Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
And if you've visited my Facebook page, you already know that the salon is in kind of a hiatus.
Yes, what's happened is that our landlord just sold the duplex we live in,
and so we're now looking for a new place to live, which will then be followed by packing, moving, and unpacking.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
KMO never misses a program, no matter what's going on in his life, and the same's true with the dope fiend.
And then, of course, there's always Lefty, who lately has actually been recording his podcast in his car when he's stuck in a traffic jam.
Well, the simple fact of the matter is that they're all better men than I am.
So, while I hope to get another podcast out in January, it could be as late as February or March
before I can get back into a routine and start cranking out new programs once again.
Now, that's the bad news, but the good news is that I've sure got a lot of new material
that I'm really looking forward to getting out to you next year.
And for our wonderful donors, well, I won't be able to mention your names each week,
but I will add a section to our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon website,
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org,
and I'll post your first name and initial there unless you tell me not to.
But since my last podcast, we have received donations from Garth A. and John J.,
which have covered our expenses through the end of the year.
So, John and Garth, on behalf of all our fellow salonners, I thank you for your support,
and I wish you and all of our fellow salonners a joyous and prosperous new year ahead.
And I guess I should say something here about the current drama about PayPal and WikiLeaks.
Several people have asked for alternative ways to make donations to the salon,
and so I've been looking into that as my time permits.
However, there aren't any across-the-board alternatives I've found,
so I'm going to keep checking into some of them and add them if and when I can.
But right now, you shouldn't be worrying about the salon.
You should be spending your money on toys for the kids.
And if you happen to not have any children of your own but are going to a family affair
where the kids get socks and stuff like that for a gift,
hey, bring them something fun to play with.
Be that aunt or uncle or friend.
The one that the kids will always remember is the fun guy that came to the party.
You know, it's probably too late for most of us to convince our relatives that we're not the crazy one.
But, hey, the kids will understand perfectly where you're coming from.
And, by the way, they're our future, so, hey, treat them well.
Now, one more thank you, and that goes out to our friend and fellow salonner, Sean Duffy,
who sent me an email that read,
Hello, Lorenzo. Thank you for all the kind work you have done.
Your podcasts have truly changed my life.
Well, you know, that's nice of you to say, Sean,
but the truth is that it's you who did all the hard work to change your life.
I am glad that the talks by these elders that we're podcasting here have worked for you,
but, hey, my hat goes off to you for actually doing all the heavy lifting.
Anyway, Sean goes on,
I have attached a file entitled Psilocybin in the Sands of Time, McKenna,
that I believe you have not yet podcast.
Although the sound quality isn't the best,
it is, in my opinion, one of the best of his lectures and interviews.
I know you have a lot on your plate,
but if you have yet to hear this recording, give it a listen.
I think you'll enjoy it as I have.
Thanks again. Love, light, and peace. Sean.
Well, Sean, you're right.
I really did enjoy that recording.
And, in fact, I enjoyed it so much that I'm going to play it for us right now.
I found that this talk, actually, that we're about to hear is from a workshop
that Terrence McKenna gave at Esalen Institute in California sometime in December of 1982.
In other words, 28 years ago this month.
In fact, today is actually the winter solstice of 2010,
which means that if you are a 2012-er,
you don't have much time to get everything done before the big event.
On the other hand, if, like me, you assume that 2013 is going to arrive on schedule
without any magical event first taking place,
well, then, maybe we should take to heart some of the suggestions
that the Bard McKenna has for us.
So let's join them now.
Consciously, it was not until the Amazon
that I saw that this was possible in a way that was accessible to me.
So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families,
and that then became the compass for all the work that I've done since then.
And I regard the degree more or less as a joke
because it was self-directed study.
They don't really...
There is no degree in shamanism.
But my interest was basically one in the phenomenology of religious experience,
religious traditions worldwide,
and primitive people against a background of tropical nature.
And stumbled onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Colombia in 1971
and was not even particularly interested in mushrooms at the time.
And we were looking for a less well-understood drug
that is still not discussed much in the literature
but exists in a very circumscribed area among three Indian tribes.
And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission that served these Indians.
And the priest at this mission had cleared pasture and brought in white cows.
And there were many, many of these mushrooms.
And as soon as we started experimenting with them,
I realized that what I had been told about psilocybin,
which was that it was analogous to LSD
but simply required a larger amount for the effect to be present,
was a complete simplification of the issue.
And actually then psilocybin became the focus of my interest
and by extrapolation the other tryptamine-related hallucinogens.
And a great dream of mine and of my brother's as well
was that the mushroom must somehow be made accessible to people
so that they may judge for themselves the difference.
And we worked with this over a number of years.
And in 1975, we succeeded in growing it
by a method that had previously been used only in the laboratory
on commercial grocery store mushrooms to study their genetics.
But it turned out to be perfectly adaptive for growing this mushroom.
