got here.
Most people can't think further back
than the first Nixon administration,
let alone,
you know,
the arrival of the Vikings,
the fall of Catalhoyuk,
the melting of the glaciers,
so forth and so on.
We have been disempowered
by
a rational tendency
to deny
our irrational roots,
which are a kind of embarrassment
to science,
because science is
the special province
of the ego,
and magic and art
are the special province
of something else.
I could name it, but I won't.
It prefers to be
unnamed, I think.
So,
how seriously then
are we to take
this,
I'll call it an obligation,
to follow the shamanic thread
back into time?
Well,
I think that it is
a matter of saving our own souls,
that this is the real challenge.
You know,
I love to dig at the yogans
by saying nobody ever went into an ashram
with their knees knocking in fear
over the tremendous dimension
they know they were about to enter
through meditation.
Still truer
and more sad,
still more true
and more sad
is the notion that very few of us
pick up our sculpting tools
or our airbrush
with our knees knocking with fear
because we know we are
invoking
and acting with the muse
at our elbow.
And somehow I think the artists
need to recover
this sense of mystery.
One of the most depressing things to me
about the art scene,
and I had a chance to reconnect with this
because I was just in New York,
is
it now has a kind of directionless quality.
You can go into a gallery
and you cannot tell whether it is 1990,
1980, 1970, or 1960
because a kind of eschatological malaise
has settled over art.
All notion
of any forward movement
toward a transcendental ideal
has been put aside
for the exploration
of idiosyncratic vision.
And I grant you
this is a tension
and perhaps in the question period
we can talk about this.
There is a tension
between the individual vision
and the notion of an attractor
or a collective vision.
Which wants to be expressed.
But to my mind
this is the same dichotomous tension
that haunts the individual
in his or her relationship to Tao.
You know we don't want to be lost in ego
but on the other hand
if we completely express the Tao
we have no sense of self.
The ideal seems to be
a kind of coincidencia appositorum.
A kind of literalizing
of a paradox
where what we have
is Tao
but we perceive it as ego.
And in the application of this notion
to the art problem
I would say
what we need is a situation
where schooling
if you want to put it that way
or a tendency toward a coherent vision
expressed by many artists
is spontaneous.
Each artist imagines
that they are pursuing their own vision.
Yet obviously
they are in the grip of an archetype
which is rising through the medium
of the unconscious.
Now the last time we saw this in American art
was in abstract expressionism.
Which was probably in terms of the values
in terms of tension
and the amount of emotional gain
between one artistic moment and another.
The break between abstract expressionism
and what preceded it
was the most radical break in American art
in this century.
Abstract expressionism
actually carried us in
to a confrontation with what
the quantum physicists were telling us.
That the universe is
field upon field
of integrated vibration.
That there is no top level.
There is no bottom level.
That the ordinary structures
of provisional space-time
are simply that.
That if we can rise out
of the human dimension
then we discover these larger
more integrated dimensions
where mind and nature
somehow interpenetrate each other.
A vision like that
a coherent vision
has yet to announce itself
here in the post-history
pre-apocalypse phase of things.
Well, I guess I have a kind of
reactionary side
when I think about the creative endeavor.
I believe that
the psychedelic experience
as encountered by each of you
in the privacy of your own mind
or as encountered by a pre-literate society
somewhere in the world
that that psychedelic experience
is in a way
the Rosetta Stone
not only for
understanding the
encryption
that our own lives represent
each to ourselves
but it's also
a Rosetta Stone
for encoding
the historical experience.
Art is
this endeavor
to leave
the animal domain
behind
to create
another dimension
orthogonal
to the concerns
of ordinary history.
And this orthogonal domain
to my mind
is
glimpsed
most clearly
in the psychedelic experience.
The psychedelic experience
shows you
more art
in an hour and a half
than the human species
has produced
in fifteen or twenty thousand years.
Now,
this is an incredible claim.
This is why I make it.
The energy barrier
which separates us
from this tremendous repository
of transcendental imagery
is very low.
You know,
it's a matter of a little personal commitment
and
the substances
which make the transition possible.
The perturbation
of brain chemistry
is easily done.
What is not so easily done
is the assimilation
of the consequences
of this act.
Ordinarily,
we assume
that consciousness
is channeled
between
tremendously deep walls
that there is no way
to force
a confrontation
with the other
or the transcendent
or the unconscious.
