McLuhan

, who's a very interesting figure, a-as, you know, a radical thinker in communications theory and a devout Catholic, believed that, uh, the Holy -- the manifestation of the Holy Ghost was electricity. And, and to him the ringing of the planet by electronic media was the unfolding arms of an archangel.

I mean, he literally saw electricity as God’s love made manifest, and-and he may not -- he hasn’t been proven wrong yet. I mean [woman laughs], it may yet knit us all together, and make us one, and lift us off and send us to the stars. It’s a wonderful stuff, electricity. You know, for, uh, I-I like to talk about it, because for thousands of years, electricity was this stuff which some people knew about, and what they knew was that you skinned a cat, and you--and you dried its skin in the wind, and then you got an amber rod, and you -- a polished rod of amber, and then you would go into a dark room with your cat skin and your amber rod, and you would rub it back and forth like this, and then you would pull the amber rod away from the fur, and you would see miniature lightning storms of static electricity. And, that was it; for thousands of years that was it.


And, then, in the 17th century, make it the 18th century, uh, people invented what we called Leyden jars, which were this tricky way of storing this stuff, so that you could store up a lot of it, and then in a dark room you could discharge it across a gap with this snap, and from that, you know, I mean, you talk about a shamanic invocation [some laughter], from that, you know, we light cities, we smelt steel, we sink shafts miles into the earth, and it’s just this little elemental, that we were able to coax into becoming our friend! Well, who knows how much of this sort of thing there is.

According to McLuhan, that’s the major thing, and 'the electrification of the body', you know, this is a theme you get as early as Whitman: ‘I sing the body electric’. You get it in Steven Vincent Benét in his poem ‘John Brown’s Body’ where he says, ‘I see the human body cold electric rage’, and he-he pictures it as a superstructure. Uh, electricity as information, as the Logos, as the freeing and re-ef--rarefaction of thought. It all, uh, it’s credible. It’s credible. I mean, when you think about electricity, in and of itself, uh, as modern inventions go, it must be the most benign there is, because other than seating criminals in electric-wired chairs, it is not a weapon of mass destruction. You cannot rain it down on your enemy’s cities. Uh, it’s, uh, pure energy in the service of light, one thing, and information. And, it’s generated--I don’t know how many of you know this, but it’s generated out, uh, stable magnetic fields.


When-when we were in the 5th grade, we made engines by wrapping, uh, nails with wires and setting them, delicately balanced between permanent magnets, and, you know, you coax this stuff into being. We take it for granted, because we don’t understand it, but if you’re down close to where it’s coming into being, it’s like coaxing some kind of demon out of the matrix and into the service of thought and light. Very psychedelic.

Q: So, how do you see the body being coaxed back into the Word?

Terence: Well, I don’t know, It’s a hard thing to picture, isn’t it? Um.

Q: Well, maybe it’s like those Tibetan letters that start becoming real and vibrating…I don't know.

Terence: Well, there are a number of -- I think we have like pieces of the puzzle, but we don’t know quite how to arrange them. One is, Virtual Reality. Do you all understand this concept? Because, I’ve mentioned it and it’s quickly becoming central to my references. Virtual reality is this technology now being developed where they give you a helmet and a body glove, and when you look in the helmet, you see another world, and you’re in it. And, you can walk around and pick things up and open doors and -- and it’s all sustained by computers, but the illusion is very real, and they’re only at the beginning of the process of creating this illusion.

Okay, so that’s a technology sitting off there with a potential application. Another is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is making things very small. And, there’s a whole enthusiasm for this. And, people who, uh, you know -- I talked yesterday about, uh, being down at the

baz


baz

, and watching the stratocumulus clouds move over the ocean, the number of water droplets in a stratocumulus cloud exceeds the number of people in the world! Therefore, if we were the size of water droplets, we could simply exist in that kind of a, of a cloudscape! Well then, okay, so that’s another technology that’s sitting there.

Another is,uh, this wonderful fantasy that I told you, some of you about a few days ago, where we see a man walking on a beach, and the man -- his planet is perfect. Its oceans and its atmosphere and its glaciers and its -- and its equatorial forests are all in balance. And this man is naked, except for a thread, like a Hindu thread that crosses him. And on this thread, there's sufficient space for as much as a thousand or more small beads. Each bead is a doorway into a technological potentiality that is entirely suppressed in three dimensional space. In three dimensional space, there is just man and nature. But, when this man closes his eyes, there are menus. And, these menus lead to other menus. In other words, the culture, the entire culture, has become virtual.


This is one possibility, that the culture be made virtual. Another possibility, which is sort of the reverse of that, and there’s a company on the peninsula trying to do this, is to place a textual reality behind apparent reality. So that everything is a button, you know. It’s, it is what it is, but it’s also a button. So, I look at this, the question forms in my mind: ‘What is this?’ The ‘What’ pushes a button, and textual accompaniment informs me that this is cypress wood, cut three years ago. [Audience laughs]. Do you see how -- what this would do to the world? Now, we’re well on our way in the project of making the Word flesh, and the flesh Word. We, at least, have them lined up with the Word behind the flesh, and in some cases, the flesh behind the Word. Embedded. Embedded. Ontologically arranged in a situation of mutual reinforcement.

Oh, okay, another, uh, technology is, um, some kind of, uh, some kind of, uh, severing from the physical connection. And, then there's a lot of debate about is this possible: the old consciousness without an object riffraff? Well, it has to be explored. It can’t be known. The other thing is, the persistence of the intuition of non-material worlds inhabited by self-organizing entelechies of one sort or another seems to imply that some kind of dematerialization is, at least, theoretically, possible.


Uh, I’ve talked a lot in these circles about the-the questions raised by the ecstasis that comes with DMT, where you actually break into a world where there are, what I call, 'autonomous self-transforming machine elves', but what we have discussed in terms of are these the 'sprites' of classical European mythology? Are they dwellers in some parallel continuum, unsuspected by any of our sciences or ontologies? And, then, still more unsettling possibility, are these--is this somehow an ecology of souls? Is the eerie connectedness to the human dimension that these thing have, because, in fact, this is a stage of some sort, in human existence? If, what God coming[?] tangential to history means is human beings unraveling the mystery of physical death, then, I think that would be a sufficient fulfillment of the, uh, sort of dramatalurgical [sic] demands of a dénoument: that we stride towards the mystery, the mystery strides towards us, and everything is resolved in a revelation of the understanding and meaning of death.

I--this kind of thing makes me very uncomfortable, uh, perhaps because it’s fairly feeling-toned and emotion-laden. Uh, I can ima--I- it doesn’t trouble me to imagine contacting, uh, informational beings in a parallel continuum. But, the notion of encountering an ecology of souls, I think, is hair-raising if you take it seriously, because, uh, even the most spiritual of us are so deeply programmed by the assumptions of scientific materialism that I think something like that on the short term here and now really gives us pause.

Brother David …

Q: Yes. In this process of, uh, great return to the Word in flesh, where do you see the function of the poets?


Terence: Well, you know, people have talked, Robert Graves and others, about what he called an Ursprache, an original speech, and Celtic poetics somewhat assumes this. I think this language that is seen, is the project that the poets should take very seriously. We need to not simply make better poetry; we need to make poetry of an entirely different order, and we will recognize it when we see it - not when we hear it. It will not be heard. It will be seen. To carry language from three -- from two dimensions into three is the task of the poet and the rebel in the 20th century.

And, there is a model for this which I will explain to you so that it doesn’t seem so outlandish and so we can see that nature once again has sanctioned this move, and that is: A long time ago, 700 million years ago, more or less, the great Tree of Life made a primary division between the vertebrates, the creatures with backbones, and the invertebrates. Evolving along the invertebrate line and reaching the greatest, uh, brain size and complexity of nervous system on the invertebrate side of things, were the cephalopods. These are the squids, and the benthic octopi, the eight-armed ones and the ten-armed ones. You may not realize that that they were actually mollusks, related to escargot. So, they are an extremely primitive creature from the point of view of those of us with backbones and binocular vision and frontal lobes, and so forth and so on


Nevertheless, the interesting thing about benthic octopi is that they can change their color over a wide range. Now, you may have heard this fact and assumed that it had to do with camouflage against their surroundings so that they can avoid predators. This is not what it’s about at all! Octopi change color, and they can also change the shape of their skin from smooth to rugose and wrinkled, and then what’s called pileate, little points all over it. They can go through all of these color changes and texture changes. And, octopi have extremely well-evolved eyes. In fact, evolutionary biologists always compare the eyes of octopi to human eyes, as an example of what is called ‘parallel non-convergent evolution' because clearly the two are not related. But, the argument is made. You see, they solved the problem the same way in two different places, so it’s a very neat example of convergent -- non-convergent evolution.