Within a matter of months, we had written
Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide,
and the information was moving out into society.
But more important from our point of view
was that the mushroom was again accessible to us
so that we had psilocybin in a form
that was certified pure by Mother Nature.
And that initiated the second phase of our work with these drugs,
which has carried us up to the present day.
And it's basically a project of taking the drugs,
calling attention to the differences,
the uniqueness of the state,
and trying to attract other people's attention to it
because I have, we have a very deep intuition
of its importance for the cultural predicament
for mankind generally.
And this is how we come to where we are today, basically.
You just mentioned that the mushroom is really important
for our country right now.
And you perceive yourself as an advocate
to bring in to our culture a new element,
like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousness.
What can you learn from these experiences?
Well, the first thing that we can learn is that they exist.
In other words, that perhaps it's a truism in the 80s,
but at one point it was thought
that there were two states of consciousness,
awake and asleep.
Now there is a gamut of these states,
but I still don't believe that the people who deal with consciousness
realize how mutable consciousness really is.
There is a prejudice against the use of drugs
because there is an inherent dualism built into Western thought
where people value the experience if it is endogenously produced,
produced through ordeal or personality or dieting,
but is undervalued if it comes from drugs.
This has, in my opinion, held back the Western development
of understanding consciousness
because, quite simply,
these states I do not believe are accessible
by any means other than drugs.
And this is heresy to a number of people,
but the evidence that I lay in favor of that contention
is the history of human art
and literature and music and painting
is surprisingly empty
of the motifs which exist
in the tryptamine-induced ecstasy.
And always when I speak of hallucinogens,
I'm speaking of this limited family of drugs,
not LSD or ketamine or mescaline,
but psilocybin and DMT
and combinational drugs
which utilize strategies
for making that effect noticeable.
My career is to point at this place in nature
which I've stumbled upon
and to say,
what is this?
What do you make of this?
What are you, the physicist,
you, the psychologist,
you, the after-death researcher?
What do you make of this place?
And even the most sophisticated consciousness researchers
tend to hurry over drugs
or to focus on one drug
to the exclusion of others.
And yes, psilocybin has not received
this kind of attention and treatment.
And why that is, I'm not sure.
I think that the element of terror
involved in doing it,
the fact that it does not bathe your ego
in a cloud of certitude
or assurance that everything is going to be fine.
It is much more cut and dried than that.
And it's a challenge.
It is when you are out in the billows,
as I call it,
because it seems to come in in waves
like sets of billows.
When you're out in the billows,
you are against the power of mind,
up against the power of mind
to such a degree
that you know
that the entire enterprise
hangs in the balance,
that no matter how much
you've been told about dosage
and this kind of thing,
that the mind actually holds the key
to life and death,
and that those parts
of your control board,
which are normally masked from you,
are suddenly unmasked,
and the buttons are there
for you to manipulate
to the degree that you understand them.
And there is an element of risk.
I never tell people that there isn't,
but I think that the risk is worth it
because I think these bizarre dimensions
of beauty and information
are actually,
it is an intimation of these things
that gives human history its coherency.
In other words,
this is not a peripheral issue
to the general phenomenon
of human becoming in time.
It is actually,
because the evolution of the human species
is the evolution of the human mind,
these consciousness-expanding agents
actually anticipate an end state
in the evolution of the human mind,
and so they cast enormous reflections
back over the historical landscape.
It is they which generate religions
and physics and messianic careers
and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment
and disgrace.
And until we understand this,
until we understand that there is
a teleological object
at the end of human history
and that it can be known,
we will continue to live
the kind of limited intellectual existence
that has characterized
the last 500 years or so
of Western development.
So aside then,
tryptamine is, in my opinion,
the means to eliminating the future
by becoming cognizant
the architecture of eternity,
which is modulating time
and causing history, essentially.
How do you perceive in this context
the future of mankind
and the human mind?
Well, I've said many times,
the human history is a lunge
across 15 or 20,000 years of time
from the primitive stone-chipping primate
to that creature
which will walk into a trans-dimensional vehicle
and leave the solar system
and human history
and the concerns of the human monkey
far behind
and may take
a thousand generations of people
but as a biological fact,
as an emergent process
of planetary significance,
that is only a microcosm,
I mean, a microsecond of cosmic time.
The immediate future of man
lies in the imagination
and in seeking the dimension
where the imagination can be expressed.
The present cultural crisis
on the surface of the planet
is caused by the fact
that this is not
a fitting theater
for the exercise of imagination.
It wrecks the planet.
The planet has its own
ecostemic dynamics
which are not the dynamics
of imagination.
In space,
the physical space
that surrounds the planet,
the modalities of imagination
will be the limiting cases
of what man can be done.
So I see
man becoming
an artist and an engineer,
in other words,
flowing into our ideas,
perhaps more than we dare
even now suspect.