We tend to assume that,
you know,
we're going to have to do
double duty
at the ashram
for three decades
before you're
vouchsafed
even a glimpse
into these places.
This is not true.
Culture,
and this is my message
to artists
and to anybody else
who cares to notice,
culture
is a plot
against
the expansion
of consciousness.
And this plot
prosecutes its
goals
through
a limiting
of language.
Language
is the battleground
over which
the fight
will take place
because
what we cannot
what we cannot say
we cannot communicate
and by say
I mean
dance,
paint,
sing,
meme.
What we cannot say
we cannot communicate.
We can conceive
of things
that we cannot communicate.
But,
and I think
every one of us here
has done that
and that's a thrilling thing.
That is
the deep homework
that the psychedelic
inner astronaut
sees things
which no human being
has ever seen before
and no human being
will ever see
again.
But in fact
this has no meaning
unless
it is possible
to carry it back
into the collectivity.
And
what motivates me
to talk
to groups like this
is the belief
that we do not have
centuries
of gently
unfolding
time
ahead of us
in which to
you know
gently tease apart
the threads
of the human endeavor
and create
a bright new world.
That's not our circumstance.
This is
a fire
in a madhouse.
And
to get a hold
on the situation
I think
we are going
to have
to force
the issue.
Well,
one way
of forcing
the issue
or
a chemical
definition
of forcing
the issue
when you're
talking about
a chemical reaction
is catalysis.
We want
to catalyze
consciousness.
We want
to move
it forward
in order
to make
it faster
toward its goals
whatever those goals
are.
Well,
I believe
that to the present
moment
language
again in the broadest
sense
speech
dance
musical composition
language
has just been allowed
to grow
like topsy.
It's
been a kind
of
every man
for himself
situation.
Now
what we really need
as we
see ourselves
moving
from one
species
among
tens of
thousands
of species
on this planet
over the past
10,000 years
we have
redefined
ourselves
and now
like it or not
we are
the custodians
of the
destiny
of this
planet.
Our decisions
affect
every life
form
on the planet
and yet
we are still
communicating
with each
other
with the
extremely
precise
medium
of small
mouth noises
mediated
by ignorance
and hate.
This
doesn't
seem
like the way
to do
business
as we
approach
the third
millennium.
So
what
I
what
I'm
hopeful
about
is that
we
will
have
a
new
kind
of
humanity
that
will
take
place
but
there
are
still
a lot
of
decisions
to be
made.
How
violent
shall
this
birth
be?
Most
people
are
afraid
of the
unconscious.
This is
why
you know
you can
have a
psychedelic
compound
like DMT
which is
very much
like ordinary
brain chemistry
appears
completely
physiologically
harmless
only
lasts
10 minutes
extremely
powerful
and generally
in this
society you have no
chance of
dying.
This is
because there
has been
a failure
of moral
courage
and the
failure
of moral
courage
is
perhaps
most
evident
in our
own
community
the
community
of
the
artists.
In a
way
it's
the poets
that
have
not
articulated
an
a
a a
a moral
vision.
The moral
vision
must
come
from the
unconscious.
It doesn't
have to
do I
believe
with
you know
these
post
meaning
movements
in art
deconstruction
ism
and this
sort of
thing.
I mean
I'm
basically
putting
it
in
a
게
a
catalogue
of
Sarpe
and
al
find the way then the way cannot be found ideology is extremely alien to art
political ideology i mean and if you will but notice it is political ideology that has been
calling the shots for the last seven or eight hundred years we can transcend politics if we
can put some other program in place you cannot transcend politics into a void and i believe that
a world without ideology could be created if what were put in place of ideology were the notion of
the realization of the good the true and the beautiful you know the three-tiered canon of
the platonic
aesthetic the reconnect the notion of the good the true and the beautiful then use psychedelics
to empower the artists to go into this vast dimension that surrounds human history
on all sides to an infinite depth and return from that world
with
a transcendental images that can lift us to a new cultural level the muse is there the dull maps
that rationalism has given us are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard by the bad
little boys of science you only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to rediscover
a nature
which is not mute, as Sartre said in a kind of culmination of the modern viewpoint.
Nature is not mute.
It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes,
and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics.