Um, but what’s interesting for our discussion is the mode of communication of these things. They become their linguistic intent. This repertoire of blushes, dots, stripes, traveling fields, color changes, and then, because they are soft bodied, they can quickly reveal and conceal all parts of their body very quickly. So, if you watch an octopus in communication, its surface texture is changing, its color is changing, and it is hiding and revealing, it’s dancing! And it’s a dance of pure meaning perceived visually by the object of its intention which is other octopi. So, compare this for a moment to our method of communication. We use rapidly modulated small mouth noises. As primates, we have an incredible ability to make small mouth noises. We can do this for up to six hours at a stretch without tiring. [Audience laughs].


No other thing that we can do approaches the level of variation with low energy investment that the small mouth noises do. A person using a deaf and dumb language is exhausted after 45 minutes. But, the problem with the small mouth noises form of communication is: I have a thought. I look in a dictionary that I have created out of my life experience, I map the thought onto the dictionary, I make the requisite small mouth noises, they cross physical space, they enter your ear, you look in your dictionary which is different from my dictionary, [audience laughs] but, if we speak what we call ‘the same language’, it will be close enough, that you will, sort of, understand what I mean.

Now, if I don’t say to you, "What do I mean?," you and I will go gaily off in the assumption that we understand each other. But, if I say to you, "Did you understand what I said then?" You say: ‘Yes. You meant that you don’t want to sit with Harry and Sally because their pending divorce makes you uncomfortable." So, "No, that’s not what I meant ." So there’s a misunderstanding because the dictionaries are not matched.


Now, notice what’s happening with the octopi – there is no dictionary. Both parties are seeing the same thing because my body is my meaning. I become my meaning, and you behold the meaning I have become. I am like a naked thought. Not even a naked nervous system. More naked than that! I am like a naked thought, in aqueous space, unfolding in time. I maintain, this is why octopi eject clouds of ink, it’s so they can have private thoughts! [Audience laughs]. Because, if you can be seen, you can be understood! Well, uh, this is a perfect model, uh, condoned by nature for the kind of transformation that we want to lead our culture toward. And I don’t think it’s that outlandish.

Our previous animal totems were chosen unconsciously, and were rather unfortunate, I think. I take the totem of the 19th century to be, um, the horse, expressed as the steam engine. And the totemic animal of the 20th century is the raptor, the bird of prey, expressed as supersonic high performance fighter aircraft, which is just, you know, the leanest, meanest machine you can get together these days. But these, uh, mammalian and avian images are too close to the rapacious heart of the primate inside us. Embracing an image of the soul, like that of the octopi, is a permission for a strange and alien kind of beauty to be led into our lives, and these things are strange and alien, let me tell you.


The situation I describe with these octopi was, uh, coastal, shallow water octopi. So called circolittoral octopi. But, they have also evolved into the depths. The so-called abyssal octopi that exist below 1500 meters in the sea where there is absolute darkness. And to carry their intention to communicate into that darkness over the past 700 million years, they have evolved phosphorescent organs, and have covered themselves with lights, with eyelid-like membranes that can be rapidly blinked and flickered, so that when you descend into the abyss, you then see pure linguistic intentionality among the cephalopodia because they have become what we aim to become under the wise leadership and stewardship of George Bush; namely, a thousand points of light! [Audience laughs] [Terence laughs]

Is this guy for real? Was it Flanders Fields, armies clash by night and that whole business?

Q: Was it only beholding one another, or is there, maybe, a mechanism at work, like when yawning is contagious, that it’s not only watching, but actually, perhaps what happens to your body has transmitted it to mine?

Terence: Well, this is fascinating stuff to study. The biologists who are studying these things are actually creating a grammar, and a syntax, and they are beginning to understand what certain things mean. And the level of meaning. There’s a wonderful book called "Communication and Non-communication Among the Cephalopods", and it makes the point that, communication is a very double edged thing. You want to communicate to somebody, but usually, you -- your message, it’s also important that your message not be picked up my other somebodies. So, there can’t be just a full-on drive toward apprehend ability.


There also is a counter-veiling force toward concealment, obscurantism, double entendre, so forth. You know someone said that language is invented to lie. Well, in a way, that’s true, because of the problem of non-communication. As soon as you have something to communicate, there are places that you don’t want the message to go. And so this creates a very interesting problem. If I were 20 years old, I'd go back into marine biology just to spend time with these things. They're quite amazing and they have very large brain capacity. I’m -- could be -- I think John Lilly was all mixed up to look for a mind in the water in that it was mammalian chauvinism, that drove them to dolphins and, and whales. That, maybe they are intelligent, but the language feats, when you see videotape of these cephalopods, you realize you are in the presence of an opera!

Q: What kinds of things are they communicating, besides maybe fear, or…


Q: What kinds of things are they communicating, besides maybe fear, or…

Terence: Well, they are communicating -- they have elaborate sexual displays, and it’s a very tricky thing, sexuality among cephalopods because the male usually doesn’t survive the encounter. So, a lot of time is spent getting it right, before you commit yourself [Audience laughs]. So, they have very complicated courtship thing, and, and one of the things that’s always said about them, is that, uh, you know, I mean, every child’s book will tell you this about octopi – they’re shy creatures. Well, guess why! It’s because they wear their heart on their sleeve! Everywhere they go, other octopi can tell exactly what they’re thinking and feeling, so they live alone, and they only get together on special occasions - for communication, basically. And, uh, and the repertoire is as complex as human language. So that they could be discussing the equivalent of, uh, Spencer’s epithalamium or something. I mean, we don’t know what they’re talking about!

Q: Do we have a sort of Rosetta Stone you know about?


Q: Do we have a sort of Rosetta Stone you know about?

Terence: We have a primitive grammar, but, uh, it’s only for one species. And, uh, I’m not really interested in what they’re saying, because I think it would only make sense if you were an octopus. But I’ll be that, uh, -- you see it’s a model for us. Wouldn’t we like to dance for each other and be perfectly understood, and we -- wouldn’t we like to see someone dance and to know that this was their mind and their body, somehow at one? In a way – God, does everything go back to everything? – in a way, this is the theme of skinny legs and all! This is the theme of the Dance of the Seven Veils! Octopi do it. Nubile Hebrew princesses do it. Everybody dances toward the truth, dropping veils as they go, and then, of course, the ‘nakedness of truth’ is a cliché.

Q: You mentioned, um, bringing it to a practical level.

[Terence: Do that, yes!]

You mentioned the hallucinogenic experiences, in one, in one way, that um, I don’t think I accelerated anything in my life; I feel that I just have just aligned with it, moving a freer way, so, I wouldn’t -- I wouldn’t seek out a kind of hallucinogenic experience in order to accelerate or to get more transforming; I do it because it’s enjoyable. It’s, um, it’s truly exciting and passionate, and I do seem to transform in the process and grow. Are there any ways, or other ways, that you might suggest? And also, I’m interested in sound which is -- you're talking about going from sound to light.

[Terence: Mmhmm]


[Terence: Mmhmm]

And I have a way of starting to where I am or, again, following my excitement which happens to be making tones. And I’ve reproduced experiences such as, uh, very simply, like a hot tub, where I make a tone and another person has an experience of being in a hot tub. They go from being very cold, to being very comfortable, very vulnerable, very open, very loving. And, uh, it occurred to me that I can reproduce a mushroom experience or, um, you know, somebody’s drugs you mentioned earlier in the Amazon …

[Terence: ‘That you could reproduce it with sound?’]

I could make tones and, such as in Tibet, they can, you know -- tones are, you know -- can bring physical objects into being, and move energy and such… That’s my exploration, I was wondering if you had any ideas on them.

Terence: Well, something sort of along that line, um, that I've worked with for years and observed for years, and I find very interesting is, you know, in South America there is this drug, plant-drug of shamanic tradition of great age, called ayahuasca, or yagé


And what seems -- it’s -- it’s chemically a little different from anything we’ve discussed, and so, consequently, neurologically a little different. When this -- when this drug was first discovered in the 20’s, they called, uh, they isolated a white crystal from it, and called it telepathine. Because they believed that these deep forest Indians were having some kind of state of group-mindedness behind this. Well then, and that was all very exciting that there was a drug called telepathine, but then later they found out that the drug had already been discovered in another plant, in the Peganum harmala, the soma plant I mentioned, and had been named harmine, so that the rules of nomenclature went back to precedent.


But, persistently, since then there have been reports of group states of mind caused by this drug. So we explored this in the 70’s fairly thoroughly. In ’71, ’72, again in ’76, and again in ’81. And, um, different things were going on. First of all, the people down there who take this drug, are into what they call, icaros. Icaros are magical songs, i.c.a.r.o.s., icaro, and the accomplishment of a shaman is judged by how many of these magical songs he has. And they're taught to you by the spirits, they say. But the interesting thing is, is that the icaro, within the culture, is criticized as a work of visual art. It is not thought of as a song. It is not listened to. It is looked at. And when people criticize it, they criticize its form and its color. And in taking this drug, we discovered that there is something about it, it -- it seems to dissolve the cultural barrier between the synesthesia of sound and light. So that you can make a tone, like mmmmmmm and it emerges as a streak of cyan blue,that just stands there in space as long as you… and it clearly, this stripe is related to the sound. When you stop the sound, the stripe disappears. Well then you discover that when you modulate the sound, the color is modulated. Well, then you begin breaking it up and you discover that voice has become transformed into an instrument for manipulating light.