In other words,
a possible end state
of that kind
of technical evolution
would be
the interiorization
of the body,
of the human body,
the individual body,
and the exteriorization
of the soul.
And this seems to me
to be what the recovery
from Adam's fall
allegorically
is getting at,
that the soul
must be made manifest
and eternal
and the body
must be
incorporealized
so that it is
a freely commanded object
in the imagination.
And what I mean by that
is something like
what William Butler Yeats
is getting at
in his poem
Sailing to Byzantium
where he speaks
of the artifice
of eternity
and talks about
how beyond death
he would hope
to be
an enameled
golden bird
singing
sweet songs
to the lords
and ladies
of Byzantium.
In other words,
it's the image
of the human body
become
an indestructible
cybernetic object
and yet
within that
indestructible
cybernetic object
there is
a holographic
transform
of the body
and it is
released
into the dream.
In other words,
the after death
state
is actually
the compass
of human history
that we
are attempting
to undergo
a complete death
of the species
and as we
struggle
with this
concrescence
of thanatos
there is
there are problems
like nuclear stockpiles
and all these
things arise
because
the message
that we're trying
to read
is the message
we most fear
to hear
which is
that you must
die to experience
eternal life
essentially
but what this death
that we're talking
about is
is an understanding
that the human
the Dasein
the being
of human beings
desires to be
released
into the imagination
and until we
confront death
with the attitude
that it is
the after death
state
that needs
to enter history
there will be
a great deal
of anxiety
it's like a birth
you know
a birth
is a death
everything you
treasure
and believe in
and love
and relate to
is destroyed
for you
when you leave
the womb
and you are
launched
into another
modality
a modality
that you would
not perhaps
have chosen
but that you
cannot do
anything about
so I
I think
these drugs
anticipate this
because I think
that
time is
the moving image
of eternity
as Plato said
and
these drugs
place you
outside of time
now the mechanism
of how that's done
you can invoke
Bell's theorem
or just call it
pure magic
but
it does happen
in the here and now
it is accessible
it is not
something remote
from us
but
somehow
the clamor
of the modern
world
and in search
for answers
people have
feared to
place themselves
on the line
and to actually
wrestle with
life and death
out there
in those strange
Bardot-like
dimensions
not realizing
that there is
no other way
to win
true knowledge
I mean it cannot
be easily
come by
there is no
knowledge without
risk taking
and
I see
the human
future
emerging along
the lines
that the mushroom
visions have
insisted upon
the proliferation
of electronic
media
the densification
of information
the breaking
down of consensus
reality
the breakdown
of a coherent
dogma at the
center of physics
all these things
indicate that
it is slowly
becoming understood
that the modality
of being is the
modality of mind
and once that
realization is placed
in the center of
someone's thinking
about the world
the importance
of these drugs
will be seen
to be paramount
and once that
culture places
that understanding
in the center
of its model
of the world
these drugs
will then
point the way
and we will be
much closer
to the end
of history
that I think
we all
desire
consciously
or unconsciously
a cutting
of the Gordian
knot
and a release
of the human
species
and individual
into the dream
basically
and primitive
people
meaning preliterate
people
they just
have
circumvented
the entire
process
of history
they have
leapfrogged
over us
they are already
in the dream
they have
accepted the drug
on its own
terms
and
assimilated it
and live
with it
the problem
with that
for them
and for us
is that we are
destroying their
world
and our
intellectual
equipment
is such
that we can
never have
that
naive
epistemological
approach
to these
phenomena
because we
know
about
technique
we know
that energy
can be
manipulated
to achieve
effects
and
so
it isn't
enough
for us
to
try to
recreate
the shamanism
of preliterate
people
we have
to go
into the
shaman
space
with
the
a priori
categories
of Kant
with
the
edetic
reduction
of
Wittgenstein
with
the ideas
of Merle-Ponte
and Whitehead
all the
intellectual
equipage
of our
culture
must be
carried
with us
into that
space
to
attempt
to map
it
in a way
that will
be relevant
for us
and that
will
point the
way
toward
a shortening
of this
period
of
accumulating
shock
waves
like the
bow
shock
of
ionized
particles
or
energetic
particles
meeting
the
magnetic
field
of
the
planet
that's
what
the
chaos
at
the
end
of
history
is
were
you
just
talking
about
the
bell
here
is
no
I'm
talking
about
a
shock
wave
which
precedes
eschatology
and is
modern times
basically
I mean
it has been
increasing
throughout
history
but as
we
grow
closer
to
this
moment
where
the
human
mind
will
evolve
into
hyperspace
confusion
the
amount
of
contradiction
the
amount
of
cue
it's
called
in
engineering
just
the
amount
of
vibration
in
the
system
is
increasing
to the
point
where
it
seems
like
the
system
is
about
to
fly
to
pieces
this
signals
to me
that
the
onset
of
the
primal
crisis
that
when
we
have
gone
through
it
we
will
then
live
in
this
realm
of
altered
understanding
that
psilocybin
and these
drugs
anticipate
and it
isn't a
coincidence
that they
anticipate
them
it is
in fact
what
eschatological
time
is
is what
they
reveal
that's
why
the
cultures
we
find
using
them
are
eschatological
and
historical
cultures
what
is
the
bell
theorem
you're
talking
about
well
the
bell
theorem
is
simply
an
interpretation
of
an
experiment
in
quantum
mechanics
which
seems
to
suggest
that
information
is
non-local
in other
words
that
everything
about
everywhere
can be
known
here
and
now
because
somehow
all
information
is
cotangent
to
every
point
in
the
matrix
I
don't
pretend
to
have
the
background
to
judge
the
bell
theorem
what
I
would
say
about
it
is
if
it
isn't
true
something
like
it
must
be
true
to
account
for
the
informational
content
of
the
here
and
now
it
should
be
efficacious
information
that
bears
on
your
survival
instead
what
we
finally
take
these
drugs
is
a
density
of
information