Now, as you know, biology runs on genes, and genes are the units of meaning of heredity.
But we could make a model of the informational environment that is represented by culture,
and in fact this is done.
A word has been invented, meme, M-E-M-E, meme.
A meme is not the smallest unit.
A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity.
A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea.
Ideas are made of memes.
And I think the art community might function with more efficiency
in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs
if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after,
the natural environment, where we as artists are attempting to create memes
which enter an environment of other memes,
that are in competition with each other,
and out of this competition of memes,
ever more appropriate, adapted, and suitable ideas can gather.
Link themselves together into higher and higher organisms now in order for this to happen
There is an obligation upon each one of us to carry our ideas
clearly because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly to be replicated or it will cause some
pathological mutation a meme must be correctly replicated or it will cause a
Pathological mutation for instance. I would say what the Nazis did to Frederick Nietzsche's
Philosophy was a bad cop a miscopied meme
became a toxic
mutation inside a culture so I
Would suggest to the people in this room tonight that you take a good look around at who's here
artistic people
Psychedelic people look pretty much like everybody else out in
Society, but we have come here tonight
Self-selected for our interest in the empowering
capacity of
Psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art
so we represent an affinity group a
population with a potential for
a
mutagenic impact on the ideological structures of the rest of society
So look around
Someone here has what you need and if you can only figure out who it is
You can make a novel connection
To move them into a new level of creativity
well, what is this new level of
creativity
Some of you may be familiar with a theme that was very big in medieval religious art, which was
the apocalypse
of Saint John or of somebody there are a number of these
apocalypses and I think that
many of us may come out of a kind of secular background or have not given this kind of a
a religious idea too much consideration
but my
idiosyncratic conclusion
based simply on trying to be honest about the content of the psychedelic
experience
is that human history
really is on a collision course
with a transcendental
object of some sort
it is not going to be business as usual
into the endless unfolding confines
of the future the very fact
that human history is occurring
on this planet the very fact that a primate
has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity
and gone into the business of running
stock markets and uh... molecular biology labs and art museums
indicates to me
the nearby presence
in another dimension
of a kind of
hyper organizing
or what i call
the transcendental object
and i believe that this transcendental object
is casting an enormous shadow
over the human
historical landscape
so that if you're back
in uh... ancient judea
you have an anticipation
of the messiah
if you are at illusus at the height of the practice of the illusinian mysteries
you have
an anticipation
the dark god
these
anticipations
of an unspeakable
transcendent reality
that are always clothed
in the uh...
in the assumptions of the individual artist in the society in which he or she is working
are in fact
genuine
and that you don't have to give your own yourself over
to fundamentalist
religion
to connect
with the fact
that human history is
an adventure
and this adventure
has a number of startling reverses and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult to anticipate
and that we are coming up
on one of those
the civilization that was created
out of the collapse of the medieval world
has now
shown
its contradictions to be
unbearable
and though no one of us
knows what the shape of the
new civilization will be
somehow
in the singing of the ayahuasca songs in the rainforest
in the
tremendous
hypermetallic transcendental off planetary flash of psilocybin
in the
teaching of the self transforming machine elves that seem to dwell in the DMT
dimension
we see
that the ordinary linear system
linear expectations of history are breaking down and that the truth of the
eminence of the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial of
the male dominator paradigm that has been in place so long. The way to make
this birth process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion that will not
betray the thousands and thousands of generations of people who who suffered
birth and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death so that we
could sit here this evening, the redeeming of the human enterprise all
lies then in denial.
In helping this thing come to birth and each artist is an antenna to the
transcendental other and as we go with our own history into that thing and then
create a unique confluence of our uniqueness and its uniqueness we
collectively create an arrow, an arrow out of history
out of time perhaps even out of matter that will redeem then the idea that man
is good, redeem the idea that man is good. This is the promise of art and its
fulfillment is never more near than the present moment. Thank you very much.
I think we'll take a ten or fifteen minute break and then we'll come
back and you can ask questions and we'll do that for a little while.
Thank you very very much
so now I'm happy to take questions. Here.
cereal
delilty
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realm, but I never felt not enough sense of personal power to be that antenna that you're saying that ours can be for bringing that to the other, until I became convinced of the existence not only of me within that other realm, but that other realm within me, and perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness, but perhaps you could comment on how, if possible,
if possible, that second awareness could be more easily accessible in the psychedelic experience.