And, again, it has to do with these drugs which are very close to neuro-transmitters, just one gene away from being naturally produced. It’s as though, this is a biochemical place where, what we experience as the evolution of language and our abilities, our cognitive abilities to integrate and express language are happening. So that, uh, you know, I think this should be looked at. I think maybe the path to the to the kind of visual lang -- visually beheld form of communication that I talk about, is to look at shamanic cultures Where this may have been happening all along, and people assume it. It is true. When you go up these jungle rivers to the really bare-assed people, that um, they, the elders really do get together and take this stuff. And they do have a collective, complex collective image of what should be done for the good of the group! It’s not exactly a vision of the future. It’s more complicated than that. Because they also have a vision -- a three dimensional vision of the kinship structure of the village, of a whole bunch of clan and sib-group associations to the plants and animals in the forest which are hidden from the eyes of the casual visitor.


They are -- it isn’t that so much that they predict the future as that they go into the higher dimension of their own cultural information space, and from there they make decisions. Where should we hunt? Who should we make war on, or not make war on? Where should we move? Um, you know, and even decisions about triage of children, and that sort of thing, since that does go on. So, uh, you know, how much of human navigation through history has been done by processing ordinary cultural information on a higher dimensional level by perturbing neurological functioning? I mean, if there is any angle that would have given us an edge, we would have found it, and we would have used it. And I’ve discussed in other lectures, the way in which small doses of psilocybin improve vision, and how this would have fit back into primitive hunter-gatherer system. Very simply, they would have just outbred everybody not using mushrooms because a pair of chemical binoculars, in a hunting environment is an adaptive advantage that could not be ignored! And so forth, and so on. Yeah.

Q: By, copying your hand movements, it helps me see what you were talking about like in a virtual reality, and that’s what they do in neuro-linguistic programming and the people who’ve made fire-walking popular, like, Tony Robinson’s country where neuro-linguistic programmers...


Terence: Maybe neuro-linguistic programmers could study octopi? If I had eight hands I could really get gestural. I, I… a funny experience involving octopi. I know a woman, I’m sure she would not begrudge me this description of her. She’s a very frank exhibitionist. I mean, this is the woman who at every party takes her clothes off and dances on the table tops and so forth. She’s an inveterate exhibitionist and she’s totally frank about it. And I, uh, I had been to the Monterey aquarium, and seen the octopus there. They have a giant octopus. Well, most of the time this guy just hunkers low, and he’s a sort of off in the corner, one beady eye checking you out. But, of course, because octopi have this mode of communication, uh, they're very set up to respond to visual display. So, this woman walked pass this tank and this octopus practically leaped into the air. It came down out of the tunnel. It was pressing against the glass. It was beating against the glass and what it was, was one exhibitionist recognizing another [Audience laughs]. I mean, it was just clear across the species’ lines. The power of neurosis knows no barrier [Terence and audience laugh together].

Q: But she also had almost orange hair, very red, bright hair that the sunlight …

Terence: That’s true, it was probably sending a message to this octopus that was, uh, obscene, in the very least.

Q: Was she dancing?

Terence: No, she was just trying to be unobtrusive, but this woman being unobtrusive is a show stopper.


Q: Terence, when you talk about language, or the word use in the way people talk, to me that sounds like a whole body language. And, and when you go into print, I’m making all these unconscious assumption values of what you’re saying is true partly based on your body language?

Terence: True, but body language is probably, is --, has really faded for us. Probably because of the telephone. And the telephone really staunches that. And, uh, yes, it would be… there… we probably were much more linguistically rich in the past. We muted ourselves.

Q: Terence, just to let you know what happens when you discover sparks nowadays. When I was a kid, I was a science buff, and I made a Tesla coil and so on. Before that, I accidentally induced a spark in a transformer. Unexpectedly, the spark jumped and it was sort of my first religious experience. I saw this spark and all sorts of things burst loose in my ten year old head. Two years later the F.C.C. triangulated my house for admitting a spurious radiation because, you know, you have to regulate that sort of thing. And, I felt sort of like someone put a big pot lid over my head, and between that and being suckered into that moody vital institute with their big Tesla coil movie,

[Terence: Yeah, right?]

just left a bad taste in my mouth. I’m glad we’re onto other things now besides sparks and amber.

[Terence: Oh, okay!]

A bitter experience.


[Terence: Oh, okay!]

A bitter experience.

Terence: There is a notion, you know, in Latin spark is as, is scintilla. This word exists only in English in the legal phrase ‘there was not a scintilla of evidence against him’. But in alchemy, this idea lived on for a long, long time, and there’s a whole literature of causing the scintilla and seeing it like you did, so you were unconsciously caught up in an alchemical archetype.

Well, why don’t we knock off, I think that’s enough for this evening …

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Inner Visions, Future Vectors

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1990

Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

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Novelty and the Transcendental

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Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA

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Experiment at Petaluma

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Terence McKenna: And I do agree with you. I think the difference between the 1960s and the 1990s in terms of the psychedelic compounds is that the sixties entirely lack any awareness of shamanism or the historical role that these substances have played throughout human history and prehistory. Uh, the sixties believed they were inventing this reality for the first time. Now that we have been able to compare the psychedelic experience to the way it is done in the Amazon, in West Africa, in areas where these things have been used and understood for a long time. We know have a model. And it's the model not that you take low doses and go with your friends to a rock concert, but that you take high doses in a situation of sensory isolation, such as a quiet dark room and make an inward journey into the self that parallels the journey that shamans have always made, uh, to recover lost souls or to cure or to discover the whereabouts of,


or to cure or to discover the whereabouts of, uh, lost objects. So, in a way psychedelic, uh, exploration has gained power, respectability and, uh, and legitimacy by discovering that it's own roots were in a paleolithic religion of great, uh, power and wide distribution. In other words, psychedelic voyaging is not something new. This is how religion was done for the first million years, not the last two thousand years. This is really the only exception to this rule. And I agree with what you also said about, uh, how how vast this domain seems to be. Serious psychedelic voyagers I think can agree the further in you go to this realm the larger it appears to be. Really what we are doing is we are discovering the inner richness of organism. That, you know, the richness of the human world is not in owning stuff. The richness of the human world is, uh, lies in being able to access what is within us. Our minds are


to access what is within us. Our minds are not blank slates or merely repositories of traumatic memory. Our minds are doorways into an infinite labyrinth. A kind of Borgesian library of infinite possibilities and we can choose to open these doorways in whatever sequence or fashion we wish.


That, that twenty thousand years ago on the plains of Africa this, the expansion of the human diet, the restless search for new food sources that led our primitive ancestors to include mushrooms in their diet that contain psilocybin. And out of that synergistic food stamping[sp?] that springs the whole spectrum of human cultural effects, religious, religion, language, poetry, magic, dance. All of these, uh, unique expressions of humanness come out of the the restlessness of primate organization and the synergy of psychoactive psilocybin in the harmaline diet. This is the real missing link. This is the real key to what the factors were that called us forth, uh, into, uh, humanness.

Then[sp?] should we talk about language?

Female audience member: Yeah.


TM: Well, uhm, first of all let's talk about ordinary language, which is probably, uh, the closest thing to a miracle in the natural world. Uh, it's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and, uh, other animals and primates. And it's not a physiological difference. It's a difference in behavior that language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and certainly it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do. We're born into what William James calls a a blooming, buzzing confusion. But, uh, by the acquisition of words we mosaic over, uh, various sectors of this blooming, buzzing confusion with words. We replace the unknown with the known through the substitution of words and by the time a child is two or three they have completely created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and, uh, reality. Reality from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumor brought through the medium of language. And every culture


brought through the medium of language. And every culture accentuates different parts of reality. So within a sense every culture is a different reality. Language is the stuff [sp?] of the world, not quarks or wave packets or neutrinos, but language. Everything is made of language. All the constructs of science are actually interlocking constructs of syntax. Well, so that's ordinary language, which seems to define reality to a kind of process of lying about it. For instance by creating subject-object distinctions, which are in fact not true to the matter, but somehow operationally necessary for us to navigate in the kind of lower dimensional space that we inhabit. Then there is the phenomena of non-ordinary, or what I call visible language. And, uh, this is very interesting to me. This is where technology, uh, virtual reality, cybernetics, human machine interfacing can actually, uh, make an impact and explore a frontier. Visual language is a transformation of the physiological impulse towards syntax into a final product, speech,