an
alienness
of
information
an
inapplicability
of information
to the
human
condition
that
suggests
that
information
is
available
that
has
no
bearing
on
the
life
of
the
individual
or
his
the
success
of
his
evolutionary
strategy
and
I
just
cannot
believe
that
these
things
are
built
into
the
human
psyche
I
have
as I
said
I
was
involved
with
Jungian
ideas
and
I
those
archetypes
and
those
archetypal
processes
are
not
what
I'm
talking
about
I'm
talking
about
the
thing
which
for want
of a
better
word
we
call
the
alien
or
the
extraterrestrial
the
thing
which
comes
out
of
the
drug
experience
that
is
unenglishable
beautiful
but
so
bizarre
that
it
seems
to
exceed
human
categories
some
people
talk
about
entities
yes
it
can
present
itself
as
an
entity
it
can
present
itself
in
a
number
of
different
ways
it
so
alienated
the
relationship
of
intellectuals
alive
today
who are
familiar
with
the
state
of
modern
science
and
that
sort
of
thing
to
a
question
like
the
existence
of
extraterrestrials
is
approximately
in
the
same
place
or
degree
of
closure
as
the
relationship
of
15th
and
only
a
tenuous
grip
on
the
real
properties
of
matter
and
consequently
alchemy
could
exist
could
project
the
hopes
of
human
psychic
transformation
onto
inert
matter
because
so
little
was
known
about
the
real
nature
of
matter
that
it
seemed
a
reasonable
place
to
expect
these
kinds
of
things
to
extraterrestrials
somewhere
out
among
the
stars
our
state
of
the
state
of
the
development
of
our
chemistry
astrophysics
linguistics
etc
makes it
reasonable
for us
as
moderns
to
expect
that
so
then
consequently
we go
into
our
heads
and
there
seems
to
be
the
extraterrestrial
it
may
be
a
true
extraterrestrial
but
it
is
odd
that
it
is
hidden
itself
in
the
place
where
we
expected
to
find
it
and
this
causes
me
to
assume
that
actually
it's
something
far
more
profound
than
an
extraterrestrial
it's
something
which
to
gain
our
confidence
is
disguised
as
an
extraterrestrial
because
its
real
nature
is so
much
dream
of
hegemony
of
organized
intelligence
out
in
the
galaxy
that
we
will
relate
to
to and be assimilated into what i think is going on is that actually the most intelligent
life form on the planet is not man and his institutions it is the a the overmind of the
human species which is a diffuse organism technical artifacts like computers and
information transfer and retrieval systems and human beings and but human institutions are like
myths woven by the individual human cells that make up society the real controlling
modality on the planet is never visible and it is this group mind and it controls the release of
ideas into history by designating certain people as geniuses and if if there's a certain kind of
imbalance a certain kind of religion will arise to collapse that imbalance if if technical advancement
is outstripping the evolution of ethics a religion can step in to freeze these developments so that
one can catch up with the other and i think the whole consciousness movement and that has evolved over
the past 20 years is an attempt to map to verify and to open a dialogue with this thing which is the
other we call it the other we call it the alien but it is actually the overmind of the species and it
it seeks this dialogue it has been waiting all these millennia to uh for us to essentially come to a point of
intellectual maturity where we did not then require messiahs religions and these various crude fine
crude interventions into the human experience which keep us from destroying ourselves this is also what
jung called the collective unconscious right but he he painted it as a very passive kind of thing more
like a data bank or a place where all myths and all memories were i think of it as a god a kind of god and i
think it it is active in three-dimensional space it can be active in something as uh personalistic and
uh circumscribed as a string of coincidences which you experience which seem to be turning your life in a
certain direction that you may not have expected or it can be active in something like the worldwide phenomenon of flying saucers
flying saucers flying saucers are nothing more than miracles and they occur essentially to bedevil science
because science is a human institution that has arisen in the last 500 years that is the dreams of displacing
the overmind without ever realizing that it exists science dreams of this place of preeminence
science uh but science uh creates alienation um species survival problems all of these things now then the
overmind which can be thought of simply like a cultural thermostat it clicks on when the clash of contradiction
between the ethics of a society and uh some other institution in this case science becomes too great
this governing device clicks on and it begins producing those events most destructive to the institution
that is seeking preeminence in this case science so the inexplicability of the flying saucer phenomenon
is its central uh reason for being and all the effort to reduce it to something
uh metal ships from far away or anything else is doomed to failure because its very reason for being is to undermine
those kind of ontological systems uh why we're talking about this is because psilocybin
makes it inducts you into the flying saucer experience in other words a metaphor for it would be to say that
psilocybin is a means of triggering the so-called abduction experience or the close encounter of a third
kind uh once you realize that once you've satisfied yourself that that's true a number of experimental
avenues are opened up a number of different approaches to what's going on are suggested i mean here we have
alien entities eager to transmit information eager to carry on a noetic dialogue and uh we seem to be
ignoring the opportunity because our categories uh mitigate against us correctly appreciating it
are these entities coming from outer space or are they more part of us it's impossible to tell this is the game
that you must play with them is through dialogue trying to figure out if this is uh the previously unseen
human psyche or whether it is actually a thing coming from the outside and it is not an easy thing to
decide because we are so alienated from the self that we don't really know what it would be