What do you mean by the second awareness? Say a little more about it.
Of being aware that other realm is something that's also very personal and...
Well, yes, I mean, it seems it's a landscape that begins within the self and seems to extend into the world.
I mean,
we...
I mean,
one of the very puzzling things about the psychedelic experience is that it argues that we are not
atomic individuals running around in some kind of society, but that if you actually drain the
psychic water away, you'll discover that we're all connected at the roots, that it isn't a journey to another world,
it's a journey inward to a world that is already present and there.
The astonishing thing is how alienated we are from our own interior, from the interior world, to the point where we can hardly recognize it.
I mean, the...
I've talked a lot about the alien nature of the psychedelic experience and how it seems
to be mappable over something as radical as the UFO experience.
This is because we truly do not know who we are.
The past 10,000 years have been so disempowering to us.
We are really like the children of a dysfunctional relationship.
We don't...
We don't know where we have come from.
It's very hard for us to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we're doing.
I mean, that really horrifies me that this is a society that loots the future.
I mean, the symbol of that is devouring of children.
We literally, for our own comfort in the present moment, are making it very difficult for future generation,
to contemplate having anything approaching the level of resource availability that we have.
And this kind of situation could not be tolerated if we had not gone through a tremendous series
of traumatic, emotionally disemboweling experiences. You know, the Native Americans
have a litmus test for all activity. Does it serve the children? And so much of what we do
is so anti-future that it's almost as though the fundamentalist position exists to permit
the destruction of the environment. I mean, this was perfectly encapsulated by this clown James
Watt, who was secretary...
...of the Interior and said, we don't need to expand the national parks because Jesus is coming.
I mean, this is a mentality so against the grain of the obvious that it has to be looked upon
as pathological. Another question here in the corner.
Hello, Karen.
How are you?
I've known you for a long time, but you've never met me. I'm one of Roy's night people.
And...
I guess, I don't know, I guess I got to preface this remark in saying that I got about a $50,000
education and three degrees, college degrees, in psychology, but I've never learned anything
like I've learned from listening to Roy's show.
In pursuing those degrees, I decided to learn a little bit about it hands-on, so I went
to work in a middle institution. So it's my misfortune, actually, to be earning my survival
at this time by working in that capacity. I would like to see psychology take a different direction,
and I know that what you're talking about provides a focus and a direction for psychology
to take, which I think would really get close to, I mean, I totally agree with Freud and
Jung, discovering the psychon just about 100 years ago, but they discovered it at night
in Santa Fe. How do we get closer to this in this kind of society? That's the first
part of this question. And the second part of this question, I'm a little bit nervous
speaking in front of all these people, but...
The second part of this question has to do with a study that you spoke of in 72, where
with single-dose administration of LSD alcoholics, we're achieving a 72% success rate, and I
would like to speak a little bit on the pro-psych and anti-psych.
Yes, well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to make the point, because in the present
atmosphere...
Yes.
...of hysteria and misinformation, this is too easily run over. It is important to make
the distinction that what has happened really is that the well of language on this issue
of consciousness alteration, the well of language has been poisoned, where you cannot make any
sense if you use the words that have...
Okay.
...been granted us to use. I mean, let's take the word drug. You know, we have a drug war,
but as I drove into town, I noticed a drug store.
So it's...elt's that we, you know, with that...with that compressed vocabulary, you can't make any
sense at all of what's going on. So I think what we have to do is make an operational
argument about drugs.