impulse towards syntax into a final product, speech, which is not heard with the ears, but beheld with the eyes. And, uh, it's very interesting that all our metaphors of clarity of speech are visual metaphors. We say I see what you mean, he spoke clearly. This means that at the organismic level we associate a higher, uh, signal clarity with visual input. And on DMT and other tryptamine psychedelics you actually experience the field of language, both heard and self-generated as something that is visibly beheld. It's, uh, almost as though the project of communication becomes high speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and intentionality. Well, this would remain a kind of esoteric performance on the part of shamans at the height of intoxication, if it were not for the fact that, uh, electronics and, uh, electronic cultural media, computers, make it possible for us to actually create, uh, records of these, uh, higher linguistic modalities. In other words it's possible


higher linguistic modalities. In other words it's possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech, adjectives, modifiers, subjects and objects, uh, were, uh, interpreted by the scientific, by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various shapes so that speech would then generate a visibly beheld topology and it's possible to imagine a future world where in setting up [sp?] corporate takeovers, in other words in areas where, uh, communication, clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was very important that people would actually go into the virtual reality to use the virtual language because its capacity for conveying intent would be much greater than ordinary spoken language. In other words, uh, it it's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of the good, the true and ultimately the beautiful. And the beautiful of those three concepts is the primary concept because it is visibly beheld, because it is seen. This is the great convincing


because it is seen. This is the great convincing power of the psychedelic experience. That it ultimately appeals to us through the sense that we value most, that we existentially relate to as the most authentic. And that is the visual. Visible language is a kind of telepathy. Because you see, if I made a statement in visual language and then you and I regard my statement we are somehow in the act of regarding made one. Because meaning is not being created out of, uh, interiorized dictionaries which we each consult in the privacy of our own mind, but rather meaning is a visible manifold in the public domain. When[sp?] meaning goes public and the differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. It's a kind of a final, uh, confirmation of the McLuhan apotheosis and I think visible language is coming. Life in the imagination is to be, uh, uh, the life[sp?] of creativity carried on through [sp?] virtual environments driven by, uh, linguistic engines.


Like that.

[Terence laughs]

[Female audience member inaudible]

TM: [inaudible] the star-ships of the future, in other words the the vehicles of the future which will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. [inaudible] The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual virtual reality folds out to. It's the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean, our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we, you know, we won't build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high. We'll build them as high as we want. Uh, roof height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost-effectiveness and gravity. It will be a parameter ruled by the imagination, as will all other parameters. And then we will discover what man truly is. When we are able to erect, stabilize, share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual hyperspace that [sp?] is seemed to be linguistic. That's what its connectors are made out of. That's what its thorough concrete and steel is, is, uh, the edifice of language. This is what the stuff of the imagination is made of. And I think this is what we're moving toward. The psychedelic shamans have always known this. Now the psychedelic underground art community points toward, uh, this goal and and leads the way.


Yes, well. Uhm. This is a segway from yesterday's discussion about, uh, visible language. The notion being that, uh, well let me review what yesterday was about[sp?]. It was about, uh, the idea that if we could see language. If language were a project of understanding that used the eyes for the extraction of meaning rather than the ears, that, uh, it would be a kind of telepathy. There will be both a fusion of the observer with the object observed and with the person communicated with. The place in nature where something like this has actually evolved and occurred is in, uh, the cephalopods. The squid and the [sp?] octopi. Now these are animals that divided from the human, uh, from the line of development that we [sp?] human beings over six hundred million years ago. They're mollusks that related to ancho- I mean to escargot. It's, uh, a an organism very different from, uh, ourselves. Nevertheless, one of the things that evolution


ourselves. Nevertheless, one of the things that evolution merry biologists always talk about is the convergent evolution between the eyes of cephalopods and the eyes of higher mammals. This is because the, uhm, cephalopods live in an extremely complex visual environment. And in fact they have evolved a form of communication that approximates this visible language that I'm talking about. Because these octopi have, uh, chromatophores all over the exterior of their bodies. Chromatophores are cells that can change color. Now many people know that octopi can change color, but they think it's for camouflage, for blending in with the environment. This is not at all the case. The reason octopi change colors in an, uh, very large repertoire of stripes, dots, blushes, uh, traveling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic communication. In other words, they don't transduce their linguistic intentionality into small mouth noises, like we do. Small mouth noises which then


like we do. Small mouth noises which then move as sound, uh, across space, uh, in the form of vibrations of the air. Rather they actually change their appearance in accordance with their linguistic intent. What this boils down to is they physically become their meaning. And one octopus observing another, it is watching the unfolding of internalized neurological states within the organism being reflected in color changes on the surface of the skin. Now these octopi not only can change their color, because they're soft-bodied creatures, they can also change, uh, the texture of their surface from smooth to rugose and folded. They can also, because they're soft-bodied, uh, fold and unfold and reveal and conceal very, uh, rapidly different parts of their body. So they're capable of a visual dance of communication that is an extremely dense kind of visual signal. And in the so-called memphic[sp?] octopi, the species that have evolved in very deep water where very little light reaches, uh, they have


water where very little light reaches, uh, they have evolved, uh, light-emitting phosphorescent organs. Some of them with membranes like eyelids over them, so that even in the darkness of the abyssal depth of the ocean they can carry out this dance of light, self-enfoldment, color change and surface texture that is their linguistic style. And that the only way an octopus can experience a private thought is to release a cloud of ink into the water into wh- which it can retreat briefly and hide its mental nakedness from its followers. This kind of biologically intrinsic wiring into the potential of language is something that we may be able to mimic and achieve using psychedelic drugs as the inspiration for the directions given to a virtual reality, uh, development program. In other words, we might be able to create kinds of visibly beheld syntax that would be the human equivalent of the dance of light, texture and positioning that constitutes, uh, the grammar and syntax of, uh,


uh, the grammar and syntax of, uh, squids and octopi.


Yes, that's right. Because, uh, operationally what these psychedelics do is they dissolve cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning is like software, but beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism. And by dissolving the cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili or whatever then one returns to this ursprach, this primal language of the animal body and can explore, uh, uh, the real dimension of feeling that culture has a tendency to cut us off from. Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine a an infant lying in its cradle and the window is open and into the room comes something marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, uh, movement, sound, uh, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled. And then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child "That's a bird, baby. That's a bird." Instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All mystery is gone. The child learns this is a bird, this is a bird. And by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird. This is a house. This is the sky. And we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception and what the psychedelics do is they first depart this cultural envelope of confinement and return it really to the legacy and birth right of the organism.

[Terence speaking indistinguishable glossolalia]

Male audience member: That's great.

Female audience member: Yeah.

TM: That's it. I'm out of here! [Terence laughs]

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November 1991

Whole Life Expo, Los Angeles, California

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All of this would have been fine. It could have gone on for millions of years in this climaxed situation. The orgies were lunar, meaning they probably occurred every two weeks, or at most every 28 days. That means every 28 days every member of this society was completely dissolving and psychic structures that may have arisen in the previous 28 days, and then everybody whistling [sp?] on each other’s bones in a big heap [audience giggle]. And you can imagine the boundary dissolving impact that something like that would have. Why then, if it was so wonderful, didn’t we just stick with it? Why the descent into, you know, the hell of Pee-Wee Herman and Richard Nixon [audience laughter], and all of this stuff? Well, the same culprit that created that happy story destroyed that happy scenario. And that is the continued drying up of the planet. And that’s what we get in that Genesis story. Remember at the end of the Genesis story it says, uh,


the end of the Genesis story it says, uh, “and God set an angel at the Eastern gate of Eden with a flaming sword so that Adam and his children could not find their way back into Paradise.“ That’s the memory of the Saharan sun scorching off the African veldt and forcing those mushroom-using pastoralists to settle in the Nile Valley and set up permanent, uh, settlements and begin thinking about kingship, large-scale agricultural projects, and so forth and so on. Uh, and what happened – it was not as simple as that may have made it seem, you see – uh, this is really the theme of this book that I wrote for Bantam, is the theme that cultures wear drugs like clothing and they’re never aware of it. They just feel naked without their particular drug. And the clothing may differ, you know, one culture feels fully dressed in penis sheaths and warpaint. Another culture isn’t fully dressed unless the gown is by


isn’t fully dressed unless the gown is by Dior. So there are different styles of clothing, and there are different styles of mental clothing in the form of drugs. And these drugs promote different kinds of cultural values. And what happened in that African situation was a tragedy that in a way we have seen enacted in microcosm in our own society. It was that at a certain point, everything was perfect. The monthly orgies, the suppression of the ego, the group values, the, uh, the recent invention of language was making food-gathering easy for women, uh, the abundant game was making hunting easy for men, so forth and so on. But this drying of the African continent didn’t halt there. It continued. And pretty soon, there were problems: less game, less to be gathered, and most important for my theory, fewer mushrooms. And when there became fewer mushrooms, then, uh, there were two possibilities: you could have your mushroom, hum, orgies