it's not important to know the context is more important to know the content the content is very
interesting yes because even if we were somehow to verify that bell's non-locality theorem applied and
that this these were real entities around a real sun somewhere in the universe it would make
them no more or less real in other words it's a hang-up to to demand that they appear in three-dimensional
space i always i have this hang-up so i i don't put it down i always think of the apostle thomas
because you'll recall thomas was not present when christ returned after when he rose from the grave he
appeared to the apostles in the upper room and thomas was not present then later he was there and the
apostle said listen the master was here and it was wonderful and he said many little brown cigarettes
that's preposterous and at that point christ walked in and he said he said thomas come put your hand into
the wound so that you will believe and so he did and so then he believed well the moral of the story as i
read it is thomas was the doubter consequently thomas was the only one who was allowed to actually touch the
resurrection body it was because he doubted that he was vouchsafed to this position of preeminence
and i'm like that i mean i would like to touch the incorporeal body i would like to call the saucer down
and observe all of its workings but this is a spiritual aspiration that cannot be advanced by any
human technique or activity this is just something you pray for in the meantime the job is to to map it
and describe it and explore it and try to direct the attention of other people more intelligent than
myself to this astonishing fact really i mean i am i'm troubled by the fact that so many strange claims
are made today so many forms of aliens and channeling and voices in the head that when i began all this
ten years ago i was afraid to speak because i sounded mad even to myself and i sounded like a voice in the
wilderness today the situation has changed to the point where i can barely make myself heard amidst
the clamor of people who have various uh entities uh from atlantis and beyond the grave and zeta reticuli and
what have you clamoring to be heard so i uh i take it on faith and i ask you to take it on faith
that i am uh more objective interested in hard facts than these other channelers i would like people to
take a look at this phenomenon and then tell me what they think and it involves risk people fear to
do it careers are placed on the line it is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug it is
not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution a university a research institution
perhaps this is why shaman are the primary sources of the information about it are you an exploring shaman
i'm an exploring shaman i wouldn't claim to be a shaman but i think anybody who takes these things and goes
out and tries to navigate through and make maps and bring back data is a shaman for sure do you want
that everybody takes this drug cameras out and take the drug no i don't think so i think it's very uh i
think it's very dangerous i do not tell people that it's safe because uh i don't have the faith that it's
safe i know what the pharmacological literature says and it says that it's safe that at the doses where
these effects occur there can't possibly be a problem but this seems to me to be the naivete of
materialists and uh we shouldn't be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us more
comfortable to do so in other words it's saying you know the drug may not be toxic but you may be self
toxic and you may discover this on the drug in the drug experience so you have to uh you have to hone
yourself and be clean and you never know if you're clean enough until it's too late because each journey
into that dimension is a total existential commitment uh and uh the element of fear is always there
i mentioned this this morning but i think the fear validates it i'm not uh i think it's fine to take
drugs uh for pleasure but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure and the high doses of
psilocybin that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires as it says in hamlet you
must screw your courage to the sticking place mankind evolving towards a teleological goal would you comment
on that what is i think there is a a final goal in the name of the history but speaking relative to the
history of the past four or five thousand years i think the goal is as i said to invert the relationship
of body and soul so that the body becomes an image in the imagination and the soul becomes an exteriorized
solid state piece of circuitry which maintains everything else uh in stasis and i'm not sure if
people even realize what i'm picturing my mind when i say this but i think that the destiny of man and
what man will make be his destiny just because of the how we are is release into the imagination
and this is what all our after death scenarios say whether they are true or not and they may be true
and this is what poetry aspires to art aspires to its release into the imagination we are creatures of
the dream and once this is articulated with sufficient clarity and it it's happening now but i think the work
we do with these drugs we are the the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred years will lead to
an understanding uh consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain we are consciousness
we may not always be monkeys we fear the dehumanizing effect of so many computers and
uh emotions euphoric emotions not related to sex and all these things we fear them we say
we are moving further and further from nature deeper and deeper into our own psyche but this is a dualism
our psyche is nature and we are not we cannot move away from nature by exploring these places
so i believe you know that a technological recreation of the after death state is what history pushes toward
and that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and
reform from but there is also the self uh related to the body image but in the imagination
so that we each would become in a sense everyone i would live at versailles and you might live at the taj mahal