drugs and say you know what is it that society finds offensive about drug abuse and then what
does that have to do with psychedelics well my own analysis of this is that what is uh offensive
about drug abuse is a unconscious repetitious and demonstrably destructive pattern of behavior
and whenever you see someone behaving that way everyone feels repulsed and brought down
and in fact severe drug addictions are like this but as a matter of record
this is what psychedelics make absolutely impossible number one the notion of unexamined
behavior how can you have unexamined behavior if you take psychedelics it holds you up into a blast
furnace of self-reflection uh it is certainly it does not promote repetitious drug use i mean uh i
i consider myself a great fan
of psilocybin and if i can screw my courage to the sticking point a couple of times a year i'm doing
all right i i know someone who says dmt is their favorite uh substance and when i asked them when
was the last time you did it they said 1968 and it lasted three minutes this is not a pattern of
drug abuse you see
so um it's a matter of educating the public and i this is probably a good place for me to get a
pitch in i i wrote a book on contract for bantam and hopefully it'll be out next fall and i'm
hoping i want to call it and i'm hoping they'll go along with me why eve was right plants drugs
and history
because
right there in the beginning of the western story in genesis what you get is it's the story of
history's first drug bust it's the story of a woman who follows her own mind and makes a decision
about consciousness alteration and then uh it works i mean she says and and they were naked
and she perceived them as naked in other words she got true information about the situation
but you have yawa there mumbling to himself as he wanders around the garden in an old bathrobe and
he's saying uh if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
they will not be able to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
will become as we are that was always the issue you see it wasn't a health issue
it wasn't an abuse issue it's about who finds out what's really going on and who doesn't
and this book i wrote for bantam makes very clear that the culture the style of a culture
is almost always and invariably a style of seeing the world through a certain set of drugs
is almost always and invariably a style of seeing the world through a certain set of drugs or a drug for example
uh you know here we're in the middle of a drug uh abuse problem but uh caffeine
has been entirely institutionalized since the industrial revolution it's the only drug that
has been honored in every labor contract that is signed anywhere you have the coffee break
the coffee break is
the workers uh guarantees the workers right to stimulate themselves
and in fact ultimately obligates the workers to stimulate themselves because
the machines and the tasks that they have been given totally reinforce the need for coffee
and the typing pool couldn't exist without coffee similarly alcohol alcohol is tremendous
and in fact ultimately obligates the workers to stimulate themselves because
the machines and the tasks that they have been given totally reinforce the need for information
so while we're all in this world where we're all about alcohol
issues are themselves forms and people are all about violence and social depends suddenly i felt that that was so interviewing 얘기 because
Because, first of all, people didn't bathe enough to make it an appetizing thing to contemplate
unless you were pretty lit.
And terrible, terrible distortions of Western politics and religiosity have taken place
because of drugs.
For example, and this is, to me, one of the most shocking examples imaginable, slavery
died with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Rome had a system of labor called the Latifundia, which was essentially a slave work crew.
And that institution died with the fall of Rome.
During the medieval period, if you were into slavery,
it meant that you were going to die.
It meant that you were going to die.
It meant you had one slave, and this slave was extremely well looked after and cared for
because they were a symbol of munificent opulence on your part
that you could afford such a luxury.
It was like having a Maserati to have a slave.
Well, then, around 1400, before the discovery of America, in the eastern area,
in the northern Atlantic islands of Madera, they began experimenting with the growing
of cane sugar.
And it was fine, except that the sugar has to be boiled at 130 degrees, and no one would
work around that.
They discovered that they had to chain people to the cooking apparatus for the extraction
of sugar.
And they began bringing Africans to do this.
And they not only reinvented slavery for the deliberate production of sugar, which
was utterly unnecessary to the diet of Europe.
I mean, there hadn't been a ton of sugar imported into Europe in the previous thousand
years.
And suddenly, they felt this tremendous need for sugar, and they reinstitutionalized slavery
with the added insult that for the first time...
A particular race was singled out as being somehow made for slavery.
And this is the beginning of black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association
with the sugar trade.
By 1800, every pound of sugar being imported into England was being produced by sugar.
And this was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans. The association with the sugar trade. By 1800, every pound of sugar being imported into England was being produced by sugar.
And this was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association with the sugar trade.
This was the beginning of the black xenophobia on the part of Europeans, the association with the sugar trade.
And slavery was going at a rate that had not been seen since the Rome of Caligula.
All in the name of commerce, all in the name of having this essentially trivial kick
from sugar.
So it's really important to educate ourselves as to what constitutes a drug and how drugs
are legislated against and...
suppressed or promoted and advertised entirely according to whether they fit into the agenda
of the reigning model of culture, whatever that may be. Yeah, here. Yes.
Who are the shamans that you would share with us as a model?
Of our times, you mean?
Well, times that we associate with, we're familiar with.
Oh, good.
So within the 20th century, the great art, the great shamanic artists.
Well, you know, it's just an opportunity to list a bunch of prejudices, obviously.