you could have your mushroom, hum, orgies less frequently, or you could created some kind of technology for preserving the mushrooms so that when you found a lot of them you could save some of them for dry spells, literally for dry spells. Uh, now the problem with this is strategy is that in a world without refrigeration, the, uh, strategy which Aboriginal people in Australia, in the Amazon basin, the strategy which the Aboriginal people tend toward when they want to preserve some delicate food is they invariably go for honey. Honey. This is why some of you may know that the Romans ate hummingbirds tongues pickled in honey. It isn’t because honey was the preferred medium for pickling hummingbirds tongues, it was because that’s a way of preserving delicate food. The problem with honey is, honey itself can ferment into a psychoactive compound. Honey changes into mead. Mead is a form of crude alcohol. The impact on a goddess-worshiping,


alcohol. The impact on a goddess-worshiping, orgiastic, non-hierarchical, non-male dominant culture of switching over to an- to the use of alcohol is absolutely devastating. In the same way that I told you what psilocybin did – improves visual acuity, promotes sexual activity, delivers a religious experience – we can talk about what alcohol does. It lowers sensitivity to social cueing at the same time that it gives an empowered of ego. In other words, it makes you into a jerk [audience laughter]. It gives you the courage to say and do what if you are a decent person you would otherwise never say and never do. It turns each one of us into a Clarence Thomas [audience laughter]. This is not what’s needed. Boo! Yes! No! Who knows! Who is Clarence Thomas [Terence + audience laughter]? And time- in time again in human History, these kinds of synergies have been enacted. Well, uh, I want to say more about it.


Well, uh, I want to say more about it. That isn’t the whole story. That could be the whole story, I mean there’s enough in that for it to be the whole story. In other words, if it’s true that the mushroom, uh, you know, suppresses male dominance, it it in facts promotes communal values, and so forth… what a wonderful thing it must be. And we can leave it there. But that’s only a small part of the story. The real story is what is so wonderful about it? Since it’s a mental experience, what is so wonderful about it that it could halt the human tendency to devolve into these counterproductive forms and lifestyles? Well, what’s so great about it is that it is nothing less than half of the intellectual universe. It is, uh, what I call the connection to the Gaian mind. In other words, to this point, what I’ve said is- could be imputed to be just talk about a superb psychedelic drug. And so


talk about a superb psychedelic drug. And so they’re saying “oh well, so this guy advocates the use of a superb psychedelic drug, seems reasonable or unreasonable“ depending on where you went to church. But it’s not that paradigm-challenging. But what is paradigm-challenging is the content of the experience. The content of the experience is completely, uh, mind-boggling, completely befuddling. I don’t know what we’re going to do with the content of the experience, because fully gotten out, and fully discussed, and fully realized it’s not going to leave one brick upon another in the cheerfully naive edifice that our half-backed civilization has erected as universal truth, we’re not going- science is not going to be able to survive the encounter with the psychedelic experience. Because it is not an encounter with the Freudian, you know, the repressed memories of your miserable and battled childhood or whatever it is you went through. And it isn’t even an encounter


went through. And it isn’t even an encounter with the miserable memories of the battered childhood of the human species that we all went through: Allah, Carl Jung. What, uh, that is all there, but that’s in the hallway where you hang your hat and the antechamber where they take your coat. The main event, folks, doesn’t even have anything to do with the psychology of human beings. The main event is another dimension. A dimension so bizarre, so titanically peculiar, so strange, so unanticipated by our language, our History, our literature, that, uh, it is literally like the discovery of another world. And- and, uh, and there’s life in that world. Now, a funny thing about discovering new worlds is that, uh, you usually- when you get the new world all mapped out, you usually discover that there’s somebody living there. And for them it’s not the new world at all. And you know, you haven’t discovered anything. You’ve just showed in the


haven’t discovered anything. You’ve just showed in the middle of their scene [audience laughter] with a distorted rap sort of like Christopher Columbus. And this is what we find with the psychedelics.


And this is why shamanism becomes, to my mind, the bridge to understanding what this archaic revival is all about. The shamanic hallucinogens are the, uh, the, uh, the meat of the thing, the pith essence, the center of the mandala. But the bridge into that is, uh, the effects that these things have. The content. The experiences that we can language and tell each other about. And what we are discovering through shamanism through looking at it, not through the condescending eyes of the white man who is just impressed by the incredibly droll quaintness of whatever these brown-skinned people who dreamed up, not that, but through a realization that we are sick and no doctor can cure us because we’re not that kind of sick. It’s soul sickness. I mean, it has to be soul sickness. And when you see stuff like Chernobyl, or the Kuwaiti oil fields, or the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, when you realize what this really


Reservation in Washington, when you realize what this really means, then you realize, you know, this is a- this is a mad species. This is a terminally depraved species. And what is required is a return to a model that can heal. And this is what shamanism has always been about. And we have not recognized it, because the part of the human being which shamanism addresses, which is the soul and the spirit, we have a 500 year old tradition that denies that there are such things. So for us, it’s absurd, shamanism. It is a, you know, painted rattles, guys dancing around in the middle of the night, blowing perfumed water around and smoking too much tobacco. That’s shamanism for us, because we cannot see with the eyes that understand. When we do, what we realize is that half of our mind has been taken away from us. That, yes the human body protrudes into profane space as 120 to 350 pounds of meat somewhere in the


120 to 350 pounds of meat somewhere in the Universe. But that isn’t the domain of humaneness. The true domain of humaneness is inclusive of that, and much, much more. Because the true domain of humaneness is a domain that honors the mind as- as self and as landscape. I mean, you are a creature loose in a landscape of meaning. And you are that landscape of meaning. And by losing contact with this, we have become essentially, uh, pathological. Very needy. This is a typical pattern in a person with an abused childhood. Uh, they become very, very needy, very thing-oriented, very security-conscious, very anxious. This is a picture of us and our psychology. And we have- we are so deep into the historical nightmare that we can’t ever remember any other way of doing business. We know we’re messed up. We know we’re unhappy. But what’s to be done, you know? I mean we have a million minor fixes, and people peddling all of these things.


fixes, and people peddling all of these things. I mean you’ve just been through the aisles, you know what I’m talking about. But somehow, salvation itself becomes an impediment to salvation. I mean once you see 500 forms of salvation being sold at prices you can’t afford, the very notion of salvation becomes obscene, you know. It becomes one more layer in the obscene layering that takes meaning out of life, and disempowers us and turns us into a subscription customer that seems to be how we always are being forced to end up. Well, the only way out of this, I think, is to, hum, it takes courage because you have to turn your back on your culture. In the most profound sense there is, because there are many ways to turn you back on your culture. I mean if everyone’s wearing grey, you can wear green. That’s one way to turn your back on a culture. But another way is to break its laws. Now, that’s a little more


to break its laws. Now, that’s a little more serious. And, you know, brings in big philosophical issues. But in fact, the culture is an enormous arrow pointing “go this way.“ And you know what lies that way? Impoverishment, madness, degradation, and death. That’s where the culture is pointing. You can see it. You can see it, just look where we’re headed. Uh, if everyone on Earth aspires to the kind of lifestyle that you people can enjoy by virtue of having paid the money to be at a scene like this, there isn’t enough glass, metal and plastic in the planet to make that many Celicas, and Jaguars, and Bluebirds, and Snowbirds, and all the rest of this crap. So what is needed is, uh, an awakening. Now, I mentioned earlier in this talk that they work- that in the 50s, before they interfered with LSD research, they were curing chronic alcoholism with a single 500 gamma dose of LSD. Well, now


single 500 gamma dose of LSD. Well, now for heaven’s sake, nobody is suggesting that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. That, to me, is absurd. It’s not a cure for alcoholism, it’s a cure for stupidity [audience laughter]. And a person who is killing themselves by drinking themselves to death, takes 500 mickes of LSD and says “what a stupid person I am [audience laughter]. I’m killing myself.“ And so then they look at their behavior and they cease that behavior. And this is what has to be done on a societal scale. And it is not as difficult as- as we may wish to be assured by the establishment. The whole folderol and hoop-dee-doo about the 1960s was that the, uh, crypto-fascist bullshit agenda was damn near overthrown by a bunch of 19 and 20 year-olds [audience giggle] on campuses scattered around the high-tech world. The- the male-dominant, uh, agenda is so


The- the male-dominant, uh, agenda is so fragile that any competitor is felt as a deadly foe. And the fact that these ideas will not die in spite of the fact that, you know, they’ve raised the price of an ounce of weed from $15 to $500, they’ve made the pinch for growing weed a slut from a slap on the wrist to lose everything you every owned or dreamed of owning. And if they cannot push it into extinction, it’s because it’s so much older than their con game [audience giggle]. They’ve invented their con game post-sphinx or something. And we’re talking about a reality that reaches back 15, 25, 30’000 years. And it’s a reality so far I’ve only spoken – I keep trying to get to this subject but I won’t let myself for some reason – so far I’ve spoken of it as boundary-dissolving, promoting group sexual activity, this and that and the other thing [audience giggle], but those are like generalizations.