and someone else might live at buckingham palace but what you would see there if there were an exterior
observer what you would see is only that man had become a coral reef of circuitry in space and on the
planetary surface but this is a very extreme view of the history of man because it's essentially gnostic it says
we are not now what we yearn to be and are destined to be we are we are not i don't see history as the process of
accepting and coming to terms with monkeyhood i see that it will inevitably seek to transform and transcend
monkeyhood and uh this will be very frightening i mean it's frightening imagine if a even a 15th century
person were to be in this room with us and the value systems the clash of uh assumptions about what is
important and unimportant and this will be a much more intense change that and whether it is good or
bad rests on a question that i have no answer for and the question is is man good and this i maintain is the
central thing to dig at and we cannot know and there's evidence pro and con i have the faith that man is
good so i don't uh i don't fear this future but if someone had a doubt even a even a small doubt about
that then they would be repelled by this and i take all these movements which want zero-sum growth and
uh reject technology reject space colonization reject drug experimentation as artificial
these people would be very alarmed by this kind of a point of view but they do not seem to realize that
the momentum toward this kind of thing is now so great in terms of the human culture and that sort of
thing that there can be no turning back we are either going to change in to this cybernetic hyperdimensional
hallucinogenic angel or we are going to destroy ourselves the opportunity for us to be happy hunters
and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature that fell away 15 000 years ago and cannot be recaptured
i think uh gerard o'neil made it in answer to this very objection he said the earth is the cradle of
mankind there is no question about that but you do not remain in the cradle forever and this is a this is
a birth crisis that we're going through for the entire entirety of human history has been the story of
monk the monkey becoming the flying saucer and it is taking just that long in geological time but we
for some strange reason happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now
and it is a turbulent chaotic multi-dimensional uh metamorphosis that is uh there's never been
anything like it on this planet before it's absolutely astonishing information which was locked for uh
kiliocosms of time into the dna of plants and animals has through the hand and articulation
the voice of man uh been able to bootstrap itself out of the dna and into these culturally validated
rapidly operating electromagnetic codes and languages and this is allowing its development
its evolution to proceed at a rate so fast that uh the transformation is taking place essentially in
our lifetimes and psilocybin is central to this because psilocybin casts a spotlight into the darkness into
which we are moving and shows that this is what lies there it is uh the human soul essentially the over
soul of mankind calling history toward itself across the dimensions and it's taking only a moment
and it is the great great uh adventure of becoming and we are very very privileged to be in this uh final
ticking out of the last seconds of the third act do you have any comments about the fact that uh dmt is
located in the human brain well i think that puts in some sense is a strong piece of evidence for the
argument that i've been making not only is dmt endogenous in the brain but beta-carbolines of the sort
that occur in ayahuasca are endogenous in the brain as well these things as i mentioned this morning
the shift of a single atom on the ring structure of one of these molecules can cause a compound to go
from inert to highly active well that means then that it's probably very reasonable to say that we are
as close to shifting the level of endogenous hallucinogens in our head we are probably only a
one gene mutation away from that happening and if you know anything about how biological evolution works
it isn't that a change a mutation occurs and the mutation is found to be better adapted than the
previous form and uh uh hence the mutation dominates that is not the way evolution works the way it works
is you have a the normal expression of the genotype in a population and then you have mutations being
thrown up all the time and they are usually quenched except in the situation where the environment shifts
so that new selective pressures are operating in the environment when new selective pressures begin to
operate a gene that was previously without consequence may suddenly have immense consequences
so then every member of the population that you're looking at that has that gene suddenly is in a much
more advantageous position to advance their evolutionary strategy and i think that certainly modern existence
has changed the selective pressures on the human genome and now it is people who are far out
that's simply a gloss it is the people who are far out who are gaining advantage you're right frank this is happening
on the hardware level on the level of endogenous tryptamines and that sort of thing i think schizophrenia
is essentially in a way a disease of modern times and it is no it's always existed of course but the
incidence of it and the incidence of schizoid if not schizophrenic personalities and types is because
the the modalities of evolutionary selection are shifting it's as though if you think of a rain forest that
has been above water 200 million years all evolutionary niches have become occupied everything is at steady state
there's not going to be any dramatic uh radiation of a new species because everything has been worked
out and the energy flows are so tight nothing can gain a leg up on that situation but if you clear a
thousand acres of forest and reduce it to uh rubble essentially open land then what are called invader
species come in there and they very quickly gain dominance where in the jungle at steady state you
never see those plants you never see weedy annual uh heavily seeding plants in the jungle the jungle strategy