Certainly, the Grateful Dead seem to me to be, you know, nobody's done it longer, better
than they have.
And rock and roll, generally, is an extremely powerful form of shamanic performance.
When I look over the 20th century, James Joyce, for what he did for language, the permission
he gave to make language a living object, Jackson Pollock is a great personal hero of mine.
Here was a boy from Cody, Wyoming, who managed to cut his way to the heart of the New York
art world.
To my mind, he was the abstract expressionist par excellence, and the high waters of American
art have never reached higher than that.
Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, maybe these aren't the answers you expected because these
are such masterpieces.
Yeah.
Such movers of masses of people.
Art doesn't have to operate on that huge scale.
I mean, art can be extremely intimate.
But shamanic art, art that moves us to a sense of the transcendental, there's been
too little of that in this century.
No.
Not since the Surrealists has there been a movement with the stated goal of carrying
people into an unimaginable world.
And I have a lot of respect for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst.
I think Ernst's career was broad and deep over a long period of time.
The art that excites me now is the art of the moving image.
I'm a little impatient with gallery art because so much of it has become the handmaiden to
the interior decorating business.
And that was never the intent.
The moving image, to my mind, is the connecting theme in the 20th century between art and
dream and psychedelics.
So film...
Yeah.
...is the extremely powerful art form that emerges into its own in the 20th century.
And film seems to me an anticipation of what is possible with psychedelics.
I have great hope now for art produced by the interaction of human beings and computers.
And crude as it is and controversial as it is...
I think virtual reality will eventually have a contribution to make.
But it's long in the future.
The technologists have to perfect the medium, and then the artists have to work with it.
My own favorite artists, which I don't offer as fulfilling that shamanic intent, but they're
simply my favorites, are Vladimir Nabokov.
Yeah.
As a novelist.
This is flawless stuff, emotionally, intellectually complete, and hilariously funny.
William Gibson's accomplishment in creating cyberpunk and envisioning a future so real
that you can taste, this is a tremendous accomplishment.
But I feel about art...
The way I feel about art...
The way I feel about rock and roll, and the way I think most psychedelic people must feel,
which is it's such pale stuff compared to what's out there.
I feel like we are...
If we could open the sluice gates to the dimensions that we explore psychedelically, we would
just be inundated by art.
And as it is, we receive it in thimblefuls.
How can we open ourselves up to this?
Because I really believe that the art unites us, it dissolves the boundaries between us,
it empowers us, it makes us a collectivity.
You notice that the great overweening control structures, the government, for example, never
communicates to us with images that are aesthetically pleasing.
It always communicates with images that convey obligation, which is a downer in anybody's
book.
So somehow we have been the consumers of imagery when we should become the producers
of it.
And all the people in the 20th century who have made that work serve to inspire in that
direction.
I don't know.
There are so many of you.
Is somebody in the back who's...
Oh, way up there.
A statement and then a question.
If it is assumed that the b-carboids are mean THH or nervous, then this is why the
BMT is orally active in the ayahuasca group.
My question is, some forms of ayahuasca BMT .
So is this to say that the plus THH are hallucinogenic?
Yes.
No.
I follow it.
Okay.
The question is, Do I remember it?
The question is, Is it so that the beta carboylene alkaloids inhibit MAO and thus
make DMT active in ayahuasca?
And yes, this is not debatable.
It's now secured by my brother several years ago.
He published on this.
It was always hypothesized that beta-carbolines were MAO inhibitors, but then ultimately they proved it.
Well, so then the questioner went on to ask, if this is so, then what about these cases where beta-carboline alkaloids are reportedly taken without DMT?
And then what does this mean?
Is it hallucinogenic on its own?
And the answer is, harmaline is hallucinogenic by itself, but fairly close to the threshold of toxicity.
So the ordinary strategy in the Amazon is to combine the DMT with the beta-carbolines,
and that makes the DMT highly reactive.
It is not then destroyed in the gut, as would ordinarily be the case, but crosses into the bloodstream and through the blood-brain barrier and reaches the brain.
I think achieving hallucinogenic levels with beta-carbolines without DMT is probably a pretty unpleasant experience, although some of these deep jungle tribes do do it.
You don't want to get the idea.
That just because somebody lives way up a river, that they know what they're doing.