[audience giggle], but those are like generalizations. What is really interesting about the psychedelic experience is it shows you a mental universe that you not only suspected existed but that you could not have suspected it existed. I don’t think there’s another way to it. I mean I’m not ready to categorically say there’s no other way to it, and occasionally, especially at gatherings like this, people grab me and assure me there are other ways to it. And they say, you know, “if you just- I want you to meet Babaji, he’s as good as psilocybin“ - “Oh really? I want to meet this man!“ [audience laughter] Because- because- I mean- let me say a little bit more about this. I would like to believe that in principle you could do- you could get to these places on the natch, only in principle however, because if some say “well, you know, these things you described on DMT and psilocybin, uh, I can show how to


and psilocybin, uh, I can show how to do that naturally.“ No thank you, are you kidding [audience giggle]? Thank God, I have the drug as a kind of marker [audience giggle], so that I know when I’m getting close to that stuff. If I woke up one morning in that place [audience giggle] and I couldn’t tell myself I’ve taken mushrooms, I would define myself as seriously discombobulated [audience laughter] and wait to see what happens, you know. Um, and people say “well don’t you think you ought to be able to do it by yourself?“ And I love this question, because the answer is “you can’t do it by yourself.“ That’s the entire message of the last 10’000 years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice. The only way you’re ever going to get anywhere, is you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you can’t do it unless you have help from


that you can’t do it unless you have help from someone whose idea of home is a cow flop [audience laughter and applause]. If you’re willing to humble yourself to that degree. Then maybe we can get somewhere. Uh, the content of the psychedelic experience is, uh, I believe, uh [long pause], relating to that is the sum total of our humaneness. And I think, based on experience, that, uh, there is a certain amount of leakage from the future backward into the past. And that many of the phenomena that are being interpreted as past lives, and reincarnation, and channeling, and regression this, and clairvoyant that, all this has to do with the misunderstanding about how causality actually works. That all of the impressions upon which people are building these models – channeling, and spirit guides, and reincarnation, and so forth – the material upon which these models are being built is real, but the models that are being built are tremendous, uh, compressions of the


built are tremendous, uh, compressions of the reality of the situation. I mean, uh, when someone tells me that experienced a past life regression and that they were a butcher in 13th century Florence, I always think to myself “but you were a butcher in 13th century everywhere. And you were a butcher in 14th century everywhere.“ I mean, once the connection is opened, the connection is not particular. The connection is general. It is- all reality is who you are. All reality is where you are, and where you’ve been, and where you will be. And, um, two things, two things are operating in the hidden dimension of the human mind. One of them is what I call the Gaian mind, and this is being imaged in this society as the rebirth as a kind of goddess. People are realizing on different levels and at different levels of sophistication that the energy of being can be imaged as, uh, a female entelechy. An enclosing,


as, uh, a female entelechy. An enclosing, nurturing, caring, forgiving kind of entelechy. And this is what, um, psychedelic shamanism has always been about. It’s about a connection to the Gaian mind. And this gives you, obviously, a tremendous sense of being embedded in a larger coherency than merely the coherency of you own small life. And that’s very empowering. But it’s not the general sense of things that this Gaian mind imparts, that is really to me the interesting part. It’s that the Gaian mind is a real mind. It has information. It can tell you things of the specific and personally important sort. This is- it tells you where the game has gone. It tells you who poisoned the well. It tells you raped so-and-so. It tells you why person X is ill and unable to get well. In other words, the Gaian mind is the database that all shamans seek to connect to in the act of curing, in the


connect to in the act of curing, in the act of functioning as doctors for their society. They get a connection for the Gaian mind. And, again at this point I feel like I have to remind you, I come to this as a sceptic, as a sneerer. I mean I have no time for this stuff unless it’s real. It happens to be real. You have to take psilocybin as far as I can tell to encounter it, at least if you have the kind of lump and neurophysiology that I have. I mean I’ve never been with the etheric [sp?] crowd, you know, uh, but this Gaian empowerment is what allowed these societies to live without technology, without modern medicine, without remote sensing devices, without any of the appurtenances of technology that we take for granted. And we have lost this connection. We can’t even imagine it. If someone were to begin talking about how the earth was speaking to them and giving them messages about how to


to them and giving them messages about how to live, you instinctively consent, this is something to be very, very careful with. You give that rap to the wrong person and they’ll drop a net over you and you’ll find stuffing envelopes for a convalescent home or something [audience laughter]. Okay, so that’s part of it. The Gaian. And it is this feminine nurturing, infolding things, it’s the mind of nature itself. It is really our own mind, but extending then away from this possessive notion of our mind back into the general concept of mind itself.


And then the other, uh, pole or the other motif encountered in this situation is, uh, trickier to envision. I call it the transcendental object at the end of time. This, if we were, you know, fanatically symmetrical model-makers then we would assign a kind of masculine value to this, but I’m not particularly into that. I just see it as the transcendental object at the end of time. But what it is, is it’s a kind of attractor. And we’re not accustomed to thinking of the historical situation as being under the influence of an attractor. We inherit our belief that history is pushed rather than pulled. We inherit this idea from the 19th century when, uh, the theory of evolution was elaborated. They- these 19th century British, uh, atheists who were creating the theory of evolution were so horrified by the power of deism, meaning the belief in God per se, that they constructed a theory of evolution where everything is pushed from behind.


of evolution where everything is pushed from behind. In Darwinian evolution, there is no purpose. A good Darwinist never lets the word purpose cross his lips. A good Darwinist knows that things just happen randomly, and then natural selection makes its selection and then you get whatever you get. Uh, and this is understandable in the intellectual atmosphere of the 19th century, that they would want to get away from that. The problem is we have matured now beyond the simple atheism of the 19th century. And it is now very reasonable, uh, sanctioned by mathematics, and dynamics, and so forth and so on, it is now very reasonable to speak of an attractor. And this, uh, I’m also a little nervous to talk about this because part of what I do is I popularize. I tell you things you should know yourself or you could know yourself if you would but go to a decent medical library and spend the time to look up all this botanical and


the time to look up all this botanical and pharmacological data. So I’m like a clearinghouse. But then there’s another thing which I do which I’m a little more nervous and touchy about, which is I tell you what I think [audience giggle]. And it’s just what I think. It has exactly that much weight behind it, which is like “zip“, you know [audience giggle]. I mean, you don’t have to believe this, why should you? But based on 25 years of fiddling with this stuff and then doing a lot of reading and head-scratching, I’ve come to the conclusion that, um, there is a transcendental object ahead of us in time. You can call it God, you can call it Jesus, you can call it her, you can call it flying saucers from Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades, I want to get all factions, here, or Zanuba Ganubi [sp?] my favorite stellar origin point. Uh, but whatever you call it, it’s an


Uh, but whatever you call it, it’s an attractor. It lies ahead of us in the future, and all of human history is being channeled toward it. Pulled toward it. And I see the entire history of the Universe as the history of a journey across a landscape of energy and matter toward union with this transcendental object. And I have a theory of History, uh, not the mathematical one. Don’t bolt for the door [audience giggle]. No, this will be a cocktail party version of the theory of History. I have a theory of History which is the Universe is a novelty-producing and conserving engine of some sort. That’s what we’re inside, folks, a novelty-making machine. Now, what do I mean by novelty? People mean- say “you mean like little plastic bugs and puzzles inside plastic capsules? Is that what you mean by novelty?“ - “No, you idiot, it’s of course not.“ [Terence + audience laughter] By novelty I mean