is for enormous plants which produce small numbers of seeds and this is again an analogy to the modern
situation that uh modernity is a desert and we are jungle monkeys and some new evolutionary selective
pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation new ideas are coming to the fore uh psilocybin is a
selective filter for this the wish to go to space is a selective filter for this just the wish to know your own mind
that this is this is this is part of the picture this is what's happening it's inevitable it's a very good
thing i think if you have faith that man is good and my uh i need to be the measure you said earlier that
psilocybin is coming from outer space there's a possibility that this mushroom is there's a possibility of
that fred hoyle and an associate of his have uh my aid on this saying that spore bearing life forms because
spores have the capacity to survive in the conditions of outer space that spore bearing life forms may over
truly large scales of time percolate out through the galaxy and serve as a basis for the evolution of life
on various planets or insert themselves into already existing planetary ecologies and insert themselves
there i don't i on these matters of specific fact like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial and that
sort of thing i haven't the faintest idea the mushroom itself is such a mercurial elusive zen
and sort of personality that i never believe a word it says i simply entertain its notions and try and
sort through them and i found that to be the most enriching approach to it to know that the option
of believing that is there on hard evidence is very exhilarating as to what is really going on
uh the mushroom assures me that i haven't got even the faintest grip on what is really going on
but something is going on can i ask another question sure what do you think is evil and can these
mushrooms be misused well i think anything can be misused uh most evil is uh trivial and i if i could
speak off the top of my head the only evil uh that associates itself with mushrooms is uh taking it but
taking too little in other words
evil evil is uh there's a word i want it uh it isn't twiddle but it's something like that
evil is when you play at things not in play in the hindu cosmic sense but where you fiddle with things
you muck with things because you don't want to get your feet wet you want to be able to say you've done
these things but you never want to really place your validity on the line and i am amazed at the number of
people who claim uh familiarity with psychedelic drugs who when you actually question them closely
it's very clear that they have a sub-threshold dose even if they've taken it 50 or 100 times they have managed
through through low doses and strong defenses to always keep the demon at bay that's the demon with a d-a-i
to keep the demon at bay and they don't know what they're talking about you must take a sufficiently large
large and dose of
you enter into these places not to knock him personally because he's a very nice man but as
an example uh roland fisher whose work you may know i talked to him and he has given psilocybin
he says to about 15 000 people at nimh and now he's retired to majorca but uh
oh you do you know and i said to him i said roland what do you make of it i mean what do you make of
it he said well make of what and i said well what do you make just specifically of the hallucinations
you say you give it to all these people you took it to six times what happened when you closed your
eyes and looked at the hallucinations he said i never closed my eyes i was highly agitated throughout
and i just realized these things which seemed to me as natural as breathing
just slide right past people i mean of course you do not eat for a few hours before you do it
of course you lie down in darkness and compose your mind and look at the darkness behind your eyelids
and of course you invoke it through the wish to have it come to you these are things as simple as
they can be yet here was a man with a lifelong professional involvement published dozens of
papers has made contributions in the mapping of consciousness but he could never just stop
fidgeting long enough to see it so that's so my idea of that as evil evil is uh anything which trivializes a
mystery would be evil and since this is a mystery uh any uh dismissing of it or constantly taking it at
low doses for hedonic purposes i mean there's nothing wrong with that but that's not the whole story and
nobody should think that that gives you a pedestal from which to uh speak about it you really have to
do these heroic amounts and uh and integrate them this is something i haven't even talked about in
this interview but these things are very state-bounded but terms roland fisher in fact coined that simply
means that they're very hard to retain and remember what exactly happened at the peak of the flash and
you come down you say well it was very strange there was information there were entities but i just can't
get back to it the way to overcome that is to be as psychedelic in your down life as possible and by
psychedelic i mean ideas cognitive activities you should dance you should read you should think you should
paint you should sculpt you should converse you should constantly involve yourself in cognitive activities
because taking these drugs is one of the major cognitive activities and then if you have a grip on
human history where the human enterprise has been where it's going if you have been many places
uh it's easier to map i'm i'm reminded of there's an alchemical aphorism i think it's attributed to
athanasius krishna where he says uh the oldest books farthest countries the deepest forests the highest mountains
this is where you must seek the stone and what he means is you can simply acquire experience
because it is only in the acquisition of acquired experiences that you have a reservoir to draw on
when you seek to make metaphors and analogies about the alien thing when you invoke the god
then you can map back onto it and say well it's like this it's like that knowing that it is not
that or this but the fund of analogies is there to give you a grip on it so there's an obligation to