Manuel Cordova Rios, in his second book, The Rio Tigre and Beyond, talks about going on curare collecting and rosewood collecting expeditions to people of the Aguaruna-Jivaro group,
and discovering that they're ayahuasca.
He even says that the ayahuasca were garbage, that they just didn't know how to make it, even though they were bear-ass indian residents, and he showed them how to make it,
and they practically made him a cultural hero.
They said, you know, my god we've been drinking swill for untold millenia.
And you came and fixed us up.
And this is a puzzling thing to us, as outsiders.
we assume they're always going for the gusto but sometimes not you know i mean cultures have
peculiar peculiar adaptations this lady yes you said that we're fouling the nest could we be
evolving you mentioned that we went from matter to object could we actually be going should we
actually be going from object to energy and when you say that art should save us all i would say
well you touch on a very interesting point one that i in my own mind am not clear about
uh is it that we are to transcend
this
world and go into some titanic dimension of energy or spirit that we can scarcely imagine is that what
this birth is is the only way we can grant peace to this planet is to turn ourselves into uh you
know electrons moving in an interbium cube that we bury on the dark side of the moon is it something
like that i'm
opened up to that self-realization and turned to an inner human being as a human being
and i think i'm troubled by that because i would like to keep it all together i would like to see
us as a part of nature but i'm not so uninformed concerning the historical adventure that i don't
know that what is called gnosticism is a very strong strain
its most severe form can be boiled down to the proposition that we are strangers here,
we don't belong here, this is not our world, we come from a place made of light and we
will never rest until we return to it.
Now the problem with that formulation is it sets us up for tremendous discontinuity and
unhappiness until we achieve that return to the realm of light.
It's a kind of Faustian thing, you know?
And yet the other possibility which I as the co-founder of a botanical garden and a lover
of nature inclined to is, isn't there some way that we can make our peace with the earth?
Isn't there some way that we can have our care?
Can we live a life that is bathtub, or a וָնַוּה and eat it?
I'm more and more to my own discomforture conclude that there isn't that the human adventure
is a forward-going adventure, that we do clothes off options.
We never again are going to be a small tribe of hunter gatherers with our flocks on a on
the plains of Africa enjoying our mushrooms and our orgies at every full
moon somehow long long ago that option was cut off shucks but but I think that
it's good to cultivate this poignancy that if we're going to go storm our
tourists at least we should do so with some sense of what has been left behind
and not just turn ourselves into mechanical technocrats somehow the
living spirit has to be brought with us and this is really the high task for
shamanism how can we who have always as Shamans had a relationship to the
spirits of the earth of the waters of the sky if we are setting out for
alpha in Sagittarius or something like that how can we do that and not leave
our soul behind you know that the Arabs have the belief that a man's soul can
move no faster than a camel gallops so if you if you drive in your Mercedes
from Jeddah to Riyadh you have to rest for a while so your soul can catch up
well I don't think we should leave our human soul behind somehow we have to
internalize the entirety of the biological world if we are going to
become a spacefaring species otherwise we are going to get out there and
discover that something vital was left behind
and this is a great tension between ourselves and the earth between our
destiny as an energy using dream compressing space-faring stormtrooper
kind of species I mean that's all male dominance and male mentality talking and
the need to somehow fold that into a nurturing stance a
preserved
stance a stance that recognizes that the conservation of our archaic values is
really our only hope and those two things exist in a dynamic tension this
is maybe the issue that the artistic community can clarify and that must be
clarified before we can make a definitive step into the future right
now we're uncertain stewardship or angel hood which shall it be maybe I'll
take one more question some poor soul over here yes in the back
I would like to say well I don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and
Superman I
don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and Superman I
I don't really think of it as the Nietzsche and Superman I
But something you said, you know that poem by Yeats called Sailing to Byzantium?
And there's this wonderful phrase in there.
I'm not sure I can quote it perfectly, but it goes something like this.
Once out of nature, I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling.
Once out of nature, he means once he's dead.
Once out of nature, I would be a thing of gold and gold enameling.
And then he says something about a nightingale set to sing for the lords and ladies of Byzantium
of what has been and what will be.
But what it is, you see, is the image of the condensation of a quasi-mechanical object.
The soul as object.
As objectification.
And to my mind, this is where the image of the UFO has something to teach us.
The UFO is not an extraterrestrial machine that haunts the skies of the earth.
The UFO is a totality symbol thrown off by our tangential approach to the end of history.
I think...
I think that, yes, the Nietzschean Superman, that whole thing was tried by the Nazis,
and they realized it in its full expression, and it was nightmarish.
What I'm proposing is more...
There's no man in it.
It's the concrescence of the collective soul of humanity that somehow I see history
as an...
As an alchemical task and process.
And the artist, as artificer, it is the task of the artist to complete this alchemical
concrescence.
And it's a kind of irrational thing.
It is irrational.
It's that mind and matter are approaching each other on a trajectory that will bring
them together with no...
With no...
Damage to the quintessential nature of each, and we can't imagine that, because for us,
things are mind or matter.
We can't conceive of a coincidencia appositorum, and yet it's that which we must hold in our
mind if we want to see truth.
I mean, even in quantum physics, they teach you that the universe is composed of what
they call islands of Boolean algebra embedded in an ocean of ordinary algebra.
What they mean is they're having their archaic and eating it too.
They're trying to say that it's both and.
And this...
It is an irrational process.
It isn't a Nietzschean program of realization.
It's a kind of an opening.
Something wants to be born.
The promptings of our...
Religions, with all the irrational and hysterical trappings that attend them, nevertheless,
have a core perception that there is, between man and nature, a kind of compact.
And this compact, it will be redeemed.
I mean, I really think that this is the psychedelic faith.
That we are the prodigal species.
We are the...
We have descended into the inferno of matter to try and recover the pearl of immortality.
The pearl of immortality is the perfected and reconstructed earth.
And somehow, we are to be the critical factor in this equation, or the point species.
We are not acting for ourselves.
We are the energy.
We are the energy-manipulating species that, I believe, carries the hopes of all life.
All nature is watching this drama.
The life of our star is finite.
The life of the planet is finite.
But potentially, self-reflecting understanding may be, in fact, immortal.
And yet, it is breaking out of the trappings of matter.
And this is a process so large, so strange, that I don't think a single mind can encompass
it within a single moment.
It's something that we triangulate over and over again.
And for me, the psychedelic experience is how you do that.
The psychedelic experience is...
The psychedelic experience is literally arising into a higher dimension in the geometric sense.
And from that higher dimension, the psychedelic voyager carries out a transecting of the
lower dimensional object, which is the world.
And in the same way that we can build up an image of a cone out of an infinite number
of ellipsoidal...
Transsections, we can build up a true model of the world by carrying out a number of these
transections from a higher dimension.
And then it shows us how the world really works.
And when you understand how the world really works, I'm beginning to get just a hint of
it.
It works through...
Living.
Live.
And we can do it all through love.
And dream.
And intention to connect.
Through love and dream and intention toward connection.
And these are ultimately irrational values.
And they ultimately must be irrationally embraced because the momentum toward a rational conclusion
is tremendous.
And I'm gonna say it again.
but unfortunately, completely fatal.
And this is the invitation that the artist has always extended
toward a radical break with the momentum of rationalism.
It's simply that now, in this moment of tremendous crisis,
when the artist is at last called upon to perform
and there must be no stitches dropped
because this dance is the dance of transformation of the planet itself.
This is the moment of empowering.
This is what all the shamanism of the past built toward,
this final magical invocation.
James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.
That's simply a way of saying that we will find a way to make our dreams
and the dreams...
of the planet, and the life it carries, one dream.
And the way to do it is to reconnect up to the Gaian mind
through the channels of communication that were always there,
but that have not been really taken up since the late Neolithic.
It's time for us to call home, and you know
how to do it.
It's just a matter of having the courage to do it, to act,
and then to have that empowering act spread back through the psychology of the planet.
I am very optimistic.
I think we are awakening to a new day from a long, long night of the soul,
but it must be done collectively,
gently, lovingly, and with a complete faith that we are an infant held in the arms of nature,
that nature wants this to happen, that we are not an aberration.
We are granted peculiar, but we are not an aberration.
We are a necessary oddness to the completion of the whole, and this is our glory,
and this is what we are.
This is why we've been graced with self-reflection,
and we can redeem that tremendous empowerment by going forward in love and faith
to save the world through art and the pursuit of meaning.
Thank you very, very much.