+ audience laughter] By novelty I mean something that has never been seen before. Something unique. The new connection. I always think of the symbolist poet Lautreamont [sp?] who said “I am fascinated by the kind of beauty that arises when a bicycle meets a sewing machine on an operating table.“ Now, that’s novelty, folks [audience giggle]. Because you just don’t get that every day. So the Universe is a novelty-producing engine. It not only produces novelty, but it then preserves it and build upon it. So, if we now look at, um, the story which science tells us – and it’s an interesting story, by the way – if you think I say things which are highly unlikely, notice that I do not ask you to believe that Universe sprang from a point of matter smaller than a proton in a single instant. This is the position of science. The is the limit case for credibility. I mean, if you can believe that, what in the


mean, if you can believe that, what in the world would you balk at for trying as well [audience laughter]. I mean that is the limit case for credibility. So, science tells us that the Universe sprang from nothing in a single instant, and that it was very hot, very hot [audience laughter]. So there were no molecules such as you and I are made out of, there were no atoms such as lead and gold and water are made out of. There was only a pure plasma of electrons. That was all, and the physics of that Universe were incredibly simple. There were the pure plasma physics unhindered by any other fields of any sort. Well, the Universe then cooled, and as it cooled, lo and behold, at a certain electrons were able to fall into stable orbits around atomic nuclei. And at that point, uh, atomic systems formed, and a whole kind of chemistry comes into being. Uh, further cooling, millions of years pass. Then we get the carbon


millions of years pass. Then we get the carbon molecule cooked out of new stars. It has a six valence structure, so that, uh, we get organic molecules. Well then, quickly, we get long chain polymers. Very quickly then, long chain polymers that can copy themselves. And after- and that becomes primitive life. And at that point, you then get complex life. And then sexuality – meaning gene mixing as opposed to the previous thing which was vegetated like- like making cuttings from plants. Well, do you see what’s happening? At each successive stage, the previous level of complexity is not only retained but used to build upon toward the next level of complexity. Well, the wonderful thing about this cosmology is that instead of human beings being like mute witnesses to the grandeur of Jehovah’s creation, or some kind of trip like that, instead you discover “aha, human beings are important. We are more novel than anything else in nature.“ And we 20th century human


anything else in nature.“ And we 20th century human beings are more novel, more interconnected, more complex, and in possession of more and different kinds of knowledge than most of the people who preceded us. So, this, uh, growing toward complexity seems to be what the Universe is all about. Now, it doesn’t go on for hundreds of millions of years into the future, because as you can see each successive stage has, uh, proceeded more quickly than the stage before it. So now, we are in what I call the short epochs. We are in periods of time where more change goes on in a ten year period than went on in a million year period near the birth of the Universe. We are living in the complex novel end of things. And that complexity, and that novelty, which we experience as tremendous stress in our lives, ushers into the transcendental object at the end time. Not that far in the future. And we as psychedelic people have an


the future. And we as psychedelic people have an obligation upon ourselves to anticipate and to help realize, uh, uh, this future. It is upon us. Every messiah, every religious ontology, every, uh, manager of every booth that this exhibit is reflecting a distorted scintilla of the spiritual reality of the transcendental object at the end of time. Everyone of us is a particular eye [sp?] and distorted image of this transcendental object into which we are being dissolved, into which global culture is, uh, dissolved. So, uh [long pause]. Well, so what? [Terence + audience laughter] So we can cut into this cycle at any point. We can become aware of it, we can become part of it, we can deny it. There is no loss in the circuit. There is no blame. Becoming then what psychedelic means is, it means claiming this dimension as your own. You know, Plato said “time is the moving image of eternity.“ That moving image


is the moving image of eternity.“ That moving image of eternity can be beheld in the silent darkness of the mind, on five grams of psilocybin [audience giggle]. And if you think the Universe is mundane, if you think there are no more frontiers to cross, no more adventures to be had, I’m telling you you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan’s ship on a long Saturday evening [audience laughter] with five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness. We are living in the most empowering age in human history. Because all of the energy of the ancestors, not only the human ancestors but our animal, our primate ancestors, all of that energy pours into, is focused into this moment. We are the transition generation. We have one foot in matter and one foot in hyperspace. And we can redeem the trust of thousands of years. All of the horror of History can be redeemed if we don’t drop the ball. Every pogrom, every instance


don’t drop the ball. Every pogrom, every instance of racial, sexual or minority persecution can be redeemed if we give the human adventure meaning. And we give it meaning by discovering the totality within ourselves and then amplifying it for each other. And this dissolves boundaries, empowers the weak, uh, enlightens the strong, and brings hope to all. And it can only be done if we accept the gifts which Nature has offered us. Thank you very, very much. [audience applause]


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Mushrooms, Evolution and the Millenium

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8 September 1991

Masonic Temple, Van Nuys, California

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Time Travel, Psychedelics, and Physics

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An elf told me that – now, there’s a fine thing for a scientist to say – an elf told me that time travel is possible, but it is constrained in ways which are not normally part of our expectation of time travel. The way in which it’s constrained is, once time travel is discovered, you can travel as far into the future as you wish, but you can’t travel into the past any further than the, uh, moment of the invention of the first time machine. The reason for this is: that before the invention of the first time machine, there were no time machines and how can you take a time machine into a domain where there aren’t any? [Audience laughs] You see, it’s just to preserve logical consistency.

[Audience] – That’s like saying that you can’t drive a car where there hasn’t been a car driven before.


That’s right. You can’t take a car where there are no roads. When cars were first invented, the main objection to them was, "What are you going to do with this thing? It can’t go where a horse can go, so what good is it?" Um, so here's a fantasy scenario which, for a while, I liked very much. It’s that quantum physics and nanotechnology, and all this malarkey is, uh, refined and focused towards the notion of building a time machine, so that then on the morning of December 22nd, 2012, at the World Time Institute in the Amazon, the first time journey is about to be taken. And, the whole world is watching on holographic television as the Lady Temponaut is strapped into the machinery that will hurl her centuries into the future. And, there's a countdown and a button is pushed, and off she goes. Now, most people’s interest would be to follow this woman wherever she’s going, but let's forget her for a moment. The point has been made. She disappears. We assume she went off into the future, but what happens right there, right then?


It seems to me in the very next millisecond, thousands of time machines would begin arriving from the future simply because they had driven to the end of the road. They had come back in time to witness the first journey into the future. It’s as though you could take your Piper Cub and fly it to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1906 to see the Wright Flyer take off. You see? Are you all with me so far? Oh yeah, right! [Audience laughs]  Now, there is a problem with this which some of you, I’m sure of, are thinking. I hope, anyway. Uh, it’s what is called, "the grandfather paradox," which is the old conundrum that haunts all time travel schemes which is: if time travel were possible, you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather. Well then you wouldn’t exist. Well, so then this sets up a logical impossibility. Either you exist or you don’t exist, and some science fiction authors have assumed


don’t exist, and some science fiction authors have assumed that somehow massive influxes of synchronicity would preserve your grandfather. You know, you would approach him with your Saturday night special, but it would blow up in your hand or it would ricochet off the St. Christopher medal he always wore [audience laughs] or something like that because he cannot be killed by you because, in that case, you wouldn’t exist, in which case, he couldn’t be killed by you.   And this troubled me for a long time. What exactly would happen in this situation because, according to Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, I mean, time travel is no big deal? The first paragraph, uh, of this paper, “The last few years have been good for time machines,” Kip Thorne, from the renowned General Relatively Group at Cal Tech, invented a new quantum gravitational approach to building a time gate. And, an international collaboration gave a convincing rebuttal


an international collaboration gave a convincing rebuttal of the grandfather paradox arguments. Another respected group suggested time machines that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty. The technical requirements for these suggestions exceed our present capabilities, but each new approach seems less onerous than the last. There is hope yet that time travel will eventually become possible, even cheap.   So, I then saw another possibility and this is the way we can fulfill the expectation of Christian hermeneutics, but not require the second coming of Christ or the intercession of God Almighty into history or all these other extreme unlikelihoods. And, to understand it, we have to have recourse to, uh, uh, physical model in a very simple realm of chemistry and physics, which is the Bernoulli gas laws. Some of you, I’m sure, are familiar with these and they’re very intuitive and easy to understand. Uh, we have a cylinder and it's a vac -- it contains a vacuum. At one end of the


it contains a vacuum. At one end of the cylinder, we have a valve and the valve is connected to a line, which is connected to a tank of some inert gas – say, nitrogen. So, we open the valve to let the nitrogen rush into the cylinder, uh, that previously was a vacuum. Now, what happens inside that cylinder, I think, is intuitively obvious to all of us. The pressure equalizes over all points equally. In other words, you can’t have 50 pounds of pressure at one end of the cylinder and five pounds of pressure at the other. We understand that, in a gas, pressure distributes itself evenly in order to achieve equilibrium. Okay. Hold that notion in your mind.


Now, think of our world in the late 1990s, uh, as a, uh, sphere or a cylinder of that sort and think of cultures as gasses at various pressures. And, let’s assign low pressures to the bare-assed folks in the Amazon and eastern Indonesia and let’s assign high pressures to the folks in Manhattan and at Cal Tech and Cambridge and Los Angeles and London. Well then we can predict, correctly, in fact, what is happening sociologically on this planet. What is happening is that the high tech cultures are totally overwhelming the traditional cultures. The values of Manhattan and Los Angeles are flooding everywhere, and in spite of the tiny lip service we give to shamanism and body painting, the truth of the matter is Amazon cultures are not really, uh, making a major contribution at this point to the evolution of high tech, global, information-dense, electronic culture.  Okay. That’s the second level of this Bernoulli metaphor. So, now, lets go back to situation where we send the Lady Temponaut off into the future. I’m not familiar with how they overcame the grandfather paradox, so we’ll pretend that the grandfather paradox is very strong.  [Audience] – I want to say something about the grandfather paradox.


Okay. Let me -- I’m close to question time. Let me press forward relentlessly here because the coffee is running out. I can feel it. [Audience laughs] The equilibrium density is dropping.   Okay. So, we send the Lady Temponaut into the future, but now with what we know about the equalization of high cultures vs. low in a temporal medium, what happens from our point of view is that the rest of the history of the universe happens instantly. That, even if it’s billions of years of, uh, of human culture and downloading into machines and claiming star system after star system and so forth and so on, somehow that -- the state vector of all those event systems collapses. I call this, "The God-whistle principle." It’s that we can actually call God into history. We can summon the end state of human evolution to appear a millisecond after we successfully achieve the implementation of this technology of time travel in order to avoid all the paradoxes that would prevail if


to avoid all the paradoxes that would prevail if there were any extension to the post time travel era beyond the moment of its inception.   So, uh, this is a -- this is a way of, in a sense, forcing the evolution of, uh, the universe and it creates the phase transition of the eschaton. And, us, is, to my mind -- it creates the basin of attraction within the domain of our own lives. Now, is there any kind of precedent for something like this, even metaphorically, in our own experience? Well, it turns out, yes, there is, in a kind of bizarre anecdote, which should sober us considerably as we think about these things. When the first atomic weapon was built by the Manhattan Project in the desert of New Mexico, Fermi and Oppenheimer and all these people got together the night before the test at Trinity, and Fermi had, uh, uh, a pad like this on which he had scrawled some equations. And, he


which he had scrawled some equations. And, he had reached the conclusion in the week before that they were not sure how high the temperature would go when they triggered this device and Fermi had some back-of-the-envelope calculations which caused him to believe that the nitrogen in the atmosphere of the planet would begin to burn if they tested this thing.  And, they would, in effect, ignite the atmosphere of the planet and the whole - the fireball would spread around the entire planet and destroy everything. And, they spent half the night going over these things and they finally decided that the information necessary to make the decision was not available and so, they said, "Well, Hell! Throw the switch! You know, at least, it'll show those 'Japs' and Germans that we mean business!" [Audience laughs] Of course, the test was carried out, the nitrogen did not burn and, instead, we were ushered into the glorious era of weapons of mass destruction.


So, let me see if I’ve got some notes here. I think I’ve covered everything. What’s interesting about this is, for the first time… In this article by Frank Tipler called, "The Omega Point as Eschaton," he seems - and this is why Paul is here and I couldn’t really get into it 'cause it’s crazy to repeat what you can’t understand [audience laughs] - but by an analysis and interpretation of quantum mechanics, Tipler reaches the conclusion that there is an omega point and it does represent the funneling together of all the, what are called world lines.And, he, for purposes of mental comfort, sets it far in the future, but in principle, there is no reason to do that. Uh, 12 or 13 years ago, the Swedish cosmologist Hannes Alfven wrote a wonderful little book called, "Worlds and Anti-worlds" in which he, uh, made the suggestion that, um, that the, uh, entire universe is what’s called a vacuum fluctuation ex nihilo, literally out of nothingness. However, there’s a caveat which is - this creation ex nihilo can only occur if what’s called parity is conserved. Now, what this means is that, um, these particles, uh, which come into being out of nothingness must come into existence paired with their anti-particle. And, so it comes into being, let's say, an electron and an anti-electron and they divide on separate trajectories and then they reconnect, and collide with each other and parity is conversed. In other words, nothing really happened. No laws of physics were violated because they annihilated each other.


Now, for a long time, a while, this was thought to be entirely a kind of a theoretical construct. But, then it was noticed that the theoretical models of black holes, which we referred to a few days ago, seem to imply that no radiation could leave a black hole and yet certain kinds of black holes were observed to be giving off hard radiation in the form of x-rays. And, it was realized, uh, that what was happening was, uh, vacuum fluctuations were taking place in the vicinity of the black hole and, because one particle went one way and one the other, the black hole interfered with the conservation of parity, and one of the particles was being sucked into the black hole and the other particle was flying off into the ordinary universe and being seen by astronomers as hard radiation. So, the fact that this process goes on has now been confirmed.


Well, now, an interesting thing about these vacuum fluctuations is that quantum physics places no upper limit on the size of a vacuum fluctuation. What it says is that the smaller the vacuum fluctuation, the fewer particles that are involved, the more likely the vacuum fluctuation is. And, obviously, from observing black holes, we can see that very small vacuum fluctuations occur quite frequently. Well, Alfven took all this and said, well then is it not possible that the entire universe, our entire universe, is simply a very large vacuum fluctuation? A vacuum fluctuation involving something like 10-high-50 particles and they have poured into, uh, the manifold in which we find ourselves and an anti-matter universe, invisible to us because it’s in another dimension, was born at the same time. And, so, one universe went off into a higher dimensional manifold this way and the other one went off in the other direction, and what this sets us up for is the possibility


and what this sets us up for is the possibility allowed by this interpretation of quantum physics that the entire universe could disappear instantly; not gradually. You wouldn’t see the stars going out, but the -- because this is all happening in a hyperspace of some sort which treats this manifold as a point-like entity.   So, what you would have is just “click” and all particles in the universe would disappear and the original unflawed nothingness would be restored. Actually, no, there’s a further caveat to all this, which is: all particles have their anti-matter, anti-particle twin, except - except the photon. The photon is this mysterious particle which is different from all other particles. It either has no anti-particle or somehow it has its own anti-particle embedded within it. So, what would happen in the case of a universe which was a vacuum fluctuation which encountered its ghost image and conserved parity and cancelled all particles except photons is that you would suddenly


all particles except photons is that you would suddenly have a universe made of nothing but light. Nothing but light! We then have to model the physics of a universe where the only kinds of particles that exist are light. Well, it’s interesting that all these human traditions of transcendentalism make a big deal about light. I mean, light is the metaphor for spirit. And, the supposition is that the rarefaction of matter and of the flesh releases us into a realm of light.


And, I am not physicist enough by a long shot to say what the behavior of a universe made of light would be, but I do know enough to say that, if you or I were made of light, uh, our subjective experience of the universe would be ruled by relativistic physics. And, we would have the impression that we could go anywhere instantly and we would have the impression that the universe was aging around us at a tremendous rate because, you see, the time dilation of the general theory of relativity, um, says that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. Now, it’s assumed that you can’t reach the speed of light because as you approach the speed of light, your mass asymptotically increases, so that to push a single atom to the speed of light would require more energy than there is in the entire universe because this particle would have become so massive that there isn’t enough energy to propel it. But, a photon


enough energy to propel it. But, a photon never moves slower than the speed of light. It never moves faster than the speed of light either. So, the photon - if you were made of photons and you went from here to Zubenelgenubi, let's say, a star in our galaxy with a wonderful name, uh, your impression of the travel time would be zero. You wouldn't and so -- again, here is a way without invoking God Almighty where physics seems to lay into our hands, uh, metaphors for the anticipation of the, uh, eschaton. Paul do you want to say something at this point?  [Audience] – It’s fascinating. You’re playing with physics. Um, you know, everything has to be conserved; it’s not just parity in the vacuum fluctuation. I mean, matter and antimatter are just one of the dozens of the conservations that has to be conserved in those phenomenon. And, um, they’re happening all the time from the point of


they’re happening all the time from the point of view of physics. Inside our body there are trillions of these virtual, um, reactions occurring all the time and they can be intercepted. I mean, you can have a -- a gamma ray break into a particle and an anti-particle, and you can intercept before they come back together again. And, that’s how they detect them on photographic plates on cloud changes. But, everything you say is right. One thing, I don’t think this notion of the big bang – and I’m not sure whether I subscribe to the big bang model – but, it sounds so far fetched because if, uh, if there there was something in the universe then we’d have a real problem explaining how it got here. So, the simplest thing to us humans is nothing here.


You mean that we are in a vacuum fluctuation?  [Audience] – No, it's just that there’s nothing here. I mean, there is nothing before the big bang and there’s nothing after.  This sounds like Buddhism.  [Audience] – A vacuum fluctuation includes everything; good/evil, male/female, the whole thing added together like a zero. Just like it always was.

Well, then what are the complex appearances that impinge upon our senses and what are we then?  [Audience] – Because we choose to pay attention to only half of the situation. But, if we could -- if we would let ourselves be and experience the whole, then it’s all unified.

It cancels.  [Audience] - It all cancels to zero.  Well, this refers back to something you and I were talking about at, at, uh, dinner. We all assume that there is one past and one future, but it’s not clear why we assume that. I mean, think about it for a moment. We’re all here gathered in this room, sharing this moment, but we all have different pasts. Not one of us has the past of another and so what we have in this room is a convergence of pasts. And, when this meeting is over, we will go our separate ways into a variety of futures. So, the assumption that there is one past and one future is just some kind of convenient mental bookkeeping.