experience deeply and richly and thoroughly and intellectually you can map back onto it but it's a
dialogue between you and it where you are discovering new things about yourself and it and trying to
resolve the question are we the same thing and i haven't resolved the question my suspicions flow one
way and then another way but i think it is without a doubt to a living mystery existing in the presence
available to anyone sincere enough to seek it and for me that was a life transforming discovery
and revelation because i didn't believe there were any mysteries i believe there may have been once
but to discover one right in our midst and it cannot be reduced it cannot be uh pulled apart into its
constituent uh uh functions it is truly a unitary mystery and it's accessible in our lives right now
without kneeling at anybody's feet without following any regimen of uh of uh denial simulation of any belief
system and this is very big news i think the mystery has always been there i'm sure but our society is so
bizarre and has led us so far astray that we have to rediscover it and this process is happening this is
what the 20th century is all about and we are still tiptoeing at the edge of it even though
great men great women great mappers of the consciousness have come and gone we are still at
the very infancy of this thing and it calls out to us it beckons it says do more see more know more
and to be more a part of it you're listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their
lives one thought at a time did you uh catch what terence said near the end of this uh lecture when
he was talking about the other and whether we are the same as it and then he said he hadn't actually
quite resolved that question yet well uh that's where i am as well you know once i quit believing
things but instead began using what i call working hypotheses about the cosmos well uh i've now gone
from a single belief to dozens of working hypotheses uh it certainly is less constricting and once you
get used to it it's kind of nice to just accept the fact that until we die we simply aren't going to
have any real answers about the next stage of our journey and so it seems to me that the only
sensible thing to do is to get together with as many friends as we can and dance and then just keep
on dancing for as long as we can you know i'm sure there are other ways to spend a life but for me
singing and dancing seem really close to the top but uh maybe the best thing for us to do is uh simply
just to get together more often with friends and family and it doesn't even have to be in person all
the time either for example at the recent psychedelic conference in la i bumped into my friend alan who
told me that up in british columbia up around nelson where dustin still holds forth late on sunday
nights he'll sometimes hear cuts from the salon so that got me to thinking and late last sunday night
i stayed up i vaped a little bc bud and then tuned into kootenay cooperative radio over the net and had a
virtual evening knowing that there were other salonners doing the same thing right then plus
i was lurking on the girl report dot com's forums at the same time which is about as close to
multitasking as i can get anymore anyway hey don't think that you're alone out there in cyberdelic
space because you aren't there's a lot of us out there and we're all connected one way or another
and as my favorite canadian comedian red green says keep your stick on the ice it only gets better
you know uh here we are at the end of uh the year 2010 and uh what a year it's been huh at this uh
very moment i think we can all sense that there is probably a little more sorrow in the world right
now than is normal even among the most affluent among us those who are financially able to travel home for
the holidays even the well-off are having a hard time right now you know on top of all the political
upheavals going on the whole planet it seems is uh experiencing unusually difficult weather and uh
travelers everywhere are having a less than pleasant time of it maybe uh this is nature's way of letting us
know uh those of us who are more well off at least uh maybe we should be able to find a little more
empathy for the vast majority of our fellow humans who are having hard days like this every day
you know uh recently there have been a few days when i decided to feel sorry for myself and
got depressed about having to move once again but then i took a look around and i see how unbelievably
fortunate i am i'm sure there are a lot of problems in my life just like we all have hey you know that's
life but you know what there are quite literally billions of people who have it significantly worse
than i do and although it pains me that i'm not in a position to help them all out there's something i
can do and i think you can do too to make the world just a little bit better and that is find a couple of
small children and bring a smile to their faces even if it's only for an instant every moment of joy we
can bring to those little innocent beings well the better the world becomes and if your holidays aren't
going perfectly well well uh don't take it out on the kids hey we're the ones who have created
everything in this world right now and they haven't had a chance yet so go out of your way to smile and be
nice to the little ones and see if it doesn't make your world a little better too and uh so that'll do it
for today and and again happy winter solstice 2010 and again i'll remind you that this and most of the
podcasts from the psychedelic salon are available for you to use in your own audio projects under the
creative commons attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions about
that just click the creative commons link at the bottom of our psychedelic salon webpage which you can
get to via psychedelicsalon.org and if you're interested in books that have a little psychedelic
orientation you may want to listen to my novel the genesis generation which is available as a pay what
you can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us and for now this is lorenzo
signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends